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.
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.