Leftism
14. False Liberalism
As could be suspected, the Labor party finally reduced the Liberals to such a size that they became impotent in British politics and retained only some local influence in Wales. All they can do now is tip the scales in Parliament, provided a near equality in the number of Conservative and Labor MPs makes this possible. Nor does British party Liberalism have any longer a real program—neither politically nor economically.
There were old-fashioned, i.e., genuine liberals who clung to their convictions; Albert Jay Nock, even H. L. Mencken were among them. But many others dreaded being called conservatives or reactionaries. As long as there existed a utopia at the end of the road, painted in the colors of absolute personal freedom, the genuine liberal was sure to be a “progressive.” Before the 1930s the “ultraradical,” the extremist (especially in America) was not the Socialist, not the Communist, but the anarchist. As a matter of fact, it took Americans quite some time to distinguish between the Communist and the anarchist, and to the average American for a long time the bolshevik was an unshaven, rowdyish creature who wanted no law, no order, but the eternal overthrow of everything—in other words, an anarchist. The more spectacular acts of violence were all carried out by anarchists, whereas Communists, believing in mass action at the right time, in military conquest and in civil wars, abhor individual action. Even in Russia the Communists (or, to be even more exact, the radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party) had never carried out assassinations or acts of terror, and the very first Communists (Bolshevikì) who had suffered death for cause were those executed in the Civil War. Russian communism up to 1918 had no martyrs.
When I arrived in the United States for the first time in 1937 I had to give written assurance that I was neither a bigamist nor an anarchist. Violent, rampaging lawless freedom still seemed to be the menace. It was also the direction in which the world—to the less initiated at least—gradually seemed to be moving. Respect and authority were declining, divorce was becoming easier and more common, crowned heads were toppling, censorship was disappearing right and left, travel was becoming simpler, liberal parties were still scoring in elections in parts of the Western World. Thus the genuine American liberal could be fully convinced that with his political convictions the future belonged to him. It was only because of the leniency and the tolerance of Americans and British liberals of an age gone by toward the real leftists, that liberals became suspect.
The old liberal did not necessarily like the democratic notion of the “politicized citizenry.” As a matter of fact, he often suspected it of being fundamentally illiberal. However, his resistance against the new winds and currents was not only weak because he cherished so deeply the idea of belonging to the camp of the innovators, progressivists, and “dawnists” (an expression of Michael de la Bédoyère) hailing the new and damning the obsolete, but because he had previously been robbed of his sense of values. He had lost his philosophical props at a much earlier date. These had been eliminated half a generation before by philosophies such as instrumentalism and behaviorism, as well as by “polite doubt,” actually a refined form of positivism. This view has been represented so well in the American scene by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., grandson of a Calvinist clergyman, son of a theologically liberal physician and essayist, himself a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—and a complete nihilist. Whereas pragmatism came on the American educational scene through that notorious institution of pedagogical training of which it has been said that there false pearls were thrown to real swine, the Justice influenced legal thinking, which in the United States is equally important to education.
There are interesting parallels between the nihilistic and materialistic undermining of the old-fashioned American liberal faith with relativist ideas and the erosion of the faith of the French upper layers prior to the Revolution through Voltairean skepticism, followed by the fanatical, yet in a way consistent philosophy of Rousseau. The nihilism inherent in the instrumentalism and pragmatism of John Dewey’s philosophy also provided Marxism with an opening wedge. If all spiritual values, if Revelation, if the concept of the natural law, if the Aristotelian tradition were “illusory” and Christian existentialism from St. Augustine to Kierkegaard were “unscientific,” then a naked materialism within and outside existentialism might well be the answer. As we have seen, de Sade had established this bridge between a subjectivist relativism and rank materialism.
