Draft of talk given at UV Patriot’s Meeting on December 15, 2011

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers…
~ Aldous Huxley, From the 1946 Forward to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

I began my own pilgrimage from Left to Right or at least from Democrat to conservative libertarian, in the late 1980s. While I always had libertarian and limited government inclinations, it wasn’t until I became exposed to the Left’s inroads into family and social policy and education that I left the Democratic Party, or as Ronald Reagan said, “the Democratic Party left me.” During my Master’s degree studies in that time period, I also became aware of the connection between Romanticism, the French Revolution, and modern totalitarianism, and the events of 1989 and the early 1990s, beginning with Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, only served to reinforce my views. Yet even as Marxism was losing ground in Europe and much of the rest of the world, it seemed to reign supreme in the American institutions of cultural transmission: education, academia, the press, the media, and entertainment. Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci’s agenda to make Marxism triumphant and dominant in the West, the so-called Marxist “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West, seems to have succeeded. The ideas of cultural Marxism were first spread through American academia by the leaders of the Frankfurt School, who fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape Nazi Germany. Members of this group included Theodore Adorno (co-author of The Authoritarian Personality), Herbert Marcuse (author of Eros and Civilization and mentor of Angela Davis), Erich Fromm (author of Escape from Freedom), and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School blended Marx and Freud and in the ferment of American universities in the 1960s, gave birth to “Critical Theory” and Political Correctness. So one might wonder why, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Marxist stranglehold on the cultural institutions of America has persisted. One answer is, as neo-conservative and former Leftist David Horowitz has offered, “tenured radicals” in the institutions of American higher education. But let me pursue these thoughts in more detail.

A question that has long plagued me is: Why does the Left always seem to side with tyrants? In this case I’m not just talking about the totalitarian Left, the Marxists and communists, but the Progressive or so-called “liberal” Left in America as well. This question is related to the fascination of intellectuals with totalitarian dictators in the Twentieth Century beginning with Lenin and Stalin, and continuing on through Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot. The list is long of academics, intellectuals, philosophers, celebrities and other cultural mavens who have supported the above dictators and mass murderers: Bertrand Russell, Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Chomsky, Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sontag, to name but a few of the most prominent “fellow travelers.” For example, Cuban refugee and writer Humberto Fontova (“Leftwingers Outraged by Being Associated with Leftwingers,” January 28, 2010) gave numerous examples of Democratic politicians and the mainstream media’s love affair with Castro with quotes from Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Ted Turner, Andrea Mitchell, Dan Rather, all gushing forth with their love and admiration for Fidel. After addressing the UN General Assembly to thundering applause, Castro “was fêted by New York’s best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan’s glitterati, pundits and power brokers.”

First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro’s every comment.

This question of why the intellectual and the cultural elite of America so often support totalitarian ideologies is not a superfluous point; in fact, in many ways it is the most essential point if the traditions of American liberty are to survive this century because who else will teach the next generation if not teachers, professors, journalists, newsmen, as well as various cultural icons who hold forth as if they were great experts on all things that pertain to the state of the nation. My recent researches on this topic have led me to read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Change (New York: Broadway Books, 2007, 2009), Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009), and Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, along with a re-reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944).

I’ll begin with my most recent reading in Berman’s book, Terror and Liberalism. Berman is anything but a conservative, with bona fide Left-Liberal credentials. (It is important to clarify that in his work, Berman uses the term Liberalism not in the current American parlance, which denotes Progressive ideas, but rather in the broader sense to encompass the whole gamut of Western political and economic institutions. Thus, by this definition, it would include both American free market conservatism as well as democratic socialism.) One of the main points of Berman’s work is his dismay at the fact that Leftist intellectuals continue to support the forces of Islamic totalitarianism, which he conceives as having not only Islamic roots, but also foundations in Western, European versions of totalitarianism, that is in Fascism and Communism. After reviewing the European roots of rebellion in French Romanticism (Victor Hugo, Baudelaire) and Russian anarchism, using Camus’ The Rebel as a guide, Berman gives an extensive overview of the rise of Arab nationalism and Islamic radicalism in the modern world. While briefly discussing the rise of the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq, Berman goes on to focus on perhaps the most important thinker in the Islamist movement, Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb, who lived from 1906 to 1966, formulated the theory that the Islamic world was under attack from the West, the Jews and the Crusaders (Christians), as represented by modern ideas and institutions, and that to survive, Islamists must undertake a jihad against the West. Both Berman and Glazov give detailed accounts of the influence of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism on the formation of both Ba’athist and Islamist ideology, and this is as true for Qutb as it is for the other principle formulators of Islamic radicalism.

