The first
presidential candidate I supported was Hubert Humphrey in 1968. I was, at that time, five years old. My reasons for supporting Humphrey were not
the most impressive. I remember the rest
of my family watching the CBS Nightly News on our floor model black-and-white
TV. The TV room, which doubled as a
library, was dim and un-air-conditioned.
Cats and people sprawled on the old carpet and rather worse-for-wear
stuffed chairs. Humphrey seemed rather
pitiable to me – a stodgy, roundish man with a wavering voice who I sensed,
though I was ignorant of the details, was drowning in a world he could not keep
up with. Being overwhelmed is a feeling
most five-year-olds can relate to. “I’m
for Humphrey,” I announced. The rest of
my family, all more-or-less adults, seemed amused by this. When you are five, amusing adults is always a
good thing, and Humphrey seemed like he needed a friend. A few days after my announcement, someone
gave me a Humphrey campaign button. Humphrey
lost the primary to McGovern, and Richard Nixon won in the fall, of
course. Nixon, I remembered, looked a
little like Ed Sullivan, who also lived exclusively on TV.
Some people cast
votes on no more enlightened basis than this their whole lives. They do not consider policy or study voting
records. They get a certain feeling
about a candidate and they trust that feeling.
This is probably not the best way to exercise one’s franchise – but it’s
probably not the worst way either.
I wasn’t born
with a political party stamped across my forehead. While I think that most of my family votes
now, none of them voted then. They had,
in the way of isolated intellectuals, a certain skepticism about the whole
business. The strongest political
sentiment that was present in my fledgling universe was my father’s bitter hatred
of the rich. “Bitter” is a weak word,
really. Have you ever been confronted by
a dog that got the idea into its head that you were in its territory and did
not belong there? A dog that stood
snarling and tense, baring its teeth, waiting only for you to make the
slightest wrong move? That is how my
father felt, and still feels, about the rich.
He denies he hates them, but the denial is about as plausible as Jerry
Falwell’s denial that he hated homosexuals.
People do not snarl in neutrality or love. At that time he hated the local newspaper
publisher and, to a lesser extent, his own employer. Now the media has provided him with Mitt
Romney and the Koch brothers, so he snarls dutifully at them. I doubt his sentiment really worries Mitt,
Charles or David very much. Hatred is
not a political belief, per se, but
if you had a political coloring book hatred would be one of the more popular
colors. It wouldn’t be a rarely used
color in the 32-color box. It would be in
the 8-color box – the one every child in kindergarten has to have. Apart from his irrational hatred my father is
a decent enough man. He taught me how to
construct rational arguments and introduced me to philosophy. He has a good heart between his bouts of
snarling. Rational arguments are
something you do get in 32-color box of political crayons. Philosophy is a 64-color box item – a crayon
for a very fussy child.
My father’s hate
was not particularly contagious. Being
around that kind of hatred is unpleasant for anyone who does not share in its
source. Even a child can tell a dog is
crazy when it is snarling at the air, and will have no particular temptation to
snarl with it. But, I must admit, there
is something to be said for the persuasive weight of dogged repetition. I never learned to hate the rich, but I did
learn to believe that capitalism is a problem.
This put me on a trajectory of its own.
The first
political precept I can remember entertaining, one that I held onto tenaciously
for quite some time, is that capitalism isn’t fair. Well, quite obviously, from a certain perspective – it isn’t. If you have some vague general notion that equality is a good thing, and you believe that people ought to get an approximately the same reward for an equivalent amount of productive effort, then a capitalist enterprise, in which a large number of people toil for a modest reward while the owner of the enterprise collects a far bigger reward, is morally indefensible. Period. This really isn’t rocket science, and any young person that approaches the world with the set of moral precepts he or she was taught in elementary school will probably come to this conclusion with very little help. Morality is a slippery concept though. The human brain is predisposed to simplify its model of the world as
much as possible – and the good guy / bad guy heuristic is a useful, if often
stultifying, simplification. The rich
are keeping all the money for themselves and making others suffer as a
consequence. Voila! And ideology is born! I’m not saying there is nothing more to leftist thought than that – I’m only saying that
there isn’t much more. Everything that follows is merely an
elaboration of this single fundamental premise – the world is a mess because
we’ve failed at the task of dividing up the stuff fairly. Armed with this powerful, hate-optional idea,
I began to color the world in with varying gradations of traditional Marxist
red.
