Unrestricted Violence and Oppression

Below is a repost from April 14, 2017. The title is new, replacing the lengthy original: “Brains or Blood? Take Your Pick—The Choice Is Not New but the Threat Is Worse.” The post is about 1960s violence and oppression on university campuses that made blood, rather than brains, the preferred method of settling disputes. The first quotation from Ludwig von Mises about Vladimir Lenin states the premise of today’s, and yesterday’s, leftists, while the second from chancellor Mitchell demonstrates the proper response. Today, if I were rewriting this, I would have to extend the violence and oppression beyond universities to public and private venues, parks, buildings, and streets and highways, with Mitchell’s courageous expel-and-arrest solution expanded to prompt arrest and deportation.
 
Recall that Lenin urged his generals to use “ruthless terror” in the establishment of his workers’ paradise called socialism. Today, random violence on streets and subways, plus assassinations, are not just called for but cheered when they occur. Recall also F. A. Hayek’s chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” in which he explained why so-called democratic socialism always gives rise to dictators: their policies require coercion and sooner or later the democrats lack the ruthlessness to carry out the necessary physical force. Hence, the rise of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, among others, to take the steps to establish socialism.
 
Are we there yet?

Allow me to begin this post with a couple of quotations.

The real significance of the Lenin revolution is to be seen in the fact that it was the bursting forth of the principle of unrestricted violence and oppression. It was the negation of all the political ideals that had for three thousand years guided the evolution of Western civilization.

This letter is to inform you that this university has dismissed more than 40 students on this day. . . . [The] university will not be run by threats and intimidation. It will not respond to ultimatums from students, and it will not be intimidated by the pressures of groups who are dedicated to the disruption of institutions of higher learning or seek disorganization to the point where such institutions can be controlled by violence and run under constant threat of disruption.

The first quote is from Planned Chaos (chapter 6) by Ludwig von Mises, referencing the Russian Revolution of 1917. The second is a rare statement of courage by a college administrator; it is from a letter to friends of the University of Denver (my alma mater), dated April 30,1968, by Chancellor Maurice B. Mitchell.*

The connection between the two is the “principle of unrestricted violence and oppression” practiced by the Bolshevists in the early twentieth century, then later by the New Left “revolutionaries” of the 1960s. Today, we see the same unrestricted violence and oppression on college campuses the aim of which is to shut down free speech and its consequent diversity of ideas.

Violence does not require the use of a gun or the laying on of hands. Criminal assault is a threat that does not involve touching. Preventing patrons from voluntarily entering a lecture hall to listen to a speaker, regardless of the nature of the ideas presented, is as much the initiation of the use of physical force as a pistol whip to the head.

In recent months, the violence, in addition to blocking patron entrance, has been quite physical: setting a food cart on fire and breaking windows of the venue (UC Berkeley), grabbing the hair of a sponsoring professor and sending her to the hospital (Middlebury College), and shouting and banging on the venue windows to disrupt the speaker, even when the presentation was being live streamed in an empty auditorium (Claremont McKenna College).

In the past I have referred to college administrators as spineless (Applying Principles, pp. 101-105) for their lack of courage to stand up to the belligerents and for their refusal to expel all participants from their universities, as did Chancellor Mitchell.

Subsequent criminal prosecution is the only way to dampen and stop campus violence and oppression.

“Complicit,” however, is the more correct word to describe our present-day college administrators. A brigade of police to protect the patrons and round up all perpetrators of rights violations is all that would be required. Some administrators in the 1960s were complicit, but it seems more common that colleges today order police to stand down when violence erupts.

Brains or blood, college administrators.** It’s your choice and you seem to have made it for the latter. Respect for brains, freedom of speech and expression, and diversity of ideas have disappeared from your citadels of reason.

“Bolshevists set the precedent,” as Mises pointed out in Omnipotent Government (p. 178). “The success of the Lenin clique encouraged the Mussolini gang and the Hitler troops. Both Italian Fascism and German Nazism adopted the political methods of Soviet Russia.”

And no one stood up to Lenin to dampen or stop his violence and oppression. Indeed, he was seen by many as a hero and liberator, but it is a straight line from Lenin to Hitler and Mussolini to the New Left to the violent Progressive (or Post-Modern—call it what you want) Left of the present.