To bring Berman’s work back to the problem of the Leftist intellectuals, he draws a parallel between current Leftist sympathies for radical Islam and the betrayal by anti-war French Socialists who collaborated with the Nazis and helped form the Vichy government during World War II. In the former case, Berman ties in the Left’s support of radical Islam with the Romantic foundations of totalitarian violence and fascination with a cult of death, murder, and suicide. Speaking of the second Palestinian intifada, both Berman and Glazov (influenced by Berman) make the point that Leftist support for the Palestinian cause always seems to escalate when violence and suicide bombings increase, which he likens to a cult of death with roots going back to Romanticism and anarchism. As Berman wrote, “The high tide of the terrorist attacks, in the early months of 2002, proved to be the very moments when around the world, large numbers of people felt impelled to express their fury at the Israelis” (p. 142). Yet, when the Israeli repression settled in and the attacks became less frequent, public support for the Palestinian cause also became less frenzied. One possibility for this strange correlation, according to Berman, was that

The suicide bombings produced a philosophical crisis among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world – a crisis for everyone whose fundamental beliefs would not be able to acknowledge the existence of pathological mass political movements. (p.143)

Berman made similar claims about Noam Chomsky’s reactions to the 9/11 attack on America. Because it was inconceivable to Chomsky that “bin Laden had ordered random killings of Americans strictly for the purpose of killing Americans,” Chomsky came up with the absurd notion that Clinton’s missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, which had erroneously been identified as a bomb factory and resulted in the death of one or two people at most, was morally equivalent to 9/11 (pp. 149 – 150). It should be noted that Berman had mixed feelings towards George Bush’s War on Terror policies. While he didn’t view Bush as an evil war monger as most on the Left did, and he was quite laudatory of Bush’s promotion of democracy and women’s rights in Afghanistan and the Middle East, he was critical of the extent to which Bush and his team subscribed to Nixonian realpolitik, and was convinced that it detracted from Bush’s more idealistic aims.

Although the War on Terror has an Islamist cultural face, Berman views the war as a clash between liberalism, as he has defined it above, and totalitarianism, which is an extension of the war against fascism and Nazism (WWII) and the Cold War against Soviet Communism. And he conceives of this war much as Qutb had, as a “mental war” or a war of ideas, more than as a war of military engagements. Berman essentially believes that if a culture of liberalism, that is Western democratic institutions, does not survive, if it loses the war of ideas with totalitarian ideologies, then freedom itself will perish. Conservatives should keep in mind that before the Cold War and the threat of expansive communism, there was no conservative movement in America to speak of. The threat of totalitarianism made it necessary to clarify what we in the West believed and cherished. But the real threat lies within, not without. As the historian Will Durant has claimed “A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

That said, I think there are some deficiencies in Berman’s work. He makes too much of the orthodox view that there are totalitarians on the Left and Right, and not enough of their commonality. Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, a democratic socialist and a Left-Liberal, have made the point that fascism, Nazism, and Communism have more important similarities than differences, Arendt in her opus The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). While it’s true that the right in America has often justified alliances with dictators as part of a realpolitik, national interest foreign policy that has often backfired and proved disastrous, these alliances didn’t tend to be ideological, but were rather examples of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” For example, in “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (Commentary, November 1979), former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick outlined a doctrine that promoted alliances with authoritarian dictators in order to oppose the spread of communism.

