On the ever-leftward turning
From political changer Sasha Stone:
It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.
Stone underwent her political change in recent years, and this phenomenon still has the power to surprise her. I experienced it over twenty years ago, and so I’m more used to the idea that most people will follow the tyranny du jour. From my observation, this mentality is more common on the left, but the right is hardly immune. It just takes a different form.
Many years ago I read Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay that appeared in Harper’s and was entitled, “Who Goes Nazi?”. It’s a catchy title, isn’t it? Thompson presents it as a parlor game, but a deadly serious one:
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
I have many quarrels with Thompson, and I also disagree with some of what she wrote in the essay. That’s not the subject matter of this post, however. I’m introducing it here because I very much agree with her basic premise, which is that most people are susceptible to totalitarian leanings and to propaganda. In the essay it’s “Nazism” – after all, it was written in 1941. But it’s hardly limited to that; we’re talking about the totalitarian impulse, either “for your own good” which turns into evil, or for outright evil.
Some embrace it wholeheartedly and some half-heartedly, some think they are being virtuous, some are indifferent but go along to get along, some don’t pay any attention, and some do it out of fear. But to defy it takes a great deal of insight and courage.
In addition to the Thompson essay, I sometimes think of the Milgram experiment. This particular post from 2008 explains the phenomenon best. An excerpt:
If you’re unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments, here’s a summary. The gist of it was Milgram’s shocking (literally) finding that ordinary people in this country could be persuaded to inflict what they thought were painful electric jolts to “subjects” (actually, actors) in what was billed as a learning experiment, if an authoritative “researcher” (also an actor) told them it was okay.
This was true for most subjects even if the “victim” was screaming in pain and complained of a weak heart. It was also true if the “doctor” didn’t have a white coat, and was in a lab in a seedier part of town. No actual shocks were administered, but I recall that, in follow-up interviews, most of the subjects thought the shocks were real.
Milgram varied the details of the experiment over and over (read his book if you have time; it’s a masterpiece of its genre), but the results always pointed to the troubling fact that the majority of people failed to “question authority” …
“Authority” can vary. It can, for instance, be some online charlatan whom a person has come to trust. It can be a leftist professor, or a series of leftist professors, at a university. It can be the baying hounds of cancel culture, or the Furies of the “Me Too” witch hunt. It can be Jew-haters of all persuasions. It’s a shape-shifter exploiting a fact of human nature.
Our Founders believed it was possible to create a system of government that would be at least somewhat resistant to these forces. They did the best they could, and they were brilliant men. Perhaps they did the best possible. But no system can guard against the tendency well enough to make tyranny impossible, and the Founders were well aware of that, too.
[NOTE: Sasha Stone’s entire essay is worth reading, and there are some especially good short videos there.]
From the Sasha Stone piece (which is generally quite good):
It might seem like one big party [the socialists winning primaries], but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win.
No. Republicans will NOT win if all they are doing is being “the more normal side.” The Overton window has moved 50 miles to the left over the last century explicitly because Republicans often have this combination of sloth and blind faith that sanity will prevail if they do nothing.
The 16th amendment creating the income tax (and causing an explosion of big federal government) happened because a bunch of GOP senators thought that it would be better to kick back (and avoid losing an election or two) and let the proposed amendment slide through the Senate, because it could never get ratified, in their opinion. Sanity does not prevail by itself.
Shortly after that Stone quote, Stone goes on to quote from Orwell’s 1984, and follows it by saying that these people who vote for socialists are entirely unequipped to understand what Orwell is talking about. YES! Because they don’t understand “normal” or history’s examples of calamity.
@TommyJay:Republicans will NOT win if all they are doing is being “the more normal side.”
Agreed. But even if they do win, the experience of the last 50 years teaches us that they will simply cement the gains of the Left into place, unless they are elected specifically to roll back what the Left is doing and held personally accountable for whether they do it.
The 16th amendment creating the income tax (and causing an explosion of big federal government)
==
It did not.
Warning from Gad Saad:
On these pages I have concluded for some time that we are in a civil war but only one side is shooting and it is not we. I was spying on the Soviets in the 1960’s for a division of NSA so I feel I know Communism. The Democrats are not hiding their beliefs anymore. Once they go there and have power agian then both sides are engaged. I’m nobody so you don’t have to believe when I say we are in a civil war.
So maybe you will believe a post on “X” by Gad Saad earlier this month:
“I hate to say this but please hear me out. For decades, I have made a daily Herculean effort to warn people about the dangers facing the West. My goal was to ensure that any auto-corrective process meant to address the problems would be a peaceful one. I fear this window has closed. Prepare for astounding violence. It may may not come tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. But it is coming. Save this post.”
I understand now, better than I ever did before, how and why the Spanish Civil War happened. In Spain the left’s relentless machtgelust, along with its ever-increasing radicalization and extremism, made an equally radicalized and extremist right-wing response inevitable. Here in the United States we seem to be at the beginning — or, perhaps, well past the beginning — of that process.
Art. It did.
