Posted on 02/08/2015 1:52:26 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must work to purchase an entry-level car, and the Ruskie answers: “In your country, you lynch Negroes.”
When Matt Yglesias says he wants to “lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success,” and that doesn’t happen, what happens next? Another chorus of “The Tea Party Is Racist!” from Ezra Klein, or from whomever.
There has been a great deal of overblown talk about the alleged “libertarian moment” that the United States is experiencing just about now, and there is a reason that the Right, broadly speaking, has taken an intellectual turn in the libertarian direction. The first and most important is the ascendance of Barack Obama, whose vision of effectively unlimited government gives conservatives the willies. But there are deeper reasons, too: The Right believes, not without some reason, that the main reason we ended up with a disastrous Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate government — the brief years of which imposed damage that will take much longer to undo — had to do with the foreign policy of George W. Bush and the fiscal incontinence of congressional Republicans during the Bush years. While the Obama administration has not yet produced a superior foreign-policy operating model, the Bush approach is not really looking any better in retrospect, at least in the sense that it would be difficult to say with a straight face that Iraq, Afghanistan, or the broader Middle East look today like more tractable problems than they did in 2001, or like they might become more tractable. On the domestic front, abortion has effectively calcified into a modus vivendi (more accurately, a horrifying modus mortis), and the new lion of the social issues, gay marriage, is a wet kitten by comparison, in that no sensible, non-fanatical person thinks of gay marriage as being as urgent an issue as abortion.
All of those are relevant, but consider one further, broader dynamic at work: The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.
That the Left has become much more intensively coercive in recent years has not gone unnoticed among conservatives. In Liberal Fascism and elsewhere, Jonah Goldberg has popularized a longstanding view of the left-wing philosophy that in the United States calls itself “liberalism” — though we cannot in good faith call it that — that connects it with the nakedly coercive, antidemocratic, and anti-constitutional tendency of Woodrow Wilson and the progressives of his era, and with the various nasty totalitarian movements that inspired them and were inspired by them in turn. It’s not that we expect Robert Reich to come marching up Fifth Avenue wearing jackboots (the Pride March ain’t what it used to be) but that managerial progressivism is fundamentally corporatist in the sense that Mussolini et al. used the term: It conceives of formal political power and economic production as a single unit to be kept working in harmony, like a well-tuned engine, by such experts as the state recognizes as suited to the task. In theory, these men are to be guided by evidence meeting scientific standards — they are to be the sort of disinterested and dispassionate pragmatists that exist mainly within the narrow confines of Ezra Klein’s cranium.
The problem, as various capital-”F” Fascists and National Socialists and Communist politburos and Vox readers all discovered in their turn, is that even if these dispassionate and disinterested managers existed — and they don’t — bureaucracies do not have the collective cognitive firepower to replace markets, or even to intelligently guide them. From the Soviet five-year plans to Obamacare, all central-planning exercises begin in hubris and end in chaos.
And when the chaos comes, the natural thing to do — the imperative thing — is: find someone to blame. The planners and schemers are intellectually incapable of dealing seriously with the fact that the project that they have set for themselves — substituting their own judgment for that of the billions of better-informed parties in the market and coming up with superior outcomes — is an impossible one. But once you’ve accepted real limits on what planning can do — on what government can do — then you have at some level essentially surrendered to conservatism.
And that means that somebody, somewhere, must be a racist.
Jonathan Chait, the sort of nice suburban liberal boy you’d want your daughter to marry if you hated your daughter, in his recent essay on the alleged renaissance of political correctness, bemoaned the emergence of racial- and gender-identity politics as an ultimate rhetorical trump card. Chait either misses or ignores the fact that this is not new; what’s new is that the wanton application of this juvenile mode of discourse now encompasses previously immune white liberals. But the tendency itself is ancient, and prominent on his end of the political spectrum.
“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must work to purchase an entry-level car, and the Ruskie answers: “In your country, you lynch Negroes.”
When Matt Yglesias says he wants to “lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success,” and that doesn’t happen, what happens next? Another chorus of “The Tea Party Is Racist!” from Ezra Klein, or from whomever.
