The Dance of the "Three Peoples"

When Karl Marx described the world in the 1840s he explained it all as a fight between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. Just as the old feudal lords preyed on their serfs and peasants, so the bourgeoisie exploited the helpless proletarians.

But all was not lost. Into this binary fight to the death came riding Marx and his merry band of Educated Youth. They would teach the bourgeoisie a lesson and, through the fierce crucible of revolution, inaugurate a thousand-year community of liberation and emancipation.

As was common in the mechanical Newtonian age, God, or Marx's revolutionary cadre, directs traffic from outside the universe. Marx's revolutionaries are not represented as well-born youths, yearning for relevance -- not to mention power -- in the social and economic and political swirl of the industrial revolution. They descend like Homeric gods to direct the destinies of the mere mortals on the plains of Troy. But in our modern 21st century we have moved on from the Newtonian action at a distance through the 20th century revolution in physics to the notion of quantum entanglement, in that everything is influenced by everything else.

So, as thoroughly modern, I have a better idea. Let us rename the proletarians of Marx's melodrama as the eternal People of the Subordinate Self. Most humans, most of the time since the dawn, have been go-along-to-get-along people, the nomadic troop under the dominant male, the villagers under the thumb of the big man, the serfs of the feudal lord, the factory workers of the corporate behemoth, the ward heelers of the precinct captain. These subordinate folk do not consider themselves as independent actors. They attach themselves to a powerful patron in return for scraps from the lordly table. They complain and they grumble, but they don't do anything about it; they already sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Let us rename the beastly bourgeoisie as the dull and boring People of the Responsible Self. These people began to emerge on the human scene during the so-called Axial Age between two and three thousand years ago when all the modern religions got their start. All of a sudden people started to think that they could understand the world and had a responsibility to do something about it. Before the Axial Age you have the world of Homer in the Iliad. Everything on the plains of Troy is decided by the gods up on Mt. Olympus, who back now the Achaeans, now the Trojans, as the mood takes them. But in the Axial Age you start to get a Hinduism that teaches there are consequences to earthly behavior in subsequent reincarnations. In Christianity, the good go to Heaven and the evil to Hell, and it's up to us to live our lives as a testament to the glory of God. As Robert Bellah writes, the new religions "promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it." I maintain that these new religions are crucially city religions that meet the needs of city people. City people cannot rest in rural idiocy doing the same thing every year; they must figure out every day how to adjust their skills to serve the market. There is no feudal lord to take care of them; they must individually shoulder the responsibility of finding their place in the city scramble and holding onto it. In my view the great story of the last half millennium is the astonished transformation of millions of humans from experiencing themselves as subordinate peasants into responsible individuals. Finke and Stark in The Churching of America 1776-1990 report on the findings of the preachers of the Great Awakening in the 1740s.

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.” 

That is what happens when a person of the subordinate self becomes a person of the responsible self. He awakes from the sleep of ages. If you want to get a taste of what such a person is like, the go-to place is George Eliot's Adam Bede, set in the Methodist England of 1800. Of course the real star of the show is the lay Methodist preacher Dinah Morris.

But where do Marx and the Educated Youth of the 19th century fit into all this? Where does today's NPR liberal fit in? I will tell you. The Marxes and the liberals are the new breed, the People of the Creative Self. Ask yourself: what in the world are the dutiful sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie to do with themselves? Are they to follow their fathers and carry on in the family business, like Friedrich Engels? Are they to get a job or start a career and become a stolid banker like George Banks in Mary Poppins? Heavens no! Our modern son of the middle class wants to live a creative life, as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. His sister wants to work in global health for a non-profit.

But there is a problem. Anyone can be a subordinate peasant. Many people can become responsible individuals. But very few people have the chops to become a genuinely creative person. It is a sobering fact that, in the quest for creativity, many are called by few are chosen. It was the genius of Marx to intuit the solution to this problem. The dull sons of the bourgeoisie that weren't likely to be chosen for creative immortality could form a creative class of not-very-creatives and rule the world by forming a political alliance with the People of the Subordinate Self in a global war against the People of the Responsible Self. That is what Marx proposed in his proletarian revolution against the oppression of the bourgeoisie. Yay!

