Socialists: Deplorables of the Left

Prior to Trump's election, we were all warned to fear the "basket of deplorables" that constituted a hefty portion of Trump's electoral base: racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes and Islamophobes. I think there might have been some transphobes in there too. You get the picture. Trump was an evil fascist bogeyman who was going to destroy all things good in America if the ruling DNC regime were removed from power. So not surprisingly, a frustrated electorate removed them from power. Shocker.

Two years on, Trumpenreich has not materialized. Muslims and Latinos have not been rounded up and deported. Blacks and whites are not being forced into separate amenities. Women have not been relegated to the status of either marthas, econowives or, of course, handmaids. Worker's rights are getting trampled, but that's par for the course Stateside. Nothing new there.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Increasingly, millennials are growing frustrated with their economic lot in post great-recession America, and more and more of them are expressing their dissent via an ideological outlook that one doesn't typically associate with the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Socialism.

That's right. Socialism is on the march in the good old U.S of A, of all places. And now the shoe of political moral panic is on the other foot. Now, the deplorables come from the left, and the red flag is the their banner. While CNN not so long ago tried to paint Trump up as a goose-stepping ultra nationalist, they're now asserting that Bernie Sanders once favored the wholesale nationalization of American industry. Self described socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is daily lampooned by conservative social media as a kind of leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin. Indeed, they both used the term "death panels" unironically. However, only one did so accurately.

My hope would be that anyone smart enough to roll their eyes at the idea of Trump being literally Hitler would also be smart enough to react the same way at the thought of Chairman and General Secretary Bernie Sanders becoming President of the Supreme Soviet of the American Socialist Republic, and immediately kicking off agricultural collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, and the pouring of legions of blue haired red guards into the country side to hound God fearing, gun toting red state, white skin, blue collar Americans as if they were the kulaks of the 21st century.

Because if you think anything like that is going to happen, you've lost the right to ridicule "THE RESISTANCE" for its propensity to hyperbole and overdramatization.

Yet despite all this, it's not just the right that's gotten in on this new red scare that's swept social media in the last year or so. The classy classical liberal minded blog Areo, which typically engages the noble cause of attacking campus social justice culture from the left, has recently published a piece by one Aaron Tao, urging us to "Listen to Immigrants Who Have Lived Under Socialism." Tao cites his own parents, who grew up in Maoist China, a Romanian student whose parents grew up under Ceaușescu, a student who recently left Maduro's Venezuela, as well as anti-socialist commentator and author Jordan Peterson.  All remind us of the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism.

They are not wrong. I'm not unfamiliar with the Black Book of Communism, as a matter of fact. It proudly adorns my shelf.  Yet I can't help but think that this is precisely the problem with Tao's article. It's attacking something with arguably even fewer supporters than Hitler and the Nazis have. Bad as they are, and as anyone who's ever delt with leftbook can tell you, they are insufferably bad, there just aren't that many tankies in the USA. Tao even admits that:

"For the purposes of this article, I will use the Library of Economics and Liberty’s definition of socialism: “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.” This is synonymous with communism. The end goal of socialism is to abolish private property, free markets, exchange, prices and profits, and substitute collective ownership and decision-making to determine the allocation of resources."

I wholeheartedly support Tao's opposition to this political and economic system. And so too would Bernie Sanders. Why? The reason for this is that rhetoric aside, Bernie Sanders is a social democrat, not a Marxian communist. Big difference between the two, and it's past time the specter of communism was exorcised from the fevered nightmares of reactionaries and libertarians the nation over for once and for all.

Here's the difference: Social democrats come to power through the democratic process. They face the voters periodically as democrats and republicans do, and if they lose elections, they step down. They do not aim to seize the means of production wholesale. Typically, the most they end up doing is nationalizing a handful of key industries and essential services. Most of the economy is left in private hands.

