Promise of American Life (again)

In The Promise of American Life (part I here), Croly seems to accept the moral basis for socialism, but soundly rejects the Marxist formulas. Maybe this is what is meant by American exceptionalism?

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels makes demands for gradual state takeover of private property. "In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society -- the state -- will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication -- the post office, the telegraphs, the railways." This nationalization was expected to lead to the whithering of the state:

Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. [1]

Croly would have nothing to do with that; in his estimation, the men (Hill, Harriman, Morgan) who built the great industrial concerns contributed to the national efficiency. Rather than banishing them, Croly wanted to harness them (and maybe control the amount of money they made [2]). His methods of regulating therefore consist of removing impediments to them, including the Sherman Act, and replacing it with a system of commissions who would review their decisions and make them more transparent. To what end? National efficiency, of course (the man had an efficiency fetish). But Croly was unsatisfied with the idea of a commission, since efficiency would normally require responsibility to be placed with one man; but by favoring national commissions, at least it gives him a way to preserve private property even as he expands the scope of the national government. Sounds like ... ?

The constructive idea behind a policy of the recognition of semi-monopolistic corporations is of course the idea that they can be converted into economic agents which will make unequivocally for the national economic interest; and it is natural that in the beginning legislators should propose to accomplish this result by rigid and comprehensive official supervision. But such supervision, while it would eradicate many actual and possible abuses, would be just as likely to damage the efficiency which has been no less characteristic of these corporate operations. The only reason for recognizing the large corporations as desirable economic institutions is just their supposed economic efficiency; and if the means taken to regulate them impair that efficiency, the government is merely adopting in a roundabout way a policy of destruction. Now, hitherto, their efficiency has been partly the product of the unusual freedom they have enjoyed. Unquestionably they cannot continue to enjoy any similar freedom hereafter; but in restricting it, care should be taken not to destroy with the freedom the essential condition of the efficiency. The essential condition of efficiency is always concentration of responsibility; and the decisive objection to government by commission as an efficient solution of the corporation problem is the implied substitution of a system of divided for a system of concentrated responsibility.

This objection will seem fanciful and far fetched to the enthusiastic advocates of reform by commission. They like to believe that under a system of administrative regulation abuses can be extirpated without any diminution of the advantages hitherto enjoyed under private management; but if such proves to be the case, American regulative commissions will establish a wholly new record of official good management. Such commissions, responsible as they are to an insistent and uninformed public opinion and possessed as they inevitably become of the peculiar official point of view, inevitably drift or are driven to incessant vexatious and finally harmful interference. The efficient conduct of any complicated business, be it manufacturing, transportation, or political, always involves the constant sacrifice of an occasional or a local interest for the benefit of the economic operation of the whole organization. But it is just such sacrifices of local and occasional to a comprehensive interest which official commissions are not allowed by public opinion to approve. Under their control, rates will be made chiefly for the benefit of clamorous local interests, and little by little the economic organization of the country, so far as affected by the action of commission government, would become the increasing rigid victim of routine management. The flexibility and enterprise characteristic of our existing national economic organization would slowly disappear, and American industrial leaders would lose the initiative and energy which has contributed so much to the efficiency of the national economic system. Such a result would of course only take place gradually, but it would none the less be the eventual result of any complete adoption of such a method of supervision. The friends of commission government who expect to discipline the big corporations severely without injuring their efficiency are merely the victims of an error as old as the human will. They "want it both ways." They want to eat their cake and to have it. They want to obtain from a system of minute official regulation and divided responsibility the same economic results as have been obtained from a system of almost complete freedom and absolutely concentrated responsibility.

This section of the book reminded me of those sections of Gabriel Kolko's Triumph of Conservatism, in which he traces Teddy Roosevelt's preference for regulating behavior by the Good Ol' Boy method. TR, the renowned trust-buster, didn't really like to bust trusts, but preferred to try to persuade the less civilized among them (read: non-Harvard men) to change their ways. Those who didn't go along, such as J. P. Morgan and (IIRC) John D. Rockfeller, felt his wrath and it was upon their necks that Roosevelt's mythological Trust-Buster reputation was built. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Croly expressed admiration for Roosevelt (one chapter features a comparison between Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and William Hearst as reformers, with TR as the hero), and later, after the publication of TPoAL, Roosevelt based his New Nationalism upon some of Croly's ideas.

And it was much the same when discussing unions. First, the Sherman Act should be repealed, and second, unions should be recognized with a deal that brings their activities in line with the national efficiency. The highest accomplishment to which a man can aspire in the Crolyist world was to place his talents at the service of the nation. You know, for the sake of efficiency.

The alternative [preferred] policy would consist in a combination of conciliation and aggressive warfare. The spokesman of a constructive national policy in respect to the organization of labor would address the unions in some such words as these: "Yes. You are perfectly right in demanding recognition, and in demanding that none but union labor be employed in industrial work. That demand will be granted but only on definite terms. You should not expect an employer to recognize a union which establishes conditions and rules of labor inimical to a desirable measure of individual economic distinction and independence Your recognition that is must depend upon conformity to another set of conditions imposed in the interest of efficiency and individual economic independence. In this respect you will be treated precisely as large corporations are treated. The state will recognize the kind of union which in contributing to the interest of its members contributes also to the general economic interest. On the other hand it will not only refuse to recognize a union whose rules and methods are inimical to the public economic interest, but it will aggressively and relentlessly fight such unions. Employment will be denied to laborers who belong to unions of that character. In trades where such unions are dominant, counter-unions will be organized and the members of these counter unions alone will have any chance of obtaining work In this way the organization of labor like the organization of capital may gradually be fitted into a nationalized economic system.

...

[T]he union should have the right to demand a minimum wage and a minimum working day. This minimum would vary of course in different trades in different branches of the same trade and in different parts of the country and it might vary also at different industrial seasons. It would be reached by collective bargaining between the organizations of the employer and those of the employee. The unions would be expected to make the best terms that they could and under the circumstances they ought to be able to make terms as good as trade conditions would allow. These agreements would be absolute within the limits contained in the bond. The employer should not have to keep on his pay roll any man who in his opinion was not worth the money, but if any man was employed he could not be obliged to work for less than for a certain sum. On the other hand, in return for such a privileged position, the unions would have to abandon a number of rules upon which they now insist. Collective bargaining should establish the minimum amount of work and pay, but the maximum of work and pay should be left to individual arrangement. An employer should be able give a peculiarly able or energetic laborer as much more than the minimum wage as in his opinion the man was worth and men might be permitted to work over time provided they were paid for the over time one and one half or two times as much as they were paid for an ordinary working hour. The agreement between the employers and the union should also provide for the terms upon which men would be admitted into the union. The employer, if he employed only union men should have a right to demand that the supply of labor should not be artificially restricted, and that he could depend upon procuring as much labor as the growth of his business might require. Finally, in all skilled trades there should obviously be some connection between the unions and the trade schools, and it might be in this respect that the union would enter into closest relations with the state. The state would have a manifest interest in making the instruction in these schools of the very best and in furnishing it free to as many apprentices as the trade agreement permitted.

Translation: The state must control industry, preferably monopolies, and then control the labor that works in those monopolies. If the unions won't go along, we'll start state unions (where have we seen this?). And the state won't countenance any shenanigans from you workers: you can bargain for a minimum wage and then shut up. This isn't for you, it's for the nation.

