Happy 2015! Some musings on looking back, around, & forward

Paul Adams

I am not much given to optimism, neither the “unscrupulous” kind so brilliantly exposed by Roger Scruton, nor the complacent kind that assumes all is already well as it is. The first deplores present evils, it is true. It calls for revolution and the rule of an enlightened, progressive elite or party. But then, after its victory, all will be well.  If it turns out not to be, as inevitably happens, that will be the fault of reactionaries or traitors in the party itself. The revolution devours its own young. The second kind of optimism, proclaiming that we already live in the best of all possible worlds – a view with which many pessimists will concur - underestimates both the need for and possibilities of change.

The unscrupulous optimist foments dissatisfaction, even an indignation addiction, if not moral panic, in order to motivate social change. The solution always involves expanding state power over civil society, ever more control and coercion of families, churches and communities of conscience, businesses and markets. There ought to be a law, the offended and outraged cry. The informal sources of care and control, safety and order in families and communities, must be replaced by bureaucrats and professionals.

So what to make of this past year? It was a year besmirched by a rising tide of vocal and violent anti-Semitism in Europe and on American campuses; of religious persecution, kidnappings, beheadings and enslavement in the Middle East and Nigeria, with the control by ISIS (staggeringly underestimated by Obama as a junior team version of Al Qaeda) of territory the size of Great Britain. We witnessed the fall into lawlessness and violence of some African-American communities, with police use of force provoking riots, looting, and the destruction of economic life.  NYPD, at the time of writing, is on a slowdown that is close to a strike in response to the murder of two officers in New York and the failure of the mayor there to support the police.  The destruction of marriage by liberal elites through the courts, egged on by media and academia, continues apace, as the sexual revolution and the raising of unprecedented millions of children without one or either of their own parents continued to wreck the lives of whole communities where father absence was the norm.

There is much to lament even without the bogus indignation of statists who want the state to increase its management of the economy in order to impose its version of a more equitable distribution of resources, to restrict freedom of speech, religion, and conscience, and to impose on campuses ever more restrictions on what can be thought, said, and done while denying due process and assuming guilt.

But let us not lose sight, in our addiction to indignation, of the fact that 2014 was a year in which health and longevity improved worldwide, dire poverty continued its steep decline as capitalism, for all the continuing distortions of cronyism and corruption, lifted average living standards worldwide. War became less frequent and less violent, rates of murder and violent crime plummeted, and racism and discrimination declined (with the major exception of resurgence of the ancient prejudice of Jew hatred, now often in liberal disguise, in Europe).

In a column on campus sexual assault: real and imagined,  Anne Hendershott cites a government study that flatly contradicts the narrative of rampant sexual assault on campus that feeds the moral panic used by other government agencies and indignant-liberal media to call for ever tighter control of campus life by government and through its agencies of faculty, staff, and students. The study, released last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, shows that the

…rate of rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher for non-students of college age than for students on college campuses. In fact, campus sexual assault has actually declined from 9.2 per 1,000 college students in 1997 to 4.4 per 1,000 in 2013. Far from being a site of violence, the study found that female college students are safer from sexual assault while in college than at any other time in their lives.

Hendershott describes how the promoters of panic have pilloried and denied platforms to anyone who questions their bogus statistics – yet another example of social liberals’ seeking to close the American mind to rational or open debate.

So the threats to freedom – political, economic, and cultural – are real and serious. But let us not be panicked by the purveyors of moral panic into statist solutions that make matters worse and undermine civil society. Nor should we be discouraged from doing what can and needs to be done to strengthen families and communities, to resist terrorism, and to eradicate poverty worldwide and remove the obstacles to the poor’s use of their creativity and initiative to improve their condition.

Happy 2015!

Blaming the Jews - Again

Blaming the Jews—Again

8:52 AM, Dec 20, 2011 • By ELLIOTT ABRAMS

If you were an anti-Semite dedicated to spreading your hatred of Jews, what charges exactly would you make in 21^st century America?

You would avoid the blood libel—too medieval to write of sacrificing Christian children to make Passover matzo.  That kind of stuff circulates in Arab lands or Pakistan, but won’t sell in suburban America.  And the “Christ-killer” material is also dated, what with Vatican II, Evangelical support for Israel, and the like.

There are two charges you would make. First, the rich Jews control our government. Second, those Jews are trying to push America into war so your sons will have to fight for Israel.

In the last week that is exactly what we have seen. First came the Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Perhaps it was jealousy from seeing Walt and Mearsheimer sell all those books with this line, but Friedman here tips right into the swamps.

