After railing for several hundred words against the left's "enemy of the people" politics, the Zman comes to the point:
The reason is quite simple. Absent an external enemy, humans will just go about their daily business of wiving and thriving. But, if you are a politician, you want to enlist and mobilize the people into the the rank-and-file of your political project. How do you divert people from their daily existence into your project? You propose a dangerous enemy that, unless defeated, will destroy us all.
Now, the left has the most need of enemies because its agenda is the complete conversion of daily life into the service of the state in which project everyone becomes a foot-soldier in the holy war against the dreadful enemy. Obviously, like a soldier in an army, the state must provide everything so that each soldier has nothing to do except fight the enemy.
This is what makes sense of all the big government programs: pensions, health care, education. For most ordinary people the daily project of working and earning and providing for family, children, education, health care, savings for old age is the meaning of life. But obviously if everyone is to be diverted into a holy project of defeating the evil enemy, then the state must take over all these mundane day-to-day tasks. Otherwise the people will have no time for the ruler's project.
One has to compliment the left on its imaginative cast of enemies. First the enemy was the capitalists and the bourgeoisie: enemies of the working class. Then the enemy was Nazis and in the run-up to WWII FDR was having a heck of a job dealing with the non-interventionist America First Committee. Then the left's enemy was southern segregationists, the monsters that had demoted blacks to second-class citizenship. Then the left's enemies were men, the oppressors of women. Now, of course, the left's enemies are racist-sexist-homophobes: white supremacists, toxic masculinists, and people that dead-name transgenders.
But the enemy doesn't have to be human. It just has to be an existential peril. Because a peril is also something that can rally people to your political standard. And that is how to understand the climate change movement. If you want political power then you have to sell people on an enemy or an existential peril. Because that's how humans are programmed; they will stop doing what they are doing only if there is an enemy threatening the gates, or an existential peril -- like a flood or a famine -- that threatens the existence of the community.
So how do we come up with an alternative, a "more appealing set of beliefs?"
It ain't easy, because the first thing to do is to rally people to our banner that says "people who are always hammering away at 'the enemy:' they are the real enemy." And that gets pretty complicated.
But here is the basic narrative/counter narrative of our age.
About 300 years ago a movement started that proposed to reduce the power of politicians -- at that time called kings. Instead of kings for life, they proposed an elected president for a term. And instead of a government completely at the king's beck and call, they proposed to divide the powers of government up into three branches that would tend to cancel each other's power out by the natural tendency of powerful people to quarrel with each other. Wait, they said. One of the big problems down the ages has been the condominium between political and religious power. So let's not have a state-approved church any more.
The most perfect development of this idea thus far has been The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak. He proposes what I call a "greater separation of powers" between the three sectors of society: political, economic, and moral/cultural. Totalitarianism is when all these sectors are combined up into the political power. It is The Totalitarian Temptation according to Jean-François Revel. And that is not good.
Obviously it is not an accident that humans are programmed to rally to the banner of a leader when threatened by an enemy or an existential peril. This was a real problem in the agricultural age, when it paid to raid the neighboring village for food and/or women. As in the Rape of the Sabine Women by the Romans. You had to be on your toes in those days. And you had to have land to grow food, and you had to defend your land or you would starve.
But now.
Now land is not so important any more, because today real wealth, according to the World Bank, is "intangible capital," or knowledge and skills about how to make things and do things.
Suppose you were a would-be conqueror, jealous of the wealth of your neighbor. You could, like the Soviet Union in 1945, seize all the physical capital of eastern Germany and take it to the Urals. But it doesn't really do you any good. You still collapse in 1989 due to the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Today you want your neighbor to be as rich as you. The only thing you want to capture is intellectual property. But you still want the neighbor to be buying your stuff and you want to be able to buy his stuff. Plus, of course, if you attack a country with nuclear weapons, well...
The fact is that we humans have entered upon a new age and it is going to take hundreds of years to figure it all out.
But meanwhile our lefty friends, in a fit of nostaglia for the good old days when enemies were enemies and existential perils were existential perils, have launched what I call a Great Reaction. It is significant that Marx made the offical launch of this project in 1848 at about the moment when a perspicaciou analyst could have seen that a new age, of industrial prosperity for all, had begun. By 1900 at the latest, it was clear that the working class itself was benefiting from the products churned out in the factories at which they worked, and they weren't as Marx prophesied, going to be "immiserated." What is this Great Reaction? My maxim:
One of the most remarkable things of the modern era, in my opinion, is the rise of sports. It is perfectly obvious to me that sports, sports teams, stadiums, and sports championships are a magnificent replacement for the old road to male glory: war.
What we need, I think, is the equivalent of sports in politics. Some harmless way in which people bitten by the political bug can display their talents and their accomplishments in a perfectly harmless way. So, political aficionados could discuss the latest "game" on TV the way that sports fans discuss the latest professional sports game.
Of course, it may be that modern domestic politics is already a harmless enaction of the old business of dynastic war. But I think that we need a further sportification of politics. To make it less lethal.
Of course, I have lots of other ideas. But this is a start.
The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.Quite. But it is misleading to say that:
The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy.No, no. Instead, "the one universal quality of all politics... is the need for an external enemy."
