The Fascist Left

Below is a repost from October 8, 2017, that discusses the origin and meaning of fascism as a form of socialism, which means it belongs on the left side of the left-right political and economic continuum. Following this repost, I have added a postscript on racism. For a detailed presentation of why the German form of fascism, Nazism, was totalitarian socialism, see George Reisman’s essay, “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian.” 

 

Slinging unfriendly epithets today has become sport, so I thought I’d throw out a few myself.

Political leftists can be described as intellectually bankrupt, hate-filled, envy-ridden fascists. They’re also postmodern progressives, but, unfortunately, they don't consider those terms to be insulting. I do.

Let me start with the left-right political spectrum. It goes back to the 1789 French National Assembly. Aristocrats and churchmen, supporters of the king, sat on the right, while the revolutionaries, some of whom were legitimate classical liberals, sat on the left.

In the ensuing two hundred years, the terms have varied in nuanced ways, but essentially the left has been understood as home of the good guys (socialists, statists, progressives) and the right as home of the bad guys, especially fascists, reactionaries and other conservatives, and thanks to the communists, capitalists.*

In my undergraduate school days of the late ‘60s, the spectrum was described as a horseshoe. At the top of the curve, in the middle, was democracy, so all of us good guys were middle-of-the-roaders who, of course, believed in voting and compromise. After all, there is and can be no perfectly free society and extremists, especially those who stick to principle, were dangerous.

No distinction between the compromise of principles and options was made (1, 2).
   
As some have pointed out, and I agree, the spectrum is best thought of as a straight-line continuum from the left—total control of life and economy by the state—to the right—laissez-faire capitalism (or liberalism in the classical tradition). In the middle is the so-called mixed economy, a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Statism is the general term that identifies the left with its two inconsequential variants, socialism and fascism. This means that fascism is “right” only in the sense that it is on the “right side of the left.”

Socialism, though, is not just control, but ownership, of life and economy. Lenin’s metaphor of the socialist state was that it would be a giant post office and we would all work for and be controlled by, or rather, belong to, the postal service, aka the state, “under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat.” (State and Revolution, p. 44, emphasis added.)

Though its roots go back earlier, fascism came about when Mussolini broke off from the socialist party and had to come up with something different. (Mussolini and Hitler were socialists to their core.) Unlike Lenin, Mussolini, and later, Hitler, inherited an industrial economy with large degrees of private life and property.

The Italian word fascio means workers’ league, which is consistent with Mussolini’s socialism, so Mussolini used it in 1914 and ‘15 and eventually adapted it to fascismo in 1921 to describe his “vision.” The private sector was allowed to continue in name only—he would have destroyed it, as Lenin nearly did, if he had nationalized everything—but it was controlled and regulated by a large and militant “deep state,” i.e., government bureaucracy.

Initially, Mussolini and the fascists adopted guild socialism, modeled on the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Syndicalism and corporativism were other terms used. All three differ only in who is going to control and regulate the economy, and how the control is to be exercised. None worked, so Mussolini increasingly adopted the Nazi approach to control, as well as Nazi tactics. Both Mussolini and Hitler copied the tactics of Lenin and Stalin.**

Entrepreneurs, as a result, ceased to exist. “In the terminology of the Nazi legislation,” says Ludwig von Mises, they became shop managers. (Human Action, p. 717. See also Planned Chaos, chap. 1, 7, and 8 and Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy). Fascism, as Mises identified, is socialism of the German pattern, differing only superficially from the Russian version.

Nominal private control and ownership of life and economy is what we have today in the United States, and have had increasingly since the 1890s with the beginnings of the early progressive era (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).

It is therefore not a stretch to describe our political and economic system as fascistic. It is not a system of liberty, classical liberalism, or laissez-faire capitalism.

Now I say the left is intellectually bankrupt because it has no new ideas to offer. It relies on the postmodern abandonment of reason and logic (Marx’s polylogism updated) to brand anyone who disagrees with them a hate-filled racist, misogynist, and homophobe. No arguments or facts are given. Only the shouting of collectivist clichés.