I am reminded of Chris Nyland's article, "Taylorism and the Mutual Gains Strategy" (Industrial Relations, Vol. 37, No. 4, Oct 1998), in which he describes Taylor's attempts to reconcile with various labor unions and convince them that efficiency was something they ought to embrace. The alliance between the Taylorists and unionists is attributed to (among others) Louis Brandeis: close associate of Croly, the coiner of the term "scientific management", and the leading spark for the Efficiency Movement. One of those unionists, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, entered into collaboration with members of the Wisconsin school of industrial relations [3], but disagreed with them over the scope of union-management negotiations. The Wisconsinists believed that the scope should be limited to wages and hours, but the unionists believed the scope should include more, including investment, plant layout, and promotions.

These dalliances between labor and the Taylorists continued right through the 1920s and the Depression, during which the Wagner Act was passed. In 1940, the creation of a bargaining agreement between GM and the UAW was influenced by the back and forth between unionists, Taylorists, and the Wisconsin school. According to Nyland,

In 1940, George Taylor [not Frederick Winslow] was appointed umpire of the newly signed UAW-GM contract. At the time, this development must have appeared a great opportunity to extend the mutual-gains model. Optimism that the model would be extended was common not ony within SAM, the AFL, and the CIO but also in wider industrial relations circles. For example, Sumner Slichter in 1941 devoted some two hundred pages of Union Policies and Industrial management to an examination of the history of union-management cooperative schemes for increasing production, quality improvement, and cost reduction. Slichter was aware that such schemes tended to have a high mortality rate and had been embraced by only a small number of employers. [...]

The hope that unionization of the automobile industry would assist the growth of the mutual gains model was, of course, not realized. As in the 1920s, it tended to be small, unionized enterprises experiencing difficult times that took up the mutual-gains option. As Leichtenstein [...] notes, while GM took much from the bargaining model that George Taylor had helped develop in the garment industry, the company was very selective as to the parts of the garment program it adopted. As a consequence, the company institutionalized a form of union-management closer to the model advocated by the Wisconsin school than that favored by [the Society for the Advancement of Management, or SAM, the name the Taylorist Society had chosen when it absorbed the Society of Industrial Engineers], and it was this model that was subsequently widely emulated through industry. Leichtenstein [...] has explained why this was so:

General Motors had a very different conception of how the grievance system and umpire machinery might function. the company, which had closely observed the way in which [George] Taylor handled disputes in the hosiery industry, wanted to avoid the freewheeling, all-inclusive style pioneered there. The largest corporation in the world had no need for the kind of economic tutelage so often meted out by those industrial relations "fixers" who had pioneered in the economically chaotic clothing trade.

In short, GM rejected "joint management" and instead institutionalized that amalgam of work practices, formalized grievance procedures, limited seniority, and constrained bargaining that subsequently became known as "New Deal Industrial Relations."

So Croly and his friend Brandeis got their way after all, at least with regard to unions. The Wagner Act, far from being the labor success it is frequently claimed, was a means of restricting labor's control over their work environment. Those aspects of work that today we call Taylorist should have been called the GM-Wisconsin model. As I argued in this article, it was GM's size and an accident of history rather than any special power of efficient management that led the world to adopt their accounting system, and so it is with their labor control system. In both cases, the adoption has been assisted by the federal government: in the first case by its adoption as the GAAP and the SEC, in the second by Wagner and the NLRB.

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[1] I guess I was wrong about the terminology of socialization and nationalization in this post, but the outcome is the same: fascists must have the state, Marxists seek to abolish it.

[2] At that time, they still naively believed that the Constitution had to be amended before you went off and assumed a power like taxing income. We have learned so much since then.

[3] Somewhere, I read that the ILGWU instituted the first Industrial Engineering program, but I don't recall where. I think Kevin Carson would suggest that the "mutual-gains strategy" will be effective right after the workers take ownership of the factory. But then it's a "worker-grains strategy," isn't it?

The Promise of American Life (long)

As luck would have it, I was browsing around in the local used book store recently and stumbled across a copy of Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909). I have plenty of other reading projects on my plate, so I didn't dive into it right away. However, when I had a moment or two, I thought I would give Cowen's approach of reading books in reverse order a try. No good - Croly's prose reads like Emerson's, only without the wit and charm. One bald assertion after another with seemingly no particular goal in mind. Not to mention that it seems so dated.

Still, I was left wondering why the was book so influential, so I started jumping around more randomly. Lo, and behold! -- Was there really a chapter entitled, "Nationality and Democracy: National Origins"? Indeed, there is, so I finally hunkered down to try to grasp the gist of his thoughts on the subject. From there, I came across another, earlier passage in which he defines the "democratic purpose". So what follows is my attempt to distill the man's program based on a few disjointed readings from the book ...

Croly asserts that "The salutary and formative democratic purpose consists in using the democratic organization for the joint benefit of individual distinction and social improvement." By this, he means that the organization must both support individual freedom and resolve the social question equally. Noting that these appear to be contradictory and mutually exclusive, he then goes on to press the third element of the French revolutionary slogan ("Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!") into service; the liberty and equality are presented as subordinates to the third principle, brotherhood. But what is the source of this brotherhood?[1]

Croly's subsequent argument is that nationalism and democracy are distinct yet crucial elements which must be used to advance efficiency. More to the efficiency in a moment, but national identity is the bridge by which socialism and democracy are brought together without sacrificing individuality (in fact, that is the title of this part of the book: "The bridge between democracy and nationality"):

The majority of good Americans will doubtless consider that the [policy of democracy] already indicated is flagrantly socialistic both in its methods and its objects and if any critic likes to fasten the stigma of socialism upon the foregoing conception of democracy, I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic if it is socialistic to consider democracy inseparable from a candid, patient, and courageous attempt to advance the social problem towards a satisfactory solution. It is also socialistic in case socialism cannot be divorced from the use wherever necessary of the political organization in all its forms to realize the proposed democratic purpose. On the other hand there are some doctrines frequently associated with socialism to which the proposed conception of democracy is wholly inimical and it should be characterize not so much socialistic as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.

In a nutshell, he is arguing that in order to realize his vision of democracy, which has less to do with majority rule and much to do with defining and obtaining "the common good", we must appeal to and have recourse to that bond between people which is national in character. From here he goes on to something I found astonishing, and astonishingly familiar:

A democracy dedicated to individual and social betterment is necessarily individualist as well as socialist. It has little interest in the mere multiplication of average individuals except in so far as such multiplication is necessary to economic and political efficiency; but it has the deepest interest in the development a higher quality of individual self expression. There are two indispensable economic conditions of qualitative individual self expression. One is the preservation of the institution of private property in some form, and the other is the radical transformation of its existing nature and influence. A democracy certainly cannot fulfill its mission without the eventual assumption by the state of many functions now performed by individuals and without becoming expressly responsible for an improved distribution of wealth; but if any attempt is made to accomplish these results by violent means, it will most assuredly prove to be a failure. An improvement in the distribution of wealth or in economic efficiency which cannot be accomplished by purchase on the part of the state or by a legitimate use of the power of taxation, must be left to the action of time assisted of course by such arrangements as are immediately practical. But the amount of actual good to the individual and society which can be effected at any one time [emphasis in original] by an alteration in the distribution of wealth is extremely small; and the same statement is true of any proposed state action in the interest of the democratic purpose. Consequently while responsible state action is an essential condition of any steady approach to the democratic consummation, such action will be wholly vain unless accompanied by a larger measure of spontaneous individual amelioration [emphasis added]. In fact one of the strongest arguments on behalf of a higher and larger conception of state responsibilities in a democracy is that the candid, courageous, patient, and intelligent attempt to redeem those responsibilities provides one of the highest types of individuality -- viz. the public spirited man and a task which be enormously stimulating and edifying.