It all comes from the same source. Marx and Engels made no distinction between communism and socialism, except to say that there was a lower and higher phase of communist society. Social democrats called themselves socialists to distinguish themselves from Lenin’s communism, but they shared the same goal (Planned Chaos, chapter 3). Social democracy is what the American Progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13) learned in Prussian universities in the late nineteenth century.

British guild socialism of the Fabian Society is what Hitler and Mussolini took as their models of the modern fascist state (Omnipotent Government, p. 178). And Bismarck’s Prussia was modeled on the medieval guilds. Thus, communism, socialism, and social democracy, at root, are all essentially medieval ideas, premised on the illiberal notion of initiating physical force to achieve one’s goals, which is to say based on the premise of unrestricted violence and oppression.

Governments hold the monopoly on the use of physical force and when they use it for anything other than retaliation against aggressors, they themselves become the aggressors. Thus, taxation, regulation, and involuntary anything, whether the military draft or public domain laws, as well as non-objective law—vague and overly broad statutes, many of which we have today, including the deliberate nebulousness of Title IX that terrorizes college campuses—are descendants of the medieval guilds and the Marx-Engels-Lenin axis of violence and oppression.

It is time to choose brains over blood, to check our premises and adopt the true liberalism of freedom of speech, property rights, voluntary trade and association, and most importantly, tolerance for a diversity of ideas.


* The students had presented the university with “non-negotiable demands” and staged a sit-in at the Registrar’s and Chancellor’s offices. By 1960s standards this was mild when compared to the wanton destruction of research and records at other universities, among other criminal activity.

** “Brains or Blood?” was the [not so] subtle title of a one-page document co-authored by yours truly and four classmates at the University of Denver, distributed on campus a year after Chancellor Mitchell’s letter. It was a response to and refutation of non-negotiable demands presented to the university by a cabal of New Leftists. Children of the sixties? Yes, we were, but we defended our chancellor! [The document was presented to chancellor Mitchell and published as a letter to the editor in The Denver Post.]

 

Postscript (11/13/2025). An anecdote about chancellor Mitchell. He did not possess even a bachelor’s degree, let alone a PhD—which made him my kind of chancellor! His extensive executive experience culminated in positions as director of Britannica Films and, before accepting the job in Denver, as president of Encyclopedia Britannica. The story goes that he was a member of the school’s board of trustees, so when it came time to select a new chancellor, one board member turned to Mitchell and said, “Why don’t you do it?”

Romance, Fantasy, Arrogance, Blindness: An Inside Look at the Communist New Left

David Horowitz’s 1997 autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey has just come out in a second edition. The book provides many insights not just into the thinking of both his Old Left parents and Horowitz himself and his New Left colleagues, but also into who and what is influencing us today. Here is Horowitz’s summary of the communist dream:

Marxism was about a new creation that would begin with a “new man” and “new woman.” It was about remaking the world. About going back to Eden and beginning again. It was the romance to end all romances (p. 112).

Romance, fantasy, arrogance, blindness—these are words used by Horowitz to describe the delusions he and his comrades suffered when worshiping the “revolutionary fantasy” of communism during the 1960s and ‘70s. “Like all radicals,” says Horowitz, “we were intoxicated by our own virtue” (p. 299)

Horowitz was a founding member of the New Left while a graduate student from 1960-62 at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years he was an editor of the New Left’s flagship Ramparts magazine* and as a result knew all the players in the New Left. By the 1980s he developed “second thoughts,” as he calls his move away from the Left. Today he is an outspoken conservative.

Horowitz’s parents were unapologetic members of the American Communist Party, that is, until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech about the crimes of Stalin leaked to the West.** Up to that point, Party members had blinded themselves to the rumors of Stalin’s purges, show trials, and executions. Horowitz’s parents, after Khruschev’s revelations, left the Party, thereafter calling themselves Progressives. About two-thirds of the Party’s members also left, losing decades old friendships, as Horowitz points out, and becoming “non-existent” to the remaining members.

The New Left, says Horowitz, was a movement of Marxist revolutionaries founded to save communism from Stalin. Fidel Castro was one of their heroes who was doing communism “the right way.” John F. Kennedy, invader of Cuba and agent of the “imperialistic” ruling class, was not a hero, though a new leftist years later rewrote history to claim they all loved JFK.*** The New Left throughout the 1960s was opposed to the Vietnam war and viewed the Black Panther Party as “vanguard of the revolution” and “America’s Vietcong.”