We see that this model explains delightfully today's politics in the United States. Well-born liberals, committed to a creative life, tell the workers, the African Americans, the well-born but downtrodden daughters of the middle class that they are cruelly exploited and oppressed by the bigots and racists and sexists of the white male patriarchy. Follow us, the liberals cry, and we will give you Peace and Justice, not to mention reduce inequality.

On this view we can describe the politics and the culture of the United States as the battle between two forces. Over here is an over-under coalition between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self, institutionalized in the Democratic Party, the education bureaucracy and the media hive. Over there are the People of the Responsible Self, the white middle class with families, jobs, mortgages, and 401ks, supposedly institutionalized in the Republican Party, the big corporations and the country club. You can see that in the presidential politics of 2016 the Republican Party is in fact split. On the one hand you have  billionaire Donald Trump representing the blue-collar white working class, who are really People of the Subordinate Self, while Ted Cruz represents the Republican base of People of the Responsible Self.

Does this reductive theory three-part theory make any sense? Well, think about this. Sigmund Freud, once beloved by our liberal friends, divided consciousness into three parts: the Id, the Super-ego, and the Ego. (By the way, in the original German, these are das Es, das Über-ich, and das Ich. the word "ich" means "I" as in "Ich bin ein Berliner"). Do you not think that Freud's instinctive Id stands for the consciousness of my People of the Subordinate Self, his Super-ego for the consciousness of the People of the Responsible Self, and his Ego for the consciousness of the People of the Creative Self? Anyway, I like to say that Michelangelo's great sculpture the David that stands enthroned in the Accademia is The Birth of the Ego. The David is not about David; it is about the glorification of the creative artist, Michelangelo.

When you divide the world into three parts, like Gaul, it changes things. It certainly has for me. In particular, it provokes me to think about the various Peoples of the Subordinate Self that have been taken under the wing of the ruling class of the day, subordinate workers and peasants who have become the "little darlings" of the rulers. But that is another story.

The Politics of Trash Talk

Obviously, the big deal about Donald Trump is that he's good at trash-talking. You could say that trash-talking is his destiny. More specifically, he has succeeded in saying things that liberals say you are not allowed to say.

Now, if you step back a bit, you could say that politics is all about trash-talking. The trick is to make sure that your trash-talking is considered mainstream and fair, and the other party's trash-talking is sick and wrong.

In other words, politics is all about controlling what other people are not allowed to say.

Strictly speaking, the things you are not allowed to say are heresies, and ought to be confined to questions of religion. But in our day, religion has seeped into politics, so now the heretics are merely dissenting from the conventional political wisdom of the ruling class.

If you look back, it seems that everything is fixed and impossible to change, until it does. You would never have thought that the button-down Fifties would have morphed into the let-it-all-hang-out Sixties, but it did. Yet who would have thought that the kids swept all before them in the Sixties would be humbled by the Silent Majority of the Seventies?

The "political correctness" of the last 20 years has been a brilliant effort, driven by the ideas of the Frankfurt School, to define political and social reality. You are not allowed to say that western culture is the best thing since sliced bread since that is racist and patronizing to other cultures. And you are not allowed to say anything that would offend any client group of the Democratic Party because racism, sexism, or homophobia.

But then along came Donald Trump, and Trump is more than the author of The Art of the Deal; he is master of the art of the insult. That's what he plays on TV.

Normally, politicians are pretty careful about insults, because the worst thing a politician can do is insult a voter. That's why they usually confine their insults to "greedy bankers" and "billionaires," who you can count on one hand, but never "our nurses" or "our teachers," not to mention policemen, firemen and members of the armed forces. That's where the kids went wrong in the Sixties. They might have thought of policemen as "pigs" and Vietnam veterans as "baby killers" but the American people did not.

Up to now, Donald Trump has done wonders with his insults, and kept the eye of the media on him. The question is, of course, whether his poll ratings translate into votes in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. The simple fact is that nobody knows. His core supporters seem to be blue-collar whites that didn't show up in the 2012 election. So the question is: will these non-voters show up at a primary in the middle of winter. Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump decided not to appear at the January 28 FoxNews candidate debate, because FoxNews host Megyn Kelly was biased against him. Was this a masterstroke, showing all the other candidates up as wimps? Or was it a "tell" of weakness? Nobody knows.

