Liberal Fascism

You're probably aware that Jonah Goldberg's new book is causing quite a stir.

This via Instapundit:

TAKE THAT, TROLLS! (CONT'D): Jonah Goldberg's book is now up to #8 #7 #6.

And, if you somehow missed it, our podcast interview with Jonah is here.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Nath emails:

I just went to the local Barnes & Noble where I found Keith Olberman's "Truth and Consequences" prominently displayed on a middle of the aisle table - impossible to miss. Curious, I went in search of Jonah Goldberg's book and where did I find it? A single copy languished on the bottom row of the current events rack with just the binding end of the book showing. Coincidence?

I'm sure. (Bumped).

The Author also speaks here.

This from Daniel Pipes via Dissecting Leftism(scroll down):

Liberal fascism sounds like an oxymoron - or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis." Really. His words, indeed, fit a much larger pattern of fusing socialism with fascism: Mussolini was a leading socialist figure who, during World War I, turned away from internationalism in favor of Italian nationalism and called the blend Fascism. Likewise, Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers Party.

These facts jar because they contradict the political spectrum that has shaped our worldview since the late 1930s, which places communism at the far Left, followed by socialism, liberalism in the center, conservatism, and then fascism on the far Right. But this spectrum, Jonah Goldberg points out in his brilliant, profound, and original new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Doubleday), reflects Stalin's use of fascist as an epithet to discredit anyone he wished - Trotsky, Churchill, Russian peasants - and distorts reality. Already in 1946, George Orwell noted that fascism had degenerated to signify "something not desirable."

To understand fascism in its full expression requires putting aside Stalin's misrepresentation of the term and also look beyond the Holocaust, and instead return to the period Goldberg terms the "fascist moment," roughly 1910-35. A statist ideology, fascism uses politics as the tool to transform society from atomized individuals into an organic whole. It does so by exalting the state over the individual, expert knowledge over democracy, enforced consensus over debate, and socialism over capitalism. It is totalitarian in Mussolini's original meaning of the term, of "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Fascism's message boils down to "Enough talk, more action!" Its lasting appeal is getting things done.

In contrast, conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone. Goldberg's triumph is to establish the kinship between communism, fascism, and liberalism. All derive from the same tradition that goes back to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. His revised political spectrum would focus on the role of the state and go from libertarianism to conservatism to fascism in its many guises - American, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and so on.

I think the observation is more than some people can stand.

Update via Instapundit:

JONAH GOLDBERG IS CURRENTLY #1 on Amazon. I hope he sends a nice thank-you note to all the lefty bloggers who have been savaging him. I don't think he could have done it without them!

Looks that way to me

In a column earlier this year titled  Days of Future Past  Jonah Goldberg included this:

All around the world, authoritarianism of one bent or another is in vogue. From Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to the Communist party’s China, statism is an idea whose time has come, again. “Over the past few months,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recently, “we’ve seen the beginning of a global battle of regimes, an intellectual contest between centralized authoritarian capitalism and decentralized liberal democratic capitalism.”

Of course, the yearning for authoritarianism is ancient. I would argue that it is baked into the human condition, which is why it must be constantly fought. But even this latest outbreak did not just emerge ex nihilo over the last few months. The heavy intellectual work has been done in plain view for years (indeed, I offer something of a survey of such impulses in my 2008 book Liberal Fascism). How many columns has Thomas Friedman written extolling the superiority of the Chinese way? “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy,” Friedman has written, “and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.”

How many times has Barack Obama, Friedman’s most influential reader, invoked China’s economic planning as something we need to emulate? How many remoras of the Leviathan have offered similar encomiums to statism? “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century,” declared former SEIU president Andy Stern in the Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Again, this is nothing new. Similar sentences were written countless times in the 20th century, insisting that the free-market fundamentalism of the 19th century was being thrown onto the same trash heap. Anne Morrow Lindbergh famously coined the phrase “wave of the future” to describe the inevitability of collectivism in 1940. The lesson here is not that history proved them wrong, because history doesn’t do anything. They were proved wrong because people proved them wrong.

That is the lesson to take away: The wave of the future isn’t a wave at all, but an eternal tide that champions of freedom must fight against, constantly. For if they stop, even briefly, the tide will push them back to the shores of the natural human condition, and the state of nature is not liberal-democratic capitalism but tribal, thuggish authoritarianism. On this point Orban was absolutely right. “The point of the future is that anything can happen,” he said. “That means it could easily be that our time will come.”

 
In another column title  Freedom  he made the point: 

It’s a little bizarre how the Left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia. And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future.”

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding. (emphasis mine)

Blogger Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm  excerpted the following from Klaven  

Whatever its pretensions, whatever its claims, statism — progressivism, leftism, socialism — is based on the idea that a small elite intelligentsia can run your life better than you can. They know how to spend your money. They know how to educate your children. They know how to run your health care. They know how to protect you from yourself.

You do not have to talk to a statist very long before he will profess an intense dislike, distrust and even fear of ordinary people. Ordinary people spend money on what they want (TV’s restaurants and cars) rather than what the elite know they ought to want (aluminum foil climate change reversers). Ordinary people teach their children that God created the world rather than a random pattern of mathematic realities that came into being through another random pattern that came…  well, the elite know: it’s random patterns all the way down! Ordinary people will give jobs and business to those who earn them rather than those the elite, in their greater understanding, know are historically deserving because of past oppression. And so on.