The new leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spearheaded by Tom Hayden, came into prominence in the 1960s, eventually morphing in the ‘70s into the Weather Underground. A founding SDS statement coined the words “participatory democracy” as code for “soviet democracy.” In my undergraduate days, the former was promoted as a fuzzy form of direct democracy. In fact, a soviet was an elected, usually local, organization in the USSR, thus making communism another form of democracy! SDS’ers believed in and meant communism.

Hayden died in 2016 but in his SDS days was instrumental in causing the Newark riots of 1967 and organized the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago (pp. 184-88). The 1968 riots, according to Horowitz, are what succeeded in allowing the Left to take over the Democratic Party, which it today still controls. In Hayden’s post-SDS life he became a California state politician and husband of actress Jane Fonda.

The Weather Underground made revolution explicit with many bombings of banks and government buildings, including the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were two early leaders. Both are now retired, Ayers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dohrn from Northwestern University Law School. Ayers, Horowitz said in a recent article, ghost wrote Barack Obama’s autobiography and “mentored the insurrectionary founders of Black Lives Matter.”

Though Marx thought capitalism would eventually collapse on its own, later revolutionaries, starting probably with Lenin, sought to help the collapse along. Hence, the remorseless bombings of the Weather Underground and today’s deliberately blind eyes to the ravaging of civilization by such violent organizations as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

The Black Panther Party in the 1960s was founded by street thugs, led by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, but to the new leftists, including Horowitz, Panthers were the oppressed minority who dared to rise up and fight (in some cases with guns) with an “in your face” activism.****

Horowitz in the early ‘70s collaborated with the Panthers to found a school in the slums of Oakland, California, and recommended a white woman, Betty Van Patter, who had worked for Ramparts magazine, to do the school’s books. Unfortunate for Van Patter, she asked too many questions about the Panther’s finances and ended up in San Francisco Bay. The Oakland District Attorney's Office could not prove who committed the murder, but suspected a Panther named Flores Forbes.

Van Patter’s death in 1974, along with suspicions Horowitz was beginning to have about the Panthers, was the turning point for him to leave the Left. He had been cautious in conversations with Newton, but did not suspect the worst. Van Patter’s daughter at the time, as well as many years later, could not believe at the time and years later that such an “idealistic” group of people would do such a thing.

Horowitz in the new Preface to Radical Son suspects that Forbes was the murderer, or knows who committed the crime, and that Newton likely ordered it. An internal group of enforcers to torture and murder anyone who did not toe the Panther Party line are believed to be guilty of at least a dozen murders. The enforcers were called, interestingly for today’s times, The Squad. Forbes was its head.

Today Flores Forbes is Associate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Program Implementation at Columbia University.

After much questioning about communism and socialism, especially about how the “noble ideal” in practice always seems to end up with millions of dead people, Horowitz concluded that the ideal itself was flawed. The aim of communism and socialism was to abolish private property and make everyone equal. But, Horowitz identified:

The abolition of property was really the abolition of private association and civil society, and of the bourgeois rights they underpinned. Socialist unity could only be achieved as a totalitarian solution (p. 308).

And everyone is not equal in nature. Who is to decide how everyone is to be made equal, asks Horowitz? A “ruling caste,” he concludes, seems always to arise.

Horowitz near the end of his book even cites Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who demonstrated the impossibility of socialism ever working, especially in the determination of prices independently of the market.

To use Hayek’s words, though Horowitz does not, the leaders of the “noble ideal” have always suffered a fatal conceit to think they had a god’s-eye view and a god’s omniscience to plan an entire social and economic system.

The “revolutionary fantasy” of socialism does not work. It only destroys.


* When Ramparts closed in 1975, several editors, though not Horowitz, went on to found Mother Jones.

** Horowitz’s father in 1935 on a trip for the Party wrote to his soon-to-be wife about the people of Colorado. He said that he felt like he was in a foreign land and that “most of us [Party members] aren’t really ‘patriotic,’ I mean at bottom deeply fond of the country and the people” (pp. 30-31).