Just in case you missed that, let me repeat it: most of the economy is left in private hands. Moreover, successive governments can simply privatize state owned enterprises that are not performing well and might be better run by the private sector.

How do I know this? Outside the United States, social democrats actually win elections and the results are, well, actually quite good more often than not. Some notable examples:

I'm Awesome. Deal with it.

Great Britain, 1945. World War 2 has recently ended and the UK is going to the polls. To the surprise of many, Conservative war hero Winston Churchill loses to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. This ends up resulting in the creation of the UK's National Health Service, as well as nationalization of several industries, making him among the most socialistic of social democrats. Due to his reforms, UK citizens got access to health care, housing and other necessities via an elaborate social welfare system, in the late 40s after the nation had been devastated by the blitz. They live longer and better, which is what conservatives and libertarians go to great lengths to tell us won't happen under socialism. In case you're wondering, Attlee hated communism. In 1951, the UK electorate voted for a Conservative government, Churchill's back in, and Labour stepped down as democratic parties in democratic societies do when they lose. No purges, no famines, no gulags.

Sure, many European social democratic parties had more radical, revolutionary and Marxist origins. But these were abandoned for various reasons, mostly because they were impractical and were achieving terrible results in the USSR and its client states. Sometimes on paper, always in practice, the social democrats were pragmatists and reformers. Perhaps too much so in some cases.

From the 1990s onward, the British Labour Party had, until the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, been existential proof of the falsehood of Conquest's and O'Sullivan's laws mandating an inevitable leftward drift in all non explicitly right wing organizations. Tony Blair's Labour Party was not Attlee's party, that's for certain. And socialist purists derided Attlee in his day in similar terms.

Elsewhere, According to Wikipedia,

"In 1959, the SPD (West German Social Democratic Party) instituted a major policy review with the Godesberg Program. The Godesberg Program eliminated the party's remaining Marxist-aligned policies and the SPD became based upon freiheitlicher Sozialismus (liberal socialism).  With the adoption of the Godsberg Program, the SPD renounced Marxist determinism and classism and replaced it with an ethical socialism based on humanism and emphasized that the party was democratic, pragmatic and reformist."

When social democrat Willy Brandt became West German Chancellor in 1969, he did not initiate a great leap forward or a cultural revolution. Instead, again according to Wikipedia:

According to Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt's domestic reform programme had accomplished more than any previous programme for a comparable period. Levels of social expenditure were increased, with more funds allocated towards housing, transportation, schools, and communication, and substantial federal benefits were provided for farmers. Various measures were introduced to extend health care coverage, while federal aid to sports organisations was increased. A number of liberal social reforms were instituted whilst the welfare state was significantly expanded (with total public spending on social programs nearly doubling between 1969 and 1975), with health, housing, and social welfare legislation bringing about welcome improvements, and by the end of the Brandt Chancellorship West Germany had one of the most advanced systems of welfare in the world.

For most of the 20th century, the Swedish social democrats and their Nordic Model were the standard bearers for social democracy, and prior to the party's more recent descent into radical feminist and open borders nonsense, they did quite well. The Scandinavian social democracies, which are not limited to Sweden but also encompass Norway and its brilliant Government Pension Fund, as well as Iceland, Denmark and Finland, consistently score at or near the top of international indices measuring overall prosperity, social equality and yes, political and economic freedom as well.

Far from being communist dungeon-states, these Nordic social democracies are a kind of capitalism that works for everyone, not just a tiny rich few. Imagine that. Even in my own home province of Alberta, Canada, the social democratic government of Premier Rachel Notley (daughter of former party leader Grant Notley) elected in 2015 has, among other things, cut child poverty in half. That's right, they've reduced hunger, not increased it. I thought resentful and peevish socialists were supposed to starve everyone to death because they hate the rich. What does Notley think she's doing? How does that work?

