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Home » The challenge of Marxism: Part II

The challenge of Marxism: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I can be found here. A Part III is also planned.]

Yoram Hazony, author of this Quillette essay on “The Challenge of Marxism,” has a great deal to say about liberalism. He writes [emphasis mine]:

Enlightenment liberalism is a rationalist system built on the premise that human beings are, by nature, free and equal. It is further asserted that this truth is “self-evident,” meaning that all of us can recognize it through the exercise of reason alone, without reference to the particular national or religious traditions of our time and place.

I found this puzzling. Why is Hazony using words from the Declaration of Independence to describe something that is quite different from what the Founders meant? What they wrote has given birth to classical liberalism (these days, much more akin to conservatism) rather than to what has been known as “liberalism” since the 60s, and what I believe Hazony means by “Enlightenment liberalism.” I found this part of his essay very murky, because it seems to me he’s mixing apples and oranges.

The relevant words of the Declaration of Independence go like this [emphasis mine]:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think it’s pretty clear what’s being said there. A Creator is the source of rights, and equality is not actual equality in the real world – as in, everyone gets a medal, everyone has the same amount of money, everyone is equally happy – but the opportunity to be treated the same by the law and to strive to be happy in the world.

Here are the things I’m talking about, things Hazony doesn’t mention but which seem quite relevant to his essay [emphasis mine]:

That “all Men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with Certain unalienable Rights” was self-evident to Americans at the time of the writing of the Declaration. They were a deeply religious people who were very familiar with the idea of universal human equality from the teachings of Christianity and from English republicanism. They were familiar with the idea of inalienable rights from the political writings of John Locke’s Second Treatise and other English sources…

Jefferson said that his purpose in writing the Declaration was to express a shared understanding of “the American mind.”…

There are two ways that all “men”—all persons—might be “created equal.” One is that they are all by birth or naturally political equals. This means that no one is legitimately the ruler of others by birth and no one is by birth the subject of a ruler. The other is that human equality goes deeper than just political equality. In this sense, all people are considered of equal value and worth, or equal in the eyes of God. All are created moral equals.

In fact Jefferson intended both of these senses of natural equality…Both senses of natural human equality were common beliefs of colonial Americans in 1776.

So, we have two basic types of equality in classical liberalism and the Declaration. The first counters the idea of monarchy and/or royalty, and the second has to do with morals and God. In the political realm, what that meant was that humans would be equal under the law (once slavery was gotten rid of, which was a problem inherited from the colonial economic structure and one that very unfortunately the Founders were not able to solve). We are speaking, of course, of equality of opportunity rather than an illusory and impossible equality of outcome, one of the most basic distinctions between classical liberalism and modern-day liberalism. They both contain the word “liberalism,” but there’s a world of difference between them.

The latter is really just another name for leftism; you might call it “leftism lite.” It does indeed sow the seeds of even greater and more extreme leftism, but only because it is a milder and less obvious form of it. If liberalism or “Enlightenment liberalism” had stuck to classical liberalism – many of the tenets of which were still part of the belief system of most Democrats and liberals when I was a child, although that is absolutely no longer true – I don’t see that it would have inevitably led to the leftist takeover we see today. The problem is that, during the 1960s, “liberalism” shed those beliefs and became leftist.

Was that inevitable? I don’t know, but I think it happened because Americans got lazy and failed to value or even understand what they already had and why it was so important, and stopped teaching the distinction to children, as well as de-emphasizing the “Creator” part. I don’t know all the details of the change from a legal system and a society that defended equality of opportunity to one that promoted equality of outcome, but I do know one turning point that occurred in 1965 in the context of civil rights, in a speech by LBJ at Howard University’s commencement [emphasis mine]:

The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory–as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom–“is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”…

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

If I could doubly highlight that last word “result,” I would, because that is the crux of the matter.

The idea was well-intentioned. And it’s something we seek. But encoding equality of outcome – LBJ’s equality of result – in law was fatally flawed because it required a type of equality that the great Thomas Sowell has called cosmic justice, an equality that cannot be achieved on earth and that always must involve an inherently leftist re-organization of society that can only substitute one injustice for another and in the end fails to achieve its ends anyway.