And not being aware of his dilemma, he is prone to the worst miscalculations in dealing with truly systematic thought abroad. Hence his naive belief that (to quote only one instance) Russian Marxism could be liberalized to the extent that Western “capitalism,” treated with Socialist hormones, could finally meet it halfway. The meeting, naturally, can be effected, but only in such a way that the flexible is bent like a blade against a concrete wall until it touches the rigid. We can be gradually socialized, communized and sovietized: Industries can be “nationalized”; but it is difficult to see how Russian industry or agriculture could ever be transformed into private property without (a) the collapse of the secular religion of communism, and (b) a transitional period of total chaos and anarchy. Revolution always remains a possibility (though in a totalitarian state a fairly remote one) but from an evolutionary viewpoint socialism is always a dead-end street. Yugoslavia now experiences this difficulty. If you have the two long legs of free enterprise you can run; with the short legs of socialism you barely walk; but with one long and one short leg you fall on your nose.
Yet, whatever our exegesis of Mr. Burnham’s test, it is obvious that American leftism, which no longer deserves the name of liberalism, has a transitory character, but the transition takes place progressively from rightist to leftist positions. This evolution, moreover, is not only in harmony with the likings and leanings of the semiintellectuals who provide American moderate leftism with leadership but is also largely consonant with the instincts and aspirations of the masses—of the American masses as well as of the masses anywhere else.
There exists, primarily in America, a myth to the effect that the masses are noble, good, decent, honest, and that they are merely misled by diabolical eggheads of the leftist persuasion, by a tiny minority with key positions in education, publishing, the press, the theatrical world, and the movie industry. This, however, is a gross and dangerous oversimplification. There might be certain “sound instincts” in the multitudes, but since they consist of human beings and not angels, they are also subject to animal instincts and to specifically human frailties: envy, jealousy, egotism, greed, avarice, pettiness. Their sense of justice is not always strong, their sadistic drives can be well developed, their sense of fairness impaired, their knowledge limited, their historic memory bad, and so forth. Thus the question remains whether the American moderate leftists have injected new and evil ideas into the American scene or whether they have not rather exploited negative drives, have appealed to the seamier side of human nature and, above all, have achieved whatever popularity they have by merely formulating cleverly and coherently the ideas and notions which could be found inchoately before their rise to eminence, before they took over the intellectual leadership of the nation. In spite of the fact that American leftists were quite adroit in importing ideas from Europe and have acted consistently as agents of European ideologies, propagating them either in toto or in selected fragments in a new synthesis, they were never insensitive to local American notions. Take merely the curious expression “Americanism”: Communist propaganda in the late 1930s and early 1940s operated with the slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”
The disappointment in the left-of-center camp was great because National Socialism, especially in America, had been regarded as a “rightist” movement. Red Russia and Brown Germany now were in the same camp and nontotalitarian democracy was fighting with its back against the wall. Some of the American leftists hoped that their country would come to the aid of “European democracy.” (There were also American conservative interventionists because their heart was on the side of the liberty-loving British monarchy and of the valiant Finns during the “Winter War” of 1939-1940.) Yet in the immediate future there was no indication that Congress would declare war against Nazi Germany and a very large number of American leftists, in their boundless sympathy for the Soviet Union, were radically isolationist. The “American Youth Congress,” a Red front organization, convening in late 1939, booed President Roosevelt because he had seemed sympathetic to the fighting Finns, but applauded Mrs. Roosevelt who (thanks to the kind ear she lent to Joseph Lash) spoke words very much to their liking. Up to the invasion of Russia there were practically no American leftist volunteers who came to the aid of Britain, although they had flocked in very great numbers to the International Brigades in Spain in order to participate lustily in the greatest sadistic orgy the Western World had experienced before 1939. There were volunteers for Britain, there were people raising funds for the Finns, but those were not leftists.
How this is done we discover in a passage which reads, “The fundamental principle is that the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom. If no liberty is granted to the murderer and arsonist, no liberty can be granted to whosoever and whatsoever threaten the divine spirit in man and above man.
“This is—in an interpretation suited to modern man—the spirit which Christ called the Holy Ghost.”