And crucial to all of this, so much so that it bears repeating, is that social democratic parties face the voters in periodic elections, as per the election laws of their respective lands, and step down when they lose. Plus they're constrained by the same constitutional (or comparable) factors that constrain executive and legislative branches of government in all liberal democracies. Were a social democrat to be elected President of the United States, they'd still have an independent congress, an independent judiciary, the constraints imposed by the constitution and the bill of rights and a free press, such as it is, to constrain them. And most significantly of all, an established tradition and history of democracy, which the crumbling monarchies of Russia and China didn't have when their respective communist revolutions took place.

On top of all of this, the reasons for the millennial generation's resurgent interest in socialism is often barely touched upon by anti-socialist commentators. In the Areo article, Tao does admit that

Many millennials lived through the 2007–8 financial crisis and graduated college with uncertain job prospects and crushing student loans. Gen Z (iGen), the newest kids on the block, grew up with smartphones in their pockets before they started high school and “do not remember a time before the internet.” Living in an economically uncertain world, in which anyone with a smartphone can easily document an unjustified police shooting, it is understandable that many young people are drawn towards social justice activism. 

And this is generous, compared to what your average macho reactionary libertarian has to say on the matter. I suppose that a generation faced with dismal work prospects, low wages, poor working conditions, lack of access to affordable health care and a host of other poverty related concerns should just shut up and be a good little peon because some internet tough guy with a lot of yellow and black in his profile pictures figures he's an economics major because he's read a bit of Ayn Rand, possibly Economics in One Lesson, dabbled a bit in the theories of Mises and Friedman, listened to some Jordan Peterson videos and so storms into any online space, invited or not, to sound off about how stupid left of center millennials are and how they're just resentful towards those saintly billionaires, who've acquired every dime they have because they're just so smart and so moral and just. Nothing to do with lopsided tax and trade policy and a broken trade union movement, or anything like that. They're rich because they're virtuous, end of story you commie wimps! Beginning each display of false bravado with "lol", of course.

If your millennial (or any) leftist should walk away from an interaction with this kind of jackass with a newfound appreciation for Antifa, a thought that the SJWs might be on to something (these free market tough guys are always white guys, I hate to say), and a suspicion that a gulag might not be such a bad thing, I increasingly wonder: can you really blame them? It should be noted that I do not regard Aaron Tao as one of these phony tough ancapistani types.

These boors insist that social democracy and Stalinism are indistinguishable, and are no more honest in so doing than your typical smug urban liberal Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart types are when they conflate Trump and Hitler, or when a woman's studies prof suggests that disagreeing with feminism equals misogyny. Which is not honest in the least. In all these cases it's willful dishonesty, contrived to feed red meat to the base, and they damn well know it. This may well suit the interests who benefit from the status quo and frustrate social democratic reform just fine. But it has real consequences for poor and working class Americans of all racial and demographic backgrounds who struggle to acquire basic necessities. It needs to stop.

The facts are plain here: social democracy, while not perfect, works just fine overall. Even in times where the popularity of social democratic parties wane, their core ideas do not. The performance of the Nordic countries proves that. Libertarian neckbeards have been shrieking that the sky is falling on the European welfare state for decades now. The only real concern is actually taking the hysterics seriously and buying into the ideology of neoliberal austerity. The improvements over central planning this results in are marginal.

The more the no-step snake crowd flies into hysterics trying to deny or suppress this, the more alike their SJW cousins they become as far as ideological hysteria is concerned.

Indeed, they've been at the game of baseless political hysteria a lot longer than the SJWs have. Remember the Tea Party? Remember the birthers? Remember Obama somehow managing to be a Muslim, a communist, a Nazi and a liberal all at the same time? It was old hat even then. Newt Gingrich takes that shameless playbook back into the Reagan years.

If they keep it up, they should be no more welcome than grandstanding SJWs in the company of people who want to take political discourse with the intent on solving pressing issues facing the western world at all seriously. With any luck, their shrill hysterics will backfire in like manner to the manner in which the Clinton campaign's fear mongering against the basket of deporables backfired and got Trump elected. A social democratic America can't come soon enough, in my opinion.