Yes, we are going to have socialism, but a socialism that preserves private property ... for now. This means of course that we are going to control the use of private property by controlling the way people think. And why not? Changing the way they think and feel will be exhilarating as they learn new modes of "individual expression". Perhaps we can forgive Croly of his naivete, since in 1909 he could not have known how this would have come out in practice as it did in the Cultural Revolution or any of the other attempts to purge people of their unfortunate bourgeois individualism.[2]

But the worst problem with socialism, according to Croly, is its unfortunate internationalism:

The great weakness of the most popular form of socialism consists however in its mixture of a revolutionary purpose with an international scope. It seeks the abolition of national distinctions by revolutionary revolts of the wage earner against the capitalist; and in so far as it proposes to undermine the principle of national cohesion and to substitute for it an international organization of a single class, it is headed absolutely in the wrong direction. Revolutions may at times be necessary and on the whole helpful, but not in case there is any other practicable method of removing grave obstacles to human amelioration; and in any event their tendency is socially disintegrating. The destruction or the weakening of nationalities for the ostensible benefit of an international socialism would in truth gravely imperil the bond upon which actual human association is based. The peoples who have inherited any share in Christian civilization are effectively united chiefly by national habits traditions and purposes, and perhaps the most effective way of bringing about an irretrievable division of purpose among them would be the adoption by the class of wage earners of the programme of international socialism. It is not much to say that no permanent good can under existing conditions come to the individual and society except through the preservation and the development of the existing system of nationalized states.

Now, this is the kind of thing that makes someone say that Croly and the acknowledged fascists share some of the same sentiments. The response to this is typically, "Yes, but he didn't share any of their other sentiments, so you are wrong to identify Croly as a fascist, and therefore you are wrong to in any way associate him with fascism." In the first place, saying that he shares some ideas with fascists and saying that he is a fascist are two different things, so claiming that I am wrong in asserting the former by proving that I would be wrong in asserting that latter is a non sequitur combined with a strawman. Secondly, I am curious as to how Croly, Hitler, and Mussolini could have all arrived at the same conclusion on this topic: is there a common influence for all three? And why aren't self-identified Progressives curious about this? And how influential was Croly's thinking on this topic? For example, it is well-known that Teddy Roosevelt based his New Nationalism on his interpretation of this book, but how much did Brandeis and, subsequently, FDR get out of it?

There are more areas in which the ideas of Croly and the actual fascists arrive at similar places. For one thing, there is his rejection of individualism and his association of that with the Manchester school. There is also his admiration for non-democratic means of arriving at his preferred state of efficiency. The chapter on nationality and democracy (VIII) is broken into segments that provide an overview of the relationship between the two; the effect on history and development on the national character; nationality and democracy in England,France, and Germany; and militarism. His synopsis of the English experience is:

The monarchy was reconstituted as the symbol of the national integrity and as the crown of the social system. The hereditary aristocracy, which was kept in touch with the commoners because its younger sons were not noble and which was national, if not liberal, in spirit, became the real rulers of England; but its rule was supplemented by an effective though limited measure of general representation. This organization was perfected in the nineteenth century. Little by little the area of popular representation was enlarged, until it included almost the whole adult male population; and the government became more and more effectively controlled by national public opinion. As a result of this slowly gathering but comprehensive plan of national organization, the English have become more completely united in spirit and purpose than are the people of any other country. The crown and the aristocracy recognize the limitations of their positions and their inherited responsibilities to the gentry and the people. The commoners on their side are proud of their lords and of the monarchy and grant them full confidence. It is a unique instance of mutual loyalty and well-distributed responsibility among social classes, differing widely in station, occupations, and wealth; and it is founded upon habit of joint consultation, coupled as the result of the long persistence of this habit, with an unusual similarity of intellectual and moral outlook.

The result, until recently, was an exceptional degree of national efficiency; and in scrutinizing this national efficiency the fact must be faced that the political success of Great Britain has apparently been due, not merely to her adoption of the practice of national representation, but to her abhorrence of any more subversive democratic ideas. On the one hand, the British have organized a political system which is probably more sensitively and completely responsive to a nationalized public opinion than is the political system of the American democracy. On the other hand, this same nationalized political organization is aristocratic to the core -- aristocratic without scruple or qualification. What is the effect of this aristocratic organization upon the efficiency and fertility of the English political system? Has it contributed in the past? Does it still contribute? And if so how?

Is the disdain for democracy shocking at all? To his credit, despite his admiration for the aristocracy, Croly seems to recognize that a problem subsequently arose because of them: although the aristocracy began bargaining with the new middle class of industrialists, they also moved to protect their privileges and in so doing froze the system in an organizational form that was appropriate to an era when their particular interest -- land -- was the most important productive asset. He continues:

This bargain appeared to work very well for a while; but indications are accumulating that a let-alone economic policy [EH: laissez-faire] has not preserved the vitality of the British economic system. The English farmer has lost ambition and has been sacrificed to the industrial growth of the nation while the industrial growth itself no longer shows its former power of expansion. The nation passed the responsibility for its economic welfare on to the individual and the individual with all his energy and initiative seems unable to hold his own against better organized competition. Its competitors have profited by the very qualities which Great Britain renounced when she accepted the anti-national liberalism of the Manchester school. They have shown under widely different conditions the power of nationalizing their economic organization; and in spite of the commission of many errors, particularly in this country, a system of national economy appears to make for a higher level of economic vitality than a system of international economy. "At the present time," says Mr 0. Elzbacher in his "Modern Germany," "when other nations are no longer divided against themselves, but have become homogeneous unified nations in fact and nations in organization, and when the most progressive nations have become gigantic institutions for self-improvement and gigantic business concerns on cooperative principles, the spasmodic individual efforts of patriotic and energetic Englishmen and their unorganized individual action prove less efficient for the good of their country than they were formerly." The political leaders of England abandoned that is all leadership in economic affairs and allowed a merely individualistic liberalism complete control of the fiscal and economic policy of the country.

The problem as Croly sees it is that the English foolishly allowed individuals to try to compete with strong, foreign competition. That competition was cooperative and bound to win. In other words, since individuals cannot compete with state capitalists, Croly believed that the United States should embrace state capitalism. We also get a little taste of a recurring theme: that Croly's idea of hell is that we would leave anything to the chaos and chance of a free market.

In this passage, and in many others, we see Croly using "efficient" and "efficiency" without defining them. In some contexts, he seems to mean that the institutions are strong (an efficient nation), while in others he seems to mean that they are the least-cost producers. This is something that requires further study, as efficiency appears frequently throughout the text as one of the goals of his system.[3]

Croly then proceeds on to France.

Even the most loyal friend of France can however hardly claim that the French democracy is even yet thoroughly nationalized. It has done something to obtain national cohesion at home and to advance the national interest abroad, but evidences of the traditional dissociation between French democracy and French national efficiency and consistency are still plainly visible. Both the domestic and the foreign policies of the Republic have of late years been weakened by the persistence of a factious and anti-national spirit among radical French democrats.

The most dangerous symptom of this anti-national democracy is that an apparently increasing number of educated Frenchmen are rebelling against the burdens imposed upon the Republic by its perilous international position. They are tending to seek security and relief not by strengthening the national bond and by loyalty to the fabric of their national life, but by personal disloyalty and national dissolution. The most extreme of democratic socialists do not hesitate to advocate armed rebellion against military service [emphasis added] in the interest of international peace. They would fight their fellow countrymen in order to promote a union with foreigners. How far views of this kind have come to prevail, an outsider cannot very well judge; but they are said to be popular among the school teachers, and to have impaired the discipline of the army itself.