The Wilsonian vision of domestic governance through expertise and fiat quickly devolved into a reality of goon squads, political persecution, crushing of dissent with formal and informal political violence, politicization of law enforcement, etc. The Occupy bomb-throwers and the imbecile hooligans committing arson to prove that “black lives matter” are not quite the American Protective League, but they’re of a piece with it. In the Wilson years, we had politicized police; in the Obama years, we have a weaponized IRS . . . and Justice Department, and police unions, and jailers’ unions. The Wilson-era progressives tried to use the Sedition Act to shut down critics of the great progressive. In our time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Harry Reid want to throw people in prison for unpopular political activism of which they disapprove. The grand plans of 2009 are coming unraveled, as grand plans do, and so the Left grows ever more naked in its coercion. On the official side of the spectrum, you have Senate Democrats voting to repeal the First Amendment so that they can suppress political criticism. On the unofficial side — as the perpetually late-to-the-party Jonathan Chait has suddenly noticed — you have people such as Brendan Eich being run out of their jobs for holding unpopular political opinions, human-rights heroes such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali run off college campuses, and Trustafarians from suburban Boston shutting down emergency ambulance services because they are displeased about . . . something.
The fun part for the Left is that, in Mount Holyoke as in Pyongyang, totalitarianism is magnified by madness, and thus The Vagina Monologues must be suppressed on the grounds that not all women have vaginas. If you do not follow these sorts of things closely, you would not believe the vitriol — up to and including death threats — rained down on feminist groups who insist that while they sympathize with transsexuals they do not believe that a penis-and-testicle-bearing person counts as a woman simply on his own say-so.
The Left’s last big idea was Communism. When Lenin turned out to be the god who failed, the Left undertook wide exploration for another grand unifying idea: environmentalism, multiculturalism, economic inequality, atheism, feminism, etc. What it ended up with was an enemies’ list.
That and a taste for brute force.
The enthusiasm for coercion and the substitution of enemies for ideas — Christians, white men, Israel, “the 1 percent,” the Koch brothers, take your pick — together form the basis for understanding the Left’s current convulsions. The call to imprison people with unapproved ideas about global warming, the Senate Democrats’ vote to repeal the First Amendment, the Ferguson-inspired riots, the picayune political correctness and thought-policing that annoys Jonathan Chait, the IRS’s persecution of conservative political groups, Barack Obama’s White House enemies’ list, the casual violence against conservatives on college campuses and the Left’s instinctive defense of that violence — these are not separate phenomena but part of a single phenomenon.
The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time.
And that means that somebody, somewhere, must be a racist. .......
The enthusiasm for coercion and the substitution of enemies for ideas — Christians, white men, Israel, “the 1 percent,” the Koch brothers, take your pick — together form the basis for understanding the Left’s current convulsions. The call to imprison people with unapproved ideas about global warming, the Senate Democrats’ vote to repeal the First Amendment, the Ferguson-inspired riots, the picayune political correctness and thought-policing that annoys Jonathan Chait, the IRS’s persecution of conservative political groups, Barack Obama’s White House enemies’ list, the casual violence against conservatives on college campuses and the Left’s instinctive defense of that violence — these are not separate phenomena but part of a single phenomenon.
Soviet Famine: "The government's forced collectivization of agriculture is considered by some a main reason for the famine, as it caused chaos in the countryside. This included the destruction of peasant activists' possessions, the selling and killing of horses for fear they would be seized, and farmers' refraining from field work. Authorities blamed the agitation on the kulaks (rich peasants) and kolkhozs (collectivized farmers), and accused them of sabotage. The authorities wrongly expected that production would increase as a result of agricultural collectivization, because of plans for exporting agricultural products based on attempts to industrialize.
...........Central authorities maintained that the collapse was caused by peasants' hiding their grain crops, despite repeated requests from local authorities that their quota be decreased. As a consequence, local activists led searches for hidden stores of grain; this caused seizure of seed corn that should have been used for sowing the next year's crop and the loss of the stocks needed to feed peasant families.".....
"Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives......
......Support from Joseph Stalin gave Lysenko even more momentum and popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivization strategy, saying that by opposing his theories the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism. Stalin was in the audience when this speech was made, and he was the first one to stand and applaud, calling out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This event emboldened Lysenko and gave him and his ally Prezent free rein to slander the geneticists who still spoke out against him. Many of Lysenkoism's opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or even executed because of Lysenko's and Prezent's denunciations.