That’s enough for today, but there’s plenty more. In Part III I plan to discuss the two major Enlightenment thinkers Locke vs. Rousseau, and how the work of one leads to classical liberalism and the other leads to 60s-type “liberalism” and leftism of all sorts, including Marxism.

Comments

The challenge of Marxism: Part II — 23 Comments

  1. My personal name for the phenomenon of conflating political equality with equality of outcome is “The Egalitarian Fantasy”.

    In every real world example, most people will admit that we are obviously not all equal. But, our culture teaches this fantasy as an ideal. Somehow, we just can’t shake it out our collective psyche.

  3. LBJ advocated for affirmative discrimination, not affirmative action. He indulged diversity dogma that is a class-based taxonomic system, process, and belief that denies individual dignity, individual conscience, and normalizes color blocs, and color quotas.

    Religion is a moral (i.e. behavioral) philosophy in a universal frame of reference. Ethics is a relativistic or quasi-religion (e.g. Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent (“=”) or exclusive) favored by “secular” Churches, notably those that self-identify as Progressive.

    Libertarianism is self-organizing. Liberalism is divergent. Progressivism is monotonic. Conservativism is moderating. The left-wing of the political spectrum favors single/central, authoritarian solutions. The right-wing favors distributed, sufficient solutions. #PrinciplesMatter

    That said, they did the same thing with men and women, they pit one against the other, the spread political myths to socially and legally justify their dogmatic beliefs, and normalized feminism, a sex chauvinistic ideology, in lieu of men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. Reconcile.

    Oh, and #BabyLivesMatter

  6. They call themselves by a term that Hazony doesn’t list, “Democratic Socialists,” which is another screen term.

    no.. its the truth… we just forgot who they were..
    go look it up NEO… you wont, but what the heck..
    you would know this if you had read what i suggested over the past decades

    In the Russian elections of 1917, the Latvian part of Livland (Livonia), which Germany had not yet occupied, the leftists won a clear victory. According to researchers, in these last elections before the October revolution, voter support in Latvia for the social democrats (which included Lenin’s wing at the time) was larger than anywhere else in the Russian empire – 72 percent voted for them in the rural areas of livland, and in all, 57.8 percent when the cities were included.

    They call themselves what they are from a past history THEY know and you do not, and they know you don’t and believe you to be stupid and deserve your fates for being that ignorant…

    The Russian Social Democratic Party, was a revolutionary socialist political party founded in Minsk, Belarus.

    Before the 2nd Party Congress, a young intellectual named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov joined the party, better known by his pseudonym—Vladimir Lenin. In 1902, he had published What Is To Be Done?, outlining his view of the party’s task and methodology—to form “the vanguard of the proletariat”. He advocated a disciplined, centralized party of committed activists who sought to fuse the underground struggle for political freedom with the class struggle of the proletariat
    [snip]
    A central issue at the Congress was the question of the definition of party membership. Martov proposed the following formulation: “A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts the Party’s programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations”.On the other hand, Lenin proposed a more strict definition: “A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organizations”.

    Its not American history, so why bother…
    They declare themselves openly… and all who know, know
    and ignorant fools who dont study, and dont know, dont..
    at least thats how they see it, and how those that know regret seeing it

    In January 1912, Lenin’s Proletary Bolshevik group called a conference in Prague and expelled the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists from the RSDLP, which officially led to the creation of a separate party, known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik). In August 1912, Trotsky’s group tried to reunite all the RSDLP factions into the same party at a conference in Vienna, but he was largely rebuffed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks seized power during the October Revolution in 1917 when all political power was transferred to the soviets and in 1918 changed their name to the All-Russian Communist Party. They banned the Mensheviks after the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921.

    Why wouldn’t bolsheviks use their traditional name when no one knows enough to oppose it or even fear it? its truly a symbol to each of them how far and fast their work has been done that they could openly walk with that banner and none would know what they do…

    Communist Party of the Soviet Union
    The party started in 1898 as the Bolsheviks, a majority faction from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, who seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. The CPSU was a communist party based on democratic centralism.