Now, of course, with the very elite of the elite running the country, we find that — what do you know? — this statism dodge doesn’t really work all that well. And there are two reasons for this. The first is that the statist premise is wrong. In fact, ordinary people left at liberty to do as they will are actually better at running their lives and businesses and country than the geniuses in Washington. Central planning works great in the imaginations of the elite, but in the real world…  not so much.

And the second problem is that the elite are stupid. No, really. They’re educated and sophisticated and they dress well and speak well. They may even have high IQs. But in the immortal words of Forrest Gump’s mother: “Stupid is as stupid does.” And the elite are stupid.

 Even though I have plenty of friends who would consider themselves part of the elite, the ideas expressed above nail it!

Illiberalism

There have been several prior posts about liberal fascism on this blog drawing on the works of Jonah Goldberg, Fred Siegel and others.  This post will draw from an article by Forfare Davis title, Why Secular Liberalism Isn't Liberal:

  

A couple of months ago readers of the Guardian were presented with the peculiar spectacle of an atheist intellectual calling out his fellow atheists for being, of all things, too religious, of engaging in what the author coined “missionary atheism.” The author was the intrepid John Gray and his article was “What Scares the New Atheists.” The religious faith he accused his atheist cohorts of was a crusading belief in the scientific and rational basis of liberal values. Mr. Gray then follows with various examples of atheism’s inconvenient history of collusion with some of the West’s most unfortunate and bloody ideological projects. The irony of the New Atheism, Gray goes on to assert, is that it is driven not by reason, but rather by fear that the march of secularism may be faltering; rather than demonstrating the self-awareness of say, a Freud or Schopenhauer, both of whom understood religion’s important roles in society, New Atheism simply offers another variant of evangelical movement based on a faith that dare not acknowledge itself as such even while crusading against other faiths. 

…As if to illustrate these critiques, recent events appear to be making Gray and Haidt’s case, for the more secular we have become, the less liberal secular liberalism seems to be. 

… the liberal project has been co-opted by a cult of political correctness, we seem to be approaching some threshold where the “party of science” is reverting to the party of the tribe.  

…much of what motivates us in terms of values, politics, and religious persuasion are really the banners we are preternaturally disposed to run to when that switch turns on. But here alongside Haidt, the work of literary theorist René Girard should be considered, for two reasons. First, Girard offers a helpful model to understand the psychology of overly ideological times, and second, the soil from which he developed this theory was primarily the writings of that great psychologist of ideology and extremism, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky once famously wrote that if his fellow Russians ever became atheists they would turn atheism into a religion. Girard’s account elaborates on this theme, suggesting that beyond a certain secular horizon, society does not cease to be religious, but rather returns to a more primitive and tribal form of religion. Like Haidt, Girard observes that ideology becomes a source of tribal identity, but at its most extreme it becomes increasingly dependent not on the principles that it espouses but on the psychological kinetics of its adversarial relationship to its rivals. Positive philosophy gives way to the need to feed on rivalry as a source of meaning. This is why extremist ideologies tend to be built upon fabulist views of a possible future: the more spectacular the vision, the more unreachable the goal, the more immersive the cause. Girard’s term of art for this is “mimetic rivalry.” It is mimetic, or imitative, because it depends upon and even apes the aspirations to power of the enemies it dedicates itself to defeating. Thus the mimetic ideologue’s battle never ends, because in “mimetic rivalry” it is the battle, not possession of the territory, that gives meaning and identity. 

… According to Girard, mimetic rivalry at its most extreme manifestation is a game the Devil, figuratively speaking, plays upon those who work to displace God. In The Brothers Karamazov the reader is introduced to many such figures, some in religious robes such as the Grand Inquisitor, others revolutionaries like Ivan. The game is that in the end, all the aspiration to transform the world by coercion or violence is really but the expression of unbounded vanity that feeds the mind full of visions of paradise while bringing only hell to the world. 

… In the penultimate chapter of The Righteous Mind, Haidt shares with the reader the disorienting moment when he realized conservatism wasn’t so backward and parochial after all.  

…He goes on:

 Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. 

… The primary difference is that while liberals tend to found their understanding of the world primarily upon moral concerns of care, liberty, and fairness, conservatives more equally distribute their understanding of the world upon these themes as well as on loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The importance of these latter principles—as elaborated by those such as Burke, Hayek, and Sowell, and unintentionally vindicated by Haidt’s own work—reveals that only one side of the political spectrum appears to see the world in its full moral spectrum. What Girard and Dostoyevsky reveal is that when these concerns are not taken into account, more still when they are discarded, what takes place after the revolution is not a new age, but a very old, very violent and primitive one. Haidt puts it this way: “You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive.”

As Western elites lurch seemingly further to the secular left, the ability to see and appreciate the import of mediating institutions appears not only to have dangerously diminished but to have paved the way for the hive-destroying Mr. Haidt warns against. If Haidt is correct that conservatives are unique in understanding the stakes, then Girard’s insights suggest that this is the reason conservatives find themselves the rival of choice for so many of today’s ideologically Possessed.