But as Jonah Goldberg has argued in Liberal Fascism, both Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism or National Socialism had their roots in socialism. In fact, Mussolini was actually one of the most respected socialist theorists in Italy before the founding of the Fascist Party. There are of course important differences between fascism and either socialism or communism: Fascism appeals as much to the middle class as to the proletariat; it tends to be nationalistic instead of internationalist; and it promotes a form of corporatism, a collusion between government and capitalism similar to present day crony capitalism, instead of the nationalization of the means of production. But as Goldberg has pointed out, the Left tends to use the term fascist as a term of derision for anyone on the Right they disagree with. He quoted from Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language” as follows: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’” (p. 4). For the most part, the kernel of truth in the Left’s use of the term Fascism to denigrate their right wing opponents has to do with the militarism and nationalism often prominent in right wing politics. But to the extent that leaders on the right ascribe to individual and economic freedom and limited government, the term Fascist would seem to apply more accurately to the Left and its advocacy of the all-powerful nanny state. And as Goldberg pointed out, there has been a convenient historical amnesia on the part of the Progressive Left, forgetting the extent to which Progressives extolled the statist economies of fascism and Nazism, until Hitler broke his notorious pact with Stalin. The totalitarian ideologies of the Twentieth Century were on the rise in the 1920s and ‘30s, as World War I was thought to prove that liberalism had failed, but certainly the history of the rest of the Twentieth Century gives evidence to the prematurity of that conclusion, as totalitarian ideologies led to even greater bloodshed, not to mention political repression. I think a more accurate conception of the political spectrum would place libertarianism and classical liberalism on one end of the spectrum and totalitarian ideologies on the other, with those arrangements in the middle determined according to what degree they promote individual liberty or state control. One possible answer to my question of why the Progressive Left so often supports tyrants, particularly of the totalitarian variety, is that they share common roots and belief in the state as guarantor of equality. Fascism and communism both have roots in socialism, and Progressives tend to admire socialism and are often willing to overlook the atrocities committed in the name of social justice.

One other deficit in Berman’s work is his Progressive belief that America should emulate Europe, or at least the Europe of “the last few decades,” although he did follow that thought with the caveat that though there was more economic equality in Europe, America was a more open society to outsiders, and the fact that Europe’s record prior to World War II was truly dismal (pp. 204 – 05). One can perhaps forgive him for not foreseeing the sovereign debt crisis that has put the future sustainability of the European welfare state on the endangered species list, as few people did.

What is often forgotten in contemporary times when the term Liberalism is used is that its meaning has changed. In the Nineteenth Century, classical liberalism was defined as a system of individual and economic liberty, limited government, free markets, and the rule of law. With the formation of the Progressive movement in the Twentieth Century, government began playing a larger role in the lives of American citizens. Significantly, up through World War II, the Progressives were the party of war, whereas the conservatives and classical liberals were in favor of non-interventionist foreign policies. Progressives like Woodrow Wilson, wanted to militarize civilian society. Philosopher William James’ essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” provided a model for the militarization of society and was much admired by Mussolini (Goldberg, p. 5). However, as Goldberg argued, when “Marxist emphasis on scientific socialism and social engineering infected American Progessivism,” it fell out of favor, and “through a dexterous sleight of hand,” Progressivism was renamed “liberalism” (Ibid., p. 221). James Burnham, in Suicide of the West (1964), eloquently described how classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (due to the influence of Marxism and other socialist doctrines):

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. . . . It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

It is perhaps significant that Norman Thomas, who was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1928 and for the next five consecutive elections, said this in a 1944 speech:

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” He went on to say: “I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.

It is perhaps symptomatic that few on the Left have the courage or honesty to admit that they do ascribe to socialist or Marxist ideologies, especially those who have aspirations for political office. Yet through clever ‘sleight of hand” to quote Burnham, a succession of Democratic administrations from Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Obama has succeeded in pushing the United States further and further down the road to socialism For example, although Obama has surrounded himself throughout his life with Marxists, the Left-leaning press goes ballistic whenever this fact is brought out and the so-called Mainstream Media has succeeded in burying this information from the eyes of the uninformed public, dependent upon them for the “news.”