I'm reminded of an incident in The Manchurian Candidate. I'm not sure if it appears in the movie, but I know it appears in Richard Condon's book. The stand-in for red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, name of Sen. John Yerkes Iselin, is asked (by his wife, I think) what he does at a Senate hearing when he needs to go to the bathroom. Why, he replies, I just get up and go. Don't do that, she says. Instead, make a scene. Say you are not going to take it any more, and stalk out of the hearing room in a rage.

I suspect that is why the Donald decided to make a scene about the FoxNews debate. I suspect that his campaign people determined that Trump didn't do all that well at the last debate, and might do worse in the next one. So the best thing to do is to fly into a rage and stalk off.

But will it work? We will know in about a month after Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Contra-deBoer: Wrapup

I'm finishing up my analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My eleventh piece was "Human". Now I'm wrapping up with a big picture look at deBoer's vision for the left and what it means for the rest of us.

Let us start by cycling through the headings that deBoer used to outline the left movement that he wanted for 2016. He started with "Materialist," meaning that the movement should be concerned with the "material reality of the present world," and science and so forth. But the left has shown remarkable lack of interest in developments in the social sciences since Marx, starting with the marginal revolution of 1870 that basically ruined the economics of Capital. Why not?

He calls for the movement to be "Anti-capitalist" and takes it for granted that the "moral and practical problems of capitalism cannot be reformed away from within the system." In the first place, the word capitalism is a pejorative cooked up by Marx & Co., and capitalism is not a "system." Nobody knows what it is. Is it the ability of young nobodies like Arkwright and Rockefeller to start enterprises without permission from the great and the good? Or is it the union of credit and government? Nobody knows. It is certainly not a system, in the Newtonian, mechanical sense; it is better to think of it as a chaotic emergent phenomenon, according to modern chaos theory. And to talk of replacing capitalism with a "moral social system" is oppression and domination, flat out. Really? Who gets to decide?

The left movement is to be "Antiracist," for racism is "a unique form of injustice... ever-present in modern society." Really? I'd say that racism is universal in pre-modern society, that only became scandalous with modern capitalism. You could certainly say that capitalism first perfected slavery in the sugar plantations and then, with the help of the evangelicals of the 18th century, recoiled from what it had wrought. And then it abolished slavery, and then extended the franchise to the former slaves, and then banned all forms of racial discrimination, so that now we are arguing about the number of black Oscars on the head of a pin. The left played a great role in the fight against racism; now it's time to declare victory and go home.

The left is to be "Feminist," for "gender discrimination is a unique form of injustice that has been ubiquitous in human history." Really? I'd say it goes all the way back to the chimpanzees, in which there is a male hierarchy and a female hierarchy, and all the males outrank all the females. The interesting question is ask is why this domination has become scandalous in the modern era. Why does the First Feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, show up in the 18th century and not a millennium before? I will tell you what I think. I think that female equality could not emerge until the frontiers of war had receded enough so that only a few men were needed to be soldiers. Now that women have emerged into the public square they have started to reshape it to fit a more feminine sensibility, as Georg Simmel prophesied a century ago. For that we need a militant political movement? I think we should let the ladies get on with it, and only interfere when their feminizing agenda starts to attack basic human rights, like the presumption of innocence.

deBoer's left is to be "Anti-nationalist," because the nation state is fundamentally illegitimate. Well, yes. But every state is illegitimate, having been born in war, not in a law court. The question is, what can you come up with that is better than the nation state, which at least expands the human community from the blood kin to the community of language. Right now, in Europe, we are seeing the looming bankruptcy of the elite-inspired supra-national community. So it looks like the nation state is here to stay, for a while.

The left movement is to be "Pacifist." I confess to a special irritation at the left's conceit that it is the Peace faction, and this comes from the left's fundamental ignorance about politics. Politics is violence; government is force. Politics needs an enemy; government needs a war. The left finds its enemies in capitalists and the rich and the white racists and conducts merciless and unremitting war against them. But the left is scandalized by the external wars of nation-state politicians. It takes a special kind of blindness not to see that the left movement and the nation state are in the same war-like game, only with different enemies and different war-fighting techniques.