 The Illiberals find it difficult to see any of this.  That John Gray column mentioned earlier provides another perspective  on how a certain flavor of atheism makes it hard to understand the world:

It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. 

 …Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction. Atheism comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial. 

…For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values. To be sure, there is disagreement as to the nature of these values. But pretty well all secular thinkers now take for granted that modern societies must in the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never well founded, this assumption is today clearly unreasonable. 

…Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. 

…If you think of morality in scientific terms, as part of the behaviour of the human animal, you find that humans don’t live according to iterations of a single universal code. Instead, they have fashioned many ways of life. A plurality of moralities is as natural for the human animal as the variety of languages.
At this point, the dread spectre of relativism tends to be raised. Doesn’t talk of plural moralities mean there can be no truth in ethics? Well, anyone who wants their values secured by something beyond the capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring values. 

.…Universal values don’t add up to a universal morality. Such values are very often conflicting, and different societies resolve these conflicts in divergent ways.  

…The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and other minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any different in future. 

…Considering the alternatives that are on offer, liberal societies are well worth defending. But there is no reason for thinking these societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular civilisation of the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
…
It’s possible to envision different varieties of atheism developing – atheisms more like those of Freud, which didn’t replace God with a flattering image of humanity. But atheisms of this kind are unlikely to be popular. More than anything else, our unbelievers seek relief from the panic that grips them when they realise their values are rejected by much of humankind. What today’s freethinkers want is freedom from doubt, and the prevailing version of atheism is well suited to give it to them.

memetic infection

This little gem was embedded in a VDH interview:

Marxism lied to us that history is only the story of material interest, rather than the narrative often of the psyche, emotion, and only perceived self-interests. ... More generally, history has become in the university a medieval morality tale, in which we deconstruct the past to find those guilty of sins against gender, race, and class, and then use the standards of the present to condemn them postfacto on grounds of illiberality—as if someone illiterate five centuries ago without electricity, running water, a toilet, or antibiotics should have been as racially sensitive or tolerant of the "other" or as environmentally conscious as we are in Palo Alto or Madison.

In general we forgot that education is simply the ability to translate daily chaos into abstract wisdom of the ages—impossible without a data bank of names, dates, concepts, and a methodology of inductive inquiry; in turn both impossible without a liberal education of languages, literature, history, philosophy, and basic science.

The ridiculous practice of judging past actions by present moral standards speaks to very shoddy reasoning skills (or perhaps very good propaganda skills). This is often done by people adhering to Postmodernist modes of thought which is a notion simply dripping with irony (no truth). It also reminds me of this Eric Raymond post which I've linked to before.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another.

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

Simple awareness starts to bolster resistance.

Grasping the essence

It has been my experience that in studying the literature on complex subjects in social science such as economics,  many of the people with significant insights could be considered polymaths.  Some time in the past year I was discussing some ideas espoused by George Gilder with  my coblogger.  He asked if I considered Mr. Gilder to be a polymath.  I've read many articles and most of the books authored by Mr. Gilder but had not thought about that question.  After a pause to think about the matter, the reply was a clear "yes."  A few weeks later while watching a video of Deirdre McCloskey, George Gilder and his ideas came up in discussion.  It was clear that McCloskey, herself an obvious polymath, considers Gilder to be a polymath.  With that introduction, here are some excerpts from  Unleash the Mind by George Gilder:

The belief that wealth consists not chiefly in ideas, attitudes, moral codes, and mental disciplines but in definable static things that can be seized and redistributed—that is the materialist superstition. It stultified the works of Marx and other prophets of violence and envy. It betrays every person who seeks to redistribute wealth by coercion. It balks every socialist revolutionary who imagines that by seizing the so-called means of production he can capture the crucial capital of an economy. It baffles nearly every conglomerateur who believes he can safely enter new industries by buying rather than by learning them. It confounds every bureaucrat of science who imagines he can buy or steal the fruits of research and development.  

Even if it wished to, the government could not capture America’s wealth from its one percent of the one percent. As Marxist despots and tribal socialists from Cuba to Greece have discovered to their huge disappointment, governments can neither create wealth nor effectively redistribute it. They can only expropriate and watch it dissipate. If we continue to harass, overtax, and oppressively regulate entrepreneurs, our liberal politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production dissolve into so much corroded wire, abandoned batteries, scrap metal, and wasteland rot. 

Capitalism is the supreme expression of human creativity and freedom, an economy of mind overcoming the constraints of material power. It is not simply a practical success, a “worst of all systems except for the rest of them,” a faute de mieux compromise redeemed by charities and regulators and proverbially “saved by the New Deal.” It is dynamic, a force that pushes human enterprise down spirals of declining costs and greater abundance. The cost of capturing technology is mastery of the underlying science. The means of production of entrepreneurs are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts. Enduring are only the contributions of mind and morality.
…
Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. The process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise. It defies every econometric model and socialist scheme. It makes no sense to most professors, who attain their positions by the systematic acquisition of credentials pleasing to the establishment above them. Creativity cannot be planned because it is defined by information measured as surprise. Leading entrepreneurs—from Sam Walton to Larry Page to Mark Zuckerberg—did not ascend a hierarchy; they created a new one. They did not climb to the top of anything. They were pushed to the top by their own success. They did not capture the pinnacle; they became it.
…
Most of America’s leading entrepreneurs are bound to the masts of their fortunes. They are allowed to keep their wealth only as long as they invest it in others. In a real sense, they can keep only what they give away. It has been given to others in the form of investments. It is embodied in a vast web of enterprises that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Capitalism is a system that begins not with taking but with giving to others.
 