Now, before you
start envisioning me as some sort of dedicated revolutionary, laying down life
and limb for the material salvation of his comrades worldwide, I need to widen
your perspective with two minor but essential points. First – I am a coward. Maybe not an abject coward, but not the sort
of person who is going to be found squatting in a jungle with the Sandinistas
or any other group of guerillas. I was happy
to wear the T-shirt and the boots on campus.
Maybe the beret, but come on – lets be reasonable. Second, like
most twentysomethings, probably in any country and at any period of history,
what I wanted, really, was to have an identity that I could live with. To be somebody doing the right thing. Maybe not somebody pivotally important – but somebody. I wasn’t about to pursue a business degree,
certainly – not with my
upbringing. I settled, instead, without
any special plan, into being a faux socialist student among sympathetic liberal
professors at a state university. That
is only a romantic image if you imagine very, very hard. I did imagine hard. I learned to paint, and to write short, inventive
research papers with suspiciously wide margins.
Pursuing one’s
identity is, by the way, about the worst thing one can do. You end up knowing neither yourself nor
anybody else. If you want to increase
the misery of the world, at least a little, narcissism is a pretty reliable way
to do it. If you want to do some good,
on the other hand, stop worrying about yourself. Gandhi once said something to that
effect. Of course, you can’t just try to
be Gandhi either. Dhotis look as stupid
on faux Gandhis as berets look on faux revolutionaries. The real trick to being somebody is to be
yourself without managing to notice.
Buddha said that somewhere – probably.
In any case, I read some Marx, a dash
of Che Guevara, a fair amount Lenin, and finished with some Trotsky and a
little Rosa Luxemburg. If I wasn’t
really all that well-read I was, at least, well… Red. It doesn’t seem worth the effort to discuss that
literature in any depth. Philosophically,
it’s pretty thin. Luxemburg, and Trotsky
in places, are at least humane. As a
narrative, the aggregate of genuine red literature does have a certain
monotonous coherence. It is not
altogether a departure from the facts. It
is a body of work that does best on the attack.
It actually does little else. The
Marxist rests entirely on the wickedness of his enemies, and of his own
principles says practically nothing. The
splendid future to be expected after the revolution isn’t merely theoretical, it is in every way an
article of faith.
My two older siblings joined the
Socialist Workers Party at some point in the early 80’s and took me along to
protests and some meetings. It is
amusing to me that conservatives of the Reagan era feared and hated little
leftist parties like the SWP so much.
They were really too inert to be a threat to anybody. If I was a coward I certainly was not
alone. What these people did, in
practice, was to get together to share a steady diet of formalized class
indignity. They were interested neither
in electoral success nor in bloody revolution.
They were content to walk the dogma with thousands of ordinary liberals
at major protests in Washington and New York, and to boast of having a single
member in some legislature somewhere in the far west. Conservatives imagined such people were nests
of Soviet collaborators ready to wreak havoc on the American soul. Soviet agents could probably have found more
useful potential agents on urban middle school playgrounds. If the problem with the recent Occupy Wall
Street movement was that they didn’t know what they wanted, the problem with
the Socialist Workers Party was that what they wanted was a certain kind of
revolutionary romanticism which was all too easy to attain – and having
attained it they were untroubled by their own actual irrelevance. They were me, in other words. No one with an ounce of integrity can really
stand his own reflection. Then too, I’ve
never gotten the hang of institutions based on faith, religious or
otherwise. My father did teach me to reason, as I’ve said. Reason does not get on well with doctrines
centered on belief.