Aaron Tao, Jordan Peterson (himself a former social democrat, from Alberta no less) and pundits the nation over are correct to be opposed to authoritarian socialism and authoritarian leftism in general. But they should be assured also. Electing a Bernie Sanders will result in an Attlee, a Brandt or a Notley, not a Mao, a  Ceaușescu or a Maduro. America could do worse. A social democratic USA will result in considerably less poverty, not more.

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A Liberal's Selective Memory

As I type this, Areo is the single best news and opinion blog on the internet. Describing itself as "an opinion and analysis digital magazine focused on current affairs — in particular: Humanism, Culture, Politics, Human Rights, Science, and, most importantly, Free Expression" Areo should be on the subscription list of every liberal minded alt-leftist. Senior editor Malhar Mali and assistant editors Helen Pluckrose and Oliver Traldi never fail to deliver top notch material. 

The recent article, "A liberal Who Remembers" by Traldi reads as a laundry list of my own grievances against the present state of left of center politics. Among the things Traldi remembers about being a liberal in the George W. Bush years was a respect for science, human decency, the search for objective truth, a respect for due process, opposition to war and a general disdain for neo-con linguistic chicanery, authoritarianism, hawkishness and puritanism. The article laments the recent decline of the once proud liberal tradition in America into the fever swamps of SJW hysteria and regressive left hypocrisy.

He will get no argument from me on any of that. I suspect Mr. Traldi and myself would agree on way more than we'd disagree on, and the internet definitely needs more voices such as his.

They've Always Been This

What I will say by way of difference of opinion, however, is that my own memory of the progressivism of the Bush years is not quite so fond. I've noticed a tendency among alternative leftists to look with fondness on some mythical past golden age of the left, a time when we got our activism right. While the alt-left was originally called "The Left Wing of the Alt-Right," I'd suggest we'd be better described as the reactionaries of the left. These damn SJWs with their dyed hair and made up gender pronouns can get off my union household's lawn.

While there are certainly many aspects of previous iterations of progressive politics that are preferable to today's, we should be careful not to romanticize our own past too much. The left has a rather long and sorry history of its own brands of smugness, self serving doublethink and ideologically driven denial of reality. 

Perhaps it was the old left, that of the early to mid 20th century, with its corrupt unions and municipal party machines. While these institutions did do much good, they're far from beyond reproach. What of the old left's dogmatic and sectarian socialist and communist parties, some of whom took orders from Moscow, and whose internal quarrels in places like Wiemar Germany actually helped right wing authoritarian regimes come to power? Soviet apologists both in and out of the Kremlin used a lot of the same kinds of whataboutism that we now see from SJWs. It was the mystical proletariat and their revolutionary vanguard party rather than feminist and critical race theorists who claimed carte blanche to act entirely as they wished, but their rationalizations were remarkably similar. No rules apply to the self described marginalized revolutionary. It was the old left of Great Britain as much as the totalitarianism of Stalin's Russia that George Orwell satirized in his classic 1984. It would be well into the postwar years that these types would catch on to the fact that the USSR was not the worker's paradise that they'd been hoping for, to put it mildly.

Was the new left of the turbulent 1960s any better? College students would gradually supplant organized labor, the deeper cultural analysis of the Frankfurt School would likewise supplant stale Marxist-Leninist economic reductionism, and impoverished minorities and women at home and abroad would succeed where the blue collar proletariat had failed and usher in an era of non hierarchical participatory democracy that would bring liberation from both capitalism and stale bureaucratic socialism alike. Or so they hoped.

The results in actuality would plant the seeds of what we're seeing on college campuses now. Radical groups like the Students for a Democratic Society would idealize despots such as Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, whom one could argue were not significant improvements on Stalin or even Khrushchev''s USSR. Their own groups were rife with the kinds of purity spiraling, virtue signaling and eventually violent protest that we're now seeing. The Weather Underground of the late 1960s make today's antifa groups look tame. 