One has to wonder where this bias in favor of socialism on the part of the intellectual elite in America derives. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises has written in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (1954) that the anti-capitalist bias was particularly bitter among American intellectuals because academics didn’t tend to socialize much with wealthy entrepreneurs in the United States. While in Europe, “[t]he stars of the Parisian salons are not the millionaires, but the members of the Académie Française,” in America, “society” was made up almost exclusively from the wealthiest families. Perhaps as a consequence, academics felt slighted and were “prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money” (pp. 11 – 12). Being mostly ignorant of economics, it wasn’t surprising that most intellectuals sympathized with what were then the most current fads in economic thinking, socialism and communism. Maybe it was true that in the 1950s intellectuals and academics were excluded from elite society, but I’m sure this is no longer the case; in fact, I would argue that they are now, at least those in prominent academic and media positions, very much a part of the elite or ruling class. But their biases remain intact. Angelo Codevilla has written in an American Spectator article, America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution (July – August 2010) that America’s “ruling class,” which includes Wall Street bankers, businessmen, politicians of both parties, academics and media celebrities is essentially different from the mass of America’s citizenry: They attend the same Ivy League schools, belong to the same clubs and organizations, and embrace the same mores and beliefs, which set them apart from the rather diverse social circles of ordinary Americans. He traces the origins of the American ruling class to the Progressive Era and argues that the Democratic Party currently represents the mores of that class. One only has to recall the wholehearted endorsement of the candidacy of Barrack Obama in 2008 on the part of the academic and the media elite, a man with an obvious dearth of executive experience, to realize what a potent force it could be in forming public opinion.

Friedrich Hayek has argued in “The Intellectuals and Socialism” (The University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949), pp. 417-420, 421-423, 425-433) that in all democratic countries and especially the United States “a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible.” “Yet,” he continued, “over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.” In his essay, Hayek defines intellectuals in a very general sense, excluding professionals and experts in specific fields of knowledge, to mean “professional secondhand dealers in ideas,” which seems to me to be a rather narrow definition. Even so, his point is well taken that those who mold and disperse ideas exert a powerful influence in politics. Hayek goes on to argue that socialism was never initially a working-class movement, but rather that it was always first embraced by intellectuals and “required long efforts” to persuade the working classes to “adopt it as their program.” There can be little doubt that this is true: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, none of the major revolutionaries came from working class backgrounds.

In The Revolt of the Elites (1995), Christopher Lasch has argued that unlike the 1930s, when Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which inspired the title to Lasch’s work, the countercultural revolt that began in the 1960s was a revolt of the elite classes from the norms of Western and American civilization. Lasch has argued that despite Affirmative Action and the pretense of a socially mobile meritocracy of the educated elite, the “New Class” of what Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, has called “symbolic analysts,” consisting of managers, professionals, and policy makers, has become increasingly isolated from the rest of American society (Lasch, pp. 28 – 41):

The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all. (Ibid., pp. 20 – 21)

Of course, since Lasch wrote his book, the Leftist elite have shown that it does have every intention of imposing “its values on the majority.”

As Hayek held that the views advocated by intellectuals eventually became “the governing force of politics,” the process by which the views of intellectuals became predominant was “of much more than academic interest.” In a similar vein to Lasch, Hayek argued in the above essay that despite their emphasis on the material forces of production in determining historical outcomes, socialists “understood the key position of the intellectuals” and therefore “have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this ‘elite.’” The importance of the influence held by the transmitters of cultural values can hardly be overestimated as I argued in the above comments on political correctness and cultural Marxism, and the conservative movement is doomed to fail if in the long run it does not provide a competing, alternative intellectual narrative.