The left is to be "Liberal," in the sense of recognizing that certain individual rights trump "the pursuit of economic and social equality." Anyway, rights are popular with the people. Well, yes. But maybe rights of every kind, including the right to engage in work and buying and selling and own private property should trump the pursuit of social justice. Just saying, because that was the original meaning of "liberal."

The left movement is to be "Democratic." deBoer means here that the left cannot be a small cadre movement; it must be a mass movement that persuades rather than coerces. I couldn't agree more. The only problem is that a political movement is inherently coercive. It wants to acquire the levers of political power and use them to have its way with the unconvinced. That's why conservatives believe in limited government. We believe that government's force is not very useful for things beyond policing lower-class young men and spanking the foreign ennemi du jour.

deBoer wants the left to be "Realist," understanding that leftist victory is neither impossible nor just around the corner. I'd say that any realist would have to say that the left is a movement looking for a cause. In the 1840s, Marx had a point. The laboring class, instead of starving on the farms and in the workhouses as of old, was surviving, just, by working under fiendish conditions in the satanic mills. There had to be something better than that. But now, 170 years later and 2,000 percent richer, the realist on the left would recognize that the left needs a total reboot.

The left should be "Pessimist." It's a broken world, and the only hope is to make it a little less broken. There is a limit to what political action can achieve. I agree.

In "Human" deBoer more or less admits that the whole left project is a crock. Dehumanization is the mark of capitalism and of the social replacements. What is needed is a world to "empower individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction." Here's a thought. I don't think that any militant political movement is going to achieve that, because every such movement, like an army, is all about subordinating its members to the organizational goal, the final victory. It is inevitable that a political movement, like an army, grinds up individuals like cannon fodder and leaves them precious little time to self-direct their productive energies to any purpose other than the Cause.

In closing, let me say this. Back when the First Feminist was writing, the First Conservative was also making waves. It is salutary to recall how modern, and how right, Edmund Burke was when he made us conscious of the notion of "tradition" and set the stage for dairyman Tevye to sing about it in The Fiddler on the Roof out in the shtetl. Burke was for Catholic emancipation and lost his parliamentary seat in the slave port of Bristol over his views; he was for American independence during the Revolutionary War; he was against colonial oppression and exploitation in the person of Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal; he was against the French Revolution which, he predicted, before the invention of the guillotine, would end in the gallows. It was in The Vindication of the Rights of Man that Wollstonecraft made her reputation with a critique of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. But Burke made a grand defense of self-conscious tradition over the mechanical Rights of Man, that we the living cannot just act as though we are free to reinvent the world for our convenience. We have a contract that we must honor, not just with ourselves, but also with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn. Before Burke, everybody just took all that for granted.

And that raises the interesting question why, in deBoer's manifesto, there is no mention of "family" or "parent" or "child." What exactly is the left's plan for the family? Inquiring minds would like to know, beyond the notion of "equal dignity for all gender identities."

Contra-deBoer: Human

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My tenth piece was "Pessimist". Now we look at his last item, "Human."

In his final heading, deBoer looks at some of the flaws in the left project and the need to "leave behind both the dehumanizing system of capitalism and the dehumanizing replacements that too many left movements have invented." Instead the new left would turn over a new leaf.

It would empower individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction. It would dissolve the grinding alienation and pointlessness of the capitalist workplace. It would reject the crude collectivism of Maoism and Stalinism and the proto-fascism of various left niche groups.

So much for the left's goal. But the means needs to be cleaned up too. No more the "anti-individuality of identity politics." No more naming and shaming, "language policing" and "in-group signaling."

It would remember that compassion is the most basic of left-wing virtues. It would forgive. Its members would treat their enemies better than they are treated in turn. It would tear down the walls the left has erected to prevent us from viewing the moral challenge in the face of the other, even when the other is awful, especially when the other is awful. It would have the courage to be human even as everyone and everything else demanded that it be otherwise.

This is, of course, magnificent. But it means that the whole left project was a mistake.