And now we have Joe Klein, in Time magazine, in a section accurately entitled “Swampland”: “Iowa Republicans are not neoconservatives. Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.”   READ MORE

Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://bit.ly/s9aXE7

Paving the road to hell: Intentions, conspiracies, and visions

Paul Adams 

Many Americans traveling to Europe have first-hand experience of European anti-Americanism, an angry, contemptuous prejudice that attributes the worst motives and intentions to Americans in culture and politics, often mixed with 
- cultural self-loathing or ethnomasochism that is at the same time self-righteous, 
- hatred of Christianity, 
- anti-Semitism, 
- excusing of the worst excesses of Islamism by way of moral equivalence (the U.S. and Israel as rogue states, the real terrorists, etc.), and 
- assumption of superior virtue on the part of a post-national, multicultural Europe. 

The aspect I'm interested in here is the substitution of intentions, good or evil, our own and those of our enemies, for analysis, evidence, or results.  

There is a piece in the First Things blog by David Mills, whom I take to be an old leftist, on the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  He misses Marxism, which offered a serious analysis and at its best programmatic and organizational leadership.  

The problem, I think, is that nearly everyone has accepted the Occupiers’ anger as validating their movement, but an anger so general has no political value. It gets you nowhere. It offers no critique of, no challenge nor any alternative to the vague abstract thing at which you are angry. “We are the 99 percent” angry at the remaining 1% doesn’t tell anyone who the 1 percent are, and what they’ve done wrong, and what they should have done, and how the system itself encouraged them to do some things and not others, and what the nation should do now.They make you, as I say, miss Marx. Or not Marx, exactly, but the kind of coherent and thought-out leftism he represents, ideas you can engage and challenge, and be challenged by, which is very different from the establishment liberalism of (to mention them again) the editors of the New York Times.

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide.  

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. 

Even Sowell, who talks about the unconstrained vision of utopians (what Scruton calls the 'unscrupulous optimism' of revolutionary/utopian/bureaucratic elites), sees Marxism as different - it is not utopian in that sense.  Well, he says it's anti-utopian with respect to past and present but falls into utopianism with regard to the future. It would be fairer in my opinion to say, as Hal Draper did, that there are 'two souls of socialism' - the bureaucratic-plannist-topdown-Stalinist-Reformist-utopian kind and the socialism-from-below, the authentic revolutionary Marxist tradition in which the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working-class itself.  If the latter is utopian (which Draper denied), it is in the belief that such struggle from below, where successful, can, has, or will ever fail to result in practice (in the not very long run) in some version of the first kind.

An important distinction between utopian, romantic social thinking and the aim of the ‘scientific socialism’ that Marx and Engels espoused is that the latter bases itself on analysis of actual historical forces and formations, and the constraints and possibilities to which they give rise at a particular, “concrete” historical conjuncture.  It identifies a specific social agency – a class and its leadership – that can play a revolutionary, progressive role. 

Utopian thinking, as Draper pointed out, is intrinsically authoritarian and anti-democratic.  This is true even though, or even because, the utopian has good intentions and wants the best for society.  The elite believes its rational, comprehensive plans are best for those who are to live under them.  The implementation and defense of the plan justify any amount of suffering along the way; and failure of the well-intentioned plan requires ruthless suppression of those with different idea or goals, who must be saboteurs and traitors.  The revolutionary elite substitutes its vision and knowledge for the experience of the infinitely less enlightened and progressive masses, for the inherited culture, the wisdom of the generations – all that must be discounted or scrapped, and we must start from scratch (appealing to the elite's Reason alone) with Year One of the Revolution.   


This is the “unconstrained vision” in which collective experience is to be jettisoned, the elite takes control, and the enlightened aim to bring the rest of us up to their level.  The good intentions and plans of the revolutionary elite justify trampling all the expressions of human culture that stand between the citizen and the all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent  state – like family and church in particular.

As Sowell and others have observed, this unconstrained vision, this utopian hypertrophy of revolutionary will and intent over all material, cultural, and moral constraints is what distinguishes the French Revolution from the American.  The French Revolution, for one example, murdered unarmed cloistered nuns (as the Spanish revolutionaries in the 1930s desecrated and destroyed churches and shot unarmed monks).  The American Revolution produced unique (in the history of the world) constitutional protections for the free exercise of religion from control, interference, or suppression by the state.  These protections stood for over a century and a half and are only in recent times being whittled away by liberal secularists and courts that turn the First Amendment on its head.