Here we see a consistency between his support for nationalism and his distrust of international socialism that betrays what would usually be called a bedrock characteristic of socialism: Croly is no peacenik. He thinks France needs a military draft and condemns those opposed to it. And he goes on to further emphasize his distaste for individualism in a way that forewarns of the coming totalitarian nature of planned economies. Where everyone is expected to do their share to advance the national, ... uh, ... efficiency, then shirking and laziness and failure to bring forth children to advance the interests of the nation is not just a matter of personal choice, but evidence of immorality, a threat to order, and possibly a sign of subversiveness. After lamenting France's lack of raw materials and the unfortunate inability to establish autarky, Croly has a surprising take on how France's unique character is a problem of too much individualism:

At first sight it looks as if France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.

But the situation is not without another and less favorable aspect. France, in becoming a country of small and extremely thrifty property owners, has also become a country of partial economic parasites with very little personal initiative and energy. Individual freedom has been sacrificed to economic and social equality; and this economic and social equality has not made for national cohesion. The bourgeois, the mechanic, and the farmer, in so far as they have accumulated property, are exhibiting an extremely calculating individualism, of which the most dangerous symptom is the decline in the birth rate [emphasis added]. Frenchmen are becoming more than ever disinclined to take the risks and assume the expense of having more than one or two children. The recent outbreak of anti-militarism is probably merely another illustration of the increasing desire of the French bourgeois for personal security, and the opportunity for personal enjoyment. To a foreigner it looks as if the grave political and social risks, which the French nation has taken since 1789, had gradually cultivated in individual Frenchmen an excessive personal prudence, which adds to the store of national wealth, but which no more conduces to economic, social, and political efficiency, than would the incarceration of a fine army in a fortress conduce to military success. A nation or an individual who wishes to accomplish great things must be ready, in Nietsche's phrase, "to lived angerously" -- to take those risks, without which no really great achievement is possible; and if Frenchmen persist in erecting the virtue of thrift and the demand for safety into the predominant national characteristic, they are merely beginning a process of national corruption and dissolution.

Wow, strong language. So if the British and the French fail to achieve the necessary balance of nationalism and democracy (Croly's definition, not the standard one), who does? It should be no surprise at this point that the section on Germany is almost entirely devoted to a fawning review of the career of Otto von Bismarck, the German Junker who forged Germany on the Prussian model with blood and iron.

German nationality as an efficient political and economic force has been wrought by skillful and patriotic management out of materials afforded by military and political opportunities and latent national ties and traditions. During the eighteenth century the Prussian monarchy came to understand that the road to effective political power in Germany was by way of a military efficiency, disproportionate to the resources and population of the Kingdom. In this way it was able to take advantage of almost every important crisis to increase its dominion and its prestige. Neither was Prussian national efficiency built up merely by a well-devised and practicable policy of military aggression. The Prussian monarchy had the good sense to accept the advice of domestic reformers during its period of adversity, and so contributed to the economic liberation and the educational training of its subjects. Thus the modern German nation has been at bottom the work of admirable leadership on the part of officially responsible leaders; and among those leaders the man who planned most effectively and accomplished the results was Otto von Bismarck.

After explaining how Bismarck saw that the path to German unification led to war between his native Prussia and Austria and then France, and that in turn led to some compromises with the democrats whom he hated, Croly writes about Bismarck's return to the task of actually forging the nation:

It remained now to organize and develop the new national state; and the government, under Bismarck's lead, made itself responsible for the task of organization and development, just as it had made itself responsible for the task of unification. According to the theories of democratic individualistic "liberalism," such an effort could only result in failure, because from the liberal point of view the one way to develop a modern industrial nation was simply to allow the individual every possible liberty. But Bismarck's whole scheme of national industrial organization looked in a very different direction. He believed that the nation itself, as represented by its official leaders, should actively assist in preparing an adequate national domestic policy, and in organizing the machinery for its efficient execution. He saw clearly that the logic and the purpose of the national type of political organization was entirely different from that of a so called free democracy as explained in the philosophy of the German liberals of 1848, the Manchester school in England, or our own Jeffersonian Democrats; and he successfully transformed his theory of responsible administrative activity into a comprehensive national policy. The army was, if anything, increased in strength so that it might remain fully adequate either for national defense or as an engine of German international purposes. A beginning was made toward the creation of a navy. A moderate but explicit protectionist policy was adopted, aimed not at the special development either of rural or manufacturing industries, but at the all-round development of Germany as an independent national economic unit. In Prussia itself the railways were bought by the government so that they should be managed not in the interest of the shareholders, but in that of the national economic system. The government encouraged the spread of better farming methods, which have resulted in the gradual increase in the yield per acre of every important agricultural staple. The educational system of the country was made of direct assistance to industry, because it turned out skilled scientific experts, who used their knowledge to promote industrial efficiency. In every direction German activity was organized and was placed under skilled professional leadership, while at the same time each of these special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national economy. This "paternalism" has moreover accomplished its purpose. German industrial expansion surpasses in some respects that of the United States, and has left every European nation far behind. Germany alone among the modern European nations is, in spite of the temporary embarrassment of Imperial finance, carrying the cost of modern military preparation easily, and looks forward confidently to greater successes in the future. She is at the present time a very striking example of what can be accomplished for the popular welfare by a fearless acceptance on the part of the official leaders of economic as well as political responsibility, and by the and intelligent use of all available means to that end. [emphasis added]

How can you not recognize so much of what shows up 16 years later in Mein Kampf? There is the nationalism; the leadership principle (Fuhrerprinzip); the skepticism of democracy, individualism, internationalism, and Manchesterism. In other places in the book, we find that the highest ambition for all men would be to use their talents to efficiently advance the national cause. There is the admiration for war as a means to promote the national spirit.

What, really? Do I exaggerate? The next section of the chapter is called "Militarism and Nationality", and consists in equal parts of a claim that colonization is good for the colonized (in Asia and Africa), good for the colonizer, and not in any way at all contrary to Croly's brand of democracy.

The nations of Europe are to all appearances as belligerent as were the former European dynastic states. Europe has become a vast camp, and its governments are spending probably a larger proportion of the resources of their countries for military and naval purposes than did those of the eighteenth century. How can these warlike preparations, in which all the European nations share, and the warlike spirit which they have occasionally displayed, be reconciled with the existence of any constructive relationship between the national and the democratic ideas?

The question can best be answered by briefly reviewing the claims already advanced on behalf of the national principle. I have asserted from the start that the national principle was wholly different in origin and somewhat different in meaning from the principle of democracy. What has been claimed for nationality is not that it can be identified with democracy, but that as a political principle it remained unsatisfied without an infusion of democracy. But the extent to which this infusion can go and the forms which it takes are determined by a logic and a necessity very different from that of an absolute democratic theory. National politics have from the start aimed primarily at efficiency -- that is, at the successful use of the force resident in the state to accomplish the purposes desired by the Sovereign authority [emphasis added - here is the definition of efficiency!]. Among the group of states inhabited by Christian peoples it has gradually been discovered that the efficient use of force is contingent in a number of respects upon its responsible use; and that its responsible use means a limited policy of external aggrandizement and a partial distribution of political power and responsibilities. A national polity, however, always remains an organization based upon force. In internal affairs it depends at bottom for its success not merely upon public opinion, but, if necessary, upon the strong arm. It is a matter of government and coercion as well as a matter of influence and persuasion. So in its external relations its standing and success have depended, and still depend, upon the efficient use of force just in so far as force is demanded by its own situation and the attitudes of its neighbors and rivals. The democrats who disparage efficient national organization are at bottom merely seeking to exorcise the power of physical force in human affairs by the use of pious incantations and heavenly words. That they will never do. The Christian warrior must accompany the evangelist; and Christians are not by any means angels. It is none the less true that the modern nations control the expenditure of more force in a more responsible manner than have any preceding political organizations; and it is none the less true that a further development of the national principle will mean in the end the attachment of still stricter responsibilities to the use of force both in the internal and external policies of modern nations.