*** “We were Marxist revolutionaries when we began the New Left and would have scorned anyone who supported Kennedy in the way [Todd] Gitlin suggests” (p. 115, Horowitz’s emphasis). Todd Gitlin today is professor of journalism and sociology and head of the doctoral program in communications at Columbia University.

**** The Left’s association with African Americans goes back at least to the 1930s. See this article about African American Manning Johnson who from 1930-39 was a member of the American Communist Party but left it because he saw that the communists “were using black Americans as pawns in their hope that a ‘bloody racial conflict would split America.’” The notion of  “systemic racism” is a concept of the Left and goes back to that time.
 

Is the Next Step for the Left to Liquidate Its Enemies?

Ludwig von Mises, of course, said it best when he described the ultimate end of all variants of socialism, whether communism, fascism, or interventionism:

Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow-citizens. He prefers to “liquidate” them. He scorns the “bourgeois” society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed. (Planned Chaos, p. 52)

Are we there yet? I hope not.

In the United States in the 1960s, we had violence and bloodshed (bombings, kidnappings, murders, the burning of buildings, and other wanton destruction of property), with considerable rhetoric from the New Left about revolution, though what they really wanted was a putsch.

But that 1960s violence and bloodshed receded after naïve students who constituted the New Left’s rank-and-file followers realized they could get shot (at Kent State).* The leaders of the New Left then either crawled back into their holes, or became politicians and tenured professors.

Violence today still occurs: shutting down speakers and plays, wanton destruction of property, and the fueling of spectacular Nazi-style fires with everything except books.

And there have been assaults and batteries and an abundance of intimidation and threats. Hostility and aggression are used against whomever one disagrees with and both are openly encouraged against prominent members of the Left’s opposition.**

Today, however, the Left’s tactics, as opposed to those used in the 1960s, are different, the preferred one being deception and trickery, also known as fraud. The goal of the Left (it’s no longer “New”) is to shut down disagreement through censorship and by securing the removal of influential people in prominent positions of universities, business, entertainment, and the media.

Facts don’t matter, so in our Postmodern Age of updated Marxist polylogism, Leftists use the word “narrative” to come up with whatever they want. The word “narrative” means “story” or “fiction,” so let’s substitute fiction to state what is promoted today as sophisticated thought.

“You have your fiction, I have my fiction, everyone has his or her own fiction. Reason, logic, objective truth, and objective reality are out. We can say whatever. And whoever shouts the loudest and longest wins.”

The law? Please. It’s malleable according to the judge’s ideology, and many laws, especially in the Federal system, are so vague and overly broad that prosecutors can and do find laws to jail anyone.

Sound familiar from history? Oops! I shouldn’t bring up history. Militantly evasive, as well as actual, ignorance of history, is flaunted everywhere. I am referring to Stalin’s secret police chief, Levrenti Beria, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

Are we there yet?

And then there’s the sheer quantity of laws on the books that I have to say, as I have said before (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83), we are approaching “dictatorship by excessive law.”

Mises would be embarrassed if he knew what passes today for the rule of law and legal procedure—though perhaps not, as he knew well what went on in Russia, Italy, and Germany.

Mises knew, because one magnum opus that he wrote was Socialism, in 1922. The essence of socialism, he says, is destructionism. “It does not build; it destroys. . . It produces nothing; it only consumes . . .” (p. 458).

George Reisman describes socialism as “simply an act of destruction” (emphasis in original), because it destroys property rights, the profit motive, and the price system. It is not another economic theory; it is “a negation of the system based on private ownership” (emphasis in original, The Government Against the Economy, p. 151).

Socialism destroys whatever prosperity has been created by capitalism, resulting in chaos the likes of which we see in modern-day Venezuela—where citizens must stand in line just to get a roll of toilet paper.

Along the way to today’s Leftist paradise, a few eggs, as in the twentieth-century utopias of Russia, Italy, Germany, China, Cuba, and Cambodia, may have to be cracked and destroyed—or should I say, “liquidated”?

Are we there yet?


* If memory serves, this observation about the Kent State shootings was attributed to Ayn Rand. Protesting students in the ‘60s, many of whom I came in contact with, displayed this brilliant stroke of independence: “Hey, grab a beer. Let’s join the demonstration!” Sidney Hook (Out of Step, chap. 33) describes the spinelessness of New York University during its building occupations and malicious destruction of property in 1969 and ‘70. When the administration finally found spine enough to call the police, they informed the students who immediately vacated the buildings. (On recent revelations of FBI-withheld information about Kent State, see this.)