    When they say that this or that threatens democracy, you think something quite different than they do… they know what they are talking about, you dont… its that simple… they are out in the open… been so for a long while and i guess everyone is waiting for a sign they have not learned enough to see to show itself.

    kind of funny…

    Stanford scholar says major reforms are needed to save our democracy
    https://news.stanford.edu/2020/08/10/u-s-democracy-facing-historic-crisis/

    they are not talking about the democracy of the American form of government
    they are openly talking about the democracy they have created as they see it in its original name. when you realize that, then what they say makes a lot of sense, otherwise, what they say is kind of confusing and people think that the ones saying it dont understand..

    again
    kind of funny

    one never explores what is the subject and what is the other parts of the language they are speaking…

    here is an example from the article above, that if your light comes on, will creep you out totally

    In the book the pair argues that while critics see Donald Trump as the most visible threat to our system of self-government, his presidency is really a symptom of long brewing forces. These forces include globalization, automation and immigration, which have created economic disruptions and cultural anxieties for millions of Americans.

    IF D Trump is draining the swamp, then what do they mean by “our” in our system? and what do they mean by “self”? who is the self? everyone in the USA or the leaders of this social democracy that leads the ignorant that are nearly waking up to the kabuki dance? what do they mean when they say WE? is it the we of all americans, or the we of the ruling class? what do those hearing hear depending on what class they are of?

    still
    kind of funny

    According to the authors, there are lessons for modern times that can be learned from both the Progressive Era of U.S. politics under President Theodore Roosevelt and the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt.

    “The Progressives gave us a modern government,” Moe said. “They replaced the spoils system with civil service.” Then, when the Great Depression hit, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were designed to deal with the deep economic problems of the country by putting people back to work.

    “That’s the kind of thing this country needs now,” Moe said. “We need something big and transformative. If we want to save our democracy, we must focus on building a truly effective government that is capable of dealing with the basic problems of the modern world. If that can’t be done, populist anger will continue to surge.”

    who controls what, and who gave what? save our democracy? our american democracy of the founders of the progressive social democracy of the powerful? the clue is who they hold up… the sentence “we must focus… a truly effective government capable of dealing with the problems of the modern world” is about what problems? the problems the common man thinks or the problems of how to control and prevent the loss of power of those who have it? a government capable of dealing with things like Trump and Reagan and other threats to its WE (the important people)?

  7. Artfldgr:

    As you sometimes do, you make an incorrect assumption about what other people are aware of or not aware of. I am actually aware of some of the history of the term in its international use. My point in using the phrase “screen term” is not to ignore what “Democratic Socialists” means as far as its history in other countries, but to convey the idea that in this country and in the year 2020, it is a screen term for Americans, a term that hides from the average American voter what the people calling themselves that are and what they mean to do. It sounds more benign than it is, and that is by design.

  8. “Why is Hazony using words from the Declaration of Independence to describe something that is quite different from what the Founders meant?” neo

    In failing to see the obvious flaws in his own argument, Hazony demonstrates himself to be an intellectual lightweight. His article is based in flawed premises and as night follows the day, the logic that extends from his flawed premises, results in flawed conclusions.

    Artfldgr,

    You’re missing “the forest for the trees”.

    It is an oxymoron to label Marxist communists… “Democratic Socialists”. That is because in Marxist/Communist systems those at the top of the power structure are the only ones who have a vote.

    “The goal of socialism is communism.” Vladimir Lenin

  9. It’s all getting too complicated. And people are deep diving into esoterica because they are afraid to face what is now inevitable. It’s Us or the Left.

    As an antidote to intellectualism run amok on both sides of the divide, our side will have to rely on some unsavoury José Millán Astray types to cut through some Gordian Knots. And necks. That’s all. The rest is the intellectual equivalent of hiding under the bed or telling beads.

  10. Hazony…

    Let’s spray some rainbow glitter paint all over the elephant in the room here.

    How to define Nationalism in such a way that Israel gets to stay Israel (i.e. Palestinians don’t get a meaningful vote) and the Rest of the West continues its slide into Camp of the Saints? Because if the West reverted to real Nationalism then guess who would start feeling uncomfortable? Better the world should burn than that.

    @#$%ed if I know how he can claim to successfully thread this needle, but he plus a bunch of suddenly popped up Gatekeepers of the Good (Neutered) Nationalism are giving it the old College Try by golly gosh.

    FWIW: I fully support Israel’s right to exist by right of conquest. I find Israeli Jews infinitely preferable to Arab Fellaheen. Sod the Palestinians! I do not, however, see why Hazony who has an Escape Pod Option has any standing to tell the rest of us how we should define our opposition to existential risks coming from Progressivism and its associate weaponised Third World Invasion of the West.