WWI was the proximate cause for a huge increase in gov. spending a few years later, but that’s always the case with big wars. And while spending did come way down afterwards, it never reached previous low levels. Those lower levels (around 1922), but still substantially higher than the 1910 levels, only lasted another 6 or 8 years before the explosion began. You can quibble that this isn’t direct causation, but it certainly enabled the explosion not that many years later.
And you can add Weimar Germany to the mix while you’re at it…
how and why the Spanish Civil War happened
That similarity was discussed on Althouse blog a while back. Another commonality is the split between rural/urban, religious/non-religious, on and on. Spain was on the edge of revolution for many years.
”I understand now, better than I ever did before, how and why the Spanish Civil War happened.”
Yup. Except it won’t be only like the Spanish Civil War. When it happens here we’ll have the Spanish Civil War combined with Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Lucky us.
In Spain, as is well known, the left lost. In the U.S. the left may win, if only because it is more ruthless than the right. Conservatives — the right — talk a lot about their guns but the left has guns too and they have not scrupled to use them. As well, the left, it seems to me, is organizing for civil war. Leftists are pursuing their agenda with vigor and determination, with real and rhetorical violence and intimidation. And, now, they’re winning elections.
I dunno. It strikes me as last-gasp failure. Rather like Iran.
Talk a good game, hold some minor redoubts, but that’s about it.
From your keyboard to God’s ears, Huxley.
The Dorothy Thompson article from 1941 is one of the best things I’ve read in months at least. She clarified my thinking as I read it, and I recognize exactly what she’s talking about. We can all see current-day versions of it.
— Dorothy Thompson
The angry intellectual, the man (or woman) who thinks s/he should be part of the elite class, part of the power brokers, but for whatever reason cannot get there…that’s one of the classics. The risen working-class person who resents and is embarrassed by their own background, that’s a common one we see today in the professional class, too.
It overlaps with the phenomenon of ‘elite overproduction’ that was a lot of what drove the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve trained more people in the university system for positions in high-social-status occupations than we have positions in high-social-status occupations for them to fill. Which can be a very dangerous situation. Eric Hoffer warned about the danger of an underemployed class of ‘scribes’.
— Dorothy Thompson
Do we have this type now? I would say we do. Not exactly like her, of course. But women fascinated with people who hate women? Women willing to march in support of ideologies that would make them part of a rich man’s harem if they are lucky? Yeah, we got that.
And not just women, either. There’s a male version of it too, though I think we see this particular weirdness in women more often. What is ‘Queers For Palestine’ other than this tendency? (At least in the rank and file, I suspect the leaders have ulterior motives.)
— Dorothy Thompson
Yeah, this is another familiar one. A slightly embarrassing one for me personally, too. Why? Because I can see a hint of Mr. G in my own much younger self. The intellectual tendency to operate independently of practical realities or my own personal situation, the tendency to look at things highly abstractly. When I was a teenager or in my early 20s, I was a little like that. Never as bad as Mr. G, but I can see the seed of that character in my younger self, and I’m grateful to have avoided falling into that trap.
The mature type of Mr. G is so divorced from practical, physical reality that everything becomes an abstract hypothetical analysis. It’s all, in a sense, imaginary to them. They often tend to take the day-to-day, messy necessities and realities of life for granted, invisible to them.
It was the same sort of theoretically well-meaning French aristocrats who argued for the very policies that ended up eventually sending them to the guillotine. The practical reality of their own status as aristocrats didn’t figure in.
It’s the white teacher who teaches her (it’s more often a her but not always) students about how bad Whiteness is, how Whites are oppressive, and never stops to consider that she’s teaching her white students to hate themselves and all of them to hate her.
It’s the authors and others who got ‘canceled’ for wrongthink over the last decade because they violated the very intolerant rules they helped set up. It’s some of the Democrat lawmakers and elected officials who are being marginalized by the monster they trained and created over the last 25 years.
huxley:
“I dunno. It strikes me as last-gasp failure. Rather like Iran.
Talk a good game, hold some minor redoubts, but that’s about it.”
Wow, talk about whistling past the graveyard. NY, CA, WA, OR and IL are minor redoubts? Who knew?
This is just the beginning, huxley. The next Democrat president will have open borders and then watch out. Hope you are not in a “minor redoubt.”
Early Johnny Carson shows featured a bit called “there oughta be a law” in which Carson and a camera crew would interview people on the street. Asking about minor annoyances. Not illegal, not immoral, not anti social. Just annoyances, maybe particularly annoying to the person being interviewed. With a couple of questions from Carson, the individual would say that the activity in question should be made illegal. Just because he didn’t like it.
To the extent this feeling is widespread…..the left can use it to get people to go along with penalizing which ever villain is up this week (“billionaires”). Don’t have to be doing anything wrong. It’s just satisfying to have a law restricting someone you don’t like.
— Richard Aubrey
Keeping in mind that we don’t know how many people they had to interview to get the ones that were funny.
— Richard Aubrey
As the old song says, “everybody wants to rule the world”. Human nature 101, and why high-diversity populations are rarely if ever high-trust or politically and socially coherent.
How many did he ask? How many does it take when nobody else is paying attention?