It’s unfortunate that although we owe most of our wealth and standard of living to the dynamism of capitalism it has gotten such an unfair hearing from the intellectual elite of America, which has filtered down to the public. Despite this fact, most Americans do prefer capitalism to socialism. But let’s look at the evidence. History provides a laboratory for the effectiveness of economic theories and the results are overwhelmingly in capitalism’s favor: For example, compare East and West Germany, North and South Korea, the Soviet Union and the United States, China during Mao’s time with contemporary China. Or observe the fact that the Soviets built a wall in East Berlin to keep people in; the United States on the other hand, has been so overwhelmed by an influx of illegal aliens from the south seeking opportunity that the prospect of building a wall on the border is a hotly debated issue. Sweden? If Sweden wasn’t a mixed economy with a homogenous population and a healthy capitalist sector it wouldn’t be nearly as prosperous. Britain has gone downhill the more it has embraced socialist policies. Canada was likewise self-destructing until it adopted fiscally conservative policies. For those who think that the democratic social welfare state is superior to American capitalism, think sovereign debt crisis. Even without hefty military budgets, European social welfare states are proving to be unsustainable.

Yet America is hardly an exemplar of free market capitalism. As I argued above, we have crept further and further down the road to socialism, as the state has grown to gigantic proportions and increasingly interventionist in economic matters. The Left would like you to think that there is no alternative between exploitative capitalism and socialism, but there is such an alternative: It’s called freedom: economic freedom, individual freedom, academic freedom, all guaranteed by the rule of law and the Constitution. There is a fundamental difference between free market capitalism and crony capitalism and that is that in the latter case, there is always collusion between powerful financial interests and government. This is something that the mis-educated youth of the Occupy Wall Street movement does not seem to understand,

With the above overview, let’s return to the original question: Why does the Left always seem to side with tyrants? I think that initially, going back to post-World War I Europe, the belief in the progress of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century order of liberalism and capitalism, had been shattered and all sorts of centralized economic and political systems – socialism, fascism, and communism – were embraced by progressive thinkers and leaders. When Hitler precipitated the events that led to World War II, fascism and Nazism became discredited by the progressive elite, but as the Western democracies aligned with the Soviet Union, communism gained a critical degree of popularity. Even after the commencement of the Cold War, many Western political leaders and economists over-estimated the effectiveness of the communist economic system. This was not finally discredited until Reagan challenged Soviet superiority, which precipitated the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. From the 1930s until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left in America embraced a series of communist tyrants – Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega and so on. An essential aspect of this trend was the increasing popularity of communism in third world countries. After World War I, the colonial system of Britain and other imperialistic European powers collapsed, and lacking a history of modern self-government, many of them fell under the sway of strong man dictators. During the Cold War, America had aligned itself with a series of authoritarian dictators who were willing to oppose communism, following Kirkpatrick’s doctrine mentioned above. Thus, the Left in America and Europe became increasingly Anti-American, sometimes with good reason, but as a result, often promoting dictators or movements that were every bit as vicious as those backed by America. Vietnam was of course a critical juncture in this whole process, in terms of galvanizing a New Left movement that opposed American foreign policy, and its gaining acceptance with the intellectual elite in this country. Now post-Cold War we have witnessed the spread of political correctness and cultural Marxism in academia and throughout the other institutions of cultural transmission. The cultural relativism of Multiculturalism has been the latest vehicle for this assault on American values. The doctrine of Multiculturalism could be rather simplistically stated as “all cultures are created equal, but non-Western cultures are more equal than others.” So my suspicion is that with the doctrine of Multiculturalism there is a fundamental Anti-American and anti-Western bias, so that any third world group such as the Palestinian PLO is automatically ethically privileged over the United States and her ally, Israel. The irony of the situation is that when the Left supports Arab and Islamist groups like the PLO because they are anti-Western and anti-American, they are also supporting a group that hates everything the Multicultural Left in America stands for: women’s rights, gay rights, a secular society, abortion, rock ‘n roll, etc. But I guess it’s like the realpolitik philosophy, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And that’s why I think the Left has a tendency to support tyrants.

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