The louder and longer the shouting goes on, the assumption apparently is, the more their falsehoods will be believed.

But it is the leftists who are hate-filled—because of their seething, hostile yelling. They also are envy-ridden. This last has been well-documented in Helmut Schoeck’s thorough analysis of envy and the motivations for statism. (Redistributionism, after all, means taking wealth from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.)

I have a recommendation for the more sincere Democrats who feel uncomfortable with our current Weimar-like culture and are in search of new ideas to promote: look at Grover Cleveland.

A Democrat, Cleveland was the last US president who advocated classical liberalism. He served two unconnected terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97. In 1888 he won the popular election against Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral vote. (His supporters, interestingly, did not whine about having the election stolen!)

Cleveland was a strict constitutionalist who vetoed more bills than any president until Franklin Roosevelt’s determined efforts to protect his progressive-inspired welfare state. Cleveland’s vetoes slowed the early progressives’ juggernaut toward statism.

The fascist left is nearly indistinguishable from its socialist and communist brethren. All use state-initiated coercion to achieve their ends.

The liberal right—the liberalism of the classical tradition—repudiates state-initiated coercion of any kind and guarantees protection for those freedoms to take action called individual rights.

The social and economic theory of liberty is a free society of laissez-faire capitalism.


* Recall that communists and fascists in the United States were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. At that point, communists equated fascism with capitalism and started calling anyone who disagreed with them a fascist. Recall also that Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms.

**And anyone today who wears black clothing and calls themselves “anti-fascists” are, by their apparel and tactics, mimicking Mussolini’s blackshirted goons.

 

Postscript (10/8/2025). “Racism,” Ayn Rand writes, “is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage . . . . Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” As a form of collectivism, racism will be found in some form in all dictatorships, whether communism, fascism, or socialism. Why? Because dictators need scapegoats, to blame for the country’s problems and “to use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.”
 
In other words, racism is not an essential distinguishing characteristic of Nazism. It is an essential trait of dictatorship. In today’s postmodern, nihilistic world, the wannabe dictators, without knowledge of or care about history, or of any care of or understanding for the concepts they are using, freely sling the words “racist” and “fascist” at their chosen scapegoats, white males in particular, or anyone who works in or runs a business.

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

Below is a repost from July 18, 2022, that is important for our upcoming election. Most of my previous posts from 2017–22 have political themes and many are linked in the article below. I plan to repost another political essay in October and, again, on November 1. Note that links to my book Applying Principles are to a free, downloadable pdf.
 
 
A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since, progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barack Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barak Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

The Fascist Left

Slinging unfriendly epithets today has become sport, so I thought I’d throw out a few myself.

Political leftists can be described as intellectually bankrupt, hate-filled, envy-ridden fascists. They’re also postmodern progressives, but, unfortunately, they don't consider those terms to be insulting. I do.

Let me start with the left-right political spectrum. It goes back to the 1789 French National Assembly. Aristocrats and churchmen, supporters of the king, sat on the right, while the revolutionaries, some of whom were legitimate classical liberals, sat on the left.

In the ensuing two hundred years, the terms have varied in nuanced ways, but essentially the left has been understood as home of the good guys (socialists, statists, progressives) and the right as home of the bad guys, especially fascists, reactionaries and other conservatives, and thanks to the communists, capitalists.*

In my undergraduate school days of the late ‘60s, the spectrum was described as a horseshoe. At the top of the curve, in the middle, was democracy, so all of us good guys were middle-of-the-roaders who, of course, believed in voting and compromise. After all, there is and can be no perfectly free society and extremists, especially those who stick to principle, were dangerous.

No distinction between the compromise of principles and options was made (1, 2).
   
