This quick entry will probably be the most incongruous of all my blog posts. It’s a thought I had last year, but never really wrote down. I want to put it down here, just so I can reference it in the future. I am worried I might forget it in the chaos of my eventual return to the US.
During my American History class last year we had two courses on the New Deal and World War II. At the time, I had been reading Arthur Schlesinger’s political-theory manifesto, “The Vital Center”, as well as the second book in his three-part series on Roosevelt. I also read Niehbur and Isaiah Berlin around that time, so suffice to say my head was crammed with thoughts of liberalism, determinism, free will, and totalitarianism.
Many of these political philosophers/historians, and particularly Schlesinger, made the point that, at root, communism and fascism are very similar. We touched on this in my American History class, but because I did not want to confuse my students, and I did not want to insult kids who still might hold strong views on the Soviet Union, I drew a quick graph and did not dwell on it.
What I drew was a circle. I said, “if you go too far in either direction, the left or the right, you end up in nearly the same place”. I do not know if the idea of drawing a circle is original or not. I think I might have taken it from Schlesinger, though I do not remember exactly.
Anyway, yesterday I got to thinking about this stuff again, and I decided to draw the circle on two axes, with a little more detail. Also, I dropped the Democrat and Republican party on there to give people in America (like me in the future) a better reference for what I am thinking about. Here is the graph:
It has been bothering me recently when people in the American chattering class draw a dichotomy between “liberals” and “conservatives”. I know that these terms in the American political context have changed from their original meaning—and that liberal, in particular, is now used as a pejorative with little connection to what the word actually means. But someone needs to point out that the opposite of liberal is not conservative. It is “illiberal”. Nearly everyone in America, certainly everyone on the center left and the center right are “liberals” in the classical sense of the word. Liberalism, with its free markets, representative democracy (admittedly limited in the early days), and individual rights is at the root of the American sociopolitical traditional. It is only on the extreme wings of the parties that the term ceases to apply.
Of course, neither party is perfect, and each harbors its own pet restrictions on freedom in the name of “order”. Democrats like to regulate markets, and they go overboard sometimes. Republicans like to control peoples’ personal lives, and favor economic and education policies that often restrict the ability of working-class citizens to actually participate in their society. Because I am a Democrat (and a registered Democrat, as of this January) I obviously think the Republican party is more beholden to its radical elements, and has slid farther down the circle’s side towards illiberalism. But just for the sake of not sparking pointless arguments, I put them at equal levels on the graph.
But, in general this is how I see things. Both Democrats and Republicans, and any liberal, must stand up to illiberalism and totalitarianism, regardless of what form it takes. I will comment more on how this graph relates to the former-Soviet Union, and the interesting similarities between communism and fascism, once I am in a different situation—ie not in the Peace Corps—where I am not required to hold my tongue on internal politics.
Sorry this is not more like my other travel-journalesque posts. I’ll put up something interesting on the Nauryz Festival when I get back from Almaty.
До свидания
PS I am also aware that “communism” never existed, and that it was really Stalinism over socialism, and that there were different kinds of socialism and different kinds of fascism, and that the whole debate seems anachronistic today. But my graph is a musing, not a grad thesis, so I wanted to get it down before I left Kaz.
PPS One more thing, I just discovered moments before I was going to post this; I have been accepted to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and the Kennedy School at Harvard. I know Princeton is great, and Woody Woo would be much cheaper… but I just cannot turn down Harvard. So, if all goes well, I will be in Boston starting September, 2008.
There's a great article on a pseudo-communist philosopher up at tnr.com right now. Here's a good graft from the piece:
There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and
will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that
prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that
finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not
communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has
inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much
in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders
of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess.
Posted by: Frosty | 11/29/2008 at 12:47 PM