The reason is quite simple. Absent an external enemy, humans will just go about their daily business of wiving and thriving. But, if you are a politician, you want to enlist and mobilize the people into the the rank-and-file of your political project. How do you divert people from their daily existence into your project? You propose a dangerous enemy that, unless defeated, will destroy us all.
Now, the left has the most need of enemies because its agenda is the complete conversion of daily life into the service of the state in which project everyone becomes a foot-soldier in the holy war against the dreadful enemy. Obviously, like a soldier in an army, the state must provide everything so that each soldier has nothing to do except fight the enemy.
This is what makes sense of all the big government programs: pensions, health care, education. For most ordinary people the daily project of working and earning and providing for family, children, education, health care, savings for old age is the meaning of life. But obviously if everyone is to be diverted into a holy project of defeating the evil enemy, then the state must take over all these mundane day-to-day tasks. Otherwise the people will have no time for the ruler's project.
One has to compliment the left on its imaginative cast of enemies. First the enemy was the capitalists and the bourgeoisie: enemies of the working class. Then the enemy was Nazis and in the run-up to WWII FDR was having a heck of a job dealing with the non-interventionist America First Committee. Then the left's enemy was southern segregationists, the monsters that had demoted blacks to second-class citizenship. Then the left's enemies were men, the oppressors of women. Now, of course, the left's enemies are racist-sexist-homophobes: white supremacists, toxic masculinists, and people that dead-name transgenders.
But the enemy doesn't have to be human. It just has to be an existential peril. Because a peril is also something that can rally people to your political standard. And that is how to understand the climate change movement. If you want political power then you have to sell people on an enemy or an existential peril. Because that's how humans are programmed; they will stop doing what they are doing only if there is an enemy threatening the gates, or an existential peril -- like a flood or a famine -- that threatens the existence of the community.
So how do we come up with an alternative, a "more appealing set of beliefs?"
It ain't easy, because the first thing to do is to rally people to our banner that says "people who are always hammering away at 'the enemy:' they are the real enemy." And that gets pretty complicated.
But here is the basic narrative/counter narrative of our age.
About 300 years ago a movement started that proposed to reduce the power of politicians -- at that time called kings. Instead of kings for life, they proposed an elected president for a term. And instead of a government completely at the king's beck and call, they proposed to divide the powers of government up into three branches that would tend to cancel each other's power out by the natural tendency of powerful people to quarrel with each other. Wait, they said. One of the big problems down the ages has been the condominium between political and religious power. So let's not have a state-approved church any more.
The most perfect development of this idea thus far has been The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak. He proposes what I call a "greater separation of powers" between the three sectors of society: political, economic, and moral/cultural. Totalitarianism is when all these sectors are combined up into the political power. It is The Totalitarian Temptation according to Jean-François Revel. And that is not good.
Obviously it is not an accident that humans are programmed to rally to the banner of a leader when threatened by an enemy or an existential peril. This was a real problem in the agricultural age, when it paid to raid the neighboring village for food and/or women. As in the Rape of the Sabine Women by the Romans. You had to be on your toes in those days. And you had to have land to grow food, and you had to defend your land or you would starve.
But now.
Now land is not so important any more, because today real wealth, according to the World Bank, is "intangible capital," or knowledge and skills about how to make things and do things.
Suppose you were a would-be conqueror, jealous of the wealth of your neighbor. You could, like the Soviet Union in 1945, seize all the physical capital of eastern Germany and take it to the Urals. But it doesn't really do you any good. You still collapse in 1989 due to the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Today you want your neighbor to be as rich as you. The only thing you want to capture is intellectual property. But you still want the neighbor to be buying your stuff and you want to be able to buy his stuff. Plus, of course, if you attack a country with nuclear weapons, well...
The fact is that we humans have entered upon a new age and it is going to take hundreds of years to figure it all out.
But meanwhile our lefty friends, in a fit of nostaglia for the good old days when enemies were enemies and existential perils were existential perils, have launched what I call a Great Reaction. It is significant that Marx made the offical launch of this project in 1848 at about the moment when a perspicaciou analyst could have seen that a new age, of industrial prosperity for all, had begun. By 1900 at the latest, it was clear that the working class itself was benefiting from the products churned out in the factories at which they worked, and they weren't as Marx prophesied, going to be "immiserated." What is this Great Reaction? My maxim:
Great Reaction: Socialism is neo-slavery; the welfare state is neo-feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism is part neo-knight-errantry and part pro-regime street-thuggery; helpless victims are neo-sacrifice, social justice is neo-plunder.Do you see how all the neo-whatsits are nostalgic lurches back the past? Slavery, feudalism, tribalism, vengeance, sacrifice, plunder? Oh and Quixotic knight-errantry. Don't forget that.
One of the most remarkable things of the modern era, in my opinion, is the rise of sports. It is perfectly obvious to me that sports, sports teams, stadiums, and sports championships are a magnificent replacement for the old road to male glory: war.
What we need, I think, is the equivalent of sports in politics. Some harmless way in which people bitten by the political bug can display their talents and their accomplishments in a perfectly harmless way. So, political aficionados could discuss the latest "game" on TV the way that sports fans discuss the latest professional sports game.
Of course, it may be that modern domestic politics is already a harmless enaction of the old business of dynastic war. But I think that we need a further sportification of politics. To make it less lethal.
Of course, I have lots of other ideas. But this is a start.
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