By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 09, 2020
Iain Murray grew up reading and writing by candlelight,
not because he lived in premodern times but because he lived under democratic
socialism.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other contemporary
American advocates of democratic socialism lean heavily on the democratic part, which is at least in
part a matter of marketing. To take their talk of democratic principle
seriously requires forgetfulness and credulousness: During the last great
uprising of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world — in the United
Kingdom in the 1970s, where young Iain Murray, now a fellow at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, was doing his homework by the light of coals and candles
— the so-called democratic socialists embraced democracy when it suited them
and anti-democratic, illiberal, and at times murderous modes of government when
those suited their political agenda better, with left-wing activists such as
young Jeremy Corbyn acting as tireless apologists for the Soviet Union, its
purges and its gulags. In the United States, Noam Chomsky dismissed reports of
Pol Pot’s genocide as right-wing propaganda; later, young Bernie Sanders and
his new bride would honeymoon in the Soviet Union even as the Communist Party
bosses were creating a new and more modern gestapo to put down democrats and
dissidents. History counsels us to consider the first adjective in “democratic
socialist” with some skepticism.
But the socialism that reduced the United Kingdom from
world power to intermittently pre-industrial backwater in the post-war era was
thoroughly democratic. The policies that turned the lights out in London were
not imposed on the British people by a repressive junta. And that is part of
the problem with democratic socialism even as notionally presented by Sanders
et al.: It is both of those things. In the United States, we use the word
“democratic” as though it were a synonym for “decent” or “accountable,” but 51
percent of the people can wreck a country just as easily and as thoroughly as
10 percent of them. That is why the United States has a Bill of Rights and
other limitations on democratic power.
The United Kingdom, having a parliamentary form of government,
does not enjoy such formal protections. A British government with an electoral
mandate can run wild, as it did under the democratic-socialist governments of
the post-war era, climaxing in the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978–79.
“I grew up in the north of England,” Murray says. “It
gets dark very early in the winters there.” A series of strikes by government
unions left the United Kingdom without trash collectors, and garbage piled up
in the streets; there were shortages of food and fuel as strikes crippled the
transportation system; medical workers in the country’s monopoly national
health-care system went on strike, with nurses, orderlies, and hospital staff
abandoning their posts and leaving sick Britons with nowhere to turn for
medical attention; the bodies of those who died piled up for months, because
the gravediggers’ union was on strike, too; eventually, the interruptions of
fuel and labor caused the electrical system to fail. Hence the candles.
This wasn’t the first time: In 1970, a similar labor
action had forced Britain’s hospitals to operate by candlelight. Think about
that: A year after Americans had landed on the moon, Englishmen were undergoing
medical procedures under neo-medieval conditions, in a medical world lit only
by fire.
This did not happen in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, in
Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, in Chairman Mao’s China, or in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
This happened in England, within living memory, only 41 years ago. Bernie
Sanders was pushing 40 — old enough to remember, just as he is today old enough
to know better.
The problems of socialism are problems of socialism — problems related to the
absence of markets, innovation, and free enterprise and, principally, problems
related to the epistemic impossibility of the socialist promise: rational
central planning of economic activity. The problems of socialism are not the
problems of authoritarianism and will not be cured by democracy. Socialism and
authoritarianism often go hand in hand (almost always, in fact), but socialism
on its own, even when it is the result of democratic elections and genuinely
democratic processes, is a bottomless well of misery. The Soviet gulags and
hunger-genocide, the Chinese prison camps, and the psychosis of Pyongyang are
not the only exhibits in the case against socialism, and the case against
socialism is also the case against democratic socialism, as the experience of
the United Kingdom attests.
Murray, talking about his forthcoming book The Socialist Temptation at a CEI event
in New Orleans, describes the inherent tension within democratic socialism.
“The tyranny of the majority means you have no rights,” he says. “Early democratic
societies realized that you had to have rights; how extensive those rights are
is normally determined by how powerful the democracy is — one reason why the
United States had such an extensive bill of rights so early is because the
democracy was quite powerful. Socialists coopt the language of rights by
introducing positive rights rather than negative rights — they will speak of
the right to a job or the right to housing — but not the right to be left
alone, which inherently contradicts democratic socialism.”
The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its
tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on
democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the
context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the
reach of mere majorities. We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because
we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but
because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them.
Hence the stupidity of complaints about our commitment to
free speech protecting speech that is offensive, divisive, extreme, etc.:
That’s precisely the point of the First Amendment — the other kind of speech
doesn’t need protecting, because it is unobjectionable. Other rights — property
rights and the right to trade prominent among them — also find themselves on
the wrong side of majorities, constantly and predictably. But they are no less
fundamental than the right to free speech, and they are no less necessary for a
thriving and prosperous society. Socialism destroys societies by gutting or
diminishing those rights. Doing so with the blessing of 50 percent plus one of
the population does not make that any less immoral or any less corrosive.
Conservatives understand the case against socialism. But
in a moment of ascendant populism, making the case for keeping democracy in a
very small box — recognizing the difference between useful democratic procedures and a more general
majoritarian democratic ethos — can
be difficult. Those who have made a cult of “We
the People” have left themselves without a very plausible moral or
political basis for telling Them the
People to go jump in a lake when they demand immoral and destructive
policies.
But it was the people who ruined the United Kingdom with
socialism in the 1970s, and it is the people who threaten to do the same thing
to these United States today.
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