War may be and has been a useful and justifiable engine national policy.

You see the emphasis on force as the organizing principle? That is not something of which the Progressive normally admits. War is not only good for building Christian nations, it is good for colonizing non-Christian ones:

Inimical as the national principle is to the carrying out either of a visionary or a predatory foreign policy in Europe, it does not imply any similar hostility to a certain measure of colonial expansion. In this as in many other important respects the constructive national democrat must necessarily differ from the old school of democratic "liberals". A nationalized democracy is not based on abstract individual rights no matter whether the individual live in Colorado, Paris, or Calcutta. Its consistency is chiefly a matter of actual historical association in the midst of a general Christian community of nations. A people that lack the power of basing their political association on an accumulated national tradition and purpose is not capable either of nationality or democracy, and that is the condition of the of Asiatic and African peoples.

No doubt modern Progressives can overlook this "era appropriate" view of the Asians and Africans to be conquered. But can they overlook the way in which Croly is intentionally trying to redefine liberal? Much ink has been spilled, chiefly by those of us who wish to reclaim the mantle of liberalism, about the change in the definition from one of "someone who defends liberty" to "someone who defends statism", and much defense has been made by the statists that they are the true heirs of Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Mill, but here we catch Croly with his finger on the scale.

He is using one interesting phrase - "national democrat" - to denote himself, while placing quotation marks around "liberals" to call their claims into question. What if he were instead to have used the phrase "national socialist"? By his own admission it would have meant the same thing, given his own definition.

Why are liberals "old school"? Why are we to question their liberalism? The answer, in this context, is that they oppose colonization because they don't understand nationalism and its relationship to democracy. And why shouldn't we oppose colonization? Here Croly has a curious answer:

The truth is that colonial expansion by modern national states is to be regarded, not as a cause of war, but as a safety-valve against war. It affords an arena in which the restless and adventurous members of a national body can have their fling without dangerous consequences, while at the same time it satisfies the desire of a people for some evidence of and opportunity for national expansion.

Got that? Colonial expansion is fun and brings us together, just like television would do in the 1950s and 60s.

No, I don't get the same impression from reading Croly that I do from reading Hitler or Mussolini. Hitler was animated by hatred, Mussolini by power, but Croly seems to have been animated by something else. But still, there is an element in each that recognizes the social question as the excuse for the implementation of a variety of other dubious programs. The Croly revolution would definitely be a top-down rather than grassroots-up movement. As it distrusted international socialism, individualism, Manchesterism, democratic liberalism, it had the appearance of being an anti-intellectual revolution, too. When you combine this with his worship of efficiency, which he defines as the successful use of force by a centrally planned state -- and notably, not by the people governed -- you can't help but think that what he most wants and needs is an action-oriented leader rather than an intellectual like William Jennings Bryan or Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps we were lucky that the Depression did not hit while TR was in office?

---------------------------------------
[1] Note Bastiat's formulation of the problem: "Mr. de Lamartine once wrote to me thusly: 'Your doctrine is only the half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity.' I answered him: 'The second half of your program will destroy the first.'"

[2] Again, Bastiat comes to mind:

Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations...

In the same manner, an inventor makes a model before he constructs the full-sized machine; the chemist wastes some chemicals -- the farmer wastes some seeds and land -- to try out an idea.

But what a difference there is between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his elements, between the farmer and his seeds! And in all sincerity, the socialist thinks that there is the same difference between him and mankind!

It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial creation of the legislator's genius. This idea -- the fruit of classical education -- has taken possession of all the intellectuals and famous writers of our country. To these intellectuals and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.

...

Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!

[3] It probably appeared self-evident to him, as efficiency quickly became the goal of his allies (including Brandeis) in the Efficiency and Technocracy movements that sprang up shortly after the publication of Promise.

National vs. Social

As if you haven't noticed, I've been giving lots of attention to the Jonah Goldberg thingy. It happens to be an interest of mine.

One of his comments on the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds was something like "Nationalizing and socializing mean exactly the same thing: When we talk of socializing health care, we mean nationalizing, and when someone talks of nationalizing the oil industry, they mean socializing it."

Well, yes and no. Goldberg is right when he says the two are the same, but they shouldn't be and they weren't always.

This gets down to what Marx said and meant in theory, and how his theories have been taken up in practice. Marx saw the final stage, the one succeeding capitalism, as being a thoroughly democratic society in which institutions like private property would give way to community property. Thus, factories would be socialized, the opposite of privatized. However, he also saw that the state, the mechanism by which the capital-owning class controls the workers, would also whither away. Thus, socialized industry or socialized health care meant something completely different to him than what we mean by that today.

Today, socialization of an industry means ownership becoming controlled by the state, i.e. nationalization. Marx's successors have adopted his vision for everything except the state and have substituted the state for the community. And in this regard, we find that the state-loving left is the more nationalistic.[1]

Nationalism is frequently conflated with extreme patriotism or jingoism. When using the term to describe a characteristic of fascism, that's a red herring. A fascist's nationalism is not primarily about which state is better, it is about the proper scope of the state. Mussolini's prescription was, "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." And so it is when people speak of those things which are "too important to be left to the market," such as education, energy, health care, transportation, and so on. For each new field of endeavor into which the state enters, the state becomes that much stronger and more important (and the realization of Marx' state-free vision that much farther off). And as I have written in other contexts, no matter which party favors and clamors for the increase in state authority, the other is happy to exploit it for their own ends when they are in power. That is one reason it is a one-way ratchet. At some point, the scope of the state's authority will enter into every realm of personal life: that is what they meant by "totalitarian". For Mussolini, it was an explicit goal, enthusiastically sought; for today's neocons and takes-a-villagers, it is a "necessary evolution," driven by their concerns for physical and economic security, "market failure"[2], and the misfortune of "living in a second best world."

---------------------------------
[1] Yes, they are quick to blame America for the world's ills, but note how easily the left will forgive and forget their own when committing the same atrocities. The Blame America First tactic is merely cover for a Blame Republicans First strategy. World War I and II? Democrats. Viet Nam? Democrats. Only president to use a nuclear weapon? Democrat. President in power for both the first World Trade Center bombing and the initial planning for the second WTC bombing and thus responsible for America's poor image in the world? Democrat.

[2] Check it out: Quasibill catches the neocons explaining -- in terms of market failure -- why the state must pay for the economic security of Big Air under the guise of paying for the physical security of the passengers.

Frida's shame

Having just returned from Mexico City, a trip which included a visit to the Frida Kahlo house (Casa Azul), I feel obligated to describe something which I wouldn't have noted had I not just got done reviewing some of the "reviews" of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

One of Goldberg's claims is that the Progressive Era progressives were just as nationalist as the national socialists who came later. Again, I haven't read the book, so I can neither endorse nor deny his claims, but it seems plausible. However, there is no denying the odd mixture of Mexicanism and Marxism in the work of both Frida and her husband, Diego Rivera.

I already knew that they were communists. In Rivera's mural in the Palacio Nacional, utopia flows both literally and figuratively from Das Kapital. What I found more shocking were the final works of Frida herself. The one upon the easel at her death was a large bust portrait of Stalin superimposed with a self-portrait, titled "Stalin and I". A slightly older work showed angelic hands emanating from Karl Marx' head to comfort Frida while an evil looking Uncle Sam Bird flew nearby; this one was called "Marxism Heals the Sick".