For this reason, wealth is nearly as difficult to maintain as it is to create. Owners are besieged on all sides by aspiring spenders—debauchers of wealth and purveyors of poverty in the name of charity, idealism, envy, or social change. Bureaucrats, politicians, bishops, raiders, robbers, short-sellers, and business writers all think they can invest money better than its owners. In fact, of all the people on the face of the globe, it is usually only the legal owners of businesses who know enough about the sources of their wealth to maintain it. It is usually they who have the clearest interest in building wealth for others rather than spending it on themselves.
…
Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard. 

The treacherous intricacies of software languages or garbage routes, the mechanics of frying and freezing potatoes, the mazes of high-yield bonds and low-collateral companies, the murky lore of petroleum leases or housing deeds or Far Eastern electronics supplies, the multiple scientific disciplines entailed by fracking for natural gas or contriving the ultimate search engine—all are considered tedious and trivial by the established powers. 

Most people consider themselves above the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.
…
Most of the world, then as now, was engaged in one of its periodic revulsions against capitalist  “greed” and waste. Lester Thurow of MIT was proclaiming a “zero sum society,” where henceforth any gains for the rich must be extracted from the poor and middle classes. William Sloane Coffin, the formidable Yale chaplain, was inveighing against capitalist orgies of greed and environmental devastation. Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were denouncing Western capitalism for displacing American Indians and condemning Israelis for displacing Palestinians (rather than praising the settlers in both countries for reclaiming and redeeming wastelands and hugely enlarging the populations they could support). Edward Said was conducting his Columbia classes (fatefully introducing the works of Frantz Fanon to future president Barack Obama) on Western psychological colonization and hegemonic evisceration of the entire Third World. 

Here we go again, deep in the New Millennium. The themes of exploitation and zero-sum equality continue to preoccupy the media. Congress remains enthralled with static accounting rules that assume tax-rate reductions will not alter economic behavior. In this model, the only way to expand tax receipts is to raise rates on the “rich.”
…
By focusing on incentives rather than on information and creativity, free-market economists have encouraged the idea that capitalism is based on greed, although, as we have seen, entrepreneurs cannot in general revel in their wealth, because most of it is not liquid. Greed, in fact, only motivates capitalists to seek government guarantees and subsidies that denature and stultify the works of entrepreneurs. The financial crash of 2007 and beyond reflected orgies of greed among crony capitalists awash in government guarantees and subsidies, sitting on their Fannies and Freddies, feeding in the troughs of Treasury privileges and government insurance scams. Greed leads as by an invisible hand to an ever-growing welfare and plutocratic state—to socialism and near-fascist corporatism (see Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for details).  

The secret of supply-side economics is not merely to incentivize people to work harder or accept more risk in order to gain a greater reward. That could be done under socialism. The reason lower marginal tax rates produce more revenues than higher ones is that the lower rates release the creativity of employers, allowing them to garner more information. They can move more rapidly down the curves of learning and experience. They can learn more because they command more capital to use in their trade. With more capital they can attract more highly skilled labor from around the globe. They reduce time and effort devoted to avoiding taxes and interpreting regulations and consulting lawyers and accountants. With fewer resources diverted to government bureaucracy, they can conduct more undetermined experiments, test more falsifiable hypotheses, try more business plans, generate more productive knowledge. 

It is not the enlargement of incentives and rewards that generates growth and progress, profits and capital gains for the entrepreneur and revenues for the government, but the combination of new knowledge with the power to test and extend it. Volatile and shifting ideas, not heavy and entrenched establishments, constitute the source of wealth.

These are not the conventional ideas that enter most discussions about economics, growth and wealth creation, but they are part of much deeper insight than most people will ever acquire.

Rebranded liberalism

The liberal label does not sell so well in American politics. That name was appropriated by American socialists as a deliberate deception of which both Hayek and Schumpeter remind us. It was originally attached to people interested in liberty. The rebranding of a politics with only limited appeal is smart although yet again deceptive politics. This time the chosen label is progressive or is that Progressive. Let's have a look at that term with the help of retired professor John Ray. This document is a bit long but here are some key points:

And who was the best known Progressive in the world at that time? None other than the President of the United States -- Woodrow Wilson -- the man who was most responsible for the postwar order in Europe. So Mussolini had to do little more than read his newspapers to hear at least some things about the ideas of the very influential American Progressives. And who were the Progressives? Here is one summary of them:

"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"

Here is a brief summary of the "Progressive" era from a non-Leftist perspective:

"The Progressive Era is a period of one big lie after another, crafted upon the false belief that modern government somehow could replace a free market, private property order and create an economy marked both by prosperity and "fairness." From "scientific" management to "enlightened" religion (called theological liberalism and, later, secularism) to Prohibition to "objective" journalism, the belief was that modern society had found the key to "onward and upward" progress."

