The Earliest Roots

Leftism in the Western World has roots reaching way back into the dim past. Leftist ideas and notions made themselves felt again and again in late medieval and modern history, but for its first concrete and, in a way, fateful outbreak and concretization we have to look to the French Revolution.

The Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans were certainly neither democrats nor liberals. John Winthrop declared that democracy was “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” The best part of the people he considered always the least, and of the best part the wiser again always the lesser. John Cotton was equally blunt: “Democracy, I do not conceyve that God did ever ordeyne as a fitt government either for the church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?

Looking now at the background of the French Revolution—historically the mother of most of the ideological evils besetting not only Western civilization but also the rest of the world—we have to make an inventory of the roots of this iniquity. We find misinterpretation and distortion of events in America, but there were also other factors leading to the French Revolution and we will consider them later.

The concept of socialism and communism is a great deal older than St. Thomas More’s Utopia, generally considered to be the first “Communist Manifesto.” Utopia is a half serious, half humorous, profound, yet satirical effort to visualize a state and a society based purely on the four natural virtues—prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, naturally do not figure in this imaginary non-Christian part of the world.

A. Proudhon

In Proudhon’s numerous books and pamphlets one finds notions and ideas which any true lover of liberty or any true conservative could underwrite, but which really are part and parcel of the “arsenal” of rightist thought. He did belong to that not so very rare category of theorists who, given the right contacts, the right friends, and the right ambiance, could have overcome the magnetism of the left.

It was not in the industrial West, as Marx had predicted, but in Eastern Europe that socialism reaped its first concrete, tangible victories. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto they also provided for a Danish edition but not for a Russian edition. Yet the Socialist victory in Russia is one of the most important facts in modern history and is worth being a subject of special study. However, there are only three aspects of the Russian Revolution we would like to put under the magnifying glass.

The first systematic leftist and nationalistic opposition against Moscow-centered communism came from Italy. It was fascism; it had clearly socialistic origins. The fasces were the Roman symbols of authority and they reappeared in the symbols of the French Republic and on the American dime at a later period. In the earlier 1890s fasci (“bundles,” leagues) of workers so-called fasci dei lavoratori created grave disturbances primarily in Sicily, but also in parts of Tuscany.

At heart Mussolini was always a Socialist. Hitler, on the other hand, had never formally belonged to the Socialist party, although he had drunk from almost the same ideological sources. His Weltanschauung too had been largely fathered by the image of the national socialist Taborites.