** Fortunately, though much belatedly, the House Minority Leader finally denounced the violence of Mussolini-clad blackshirts, absurdly known as the “anti-fascist” organization, Antifa. And the Senate Minority Leader recently, also finally, spoke out about “un-American” calls for in-your-face hostile and aggressive harassment of political opponents. Will the press ever speak out against violence and bloodshed??

Brains or Blood? Take Your Pick – The Choice Is Not New But the Threat Is Worse

Allow me to begin this post with a couple of quotations.

The real significance of the Lenin revolution is to be seen in the fact that it was the bursting forth of the principle of unrestricted violence and oppression. It was the negation of all the political ideals that had for three thousand years guided the evolution of Western civilization.

This letter is to inform you that this university has dismissed more than 40 students on this day. . . . [The] university will not be run by threats and intimidation. It will not respond to ultimatums from students, and it will not be intimidated by the pressures of groups who are dedicated to the disruption of institutions of higher learning or seek disorganization to the point where such institutions can be controlled by violence and run under constant threat of disruption.

The first quote is from Planned Chaos (chapter 6) by Ludwig von Mises, referencing the Russian Revolution of 1917. The second is a rare statement of courage by a college administrator; it is from a letter to friends of the University of Denver (my alma mater), dated April 30,1968, by Chancellor Maurice B. Mitchell.*

The connection between the two is the “principle of unrestricted violence and oppression” practiced by the Bolshevists in the early twentieth century, then later by the New Left “revolutionaries” of the 1960s. Today, we see the same unrestricted violence and oppression on college campuses the aim of which is to shut down free speech and its consequent diversity of ideas.

Violence does not require the use of a gun or the laying on of hands. Criminal assault is a threat that does not involve touching. Preventing patrons from voluntarily entering a lecture hall to listen to a speaker, regardless of the nature of the ideas presented, is as much the initiation of the use of physical force as a pistol whip to the head.

In recent months, the violence, in addition to blocking patron entrance, has been quite physical: setting a food cart on fire and breaking windows of the venue (UC Berkeley), grabbing the hair of a sponsoring professor and sending her to the hospital (Middlebury College), and shouting and banging on the venue windows to disrupt the speaker, even when the presentation was being live streamed in an empty auditorium (Claremont McKenna College).

In the past I have referred to college administrators as spineless (Applying Principles, pp. 101-105) for their lack of courage to stand up to the belligerents and for their refusal to expel all participants from their universities, as did Chancellor Mitchell.

Subsequent criminal prosecution is the only way to dampen and stop campus violence and oppression.

“Complicit,” however, is the more correct word to describe our present-day college administrators. A brigade of police to protect the patrons and round up all perpetrators of rights violations is all that would be required. Some administrators in the 1960s were complicit, but it seems more common that colleges today order police to stand down when violence erupts.

Brains or blood, college administrators.** It’s your choice and you seem to have made it for the latter. Respect for brains, freedom of speech and expression, and diversity of ideas have disappeared from your citadels of reason.

“Bolshevists set the precedent,” as Mises pointed out in Omnipotent Government (p. 178). “The success of the Lenin clique encouraged the Mussolini gang and the Hitler troops. Both Italian Fascism and German Nazism adopted the political methods of Soviet Russia.”

And no one stood up to Lenin to dampen or stop his violence and oppression. Indeed, he was seen by many as a hero and liberator, but it is a straight line from Lenin to Hitler and Mussolini to the New Left to the violent Progressive (or Post-Modern—call it what you want) Left of the present.

It all comes from the same source. Marx and Engels made no distinction between communism and socialism, except to say that there was a lower and higher phase of communist society. Social democrats called themselves socialists to distinguish themselves from Lenin’s communism, but they shared the same goal (Planned Chaos, chapter 3). Social democracy is what the American Progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13) learned in Prussian universities in the late nineteenth century.

British guild socialism of the Fabian Society is what Hitler and Mussolini took as their models of the modern fascist state (Omnipotent Government, p. 178). And Bismarck’s Prussia was modeled on the medieval guilds. Thus, communism, socialism, and social democracy, at root, are all essentially medieval ideas, premised on the illiberal notion of initiating physical force to achieve one’s goals, which is to say based on the premise of unrestricted violence and oppression.