And a scholarly summary can be found here in a book review of David W. Southern's book on the Progressive era. The following may be a useful excerpt:

The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women's suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else....

Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917, the very worst of it-disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching-"went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today's activist left.

At the heart of Southern's flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. "At college," Southern notes, "budding progressives not only read expos,s of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science."

And as this article shows, the American "Progressives" of the late 19th and early 20th century were not only Leftists but they were also war-glorifying militarists.


Wilson even foreshadowed Hitler's racism. Note this quote about his actions in 1912:

"Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington's large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson's cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington. Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments".

So Wilson actually reversed more tolerant policies put in place by Republicans. Racism was very LEFTIST in Hitler's day. Leftists like to portray Wilson as a visionary. They neglect to mention that the future he envisioned was a racially segregated one.

Unlike the American Leftists of today, the Progressives were in fact thoroughly patriotic, and Croly -- arguably the leading light of Progressivism -- was certainly explicitly nationalist. And one of Croly's disciples was both vastly influential and a remarkably exact model for Mussolini's imperialistic nationalism. The disciple concerned? Yet another American President: Theodore Roosevelt.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it must be noted that it is only in very recent times that the two major American political parties have become clearly delineated as Leftist and Rightist and so the Progressives were an influence that could and did operate within both major parties of that time. And before his break with the Republicans it was the progressive wing of the Republican party that TR was identified with.

And the following description of American Progressivism in the early 20th century could just as well have been a description of Fascism:

"Progressive policies embodied an underlying philosophy repugnant to Jeffersonianism. As Ekirch describes this philosophy, "Society in the future would have to be based more and more on an explicit subordination of the individual to a collectivist, or nationalized, political and social order. This change, generally explained as one of progress and reform, was of course also highly important in building up nationalistic sentiment. At the same time, the rising authority and prestige of the state served to weaken the vestiges of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and to intensify the growing imperialistic rivalries." In their statist cause the progressives, who were now appropriating the name "liberal," enlisted Social Darwinism, economic determinism, and relativism.

So 20th century Fascism was in fact an American invention, or more precisely an invention of the American Left. Like many American ideas to this day, however, it proved immensely popular in Europe and it was only in Europe that it was put fully into practice. As it does today, American conservatism kept the American Left in some check in the first half of the 20th century so it was only in Europe that their ideas could come into full bloom.

So where did the Progressives get their ideas? Did they invent their ideas out of the blue? Of course not. Right up until World War I it was popular and even fashionable for American intellectuals to study in Germany -- where the thought of Hegel was very influential. And many of the Progressives were included in that movement.

Because they are so embarrassing to the Left of today, there are always attempts to deny that the American Progressives of a century ago were Leftists.

Well the new label may sound good, but they better hope people don't do any homework or that their political opposition is ineffective in exposing who they really are.

The Narrative, the Narrative, the Narrative

Earlier this year history professor author Fred Siegel released an interesting and surprisingly good book titled,  The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.  The introduction begins:

This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of liberalism today – the top and bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-WWI disillusionment with American society. In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s foundational writers and thinkers such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis and H.L Mencken was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide a sense of hierarchy and order associated with European statism.

Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism, critical of both capitalism and democracy, was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. They despised both the individual businessman's pursuit of profit and the conventional individual's pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.

The introduction concludes:

Liberalism, as a search for status, is sufficiently adaptable that even in failure, self-satisfaction trumps self-examination. As the critic Edmund Wilson noted without irony, the liberal (or “progressive reformer,” in his term) has “evolved a psychological mechanism which enables him to turn moral judgments against himself into moral judgments against society.”  This is a book about the inner life of American liberalism over the past ninety years and its love affair with its own ambitions and emotional impulses. Liberals believe that they deserve more power because they act on behalf of people's best interests – even if the darn fools don't know it.   (emphasis mine)

Thanks for demonstrating this so well Mr. Gruber:

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Mr. Driscoll concludes:  "The left have displayed enormous condescension to voters in recent years; lying is merely one manifestation of that. And they wonder why they got clobbered last week."



The concluding chapter contains the following passage:

Liberalism, argued Herbert Croly and his heirs, rested on “disinterestedness.”   Experts and intellectuals could be trusted, their theory held, because, unlike the Jeffersonian small-business owners, they weren't motivated by narrow self-interest. But with the expansions of the Great Society and onward, much of the public came to see politicians in general and liberals in particular as engaged in the self-interested business of expanding government expressly to secure policies and privileges for themselves and their supporters. The growing importance of public-sector unions has greatly increased the sense that government has gone into business for itself.

In addition to dealing with increasingly complex and burdensome tax and regulatory regimes economic actors must contend with a bureaucracy and elected officials that have become practically parasitic.  Even when this problem was less pronounced, there were still limits to how much of a positive role the state could play.  As the story is usually told, there is a statist bias with many private actors being unfairly vilified.  Many such examples are in evidence in an old post titled revisiting economic history . (If you haven't seen this post before you might want to give it some attention.) Some of the portrayals are blatantly misleading others are more subtle.  Economic history is not the only area of inquiry  where the conventional wisdom is transmitted through very questionable story-lines. 