I have never, at any point in my life,
considered myself a liberal. If the SWP
was bad, the liberal Democrats have long been far worse. At least the SWP theoretically wanted something that was theoretically better than the status quo. I was to eventually conclude that even the Marxist
dream itself was flawed, but at least it seemed
to offer something better than a world run by the usual group of elitists
painted with a coat or two of political correctness. When liberals ooh and aah over the Kennedys
or the Clintons, I get the depressing feeling that we haven’t changed much
since the middle ages. Mind you, those
Republicans that pledge undying fealty to the uninspiring House of Bush don’t
thrill me either, but at least they don’t muddy their stupidity with the same
hypocritical blather about being somehow dedicated to political equality. In Animal
Farm, George Orwell said: “All
animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That ought to be the motto of the current
Democratic party. At the top there are the
Kennedys and Clintons of the world, followed by the lesser politicians and
assorted bureaucrats. Beneath, there is an
advisory layer of academics from the best universities. Lower still, an assortment of workaday
professionals of various kinds – people who think that they are part of the
planning process because they know something about wine and read the New Yorker. At the very bottom, are the people with their
hands out and their mouths open – waiting to be fed and led. It may be that the world has always been like
that. It may even be that the world
always will be like that. It might even turn out, though I doubt it,
that such an arrangement is ultimately for the best – but let’s at least not
say that equality is just a clever alternate spelling for oligarchy. It
isn’t.
Despite what you might think, my
anti-aristocratic fervor is not the same as a snarling hatred for the
rich. I no longer object at all if people make themselves wealthy
by engaging in good old fashioned free market enterprises – the kind that
produce arguably useful goods and generate employment for that most luckless of
minorities – people with a work ethic. I
am less convinced that investment
bankers and hedge fund managers are a net boon to humanity, and perhaps it’s
not unreasonable to dislike a group of people who make money by destabilizing
the entire global economy. Still, as bad
as this latter group of high rollers might be, they have at least one saving
grace: they do not, as rule, give a damn
about what I think or how I live. They
want my money, if I have any, but they have no ideological fascination with
curtailing my free agency. The elites
that worry me are not the ones building floating houses in the Caribbean, but
the ones building utopian ant farms who insist I play the obliging role of ant.
How could I have been so blind as to
have ever been a leftist? This is not really
a question, but a lament. The question
itself I have already answered. It
sounded nice. How could something that
claims to be progress not sound nice?
The real question is – how could I have been so caught up in the
rhetoric and romanticism to have failed to think the inexorable logic of
leftism through? The answer to that question lies in an understanding
of world history.
My mother’s major contribution to my postnatal
development was to infuse me with a love of history. She read books about ancient Egypt and she
talked about them. That threw open a
window for me that for many people remains forever shuttered. Without an understanding of history, one can
only understand politics in the way an Alzheimer’s sufferer understands her
relationships. Everything just comes as
a continual surprise. Unfortunately, learning
enough history to begin to get an accurate sense of how societies actually behave
takes a very long time. The primary
reason it takes so long is that all historical analyses are burdened with the ideological
zeitgeist of their particular period and place of origin – whether their authors
intended them to be burdened or not. To
do more than merely indoctrinate yourself, you have to read old books and new –
foreign and domestically produced. A
quick read of Howard Zinn’s A People’s
History of the United States is
insufficient. It will tell you much
about Howard Zinn, but only one oblique perspective on the history of the
United States. You can learn to argue
intelligently in a few months if you have the aptitude, but discerning facts
from axe-grinding exercises is an art – and, even then, an imperfect art. Read a book on any historical topic and you
will usually come away with one of two impressions. The first is that the author has taught you
something interesting and valuable about the world. The second is that the author is a
brainwashed, opinionated ass. Which of
these two conclusions you come to tends to depend on what beliefs you started
with. History is not like
chemistry. You can’t just run the
experiment again to see whether or not the author got it right. In time though, if you expose yourself to
enough variety of material, certain patterns do begin to appear out of the
noise. It was on reaching this sort of critical mass of historical knowledge
that my illusions about leftism started to fade. If this is vague, it can’t be helped. Mine has never been an easy path to trace.