As critics from Burke on have noted, the unconstrained vision in power, with its insatiable need for scapegoats to blame for the failure of the utopian-elite vision in practice, is intolerant, violent, and dictatorial.  It needs to uncover conspiracies, traitors in its ranks, corrupt and counter-revolutionary elements, groups and classes (kulaks, Jews) that stand in the path of the vision and have to be swept aside with whatever violence is needed.

But what interests me is the way, in my experience, Marxism in its classic revolutionary form, resisted conspiracy theories, moralistic narratives (greedy capitalists/bankers), and scapegoating (Jews, Americans).  I recall one Marxism summer event in London, where some Brits were verbally trashing Americans over beer at the next table and a Socialist Workers Party leader sat down with them and lectured the semi-drunken comrades about solidarity, internationalism, class struggle in the U.S., and the reactionary role of national prejudice in dividing the class.  Well, I don't remember what he said exactly, but it would have been consistent with that line.  Among reformists and in the Labour Party, by contrast, as in the Guardian, anti-Americanism is blatant and unchecked, along with a hostility to Israel and all who support its existence that is distinguishable only in tone from the more blatant forms of anti-Semitism. 

The Marxist response is possible because Marxism (again, at its best) has an analysis that does not depend on evil intentions or mean, morally reprehensible villains.  Capitalism depends on the compulsion, driven by competition, to accumulate capital.  Economic crisis, in this analysis, is endemic in the system because, in a nutshell, the drive to accumulate operates irrespective of the system’s absorptive capacity.  Crises of overproduction, with financial collapse, mass unemployment, and so forth can perhaps be postponed but not prevented.  Such an analysis, or something like it, has nothing to do with the vices, the greed or malevolence, of bankers.  The least greedy, most beneficent banker in the world is not relieved by his personal virtues from the need to accumulate or go out of business.

Absent such an analysis, people readily fall into scapegoating and conspiracy theories to give expression to anger and resentment at the state of affairs they find themselves or the world in.  So it is not such a surprise to learn of the anti-Semitic origins and elements of the OWS movement:

http://bit.ly/rQODt9

http://nyp.st/og25x7

http://bit.ly/sTBeMz

http://thedc.com/tCzkPL

These stories, along with the liberal media denials of anti-Semitism in OWS, are symptomatic of an increasingly unconstrained anti-Semitism on the left as well as the right.  This in-your-face “Jewish-Zionist pig” rhetoric remains unacceptable in public discourse in both the U.S. left and Europe, despite the leftist bigot's care to add 'Zionist' to 'Jewish'. But traditional anti-Semitic tropes have become mainstream across Europe and clearly relate to the historic blaming of Jewish bankers, formerly a mainstay of specifically right-wing anti-Semitism.  If you have no serious analysis of the economic crisis and of governments' role in it, it is an easy transition from blaming greedy bankers to noting Jewish representation in finance or among neoconservative supporters of Israel.

There is, as Sowell and Scruton among others argue, a natural tendency in that direction on the part of utopians/plannists/bureaucrats/socialists-from-above who find themselves in power and who inevitably find that their schemes for improving humankind, starting from scratch to create a new world unburdened by the wisdom of preceding generations, produce results different from, or opposite to their intent.  Do they conclude that good intentions are not enough, we just don't know enough as an enlightened elite, and don't and shouldn't have that much control over the lives of the masses (even if we know what's best for them)? Some do, but more common is the response that our plans are being sabotaged by...Jews, Trotskyists, the Church, etc.  Utopian elitism requires scapegoats to blame its inevitable failures on. 

These considerations led me to a 2004 interview with Andrei S. Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, reflecting on the rise in volume and public acceptability of both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in the wake of 9/11.  

One of Markovits’ points is that Europe needs anti-Americanism to give it identity.  It's what (and what alone) Swedes and Greeks have in common - they are not Americans. He doesn't say this, but jettisoning and erasing the continent's core geographical and cultural definition and roots in Christianity, and not ready to embrace a new Islamic identity, anti-Americanism is what holds Europe together ideologically. (One expression of this is the readiness of high proportions of young, educated Europeans to believe conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Dan Brown fantasies about the history of Christianity, and to be completely impervious to evidence and reason on these questions.) 

Markovits also makes interesting points about the dynamics of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, which are closely related historically.  We hate those we wrong and those who do us good.  Europeans cannot forgive Americans for rescuing them from Nazism in WWII and putting the continent back on its feet afterward. 

Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex was correct in saying that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. In an analogous manner, I would argue that Western Europeans will also never forgive the Americans for being daily reminders that it was the Americans - together with the Red Army - who defeated Nazism, and not the Europeans themselves. Impotence breeds resentment, which in turn breeds disdain, hatred, and contempt.