The Stalin homage is clearly the more shocking. This was a portrait from the early 1950s, at which point it was surely known that Stalin had been responsible for millions of deaths, rivaling or surpassing Hitler's death count. And it must have been plain that Stalin was behind the murder of their friend, Leon Trotsky. So why the worship?

A few conjectures may be ventured. First, Frida and Trotsky were reputed to have had an affair. Certainly, this was not the first such event that interrupted the tempestuous relationship between her and her notoriously womanizing husband. However, they reconciled thereafter and it seems possible that she adopted her husband's new-found rejection of Trotsky. Such a rejection may have originated in jealousy, but it is easy to see how, once the blinders fell, that he might begin looking for ideological as well as personal reasons to oppose the fallen Russian leader. And as we have seen in so many contexts, people are frequently animated more by opposition than by alliance, so it doesn't seem too far-fetched that Rivera could fall in league with the Stalinist Trotsky-haters. At some point, there may even have been an element of self-promotion as they claimed to have participated in the plot to kill him. The final conjecture involves Frida's mental deterioration at this point in her life as the result of her constant pain and use of pain-killers.

How did such a person become the object of so much recent fawning attention? I was surprised to learn that one of the reasons was Madonna's interest in her art. This led to the development of a movie project in which Salma Hayek eventually won the role, but for which Madonna was an early contender. It would have been a much worse movie with Madonna in the lead (Madonna did appear in a minor role). The Stalin worship was but a footnote to her life, and was completely ignored in the movie (from what I remember).

Frida and Diego were very clearly nationalists, though. This may have been partly in reaction to the Great Satan to the North, whose involvement in Latin American politics began with the Monroe Doctrine, peaked in the War of Northern Aggression North American Intervention United States Invasion Mexican-Amerian War of 1846-1848, and subsequently included interventions in just about every country south of our border, a total realization of Marxist claims about imperialism. [1] Their Mexican nationalism may have also been an affectation to cover their own origins and "sins", she being of German and native/Spanish descent and he being fond of international travel, study, and patronage by notorious capitalists including Rockefeller and Ford.

We can see less obvious indications of their nationalism in several ways. Frida overemphasized her facial hair in her self-portraits in order to emphasize her native origins. Despite her cosmopolitan upbringing and marriage to an inveterate international traveller, she stuck to traditional dresses and household decorations. Diego, for his part, was a tireless chronicler of Mexican history, producing works that mimicked the Aztec codex style of story-telling and giving birth to the Mexican muralism style.

A more prominent statement of their nationalism is the frequent recurrence of the Xoloitzcuintli, or Mexican Hairless Dog, in both their personal lives and their artwork. The dogs are small, black, hairless, and quintessentially Mexican, having been originally domesticated by the Aztecs. The dog can be seen in each of the pre-Spanish mural panels in the Palacio Nacional mural as part of the idyllic village life. When the Spaniards show up, the dogs snarl defensively at their European counterparts, and when the Europeans begin human trafficking in natives, the dogs become sickly and skeletal.

But nationalism is anathema to true Marxists, is it not? Well, yes, but then this seems to be one of those things Marx got terribly wrong. A Mexican painter has far more in common with a Mexican cab driver than with an American painter because language, culture, and other sources of personal identity are much stronger than class. Does this make Kahlo and Garcia bad people or bad artists? No, only bad Marxists (a charge which is only strengthened by their support of the antidemocratic Stalin).

And what of their unabashed support for the murderous dictator? In Latin America, where Che calendars are sold openly [2], perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by their embrace of brutal dictators. But we should be aware of it. Octavio Paz concluded about this issue,

Diego and Frida ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study--and of repentance . . . the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin. The two of them betrayed their great gifts, and this can be seen in their painting. An artist may commit political errors and even common crimes, but the truly great artists--Villon or Pound, Caravaggio or Goya--pay for their mistakes and thereby redeem their art and their honor.

---------------------------

[1] We were pointedly reminded of the "1847 war" by a guide at the Palacio. I had thought it was 1848, but decided not to pursue it upon recalling that Americans are wisely counseled to avoid discussions about American foreign policy when traveling abroad: they generally know more about it than you do because they have been the victims of it. Several tourist sites stress that you should never talk politics in Mexico because it is expressly against the law for foreigners to participate in Mexican politics. Guess why.

[2] I was so tempted to ask if they also carried calendars with Mengele or Himmler. Murderers are murderers, the nature of the intent matters little to the victims.

Defining fascism

When trying to define something like fascism, it is important to keep several distinctions in mind. First, "fascism" was specifically coined by Mussolini in reference to his own views. There are differences between other regimes who either used it to refer to themselves, or to whom it has been applied with general approval. Nazi Germany and (apparently) Falangist Spain would fall in the former class, while arguably Japan in the same era and Chile under Pinochet might fall into the second.

Second, the one-dimensional, number-line model of political parties (below) is not helpful for understanding this controversy. For one thing, you have the libertarians over on the right when they have very left-leaning views on many issues (drug war, immigration, abortion, gay marriage, etc.).

Yoram Bauman notes the libertarian problem in coming up with his political spectrum:

Libertarians-Leftists-Rightists-Libertarians

For another, given that their actual policies and policy applications resulted in nearly identical outcomes, anything that pits Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless.

Communism-Socialism-Progressivism-Center-Conservatism-Libertarianism-Fascism

The Nolan Chart (below) is a better but not perfect model for understanding this issue. For those unfamiliar with it, it is based on the observations of Stuart Lillie and William Maddox that people tend to separate their economic views from their social/cultural views. An example of a quiz based on this was recently posted at Crooked Timber.













Rotating it 45 degrees, we find that the traditional, one-dimensional view lines up from the left to right corners. Other axes might be chosen, such as elitism vs. populism, foreign vs. domestic focus, and so on.












Using this chart, we can illustrate the "traditional" or high school civics version of fascism, which says that fascism is an extreme right wing movement (black).













We can also illustrate the non-traditional view in which statism or collectivism is located along the bottom edge (blue).












In this form, it is contrasted with anti-statists (classical liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism) at the top. Note that in this view, Hitler and Stalin may be located near each other towards the bottom, having arrived at that point from their positions on the right and left. To me, this is an imperfect but much more satisfactory outcome than the one-dimensional model.

To be sure, many people attempt -- through deliberate attempts to obscure, or through innocent error -- to place fascism on the left (red).












This is one of the strawman versions of Jonah Goldberg's thesis in Liberal Fascism; the other is that he is painting the entire black, red, and blue space as fascism in order to reduce the epithet to meaninglessness. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure he isn't, but from the interview, that doesn't seem likely (20%). Instead, I think Goldberg is attempting to point out that the blue version of the origins and location of fascism has a left as well as a right side to it. If so, I would agree with him, but I would emphasize that it has two sides to it and they both tend to collaborate or at least feed off of one another. In other words, I would not have given the book the title it has.

Note that everyone wants to define fascism in a self-serving way, i.e. the left wants to paint them as right-wing, libertarians want to paint them as pro-state, and the right (of which Goldberg appears to be a member) wants to paint them as left-wing. The libertarian version of this makes the most sense to me, as it explains much of what has happened and why the other two groups seem to be blissfully unaware of the problems caused by their respective allies.

Having offered this graphical guide as background, I think I can proceed to actually working out a definition, but not before noting those who have come before. First, Mussolini himself. However, George Orwell tells us that fascism as a word had become meaningless by 1944. On the other hand, Eco has worked out a theory which makes them easy to spot -- or has he? Wikipedia offers a list of traits.