If we accept that capitalism and its dehumanizing replacements are morally equivalent, then what was the point of the revolutionary left and its political project in the first place? To replace one inhuman system with another?

If we propose to end identity politics then we are talking about ending the second wave Marxism invented by the Frankfurt School. This was the effort to revive the left after Marxists realized that Marx's immiseration prophecy was wrong and that the workers were nationalists before they were socialists. So in the future Marxists would move on from the working class as their project and base their movement on liberating and emancipating historically marginalized groups like non-white races and women. And gays. And now transgenders.

But if the left is now to be all about compassion and loving your enemies then what is left of it as a political project? Politics is violence; it the the belief that things are so unjust that force is needed to rebalance the scales of justice. That is why the left has always been structured as a political army, featuring military discipline and victory as the goal. But if we are now talking about loving our enemies, then what is left of politics?

There's another issue, that of empowering "individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction." I'm all in favor of this, myself, but I understand, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the self-conscious desire for "meaning and satisfaction" is part of the belief system of creative people, and creative people, although well-represented in the global intellectual elite, are really a rather small minority. Most people just want to get a job, especially a job that might last a lifetime. If they are what I call "subordinate" people they want to shelter under a powerful patron, or if they are "responsible" people they want to live as a responsible person that takes care of himself and his family. The great mass of mankind don't think about "productive energies"; they think about families and friends.

In my view, the result of the creative people adapting society so that it empowers creative people to follow their bliss is the society described by Charles Murray in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. In this society, Murray writes, the educated elite, like residents of Belmont in the Boston area, lives rather well, with satisfying careers and lifetime merger marriages. The middle 40 percent does so-so but there's a lot of family breakdown, and the bottom 35 percent, like residents of Philadelphia's Fishtown, is not doing so good at all; the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. In other words, after a century or more of big government there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and I doubt if the wise advice of us folks in the creative elite, left or right, is going to fix it.

Having analyzed all this and reached the end of deBoer's "Left materialism for 2016" I'll be back for a final "Wrapup."

Contra-deBoer: Pessimist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My ninth piece was "Realist". Now we look at his "Pessimist."

In Pessimist, Fredrik deBoer surprises us. Here is what he writes, in full.

A functioning, healthy left political movement would understand the fundamental limits on human flourishing. It would acknowledge that tragedy and despair are unalterable aspects of the human condition. It would not posit political struggle as an attempt to create an ideal world but as an attempt to make a broken world a little less broken. It would concede that alienation, loneliness, heartbreak, dissatisfaction, ennui, depression, boredom, anguish, and disappointment can sometimes be ameliorated through political action, but can never be eliminated. It would identify utopia as a dangerous idea. It would know that not getting what you want is something like the default condition of human life. It would always remember that “should” implies “can.” It would face up to the fact that human life is not fair and will never  be fair.

What can one say, except to agree? But this section brings the whole piece into question. If we are just trying to make the world "a little less broken" then how far do we need to go in the direction of economic and social justice? In particular, how much government coercion is justified if the objective is not utopia, but just a little more fairness? For instance, the left has achieved a lot just with cultural naming and shaming, particularly in shaming people into a more inclusive attitude towards people of other races. If that worked so well, how about shaming us into helping others more? Actually, Americans are already just about world champs in charitable giving, and the 1% accounts for about 1/3 of the giving.

If alienation, etc., "can sometimes be ameliorated through political action, but can never be eliminated", what about the reverse proposition? What about the pessimist position that political action can make, and ofgten does make "alienation, loneliness... depression... and disappointment" worse instead of better? In other words, there is plenty of research to indicate that government free stuff makes people miserable, because  if you want to feel good about yourself there is nothing like being a responsible person that works and pulls their weight.