  11. What is really murky here is the failure of Hazony to distinguish between French Enlightenment, obviously atheistic anti-Christian, and Scottish Enlightenment, deeply religious and more influential on Founders than the French one. As well a failure to recognize the nature of the European Enlightenment as a Neo-Paganism, a new secular surrogate religion with ambition to dethrone not only the Church, but also the authority of Scripture and Christianity as such.

  12. “How to define Nationalism…”

    Just a sec. Are you saying that according to Hazony’s version of “nationalism”, Europe, the US, Canada and Australia are obligated to permit themselves to be overrun by foreigners?

    Sounds just a bit counter-intuitive….

  13. Again, references to Marxism are distractions. What the diversity discourse has in common with Marxism is that it provides a justification for those Alvin Gouldner called ‘the New Class’ to abuse other sectors of society. The diversity discourse is more inchoate and emotional than is Marxism, because Idiocracy is now.

  15. I weary of the endless arguments about the definitions of political labels. Different countries have different meanings for the same labels. And even in one location, the meanings of the labels are mutable over time.

    Some of the reasons for this is the “screening” that Neo describes by the “Socialist/Communists” to obscure their true intentions. But regardless of the reasons, these labels are symbols used to represent highly abstract concepts. I’m sure that the labels mean different things even to different people who are in the same party in the same place.

  16. I think it’s pretty clear what’s being said there. A Creator is the source of rights, and equality is not actual equality in the real world – as in, everyone gets a medal, everyone has the same amount of money, everyone is equally happy – but the opportunity to be treated the same by the law and to strive to be happy in the world.

    See Jerome Blum’s works on the evolution of agrarian systems in Europe.

    This remark in the Declaration was made in a particular social matrix. European societies were societies of orders. Crown, nobility, clergy, burgesses, and peasantry. Each order you entered at birth and in each there were endowments of privilege and obligation. With some qualification, the peasantry was subject to hereditary subjection and owed dues to their seigneur. The contrary social model in formation in the colonies was one of a society of classes not orders. Subjection was contractual and term-limited. The gentry were market participants without formal titles and formal privileges and land was bought and sold on the market. The religious congregations were voluntary associations formed in accordance with statutory law. There was to be no crown. This was aspirational, not actual, in 1776. NB, it was soon actual in many respects. The religious establishments were dismantled in all but three states during the last quarter of the 18th century. Indentures were limited to youths apprenticed, &c. The one qualification was the caste society formed in the South, significantly different from a European society of orders; you had no serfs in the South; you had yeoman farmers, planters, and agricultural / household labor in bondage, and the castes were delineated by phenotype.

  17. How to define Nationalism in such a way that Israel gets to stay Israel (i.e. Palestinians don’t get a meaningful vote) and the Rest of the West continues its slide into Camp of the Saints?

    Thanks for the recycled bilge from the Unz comboxes. Always an education.

  18. Well, then…
    I guess its hopeless…
    and we should invest in ovens while we can invest at all

  19. Zaphod,

    Islam has always supported the ancient “Right of Conquest”.

    But only for Muslims. Not just in regard to Israel but also in Andalusia (Spain & Portugal) + parts of southern eastern Europe and India.

  20. Zaphod — Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel with full political and civil rights. Palestinians get rights they are allowed in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, which is to say none. And you know that.

    Or are you saying that it’s Israel’s fault that the Palestinians got the traditional third-world “One man, one vote, one time”?

  22. Jeff is quite active on Twitter, and as you point out, he has posted a few things fairly recently. His previous batch of posts – that weren’t football related – are nearly a year old.

  23. The abandonment of classical liberalism for modern “liberalism” goes back much further than the 1960s. It was already taking place in the late 19th Century.

    The root of all this is goes back into pre-history, and the idea that anyone who has more than others have is evil, and has gotten his extra-large share illegitimately. You can see it in the ordinary usage of the word “selfish,” where it is assumed that if I do something that benefits me, I have harmed you, or at best am utterly indifferent to you.

    This odd belief seems to be wired into our genes, along with the hostility to those who have more. Unfortunately, the urge to get more for oneself and one’s family also seems to be hardwired genetically.

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