Returning to The Revolt Against the Masses, in a chapter titled Three Trials, the author provides the following (excerpts):

No one incident or event contributed more to the self-understanding of liberals or the way they conceived of their political rivals over the past half century than the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” or more precisely the version of the trial rendered in the wake of McCarthyism by the 1955 Broadway hit Inherit the Wind.

...

Beginning in the 1950s, the play Inherit the Wind and the two film versions of the stage production suffused the liberal imagination.

...

In the dramatized version of the case, which took considerable liberties with the historical record, the trial was initiated when Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was dragged out of his classroom by a mob and thrown into jail. In reality, as historian Edward Larson showed in his scrupulous rendering of the case based on primary sources, there was no mob, nor was there a jailing. Evolution had long been part of the Tennessee high school curriculum, and there had been no attempt to enforce the symbolic law – the Butler Act – that barred its teaching. In an era when science was seen as wondrous, this law was meant more as a matter of symbolism than substance. It was a period in which eugenics, which had first been introduced by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, won strong support from liberals who supported both family planning and economic planning. Thirty-five states had enacted laws to restrain the ability of the genetically “unfit” to reproduce themselves.

The case was a contrivance from the outset. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded in the wake of WWI's repression, had initiated the case, which it saw as an opportunity to repeal the Butler Act while also making a name for itself. The ACLU ran newspaper ads across the state looking for a teacher who would be willing to cooperate with them in challenging the state law. They needed a defendant who would agree to be tried for violating the Butler Act. The town fathers of Dayton envisioned the trial as a potential boon that could put them on the map, and they convinced Scopes, a local high school teacher, to intentionally incriminate himself so that he would quality as a defendant and the state's case could go forward. His arrest was a friendly affair arranged by local boosters as a prelude to the show, which would make history by being the first trial broadcast on radio.

...

Mencken, who wrote about the trial for the Baltimore Sun, gilded the liberal disdain for Bryan by depicting him as a buffoonish bigot and the “idol of morondom.” Mencken, a eugenicist, despised Bryan as a demagogue “animated by the ambition of a common man to get his thumb into their eyes.” He mocked the locals as “Babbits,” “morons,” “peasants,” and “yokels,” which, to be fair, was no less caustic than his usual characterizations of the immigrant masses.

Bryan saw the Scopes trial as in part a matter of self-government. The trial, he wrote, raised the question of “whether the people...have a right to control the educational system which they have created and which they tax themselves to support.” By contrast, Mencken saw the trial, and Bryan in particular, as the living proof of why democracy was a despicable form of government. Mencken's Notes on Democracy (1926) argued that democracy was both impossible and undesirable. Kaiser Wilhelm II, by then dethroned, praised the book highly, but a friend sighed that he wished Mencken hadn't written it, “because it reveals too much about him.” It was a tedious, repetitious performance by an intellectual vaudevillian whose writing never rose above his resentments.

But Bryan, Mencken's avatar of dreadful democracy, was far from a bigoted provincial man. A well-read world traveler, Bryan had read On the Origin of Species in 1905 and had engaged in an ongoing debate about the book with eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History. The Great Commoner treated his talented wife as a partner and decried the sin of religious prejudice. He roundly criticized his supporters who attributed his 1908 defeat at the hands of William Howard Taft to a Catholic conspiracy, and he would later take Henry Ford publicly to task for publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

...

Regardless of what happened in Dayton, the effect of the case was clear: European-like divisions, largely absent thus far in America, opened up between science and revealed religion – it was a chasm never to be closed. Absent the Scopes controversy, some of the fundamentalists might have drifted into the position already adopted by a few of their leaders that evolution was but another name for God's creation.

...

After Scopes, and the case's revival with Inherit the Wind, fundamentalists were seen by many Americans as not just wrong about evolution, which was clear enough, but so psychologically deranged that they needed to be barred from the public square.

The irony of the Scopes trial, notes historian Michael Kazin, was that it led liberals to tag Bryan, who in many ways was a proto-New Dealer, as a “right-wing authoritarian.” At the same time, it helped position Mencken – the rabidly anti-democratic and sometimes anti-Semitic supporter of eugenics who admired both the Kaiser and 1930s Germany – as “the champion of liberalism.” But this is less of an irony than it appears to Kazin. Modern liberalism, before, during, and since the New Deal, has been based in large measure on Croly's “exceptional fellow countrymen,” the professionals who feel contempt or pity for the unwashed and who are resentful that many business people are better off than they are. Bryan's humiliation became a central event in the liberal story of modern America; it linked together the post-WWI persecutions by rednecks, the execution of Saco and Vanzetti, and Sinclair Lewis's ever-popular It Can't Happen Here, the 1935 novel in which a Bryan-like leader established a dictatorship in America. It's a story whose echoes can still be heard during dinner-table conversations in America's hipper precincts.

I repeatedly hear about "the narrative" from my progressive friends.  My question is, "do you care how much in your story is fiction and how much is non-fiction?"  Even more than what is written in a history book, movies, plays and novels shape the culture.  As Breitbart observed and Lawrence Meyers explains, politics is downstream from culture.

Memetic Warfare

Being rather fond of the benefits of civilization and having an interest in maintaining a free and pluralistic society, I thought this post over at the Armed and Dangerous blog was worthwhile. It is rather remarkable how quickly some people condemn American society for not being perfect while ignoring our history of improvement and the even more flawed alternatives.