While the radical "spirit of '68" would gradually taper off over the course of the 70s, the feminist migration into the universities was well underway. The ideological foundations of all of the regressivism we're now seeing: postmodernism's denial of a common reality and the resulting ascendance of authoritarian and opportunistic "Standpoint theories", the view that speech offensive to "marginalized peoples" - or their self appointed representative vanguard - constitutes a kind of oppression that warrants censorship, the erosion of the boundary between activism and scholarship and the self serving denial of the possibility of being racist towards whites (try telling that to a white South African farmer) or sexist towards men (try telling that to a divorced father) were all securely in place on university campuses across the western world by the late 1980s. 

Thus, I do not remember the left of the Bush era being quite so liberal as Traldi recollects. What I do remember is the emergence among progressives of the new Atheism - the popularity of authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and YouTubers such as TJ Kirk, then called the Amazing Atheist. The problem, as far as they were concerned, was too much church attendance in red state America. All of the problems of the Bush White House were simply reducible to uneducated bumpkins who believed in an invisible man in the sky.

Religious belief systems are not beyond criticism, of course. I'm an agnostic myself. But what was truly odious about the religious right was not that they believed in God per-se. It was that they so flagrantly used religion in such self aggrandizing ways. They bear much more resemblance to the kinds of people whom Christ actually contended with in the gospels - money changers in the temples and self righteous pharisees who, thinking themselves without sin, were more than happy to cast the first stone, than with Christ himself. 

None of this exonerate religious belief from the very real problems presented by a reading of the bible, of course. But it also represented a troubling shift towards preoccupation with people's private beliefs among outspoken progressives. The left of the Bush years was much more worried that rural Mississippians were praying in conservative churches than they were about the hawkish foreign policies and regressive economic policies of the Bush White House and its largely captive congress. An air of smug superiority over the common people, as opposed to solidarity with the common people, increasingly became a trait of the Bush era left. 

What I remember about Bush era liberals is how unwilling they were to discuss comparable problems with the theology of Islam, or the glaring racism and authoritarianism of the nations in the middle east we were at war with. I even remember UK author Nick Cohen writing a book denouncing Islamist apologism on the left in 2007, while still remaining critical of neo-con hawkishness. Very much while Bush was still in office.

To these noble and intrepid Bush era liberals, this came across as being a tad bit victim-blaming, if not outrightly racist. I distinctly remember Bush era liberals reacting with similar anger to observations that college feminists could be no less sexually puritan and censorious than the True Love Waits and Purity Balls crowd that they so loved to make fun of, were. Clerical celibacy and waiting until marriage to have sex were so repressive and unhealthy, but crying sexist over men complimenting women and hosannas of praise sung to lesbian separatists were as much a staple of "progressives" in 2006 as they are of progressives in 2017. They just didn't yet have tumblr and twitter to further extend their reach. 

At the end of the day, what most offended Bush era liberals about all the odious things that the Bush White House was engaged in: middle east wars, erosion of civil liberties, science denial, sexual repression, a black-and-white world view, religious fundamentalism, censorship and the circumvention of due process was that whites, males, Christians, conservatives and Republicans were the ones doing them. And they were no less obnoxious, arrogant and condescending in their tone towards anyone who disagreed with them. Argue with the Bush era progressive about anything, no matter what your actual beliefs, and expect to be lumped in with Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The basket of deplorables of not so long ago.

 And even then, none of it was new. While there have always been principled liberal and egalitarian voices and causes on the left, and I do count the authors and editors at Areo among these, regressive hyper-partisanship and bigotry turned against the self have always been a part of the left in the western world, and likely always will be.

And I should know. I too am a liberal who remembers.

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Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology beginning with part 1, Recent Regressions