By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, February 02, 2021
American politics used to be stuck in the 1930s, with the
Republicans always sure that a military buildup was necessitated by the
ascendancy of some new Hitler in some distant land and the Democrats always
convinced that we are on the verge — or in the midst — of a New Great
Depression that can be countered only by a New New Deal. We haven’t quite got
out of the 1930s yet — see, e.g., the “Green New Deal” — but perhaps it is time
to look around for some other points of comparison.
Conservatives used to think a great deal about the French
Revolution, with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France serving
as the ur-conservative document. Comparison with 1789 remains terribly
apt. I am not ready to go long on guillotine stocks just yet, but consider this
passage from François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution:
Here I am using the term ideology
to designate the two sets of beliefs that, to my mind, constitute the very
bedrock of revolutionary consciousness. The first is that all personal problems
and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no
human misfortune not amenable to political solution. The second is that, since
everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action,
knowledge, and morality. That is why the revolutionary militants identified
their private lives with their public ones and with the defense of their ideas.
It was a formidable logic, which, in laicized form, reproduced the
psychological commitment that springs from religious beliefs. When politics
becomes the realm of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, and when it is
politics that separates the good from the wicked, we find ourselves in a
historical universe whose dynamic is entirely new. As Marx realized in his
early writings, the Revolution was the very incarnation of the illusion of
politics: It transformed mere experience into conscious acts. It
inaugurated a world that attributes every social change to known, classified,
and living forces; like mythical thought, it peoples the objective universe
with subjective volitions, that is, as the case may be, with responsible
leaders or scapegoats. In such a world, human action no longer encounters
obstacles or limits, only adversaries, preferably traitors. The recurrence of
that notion is a telling feature of the moral universe in which the
revolutionary explosion took place.
I have often pointed readers toward Julia Azari’s very
useful discussion of the paradox
of strong partisanship with weak parties, published in Vox
in 2016 and, as of this writing in the weest of hours, still the only
interesting article Vox ever has published. What is even more remarkable
is that this bitter, tribalistic partisanship has arrived on the American scene
at a moment when there is a broad, deep, and bipartisan consensus in
support of an array of very stupid policies. I was not the only observer in
2016 to note that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were giving
substantially identical speeches in similarly honking Outer Borough accents
to the cheers of very similar crowds: The similarity was remarked upon by,
among others, Donald Trump, who thrilled to Senator Sanders’s denunciations of
purported billionaires’ plots to impose open borders on the United States at
the expense of the American blue-collar worker. Both men spoke bitterly of
their desire to raise taxes on private-equity investors and hedge-fund
operators, those great villains of our time. Senator Sanders, the socialist
from Vermont from Brooklyn, has perforce got woke about immigration and has
altered his rhetoric somewhat, but the fundamental assumptions supporting his
thinking remain unchanged.
And why should they change? One must appreciate the fact
that Benito Mussolini evolved from man of the Left (a socialist newspaper
editor) to man of the Right (nationalist and anti-Communist, a cultural
traditionalist allied with religious orthodoxy) without changing his policy
agenda much at all. Only the enemies’ list changed, and even that did not
change very much.
Across a great spectrum of issues, from trade to military
policy to entitlements, the policy preferences of the populist Right broadly
overlap with those of the populist Left. For example, both sides speak of
“economic patriotism.” In this Friday’s issue of National Review,
subscribers can read about the evolution of “economic nationalism” from the
Trump iteration to the Biden version, which has not required very much
substantive change at all — no surprise, considering that the Trump version had
so much in common with the vision offered by Barack Obama and his New
New Nationalism, which was a lot like the old New Nationalism and the
unreconstructed nationalism that preceded it.
The policy arsenal is mostly the same — tariffs,
domestic-preference rules, subsidies, etc. — and the goal is the same, too. And
it is important to understand what that goal is, because it sets on its head
criticism from right-leaning advocates of central planning such as Oren Cass,
who complain that ordinary market operations favor short-term profit-seeking at
the expense of desirable long-term investments. In reality, it is precisely the
political actors who are willing to neglect the long-term economic interests of
the United States in exchange for achieving a short-term goal: maximizing
employment and wages between today and the next election, with very little
interest in what happens after that. Of course, no politician admits
that his goal is goosing the labor market in the short term at the expense of
the overall health of the economy, but that is what almost all proposals
offered in the name of “economic nationalism” are plainly designed to accomplish.
That they generally fail to accomplish this brings us
back to M. Furet.
The American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, which
in turn inspired the Bolshevik Revolution — as Furet and others note, the
Russian revolutionaries in many cases explicitly modeled their organization,
tactics, and aspirations on French examples. And if the political process that
gave rise to Soviet totalitarianism seems to us entirely alien to the one that
gave rise to the United States, bear in mind that there are many men who in no
obvious way resemble their grandfathers even though they carry their genes.
Steve Bannon, recently pardoned of felony fraud charges, cheerfully describes
himself as a right-wing “Leninist,” by which he means eager to smash what stands
(the least conservative of sentiments) and seize power for himself and his
allies — the politics of jihad.