As some have pointed out, and I agree, the spectrum is best thought of as a straight-line continuum from the left—total control of life and economy by the state—to the right—laissez-faire capitalism (or liberalism in the classical tradition). In the middle is the so-called mixed economy, a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Statism is the general term that identifies the left with its two inconsequential variants, socialism and fascism. This means that fascism is “right” only in the sense that it is on the “right side of the left.”

Socialism, though, is not just control, but ownership, of life and economy. Lenin’s metaphor of the socialist state was that it would be a giant post office and we would all work for and be controlled by, or rather, belong to, the postal service, aka the state, “under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat.” (State and Revolution, p. 44, emphasis added.)

Though its roots go back earlier, fascism came about when Mussolini broke off from the socialist party and had to come up with something different. (Mussolini and Hitler were socialists to their core.) Unlike Lenin, Mussolini, and later, Hitler, inherited an industrial economy with large degrees of private life and property.

The Italian word fascio means workers’ league, which is consistent with Mussolini’s socialism, so Mussolini used it in 1914 and ‘15 and eventually adapted it to fascismo in 1921 to describe his “vision.” The private sector was allowed to continue in name only—he would have destroyed it, as Lenin nearly did, if he had nationalized everything—but it was controlled and regulated by a large and militant “deep state,” i.e., government bureaucracy.

Initially, Mussolini and the fascists adopted guild socialism, modeled on the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Syndicalism and corporativism were other terms used. All three differ only in who is going to control and regulate the economy, and how the control is to be exercised. None worked, so Mussolini increasingly adopted the Nazi approach to control, as well as Nazi tactics. Both Mussolini and Hitler copied the tactics of Lenin and Stalin.**

Entrepreneurs, as a result, ceased to exist. “In the terminology of the Nazi legislation,” says Ludwig von Mises, they became shop managers. (Human Action, p. 717. See also Planned Chaos, chap. 1, 7, and 8 and Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy). Fascism, as Mises identified, is socialism of the German pattern, differing only superficially from the Russian version.

Nominal private control and ownership of life and economy is what we have today in the United States, and have had increasingly since the 1890s with the beginnings of the early progressive era (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).

It is therefore not a stretch to describe our political and economic system as fascistic. It is not a system of liberty, classical liberalism, or laissez-faire capitalism.

Now I say the left is intellectually bankrupt because it has no new ideas to offer. It relies on the postmodern abandonment of reason and logic (Marx’s polylogism updated) to brand anyone who disagrees with them a hate-filled racist, misogynist, and homophobe. No arguments or facts are given. Only the shouting of collectivist clichés.

The louder and longer the shouting goes on, the assumption apparently is, the more their falsehoods will be believed.

But it is the leftists who are hate-filled—because of their seething, hostile yelling. They also are envy-ridden. This last has been well-documented in Helmut Schoeck’s thorough analysis of envy and the motivations for statism. (Redistributionism, after all, means taking wealth from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.)

I have a recommendation for the more sincere Democrats who feel uncomfortable with our current Weimar-like culture and are in search of new ideas to promote: look at Grover Cleveland.

A Democrat, Cleveland was the last US president who advocated classical liberalism. He served two unconnected terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97. In 1888 he won the popular election against Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral vote. (His supporters, interestingly, did not whine about having the election stolen!)

Cleveland was a strict constitutionalist who vetoed more bills than any president until Franklin Roosevelt’s determined efforts to protect his progressive-inspired welfare state. Cleveland’s vetoes slowed the early progressives’ juggernaut toward statism.

The fascist left is nearly indistinguishable from its socialist and communist brethren. All use state-initiated coercion to achieve their ends.

The liberal right—the liberalism of the classical tradition—repudiates state-initiated coercion of any kind and guarantees protection for those freedoms to take action called individual rights.

The social and economic theory of liberty is a free society of laissez-faire capitalism.


* Recall that communists and fascists in the United States were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. At that point, communists equated fascism with capitalism and started calling anyone who disagreed with them a fascist. Recall also that Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms.