I think the best way to work through this is to realize that fascism, if it can be applied to states which have not embraced the term themselves, must account for regimes whose outcomes look like those who have embraced the term regardless of their rhetorical claims. In other words, it is not enough to take someone at face value when he claims to be an enemy of fascism. There seem to be characteristics in fact which are common to states we might term "fascist", but they may be present in different degrees from state to state. By way of illustration, I offer modernism, socialism, and anti-semitism.

Hitler was anti-modern in a number of ways. The pan-Germanism movement was stuck in place at the moment when Germany was trying to come together from a group of loosely attached states in the early 19^th century. They were dominated by their admiration for Prussia, by their Romanticism, and the influence of Rousseau and his Noble Savage. Through the influence of Spengler and others, Hitler subscribed to the Blood and Soil ideals of the Romantics, and with it the yearning for heroes to lead innocent men through the travails of modernism. Accordingly, Hitler idolized the work of Wagner and rejected the modern artists. Mussolini, on the other hand, recognized that if Marx' material dialectic theory of history was to be correct, Italy must be dragged through the capitalist phase of development in order to get to the socialist phase. There were broad overlaps between the Italian futurists and fascism, including the embrace of violence and focus on the future (see this, this, and this [1] for example). That is not consistent with Eco's claim that fascist movements are exclusively backward looking (is mine a fair reading of Eco?).

It is worth pointing out too that the meaning of "left wing" or "liberalism" has changed much throughout the past 200 years. The original denotation of left-right came from the seating in the French Assembly, with the Jacobins, sans-culottes, and their allies on the left and the reactionaries and other pro-monarchy and pro-aristocracy members on the right. The left was in favor of change and justice. Today, at least in the US, both left and right seem to want to return to some idealized past; for the left, it is a past in which The New Deal is still fresh, unions represent a majority of workers, trust-busting is still high on the agenda, the marginal tax rate on high earners is 90+%[2], and a program can be introduced for whatever ails you. For the right, the past is a place where taxes were low so a family of 4 could get by comfortably on a single salary, leaving mom free to raise the kids, the government consisted mostly of a Defense Department to protect us from the forces of evil, and we exported the best goods to the rest of the world because Americans were simply better at stuff and the government wasn't interfering. Neither of those places existed, and we couldn't go back if they did. Today, of the two, the left is largely the more conservative in the sense of being for maintaining the status quo if not returning to some perceived past, while the right is torn between creating a new idyllism and returning to the perceived old one. To some extent, the left is still the one in favor of achieving some measure of justice for both our own poor and for those abroad (though many of their favored policies would either do one at the expense of the other, or achieve neither), while the right wants to achieve justice by being left alone to enjoy their H3 Hummer, ATV, and the house whose 125% mortgage pays for it all.

With regard to socialism, Hitler was an enthusiast, but not a well-informed one. Mussolini, on the other hand, was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who grew up on it and rose to the heights of the Italian socialist party. It is necessary to distinguish between Marxist "scientific socialism" and other varieties of socialism; so great was the man's influence on subsequent thinking that we forget today that socialism had been around for at least two generations before Karl, and that Karl was a successful polemicist who cowed or outlived his contemporary detractors (in part because Karl was frequently really Engels' interpretation). Germany was the first state with an in-depth experience with socialism thanks to Marx' contemporaries Ferdinand Lasalle and Otto von Bismarck, the former the wildly popular socialist leader in the Bundesrat who died before his time at the hands of a romantic rival, and the latter the classically conservative (pro-aristocracy) empire builder. Hitler grew up in the wake of Bismarckian or State Socialism (though in Austria, not Germany); in Mein Kampf, he consistently and eloquently expresses socialist sentiments while denouncing the Marxist variety (which he identifies by various names such as Communism, Bolshevism, and -- in reference to the specific party -- Democratic Socialism). Mussolini, on the other hand, was steeped in Marxist thought thanks to a father who was a member of the International. Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez and Italian revolutionaries Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa. He was the editor of the Socialist party paper, Avanti!. Benito and the Soviet leaders were mutual admirers: Joshua Muravchik notes among other events (in Heaven on Earth) that

British journalist George Slocombe, who interviewed Mussolini at the 1922 Cannes Conference, reported that "Lenin was the only contemporary for whom he would express respect." Meanwhile, Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin commented that in their methods of combat, the Fascists "more than any other party, have adopted and applied ... the experiences of the Russian Revolution." Later, Mussolini perceived that the Soviet system under Stalin had become a kind of "Slav fascism" or "crypto-fascism."

Mussolini, like the French Vichy government, was forced into deporting Jews to Germany. Franco apparently aided some fleeing Jews. It is perhaps more instructive to look beyond anti-semitism to the larger picture and say that fascists have to divide the world into us and them. I wanted to provide these three areas of contrast regarding their futurism/pastism, relationship with socialism, and anti-semitism to show that even universally acknowledged fascists have differences between them on these key issues.

So here is the list of traits from Wiki offered with a few comments:

Trait	Germany	Fascist Italy	Falangist Spain	Arrow Cross
Nationalism	10	10	10	10
Anti-communism	10	8 (early admiration for Lenin and Stalin, tepid and opportunistic anti-communism)	10 (worth pointing out that the communists helped bring Franco to power by fighting against the anarchists)	10
Anti-liberal	10	10	10?	10?
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	7	8?	8?
Militarism	10	10	10?	10?
Totalitarianism	8, though Buccheim and Scherner have pointed out that there was still competition in the letting of contracts and in the methods by which they were fulfilled	10, Mussolini coined the term.	8?	8?
Anti-democratic	8 (came to power by democratic means)	10	10	10
Strong leader	10	10	10?	8?
Total	74	75	76	74?

Totalitarianism does not mean "particularly mean" or "vicious". It means that the state is involved in or wants to control every aspect of a citizen's life for the purpose of coordinating their activities for the benefit of the group.

And of the other states, what can we say about them?

Trait	Tojoist Japan	Stalinist USSR	Pinochetist Chile	Modern USA
Nationalism	10	9	10?	8
Anti-communism	10?	4 (but they were making up what communism was, e.g. not Trotskyite, and not very Marxist)	10	8
Anti-liberal	10	10	5 (the Chicago Boys)	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	9, against Kulaks and later against other ethnic groups including Jews in the Doctor's Plot	3?	3
Militarism	10	9	10	3
Totalitarianism	8?	10	7	4, but moving that direction
Anti-democratic	10	10	9, until they allowed elections	3
Strong leader	10	10	8 - Junta rather than single strongman	3, both parties believe in the imperial president
Total	78	71	62	40

And more to Goldberg's point?

Trait	Wilson Progressives	FDR	Modern Progressives	Neocons
Nationalism	8 (WWI)	8 (WWII)	4	8
Anti-communism	8 (Palmer raids)	6	6	8
Anti-liberal	7 (many laws passed)	8	9	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	8 (support for Jim Crow)	8 (Japanese internment camps)	3 (soft racism, bombing brown people was fine as long as Clinton was doing it)	6 (xenophobia)
Militarism	4	7 Yes, the CCC was a quasi-military	2 (generally supported Clinton's imperialism)	7 (though they failed to support Clinton's imperialism)
Totalitarianism	9 (Efficiency, Technocracy)	8 (controlled the press, controlled prices during the war, supported legislation that controlled wide swathes of economic activity)	9 (Heading that way on efficiency grounds)	9 (Heading that way on moral grounds)
Anti-democratic	3	7 (4 terms? Using social programs to buy votes, machine politics)	6 (judicial activism, anti-change in social programs, gerrymandering, antifederalist)	6 (gerrymandering, judicial activism, antifederalist)
Strong leader	3	8? Corporatism?	8 (belief in Executive Power)	8 (Ditto)
Total	50	60	47	60

And just for fun:

Trait	Cuba	Ba'athist Iraq	Israel	Jihadists
Nationalism	10	10	8	10 for their belief in the caliphate
Anti-communism	2	8	7	10 - look what happened in Afghanistan
Anti-liberal	8	8	7	10
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	5	7	5	10
Militarism	10	10	8	10
Totalitarianism	10	10	3	10
Anti-democratic	10	10	3	10
Strong leader	10	10	2	10
Total	65	73	43	80!