And in Lenin’s economic thinking, we can see the germ of
our current tribalist-partisan soft civil war. Lenin, who might very well have
been a Vox contributor in our time, believed, as Furet’s revolutionaries
believed, that the techniques, capacity, and competency to solve most existing
social problems already were in existence, that these could be applied in a
scientific manner, that policy and processes could be perfected with empirical
tools — and that the only reason this had not already been done was the fact
that power resided in the wrong hands rather than in the right ones: his.
There is no scarcity or trade-offs, only saboteurs and traitors.
In a much-quoted passage, Lenin wrote that the management
of industrial operations already had achieved a state of “high technical
perfection” that “the united workers themselves could very easily set in motion
by engaging technicians, superintendents, or bookkeepers.” He argued that any
business could be run by “anyone who can read and write and do simple
arithmetic.” His model society was the business corporation made universal:
“The whole of society will have become an office or a factory, doing the same
work and receiving the same wages” (as quoted in René Fülöp-Miller’s The
Mind and Face of Bolshevism).
All that is needed, from that point of view, is better
bosses. The right bosses.
Genuine politics requires a grounding in the real world,
with its good-enough second-best outcomes, its compromises and tradeoffs, its
limitations, its no-good-choices dilemmas. Furet was right to call the pre-revolutionary
settlement the illusion of politics, which is what we Americans currently are
engaged in: politics as role-playing game, politics as group therapy, politics
as exorcism.
This leads to some unconstructive political positions: On
January 31, National Review Online published
a very interesting and intelligent essay by American Enterprise Institute
scholars Dalibor Rohac and Ivana Stradner, excoriating German CDU leader Armin Laschet
for his accommodating position toward Russia and China. “The presumptive German
chancellor is a man of little patience with those who see the promotion of
democratic values as integral to foreign policy,” they write, and much of their
criticism is moralistic. Among his other sins, Rohac and Stradner charge
Laschet with supporting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline even “amid a chorus of
U.S. and European critics.” Nord Stream 2 will benefit the Russians, but it
also will benefit — at least as Armin Laschet and Angela Merkel before him have
calculated — the Germans, who, like many of our European allies, have not been
much disposed to entertain moralistic pronouncements from Washington about how
they conduct their foreign and economic relations in recent years.
The Germans, and the Europeans at large, want to have
options, especially in the shadow of an increasingly unstable and nationalistic
United States. The moralistic account is this: Vladimir Putin is wicked, Xi
Jinping is wicked, and whatever may benefit them must therefore be wicked, too.
The political account is different: German leaders perceive their interests as
being at odds with Washington’s preferences in this matter; and, being
accountable to the German people rather than to the American people, they
pursue their interests as they understand them. The moralistic account produces
a moralistic response: Hector, threaten, abominate.
The political account should produce a political response
that speaks to the German situation as it is, treating the economic and
political limitations of that situation as a fact rather than as a sin,
and therefore taking Germany’s understanding of its own interests into account
as something other than a nuisance issue of secondary importance. The political
approach might produce a political solution. The moralistic approach will
produce, at best, momentary catharsis. Because Americans are a politically
unserious people, the offer of emotional catharsis can get you elected
president.
The tribalistic dynamic is expressed much more intensely
in our domestic political rivalries, and it drives the retreat into conspiracy
theory, which is mainly an exercise in identifying and condemning the
“traitors” mentioned by Furet. Democrats insist, and many of them are indeed
daft enough to genuinely believe, that the Republican agenda at large is driven
not by a collection of cultural attitudes expressed in preferences about tax
rates or energy policy or the Waters of the United States regulation but
exclusively by something sinister — white supremacy, for example, or bad-faith
positions that they were bribed into by scheming corporate bosses acting behind
the scenes. For their part, many Republicans believe . . . a lot of absolutely
bananas things right now, but also that the Democrats are acting in pursuit of
a hidden agenda, probably funded by George Soros, etc. Of course there are
white supremacists on the Republican side, just as there are socialists,
anti-Semites, and self-described Jacobins on the Democratic side. But as
regrettable as that is, such malefactors are not the source of our present
discontent.
One would think that Lenin’s superstition — that the
ready-made solutions are all there waiting to be implemented, requiring only
pure hearts and some political will — would have been dispelled in both parties
by their experiences in power. Barack Obama came into office with his
party controlling both houses of Congress, but his promise to fundamentally
transform the United States came to very little — and exactly the same thing
was true of Donald Trump. But, of course, the partisans have an answer for
that: “The traitors have infiltrated our
operations! Saboteurs and wreckers!”
Thus the We the
People vs. the Establishment
rhetoric that so completely dominates our politics on both sides of the aisle.
I do not expect the American Left to question the premise
that “human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries,”
because the American Left is, always has been, and always will be both utopian
and juvenile. But an American Right that consistently fails to grapple with
reality, as in the case of so many contemporary Republican elected officials
and prominent right-wing media voices, is incoherent. It is no longer
conservative in any meaningful sense, but, as expressed in the rhetoric of so
much of the Right today, self-consciously revolutionary.
Utopianism-in-arms does not have an especially admirable
historical record.
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