Here are some excerpts:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithetic. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he’s reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and ’40s.

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.


In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.

The author actually offers a somewhat optimistic view of the future. All in all, quite a series of thoughts and observations!

The Industrial Counterrevolution

In an earlier post I referenced a very fine book mentioned here authored by Brink Lindsey. Drawing upon a more limited portion of the material therein he wrote an article available here. Excerpts follow:

How nationalism, protectionism, and collectivism spawned a century of dictatorship and war.

Globalization, by any other name, was in full swing a century ago. Indeed, it was remarkably advanced, even by contemporary standards.

In 1913, merchandise trade as a percentage of gross output was about 12 percent for the industrialized countries. They did not match that level of export performance again until the 1970s. The volume of international capital flows relative to total output reached heights in the early 20th century that have not been approached since.

The first world economy was made possible by the staggering technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution. Most obviously, new forms of transportation toppled the age-old tyranny of distance. For inland transport, the significance of the railroad is difficult to overestimate.

The railroads knitted countries into truly integrated national markets and facilitated the penetration of foreign goods from port cities into the interior.

Meanwhile, another technology was uniting those national markets into a global whole. Although the steamship was first developed early in the 19th century, further innovations in subsequent decades -- the screw propeller, steel hulls, the compound engine -- transformed what had been primarily a river vessel into cheap and reliable ocean transport. The effect on freight costs was nothing short of spectacular: An index of freight rates along Atlantic export routes fell by 70 percent in real terms between 1840 and 1910.

The Industrial Revolution's burst of technological creativity thus demolished the natural barriers to trade posed by geography. At the same time, it created entirely new possibilities for beneficial international exchange.

So arose the initial grand bargain on which the first global division of labor was based: The core specialized in manufacturing, while the periphery specialized in primary products. For Great Britain, the first industrial power, manufactured goods constituted roughly three-quarters of its exports. The sprawling United States, on the other hand, straddled both core and periphery.

While far-flung foreign trade is as old as human history, this was something new. No longer was such commerce a marginal matter, limited to a few high-value luxuries. Now, for the first time, specialization of production on a worldwide scale was a central element of economic life in all the countries that participated.

But it was not to last. The global economic order that arose and flourished in the waning years of the 19th century was swept away by the great catastrophes of the 20th: world wars, the Great Depression, and totalitarian dictatorships. Only in the past couple of decades has a truly global division of labor been able to reemerge.

According to contemporary critics of global trade, the sad fate of that earlier epoch reveals the inherent dangers of unregulated markets. Then as now, they argue, economic forces had slipped all proper constraints; then as now, the ideology of laissez-faire ran roughshod over social needs.

These arguments are an almost perfect inversion of the truth. The tragedies of the 20th century stemmed, not from an over-reliance on markets, but from a pervasive loss of faith in them. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of mechanized mass production, a powerful new idea began to take hold and remake the world in its image. That idea, reduced to its bare essence, was that the economic revolution of industrialization both enabled and required a revolution in social organization: the eclipse, partial or total, of markets and competition by centralized, top-down control. The intellectual and political movements spawned by this idea emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century and utterly dominated the first three-quarters of the 20th. This 100-year historical episode, though composed of diverse and widely varying elements, possesses enough coherence to merit a name, and the one I suggest is the Industrial Counterrevolution.

In analytical terms, the common intellectual thread that runs through all of these movements -- namely, the rejection or demotion of market competition in favor of top-down control -- represents a direct assault on the principles of social order that gave rise to industrialization and are truest to its full promise.

It is impossible to understand the collapse of the first world economy, or the rise of the present one, except in relation to the Counterrevolution's centralizing impulses. For the story of globalization and the story of the Industrial Counterrevolution are mirror images of one another: In the early decades of the 20th century, the rise of collectivism spelled the demise of the global economy; in the past couple of decades, the loss of faith in the collectivist dream has allowed globalization to resume its course.

It is clear enough that the final breakdown of international economic integration during the calamitous 1930s was an extended consequence of the Great War. What is less well known is how the collectivist delusion helped to lead the world toward that awful conflict -- and thus toward all the horrors that followed in its wake.

At the midpoint of the 19th century, a very different future appeared to be on the horizon. The liberal creed of cosmopolitanism, free trade, and peace promised to define the shape of things to come.

The liberal champions of free trade did not view their cause solely or even primarily as a commercial matter. In their view, free trade carried profound implications for the whole field of international relations.

The free traders' sunny cosmopolitanism all too quickly gave way to a very different vision of the international scene. As the Industrial Counterrevolution began to gather momentum, the prospect of a world at peace started to recede. A new prospect, dark and menacing, came in its stead to the fore -- one of rival nations, rival races, pitted in fundamental and irresolvable conflict, engaged in a grim and merciless struggle for supremacy or submission. This radical and ruinous shift of perspective did not merely coincide with the spreading enthusiasm for centralization and top-down control; rather, the two developments were interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

The momentum of the Industrial Counterrevolution pushed inexorably toward expanding the power of the national state.