And what about the whole anti-capitalism thing? The capitalist textile revolution created cheap cotton washable textiles for the masses for the first time in history. The capitalist railway revolution allowed the masses to travel on something other than their feet for the first time in history. The illuminating oil revolution allowed the masses to be able to afford artificial lighting in their homes for the first time in history. All in all, according to Deirdre McCloskey, people under the thumb of the capitalists have experienced about a 3,000 percent increase in per-capita income in 200 years. Wouldn't a pessimist say that the chance of meeting or beating that with anything other than capitalism is slim to none? Particularly since capitalism is not a system of capitalist accumulation, as the critics like to imagine, but a process of "zero to one," as PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel puts it. It's the process of coming up with and implementing a new idea that, when capitalized in a startup corporation, is worth billions. No "accumulation", no immiseration of the workers, but something new that provides value to the masses.

It's good to see Fredrik deBoer requiring a little pessimism in his left movement. It's good to see him write that "utopia is a dangerous idea." But I would recommend facing squarely the pessimistic fact that government is always and everywhere force. Even the legal system is a coercion system. It says that if you two guys can't resolve your differences then we judges and juries will impose our judgement on you both, and we will enforce our decision with the power of the state. How much force is enough, and to what extent does the addition of the sweet use of force dissolve any conceit about justice? And really, what is a left movement without its millennarian idea of heaven on earth through the violence of politics?

Here's my idea on pessimism. Pessimism is the root and branch behind the idea of limited government. It just says that there is a limited amount of stuff you can do using force.

Next up: "Human."

Contra-deBoer: Realist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My eighth piece was "Democratic". Now we look at his "Realist."

Fredrik deBoer wants the left to realize that victory is neither just around the corner, nor it is impossible. It should refrain from the two extremes of "triumphalism and fatalism", but start from the fact of the rootedness of "existing power relations." The way forward is going to be hard. But it is not impossible, as the history of left mass movements shows: "progress is possible, even likely," as the "history of labor and socialist victory" proves, and "political change seems impossible until it suddenly seems inevitable." But deBoer doesn't like the politics of word games.

[The left] would be skeptical of the value of symbolic or linguistic achievements. It would place little political importance on altering vocabulary, communication, and similarly symbolic goals. It would not treat popular culture or celebrity as meaningful sites of left-wing practice. It would always define success in material terms, not in representational or symbolic terms.

These, of course, are the words of a Moses rallying the Israelites in the middle of their 40 year wanderings in the wilderness. We will get there, but it won't be easy. Only men of steel -- well, more likely bronze -- and the women that love them will get to the Promised Land. By the way, do you notice the word "socialist" above? It's the first time that deBoer has used the S-word in his Left 2016 piece.

If we are going to be realist, could we please look at the difference between now and the situation in the 1840s when Marx was formulating his scientific socialism? Back then the Irish were dying in their millions in the potato famine, and the Germans were also experiencing a hungry forties of their own. In Britain the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had reversed 250 years of welfare policy and forced the poor into factory work under inhuman conditions in the cities where everyone could see them. It looked like this misery would continue forever unless Something Was Done about it, i.e., socialism.

Only the misery didn't continue forever; instead, everyone became richer, including the working class. As a racist, sexist, homophobe, I like to believe that the misery retreated because the textile revolution was followed by the railway revolution, followed by the oil revolution, followed by the electric revolution, followed by the auto revolution, followed by the electronic revolution followed by the information revolution. The textile revolution provided cheap cotton clothing for the masses, the railway revolution provided transportation for the masses, the oil revolution provided cheap illuminating oil for the masses, the electric revolution provided cheap urban transportation for the masses, the auto revolution provided personal transportation for the masses. And so on.

A left-winger like Fredrik deBoer would insist that the decline of misery was caused by the worker mass movement and the socialist mass movement. Very well, except that in 1850 "economic and social justice" would have meant equality at a very low level. And what would the economic and social justices have said about the upstart John D. Rockefeller and his standard illuminating oil?

A realist would have to admit that the attempts to create a socialist society have been horrible failures, and indeed the most grotesque tricks on the common people. For the leaders of the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, and post-independence India all thought that they were implementing the very latest in western European social and economic technology when they socialized their economically backward states. Reading the manifestos of the ideologically fashionable back in Europe they didn't realize that the socialist ideas were the ideas of a crank, a man who had taken the incomplete ideas of the classical economists and completely missed the point. So they visited untold miseries on their peoples, and compounded the error by resorting to terror (except in India) to force their crank ideas through to success. In other words, they turned the realist hard-slog rhetoric of Fredrik deBoer into brutal reality and utterly immiserated their peoples in a way that was unimaginable to the Educated Youths like Marx and Engels.