Looked at historically, modern
socialism consistently fails to achieve its aims. Whether we are talking about the Soviet Union
of the 1980’s or Western Europe of today, it has failed to produce prosperity
for the public as a whole. Leftists can
get some limited projects done, but they cannot bestow prosperity on the public
after having denuded them of the agency to pursue prosperity themselves. I remember once watching a cat who had beaten
and clawed a little bird to death. Despite
the bird’s condition, the cat continued to bat the thing into the air in a miserable
and obviously frustrating attempt to make it fly. Try as it might, it just couldn’t get the
game restarted. This is more-or-less
what any group of socialists is prone to do when given power over an
economy. Having wrecked the thing for
their own ideological amusement, they expect its broken corpse to flourish
under their ongoing punishment. It never
does. Socialism elevates the poorest of
the poor by pushing down the living standards of the middle class. The net result is always negative. The collective pie gets smaller, only to
accomplish the modest gain that no one actually starves for want of the most miserable
of slices. This does not seem, to me, a
resounding success. Worse still,
socialism’s equality project is an utter sham.
This is obvious if you simply pay attention. Are the central planners and the public ever
equal? No. Moreover, their inequality is not merely economic, but political in the extreme.
The central government makes all
of the decisions and imposes them through the authority of the state. The citizen obeys – or suffers punishment. All governments coerce, but under socialism
the scope of government intrusion into the life of the individual is
unlimited. There is a tragic difference
between a legislative body whose members owe their stations to the public’s
approval, and a body of appointed central planners who preside over the public
in the public’s name. “Social Democracy”
is an oxymoron because central planning
and democracy are as antithetical as
two concepts can possibly be. “Freedom
is Slavery,” said George Orwell, not in Animal
Farm but in 1984. I understood Orwell’s ruthless irony when I
read it, but quickly covered it up with lots of dreamy, optimistic,
collectivist perfume.
The last straw, really – the final
insult to my leftist point of view, was the discovery that socialism is ultimately
regressive rather than progressive. The long history of civilization can fairly
be said to have been one slow, uncertain advance against the bulwark of political
oppression. In other words, the
direction of progress has been that of the triumph of the individual over state
authority. Kings, pharaohs, sultans and great
khans, varied and colorful though they might have been, had a set of salient
features in common – their authority was capricious, arbitrary, and largely unrestrained. The great khan may have indeed been great,
but if you displeased him there was nothing in the makeup of his government
that limited the amusing and horrific things that he might do to you. Maybe, in the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth (though, personally, I doubt it) – but it is historically
undeniable that no one initially bothered with creating rights. Rights were chiseled away from established
authorities bit by bit, generation by generation, in an uneven manner and with
numerous reverses. They are hard-won
things. Constitutional government, in
which authority agrees to be bound by a framework of laws – effectively on pain
of public revolt – must rank among the greatest of human accomplishments. Under the rule of law, the government
protects people from murdering and robbing one another, and the people protect
themselves from government by the vigilant defense of their own generally
understood rights. Rights are not given to us by government, or by God, or
by anybody else. Rights were wrested from authority by the very fact
that we, the people, had sufficient collective power to effectively demand
them. Unfortunately, when people begin
to feel that government should do more than be the administrator and policeman
of last resort – that it should, in fact, serve as parent and provider to its
citizens – the historical progress that brought us Constitutional government is
inevitably undermined. If the question
becomes “How can government help?” there is hardly any personal sphere into
which government cannot find justification for intruding. Eventually, in the name of the public good,
capricious, arbitrary, and largely unrestrained authority is reinstated. There is no reason to think a committee of
planners has innately better motives than an individual tin pot dictator or,
for that matter, than a hedge fund manager.