Governments hold the monopoly on the use of physical force and when they use it for anything other than retaliation against aggressors, they themselves become the aggressors. Thus, taxation, regulation, and involuntary anything, whether the military draft or public domain laws, as well as non-objective law—vague and overly broad statutes, many of which we have today, including the deliberate nebulousness of Title IX that terrorizes college campuses—are descendants of the medieval guilds and the Marx-Engels-Lenin axis of violence and oppression.

It is time to choose brains over blood, to check our premises and adopt the true liberalism of freedom of speech, property rights, voluntary trade and association, and most importantly, tolerance for a diversity of ideas.


* The students had presented the university with “non-negotiable demands” and staged a sit-in at the Registrar’s and Chancellor’s offices. By 1960s standards this was mild when compared to the wanton destruction of research and records at other universities, among other criminal activity.

** “Brains or Blood?” was the subtle title of a one-page document co-authored by yours truly and four classmates at the University of Denver, distributed on campus a year after Chancellor Mitchell’s letter. It was a response to and refutation of non-negotiable demands presented to the university by a cabal of New Leftists. Children of the sixties? Yes, we were, but we defended our chancellor!

The Communist Era and Capitalism vs. Democracy

Sidney Hook’s 600-page autobiography Out of Step provides a wealth of information about New York intellectual life in the twentieth century, especially the communist era from the 1930s to 1960s.

It also indicates that the main debate today is not, or should not be, capitalism vs. socialism, but capitalism vs. democracy.

As Marxist scholar, communist fellow traveler, anti-Stalinist, pro-Cold Warrior, anti-New Leftist, and adamant defender of democracy, Hook knew or was acquainted with nearly all of the players of the communist era.

The difference between Hook and his Communist Party colleagues is that he actually read and thoroughly understood Karl Marx, so if he had been a professor in a USSR university in the 1920s and ‘30s, he, like others before him, certainly would have been purged.

The names of many of these players should be familiar to anyone who has read about or lived through any portion of the communist era, for example, playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was worshipped by my 1960s New Left professors, and journalist Whittaker Chambers. Hook has stories about all of them.

Brecht, one day in Hook’s apartment in 1935, made a casual remark about a Stalin-assigned assassination: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook showed Brecht the door and never saw him again.

Chambers was a Stalinist spy in the 1930s who, when he came in from the cold, was immediately hired by Time magazine. Chambers later testified against Alger Hiss, accusing the high-level State Department official of also being a former spy. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury and went to his death denying it all. Hook concluded the evidence was against him.*

Never a card-carrying Party member, Hook became anti-communist after the Moscow Show Trial revelations of 1936-38. He supported US entry into World War II against the Nazis while Party members, who took their orders from the Kremlin, opposed any support for the evil capitalist regime of the United States.

During the Cold War, when communist apologists were advocating unilateral disarmament on the part of the US and saying it was better to be red than dead, Hook supported a strong defense and pushed the slogan “better free than slave.”

His chapter on the New Left’s spring 1969 uprising at New York University, that is, its occupation and disruption of academic life, is detailed and alarming. His description of the corresponding spinelessness of the school’s administration is equally detailed and alarming.

Not a friend of the New Left in the 1960s, Hook declared its campaigners “anti-intellectual” and “barbarians of virtue.”

And to set the record straight on whether or not, in earlier years, Communist Party members had infiltrated US educational institutions—the New Left had rewritten history to say otherwise—Hook cites Communist Party instructions to its members to teach Marxist-Leninism in every class without being caught or exposed. This confirms what I once heard Ayn Rand say, this time in Hook’s words: the duty of card-carrying communists was “to deceive and to cheat.”

The main political debate throughout Hook’s life, especially as stated by him, was democracy vs. totalitarianism. Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism represented the latter, but as a lifelong socialist—on moral, not economic, grounds—the former meant democratic socialism.
   
For Hook and his socialist colleagues, socialism is the ultimate end of Jeffersonian democracy and the Bill of Rights. This is sometimes called social democracy, though more often in the US its close cousin is social or progressive—as opposed to classical—liberalism. Social liberalism is an alleged improvement on the classical type.