Underneath the realist rhetoric in deBoer is a naive faith in politics, as though politics can solve the existential problems of humankind. But politics is violence; it proposes to correct the violence of the "existing power relations" with new, righteous violence that will correct the dominations and oppressions of the old order. But how bad can things be if they have increased per capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years? How bad can things be when three-fourths of the poor in the US  own a car or truck? When 42 percent own their own home?

When deBoer talks about a "mass movement" and about "victory" he is making my point that politics is violence. For sure, he is not talking about violent insurrection, but he is talking about the intimidation of peaceful protest and naming and shaming. And he is talking about using the power of government to alter the decisions of the market. How do you think that a policy of "economic and social justice" would be implemented? By suggestion? It would be implemented by government functionaries, backed up by government enforcement officers, also known as men with guns.

Fredrick deBoer opposes a symbolic politics of "altering vocabulary, communication, and similarly symbolic goals" because for him a left movement is about material goals. Really, he knows not what he says. The left has made extraordinary progress in recent decades with its program, borrowed from the Frankfurt School, of changing the culture by naming and shaming those that don't talk leftist. And politics is downstream from culture. If there is one thing that conservatives fear it is that the left has won over their children in the culture wars. And once you have won the culture, what else is there?

Next up: "Pessimist."

Contra-deBoer: Democratic

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My seventh piece was "Liberal". Now we look at his "Democratic."

Fredrik deBoer recognizes that one of the problems of the left today is what political professionals like to call "messaging."

A functioning, healthy left political movement would identify building a mass movement by appealing to the unconvinced as its most central, most essential goal. It would identify obscurantism, factionalism, purity signaling, and other behaviors that limit the potential numbers of the movement as counterproductive. It would limit the use of specialized vocabulary and other forms of in-group signaling. It would constantly consider how its practices and discourses actually grow or fail to grow the ranks of the movement. 

Principles, he writes, are important, but they shouldn't exclude "vast swaths" of the population from understanding the movement because that limits its size. He is arguing that a mass movement should appeal to the masses.

The movement would use voting systems for decision-making, and would provide for minority voices and dissent. But it would avoid "flat" and anti-hierarchical organization; they have failed the left. The movement "would recognize the basic, beautiful radicalism of voting and democracy and defend it against the tyranny of structurelessness."

Note that by "Democratic" deBoer is not talking about how the successful left movement will govern. He is talking about how the left movement governs itself and is obviously reflecting conventional wisdom emerging on the left that their ideal of a government of consensus collectivism doesn't work for their political movement. The movement must have leadership, and while voting is important and democratic the movement should not get carried away by an excess of egalitarianism.

On the other hand deBoer is also concerned about getting the word out. He obviously feels that the left is hampered by its in-group jargon that doesn't communicate enthusiasm to potential recruits to the movement. Principles shouldn't get in the way of building the movement. In this deBoer is just like any sauntering politician and understands that the voters are not interested in ideas. They want a strong leader who will get them what they want. Or they want the government to keep its hands off their paycheck.

For someone like me, who is not a leftist, all this is rather encouraging. It tells me that the left finds itself tangled in its traces. On the one hand, of course, it believes in a militant political movement that will march and protest until it replaces the current unjust regime. In other words, it believes in a military top-down organization in which people are expected to fight and die for the cause. On the other hand it believes in a perfect cooperative and collective society free of all state coercion and domination and hegemonic structure where everyone is equal, everyone is consulted, and everyone matters. This is what the Marxists call an "internal contradiction." In the Hegelian dialectic "being" and "nothing," although opposites, are identical and resolve themselves, as I understand it, in "becoming." That's easy for Hegel to say, but how does the left resolve the problem of being at once a political movement, which must be focused and disciplined, and also a collective of peace and justice in perfect equality? As Candidate Obama once said, that is above my pay grade.

But I would be really interested in how "democratic" the left movement would propose to be after it had acquired power. None of the "so-called Communist" regimes of the last century seem to have done a good job on the democratic front.

Next up: "Realist."