Restrained by the vestiges of public traditions and democratic processes,
socialism may present a benign appearance for a time, but an unelected
bureaucracy’s relationship to the public – that of master to subject – is essentially
the same one that existed under any ancient despot. F.A. Heyek said this all seventy years ago,
of course. It is still worth saying.
Worse, in human terms, than my
political mistake was a far broader social one.
I got used to simply disliking the people that the subculture I was
immersed in told me to dislike. That is
an exceedingly crappy way to deal with real, flesh-and-blood human beings. The fact that it is an easy trap to fall into
doesn’t mitigate its essential, deep-down crappiness. The generic leftist-liberal miasma that I
lived in dictated that racial minorities and certain other groups were always
hapless, noble victims to be pitied and deferred to, and that conservatives,
Republicans, and Christians were monolithic, soulless, cookie cutter
villains. I know that there are many
decent, caring people who believe this crap, but as a system of organizing
one’s understanding of humanity it is crap nonetheless. It is the same good guy / bad guy heuristic humans beings
have been employing to justify despising one another since prehistoric
times. I strongly suspect that even the
majority of four-legged animals have the good guy / bad guy trick down
pat. You can be a habitual bigot even
before mastering the invention of fire.
You can be a habitual bigot even without a thumb or vocal chords. At some level, I guess, being narrow-minded
is a feature of social behavior. Now
there’s an irony, if ever there was one.
I
came to live among the soulless, cookie cutter villains more-or-less by
accident. I moved from a city to a village
in pursuit of a better paying job. I was
a leftist among conservatives. An
atheist among Christians. An urbanite in
a rural area. The first thing I learned
about my conservative brethren was that they know what a community is. They have what used to be called, in rather
more innocent times, a sense of social responsibility. Many of them are habitually charitable. There is a tendency for liberals to think
that conservatives only care about themselves and their own little circles, but
in my experience this usually isn’t the case.
I rarely get through a week without an envelope full of money coming
across my desk with an attached sympathy card for some poor schmoe who has
suffered a misfortune. The bulletin boards
of my company are plastered with charity raffles, donation requests, mission
news, etc. African charities are big
here, as are charities for the usual well-known and popular diseases. Blood drives are a vampire’s delight. There is no coercion driving any of this that
I am aware of. It is just a feature of
the culture. The culture of these rural,
redneck villains – these narrow-minded haters.
It is one thing to be caught in an intellectual error, but it is quite
another to have to measure your own humanitarian pretentions against somebody
else’s real, tangible charity. It is
humbling, to say the least.
Of
course, there is no shortage of bad intentions among the non-progressive
population. There is no shortage of bad
intentions anywhere. We are all human, like it or not, and no
group has a monopoly on ill-will or sheer, pig-ignorant stupidity. I am not naïve enough to believe that people
on the right end of the political spectrum are incapable of harboring some
terrible ideas. Plenty of conservatives
I know believed that the Bush administration’s torture policy was commendable. Decent people, I think, should not believe
such things. It is a hellish sort of
doublethink when basically decent people somehow manage to. I hope it hurts their heads, because it
certainly hurts mine. On the other hand,
the right has no monopoly on finding justifications for inflicting pain. When it comes to torturing their own
citizens, several socialist regimes are in a class of their own.
What I have
concluded, over the long run, is that ideology itself is dangerous. It is not a matter of backing the right one. There is no right one. If you become so caught up in a cause that
you are willing to twist reality into a pretzel to forgive its sins – or to
shut your mind to the possibility that it even has sins – you cannot
meaningfully say that you care either about people or about the truth. A handful of rough-and-ready principles is
probably the best that we can manage in a lifetime. I, myself, am tired to the bone of being an
–ist or an –ive or an –ian. I will
proudly stand with whoever seems to be getting it right at any given moment,
knowing full well that human wisdom is always tentative and fleeting – and that
any group of people moving in the right direction all at once is probably only doing
so by accident. So be it. I leave certainty, and Santa, to the
enthusiasm of the young.