This seems to take care of the whole theology concerning the Holy Trinity by infallible deduction—not from the Vatican but from the White House, because we also read, “The religion of the Holy Ghost, and nothing else, is the ‘spirit of the New Testament’ of which the President of the United States spoke.
In the City of Man we see quite clearly the Thirteen Point Program of American pseudoliberalism behind whose mask hides the not strictly Marxian left. And here are the points:
3. Centralization as opposed to local rights and “privileges.” (The Rule is supreme; there are no exceptions, no “privileges,” no deviations.) No planning is possible without centralization, and there is no utopia without planning. (Utopia will come automatically, yet we have to plan for it: an inner contradiction without solution and present in all leftist creeds.) Free Will is rejected as a dangerous fiction (if it existed it would have to be respected) and there is little freedom—“individualism” would become a term of abuse!—because it interferes with the blue prints guaranteeing the “foreseeable.”
4. Identity, Sameness. The “masses” (Humanity) consist of identical units of mere “individuals” (exchangeable grains of sands) not “persons.” To be different, to think or act differently, becomes a crime. Where differences exist, they are declared to be meaningless. Where they cannot be “explained away” and when they cause trouble to The Plan, they call for enforced standardization, expropriation, demotion, exile, and, in the more extreme cases, execution—measures, to be sure, which could not yet be taken. But they are encouraged abroad where all leveling movements and actions get the full sympathy and encouragement of the “local left.”
7. The Socialist hatred for free enterprise (“anticapitalism”) because a free economy puts a premium on hard work, thrift, and ambition—the natural enemies of “equality.” A free economy gives man the chance to build up a little fortress of his own, to escape state omnipotence. (State welfarism is just one more means of firmly establishing state control over the citizenry.)
All attitudes, all laws and regulations designed to protect the family (and sex, its root) morally are ridiculed and rejected. The only element inherited from a liberal past is the American leftists’ indifference to man’s biological views and behavior patterns. While prone to deny it, he is in all other domains a subtle or even shameless authoritarian.
10. Allied with this attitude is statism which characterizes leftism perhaps more than anything else. When the designers of The City of Man accuse the teachers of totalitarian philosophy of proclaiming, “Everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state,” they merely want to divert our attention. And it is the state at the highest level, in its most centralized aspect that the American Leftists worship, i.e., the federal government.
12. Anticolonialism. This Messianism has the task of eventually saving all mankind, but in the meantime it must be the savior of the colonialized nations and tribes. Thus anticolonialism forms part and parcel of the American leftist’s creed.
All these thirteen points, needless to say, are as characteristic of the leftist outlook in English-speaking countries as they are of the ideologies animating the French Revolution and its evil offsprings: socialism, National Socialism and communism. They have nothing to do with the convictions of men and women called “liberals” in the rest of the civilized world. And it must also be added that the leftist outlook in America and Britain has hardly changed since 1940 when this rather unique manifesto was published. In America, we must admit, there is today a highly increased emphasis on “racial equality”; yet leftist antiracism, it must be borne in mind, is of a very different character than that of the genuine right. And the same is true of the leftist stand towards (ethnic) nationality. Leftism with its strongly identitarian bent and a nonspiritual, materialistic enthusiasm either declares race and nationality to be supreme values to which everybody has to conform (as the Nazis did) or they want to “explain them away” and ignore them with iron determination. . . because they are an obstacle to identitarian uniformity. The Nazis wanted to eliminate by brute force those who did not racially conform, those nationally (ethnically) not conforming by cultural high-pressure methods. The “international leftists” wants us to close our eyes and ignore facts. This is just another process of “elimination.” The rightist, who is a liberal in the genuine sense of the term, keeps his eyes open and gladly and charitably accepts the diversity of mankind. Rejecting egalitarianism (no less than identitarianism), he knows that God’s gifts are distributed in mysterious ways—not only among persons but also among nations and races. Though they cannot be expressed in a simple scientific formula and never work out mathematically in time or space, they do not invalidate the rightist principle of suum cuique.