**And anyone today who wears black clothing and calls themselves “anti-fascists” are, by their apparel and tactics, mimicking Mussolini’s blackshirted goons.

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.

The Two Liberalisms

Politics bores me. That’s why I have not written a blog on politics or on the upcoming election. Let this post suffice as my comment on today’s politics.

The Democrats’ loss in 2004 led to much soul-searching to define what the Democratic brand of liberalism should be or represent. Advice given focused on the usual concretes—guns, abortion, gay rights—the kinds of issues that would excite no one except conservatives. My advice is this. Reexamine the meaning of liberalism. Note its fundamental principles, especially as they evolved out of the Enlightenment. Then, in a radical departure from “politics as usual,” adopt those principles as vanguard for freedom worldwide.

The problem is that two liberalisms came out of the Enlightenment. The first was classical or market liberalism (today also called libertarianism). The second, developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England and the United States, is social liberalism, an amalgam of ideas ranging from mixed-economy features of part capitalism, part socialism, to Fabian or democratic socialism.

Market and social liberalism have the same genus, which means they share certain principles, and for advocates of market liberalism, this is an argument for possibly seeking common ground with some of their social counterparts. The common principles are these: emphasis on self-realization or self-actualization of the individual human mind as the essence of liberty, which translates to demands for the freedom of speech and press; strong value placed on reason, science, and technology as the source of modern material civilization; and the complete separation of church and state, with an emphasis on secular naturalism, including the naturalization of consciousness.

Where market and social liberalism differ is in their attitude toward business. Social liberalism holds that business, especially big business, is the new aristocracy that, through its positions of power and privilege, coerce the poor into remaining poor and generally disrupt the good taste of society. Hence, government might must be brought in to make right.

The history and theory of capitalism as understood by social liberals, of course, is patently false and has been demonstrated so by Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, among many others. And social liberals are mistaken to think that reason, science, and technology by themselves created modern material civilization. Without capitalism, at the end of the eighteenth century, reason, science, and technology would have remained, respectively, little more than a mental exercise, a curiosity, and a hobby. Instead, capitalism unleashed their creative and productive powers.

It is these errors of social liberals that market liberals must articulate in conversations. Reality exists in a continuum; so do people. Social liberals range in thought from those who are merely mistaken to those who are explicitly and rabidly socialist and are out to destroy business. It is the former with whom one can make common cause, because such social and market liberals share many of the same values, namely freedom of the individual human mind, reason, science, technology, separation of church and state, and naturalization of consciousness. It is a challenge to the market liberal, then, to convince the mistaken social liberal that true liberalism is the market or libertarian variety. If Democrats want to remain advocates of freedom, they should make their liberalism consistent and adopt market liberalism.

So what about religious conservatives and today’s Republicans? People exist in a continuum, so some conservatives do still understand capitalism and promote it correctly, but most pretend to advocate capitalism, while rushing to outdo the Democrats, and usually succeeding at the job, in expanding the welfare-warfare state.

Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, has this to say about conservatives:

The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy.

This is a good statement about conservatism, but one question remains: why does conservatism hate the left? The answer is the secular naturalism of liberalism; from its beginnings in the Enlightenment, liberalism has always seen religion and the church as enemies of individual rights and freedom. The phrase “pinko-commie atheists,” with emphasis on the last word, summarizes the motivation of conservatism. It is intolerant of irreligion. That identifies conservatism as a movement that is pre-Enlightenment.

Conservatism is not a friend of capitalism, nor is it a philosophy of liberalism.

The fundamental problem with both social liberalism and religious conservatism is that both identify morality with altruism. Social liberals may force their children to give all proceeds from a lemonade-stand sale to charity, but the religious conservatives force their children to give ten percent or more of their allowance to the church. Both advocate as gospel self-sacrifice in their personal, social, and political lives.

Eliminating the premise that government might makes right requires first that the premise of self-sacrifice be challenged and replaced by the right, whether child or adult, peaceably and cooperatively to pursue ones’ own values.