On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko's research. Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist", and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields in the Soviet academy at this time.........
....From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed....or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Hermann Joseph Muller (and his teachings about genetics) was criticized as a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and promoting fascism so he left the USSR, to return to the USA via Republican Spain.
In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who claimed to be an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.".......
You see our Russian FReepers do it on a constant basis.
Thank you. Spot on.
Just as Obama did at the National Prayer Breakfast this week.
~~~~Whatabout those Christians and the Crusades? ~~~~
The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time.
“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must work to purchase an entry-level car, and the Ruskie answers: “In your country, you lynch Negroes.”
"The first five-year plan also began a period of rapid agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union. One reason for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was to increase the number of industrial workers for the new factories. Soviet officials also believed that collectivization would increase crop yields and help fund other programs. This agricultural collectivization was however a failure for the Soviets. At the end of 1929 the Soviets asserted themselves to forming collectivized peasant agriculture, but the “Kulaks” had to be “liquidated as a class,” because of their resistance to fixed agricultural prices. Resulting from this, the party behavior became uncontrolled and manic when the party began to acquisition food from the countryside. In the years following the agricultural collectivization, the reforms would disrupt the Soviet food supply. In turn, this disruption would eventually lead to famines for the many years following the first five-year plan, with four million dying in 1933......."
Of possible interest to your list.
The author implies that the “nakedly coercive” left is a new phenomenon, but it’s not. Leftism has always been about both institutional brute force and vicious personal violence.
Ann Coulter goes through the history very nicely in “Godless.”
I don't believe that the author is suggesting that this is a new phenomenon, but rather there has been an awakening - a fuller understanding by those on the Right (and others) about the depth of deceit employed by the Left.
As David Horowitz put it in June of 2000 in his essay about Hillary Clinton: Hillary Clinton and "The Third Way" How America's First Lady of the Left Has Bamboozled Liberals and Conservatives Alike ..........................."Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left—by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them."
Abortion isn't the Left's way to "free" women, it's the Left's way of controlling population (GREEN).
Great article. I find it interesting, too, that some conservatives are embracing statism (think of the Putin fans) as long as the state will force Christian conservatism on people. I get fighting stopping ISIS, al Qaeda, and so on. I don’t get fondness for the president-for-life Putin model as preferable to the American system. When I hear “conservatives” using the failures of Obama to justify their fondness for Putin, I remember the whataboutism of these putinistas and their Soviet ancestors.
Okay, I see how he was making his point.
David Horowitz does a great job explaining, too.
The difference between Elizabeth Warren’s partisans and the Tontons Macoutes is very little more than testosterone and time.
These are two insightful quotes from an excellent analysis. We aren't seeing "progress" in this country. Instead, we are witnessing it's willful destruction in the name of "progress".
When one snatches from them one of their icons and speaks of many of their goals while identifying the source of distinction being principally one of means (theirs being coercive in nature) while in the same time identifying the source of their failures as their dependencies upon well-hidden corporate corruption, it becomes necessary for them to give at least partial heed.
At that point, the denser among them, usually professors, argued as if I had not heard "their side," believing that it would somehow be impossible for any sentient being NOT to have heard their point of view while immersed for fifty years in NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Pacifica Radio... whatever. Point that out, and they're stuck. They know damned well they've never heard what I have to say.
Along the way, they'll grasp at straws, effectively foundational truisms by which they can discount "scientific" grounds, climate change, overpopulation, etc. Don't reply with skeptical data, no, point out that the whole crooked fiasco was financed by Rockefellers (ExxonMobil), Pews (Sunoco), or British royals (BP)... explaining that they just don't get how they're being used. It drives them crazy. Then start talking about who funded communism in the first place, that it always has been the flip side of fascism and its armies of bureaucratic experts and university consultants... That scares the crap out of them.
Good link. Worth the time to read it in full.
Bump!
Plus, my tag line is relevant to Obama’s recent PB ramblings....
bfl
As to the original Soviet joke, why would anyone care what a country without Black Folks had to say about them?
"Then why aren't you complaining about how PETA kills puppies?"
The Russians too have their version of `black people’ at whom they hurl racial insults all based upon the latter’s perceived `blackness’, calling them `chernozhopii’ (”black @zzes”) & worse.
We in the West call these people “Central Asians”, i.e. Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Kazakhs & others.
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