Wow, of all of the groups scored, the jihadists are the only ones to achieve a perfect 80. The United States as a whole is less fascist than Israel which is less fascist than either the neoprogressives or the Wilson Administration, and they in turn are less fascist than the neocons or the US under FDR administration.

Country	Score
Jihadists	80
Tojoist Japan	78
Falangist Spain	76
Fascist Italy	75
Nazi Germany	74
Ba'athist Iraq	73
Stalinist Russia	72
Cuba	65
Pinochetist Chile	62
FDR	60
Neoconservatives	60
Wilson	50
Neoprogressives	47
Israel	43
Modern US	40
Arrow Cross	74?

Obviously, this isn't terribly scientific. My scoring is likely to be skewed by availability bias and my own personal knowledge. I'd love to know how other people would change these scores. I have read quite a bit on the history of Germany's descent into Nazism, a little on the Progressive and New Deal eras, Italy, USSR, Spain, and Cuba, but not so much on the rest.

I think it would also be instructive to try to score the US through its history. I suspect that the racism would score high in the early Republic, but everything else would be quite low. That would change abruptly as we pass through the Civil War era in which the strong leader score would rise. The militarism would also gradually rise; it basically never went down very far after the Spanish-American War. Anti-liberalism, while never quite 0, has been on the rise since the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. Totalitarianism was near 0 before the Civil War, but has been at least a 5 since the original Progressive Era and rising since then. Nationalism has aways been high; anti-democratic tendencies have been on the wain since the colonial period but have accelerated in step with the totalitarianism. Politicians don't want to be seen as responsible for the rising intrusion into our lives; better leave those decisions to armies of faceless technical experts known as civil servants.

I think the main point here is that fascism is a combination of elements and a group or regime is fascist to the extent that they embrace those elements. It is not a fair deconstruction to look at the elements taken one at a time and out of context with the whole. People taking that approach (which so far has dominated the anti-Goldberg legions) are like the blind men investigating the elephant. By concentrating only on the parts, they conclude that an elephant is like a snake, a wall, a spear, a fan, a rope, or a tree. They will never realize that the elephant has all of those characteristics, but is never entirely like just one of those elements. Few would conclude that an immature elephant is not an elephant because it lacks tusks. Similarly, if a regime is strong in all but one category, I don't see how you can fail to conclude that it is fascistic if not fascist. After all, can we really claim that Hitler was not fascist because he obtained office by democratic means? Or that Pinochet's Junta was not fascist simply because he allowed elections to be held and the democratically elected government to succeed him?

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[1] Mussolini makes the statements, "Activism: that is to say nationalism, futurism, fascism." and "The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future."

[2] see Rosser's comments here in which he concentrates on the posted marginal rates rather than the actual average rates which were considerably lower due to the complexity of the tax code and the various holes in it.

More Goldberg

After listening to the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds, I'd have to say that the Sadly, No gang's fisking is not illuminating (the Crooked Timber takes are even less useful, since they are literally judging the book by its cover). Take this exchange, keeping in mind that one of Goldberg's themes is that the proto-fascist socialists were pro-military:

JG: There is confusion over Nazi attitudes about homosexuality.
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]

Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:

The SA, led by Ernst Rohm, included control of the Reichswehr (the army) in the program of the second revolution.

The more radical/socialist members of the NSDAP wanted to control the military? It's hard to see how this doesn't support Goldberg's thesis. Instead, we get lots of side track comments from the Sadly, No author that are self-contradictory.

This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:

Hitler was a vegetarian.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.

Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]

Then we have this line from another post:

Starting wars simply to demonstrate national strength is about a billion times more fascist than some namby-pamby bureaucrat telling you not to super-size your fries.

By comparing nanny-state bureaucracy to something that arguably more fascist [2] and declaring that it pales in comparison, the author concludes that it can't be fascist. I'm sure that's a named fallacy. But even if I can't be bothered to look up the name of that fallacy, I recognize the attitude: it's the Banality of Evil.

Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.

In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:

In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of "nasty racism" for her era-appropriate belief in eugenics

I asked, in response,

I wonder if you'd also characterize the antisemitism of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as "era-appropriate"? Surely, if such ideas are bad, they are bad in any era, regardless of the identity of the person who thinks those thoughts?

Nobody has answered. If those ideas were so era-appropriate, how does one explain people like G. K. Chesterton who were opposed to eugenics? Could it be that the era-appropriateness hinged on the acceptance of the idea among H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives?

It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?

The roots of National Socialism, however, were peculiarly German, grounded, for example, in the Prussian tradition of military authoritarianism and expansion; in the German romantic tradition of hostility to rationalism, liberalism, and democracy; in various racist doctrines according to which the Nordic peoples, as so-called pure Aryans, were not only physically superior to other races, but were the carriers of a superior morality and culture; and in certain philosophical traditions that idealized the state or exalted the superior individual and exempted such a person from conventional restraints.

The Prussian thing, the Romantic thing, and the Aryan thing are tied together in Fichte, Herder, and several others who also influenced Hegel and through him, Marx. Stir in some Plenge, Spengler, and Chamberlain, add a dash of George Bernard Shaw's Nietzche's Superman, and you have the National Socialist German Worker's Party philosophical stew made almost exclusively from the same philosophers who influenced the era's leading progressives, Fabians, and socialists.

Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:

Was the Fascist Party a "right-wing" party?
Mussolini's party was a right-wing party but only to some extent, just as the Nazi party. These were not conservative parties. They were radical, radical nationalist parties, which in the programs very much maintained the socialist ideals [emphasis added]. For example, Mussolini's corporate state workers participated in the decision making in the business enterprises. They had as much say in some respects, as did the owners of factories.

Mussolini did shift to the right gradually because I think he was afraid of the power of the communist and the socialists, and since he was a dictator and wanted dictatorial power he felt that one has to suppress these parties and they were suppressed.

...

Are Communism and Fascism totally different things, completely opposed to one another?
Well, the notion that Communism and fascism are diametrically opposed is something that was fostered by the Communist party, by the Communist International. In the 1920s, basically the International defined fascism as any anti-communist movement. If you were anti-communist, it doesn't matter what platform, you were automatically fascist. So that even the western democracies were called fascist. This is a meaningless term. I use the term Fascism concretely, to apply only to the Italian fascist party and the Nazi to the Nazi party.

The idea that fascism as a far-right ideology was a creation of the Comintern is something Goldberg makes reference to in the interview linked above. And if you doubt the extent to which the Comintern would go to paint their fellow-traveller rivals as reactionary, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?

This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.

Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:

JG: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.

SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.

Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.


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[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?

[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.

Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?

[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.

Liberal Fascism? Never heard of it, can't be true

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has drawn the ire of both the Crooked Timber and the Sadly, No gangs, as well as many other left-leaning reviewers. Their refutations consist mainly of calling Goldberg a stupid fascist; the general approach is to assume he's obviously wrong, beneath answer, and therefore only to be mocked. I have yet to find one who takes on Goldberg's actual arguments, much less his strongest arguments.

No matter the qual