At the end of his life (and book), Hook acknowledged that collective ownership of the means of production—the socialist state as giant post office, to use Lenin’s metaphor—does not work. Thus, he describes himself as “an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax.” Interventionism, in other words, with a strong leftward bias.

Although he spent many of his last years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and was awarded the  Medal of Freedom in 1985 by President Reagan, Hook was no conservative. He was a secular humanist (and naturalist), which means he was a lifelong atheist and ardent supporter of science and scientific method.**

Democracy for Hook, however, was primary. He and nearly everyone else in the world today, including the Marxists and communists, seem to advocate democracy. So what does Hook mean by it?

In the absence of genus and differentia, he gives descriptions, such as “free discussion,” “freely given consent,” “voluntary [consent], not subject to coercion,” and, most importantly, the absence of economic obstructions to that consent and to the pursuit of education, jobs, and happiness.

Hook’s moral basis for being a socialist was, of course, his unexamined assumption that capitalism exploits workers. Socialists are more moral because they are “nicer” (meaning more altruistic, though Hook does not use the term) than the capitalists who are mean and selfish. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite of modern democracy is that economic power must be put under political control.

I say the main debate today is, or should be, capitalism vs. democracy, rather than vs. socialism, because of the near-universal endorsement of democracy and equally near-universal failure to define it. Hook’s somewhat muddled understanding is how most currently see it.

Socialism, to be sure, still needs to be refuted, though Ludwig von Mises did it thoroughly in 1922. And telling a naive voter that the government often abuses its legal monopoly on the use of physical force is likely to produce a “but we are the government and we can change it” response.

What percentage influence does a voter have in a typical US presidential election? Less than a millionth of a percent!

As I suggested in an earlier post, the vote is not unimportant in a free society, but it is neither primary nor fundamental. Hong Kong, after all, did quite well for decades with no general elections. What it did have was the English constitution and legal system.

This means that if democracy is a term to be endorsed at all, it must be defined as voting restrained by individual rights and those rights must be clearly distinguished from the collectivized versions of the social liberals. Individual rights are freedoms to take action, not entitlements to things, that is, to food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, and happiness.

I’m tempted to say that democracy should be tossed entirely in defenses of the free society. If capitalism is understood as a social system, not just economic, it can be put where it belongs—in philosophy—and therefore cannot be dismissed as “just economic,” which most opponents and the ignorant alike do when the term comes up.

Discussions of social systems come from the fourth branch of philosophy called social (or political) philosophy. Social philosophy defines the nature and proper function of government, which brings rights and ethics into the discussion of capitalism, which means egoism should also be brought in, as well as a theory of human nature, and a theory of consciousness and universals, among other fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.

Sidney Hook was a philosopher who knew about discussions of this sort, at the fundamental level, and used fundamentals to defend Marx and socialism. He was an advocate of Enlightenment values: reason, science, technology, freedom, and, of course, rights and democracy, as most socialists of his era were.

Defenders of the free society cannot just say they are advocates of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, technology, freedom, rights, and democracy . . . and expect to win arguments.

What is required today for a proper defense is the elevation—that is, the boosting, heightening, raising up—of discussion from our current concrete-bound, trivial, and disconnected mess to universal and fundamental principles.

Socialism was a moral ideal in the 1920s, ‘30s, and, according to Ayn Rand, until the end of World War II. As a practical ideal it died with the USSR collapse in 1991, yet its flotsam lingers in 2016 to obstruct passage to a genuinely free society.

It lingers by default because of the lack of principled opposition.

Sidney Hook was a significant member of the generation that sought to promote a moral ideal. His book provides lessons for anyone in 2016 who wishes to do the same, this time, one would hope, promoting the ideal of laissez-faire capitalism and all that it rests on.


* Chambers became a neoconservative and wrote the infamously sleazy review of Atlas Shrugged in William Buckley’s National Review. “From almost any page,” says Chambers, “a voice can be heard . . . commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’” Chambers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1984 by President Reagan.

** F. A. Hayek, in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” points out that conservatives are not averse to using coercion to achieve their goals and he even suggests that coercion is the common denominator uniting “repentant socialists” (like Whittaker Chambers) and conservatism. True (classical) liberalism, says Hayek, supports liberty over equality or democracy.