Many other emerging centralizing movements embraced an expanded national state from the outset. Edward Bellamy, American author of the utopian fantasy Looking Backward and a major influence on subsequent Progressive and New Deal intellectuals, called his philosophy "nationalism" to distinguish it from Marxist-style socialism. In Great Britain, the Fabians advocated incremental reform and a political strategy of "permeation," or working through established political parties. And in Germany, the conservative, Bismarckian "state socialists" were unabashed in their devotion to the national state. Characteristic in this regard was the economist Gustav Schmoller, who proclaimed the state to be "the most sublime ethical institution in history."

Furthermore, the growing enthusiasm for national economic planning was fundamentally at odds with the new international division of labor. After all, if centralized decision making is more efficient than markets, why allow international markets to persist?

A new collectivist case for protectionism thus began to emerge. If a nation's economic life is to come under central control, that control must extend to the nation's connections with the outside world.

It is true that many partisans of centralization, especially on the Left, resisted the protectionist logic of their position. Free trade appealed to their internationalist sympathies; also, a low-tariff policy was generally associated with cheap bread and thus was widely considered favorable to the working class. (How times have changed!) The momentum of centralization, though, generally prevailed over tradition and class interests. In the end, the fortunes of collectivism and protectionism rose together. In the middle of the 19th century, enlightened opinion was almost uniformly in favor of free trade; by the end of the century, protectionism had once again become intellectually respectable.

Protectionist measures did slow the pace of globalization (and blocked it for certain regions and sectors), but did not stop it. Despite increasing obstacles, the internationalization of economic life flourished in the decades before World War I.

Nevertheless, the drift toward protectionism did contribute to a new international atmosphere of conflict and tension. In Bellamy's utopia, national planners could somehow control their imports and exports without so much as a cross word from abroad. But in reality, restrictions on trade inevitably set nations against each other.

The implications of trade barriers for international relations are thus enormous. In a world of free trade, citizens of one country can exploit the benefits of a broader division of labor through peaceful commerce. But in a world where severe trade restrictions are endemic, such benefits can be attained only through warfare -- through defeat of the foreign sovereignty that blocks access to the desired products or markets. Free trade makes war economically irrational; protectionism, carried far enough, makes it pay.

The drive toward centralization had thus transformed the legacy of the industrial revolution from that of world peace to one of a world at war. It is indeed fitting to call this transformation an Industrial Counterrevolution in international affairs.

The result was that collectivism and militarism became mutually reinforcing. Aggressive nationalism was needed to secure and safeguard the full blessings of collectivism; at the same time, collectivization was needed to render the nation fit for military conflict. From this basic feedback loop issued the great tragedies of dictatorship and total war.

It is customary to view World War I as a tragic accident. But at a deeper level, the war was no accident. It was a product of the ideas of the Industrial Counterrevolution: ideas of centralization that merged into statism, ideas of statism that merged into aggressive nationalism, ideas of nationalism that merged into plans for military conquest.

The Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism were direct outgrowths of the Great War. Less obviously, so was the Great Depression. Postwar efforts to reconstitute the old international economic system, in particular the gold standard, were enacted under the badly distorted and volatile conditions of the time, leading ultimately to disastrously deflationary monetary policy in the United States and Europe. In the 1930s, the combination of economic catastrophe and predatory totalitarianism -- both aftershocks of the Great War -- spelled the end of the first global economy and precipitated a second global war. So ended the descent into fire and chaos that began with the guns of August.

When critics of global trade claim that the phenomenon's first, failed episode should be seen as a warning against reckless faith in markets, they are standing history on its head. In truth, the first global economy was destroyed by the antithesis of economic liberalism -- namely, the misbegotten dream of central planning and social engineering that inspired the Industrial Counterrevolution in all its variants. The collectivist delusion was flatly incompatible with an international division of labor: When the former was ascendant, the latter could not survive. For collectivism invariably attached itself to the ready means of the nation-state, and once so ensconced, it helped to stoke aggressive, beggar-thy-neighbor nationalism. In a world of centralized and increasingly regimented states whose interests could not help but clash, conflict was inevitable. And when war came, its terrible fury hatched new monsters: ruinous economic disruption and barbaric totalitarianism. The gossamer bonds of trust and mutuality that sustain a global marketplace had no chance against such an onslaught.

Only in the past couple of decades has the counterrevolutionary momentum exhausted itself in disillusionment and failure. And as overweening state control has receded -- with the opening of China, the fall of the Soviet empire, and many Third World countries' abandonment of state-dominated models of development -- market connections have been reestablished. The death of the dream of centralized control has marked the rebirth of globalization.

But the collectivist past continues to cast long shadows. The move toward more liberal policies has occurred amidst the ruins of the old order, and so has had to contend with grossly deformed conditions. The transition, as a consequence, has been wrenching and often brutally painful. And that transition is far from complete. The world economy is littered still with the wreckage of discredited systems, constraining the present and obscuring the future. Life has left the old regime, but the dead hand of its accumulated institutions, mindsets, and vested interests continues to weigh heavily upon the world. Against that dead hand -- which includes, among other things, the ideologically distorted misunderstanding of globalization's past -- the cause of freedom must contend for many decades to come.

While one can offer alternate narratives, I think this perspective has substantial validity. In some sense this period could be thought of as an exploration of alternative arrangement in political economy. In a starker light, it could be viewed as political failure on a global scale.