people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials.
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit.
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
McCarthyists [...] did want to make Communism disreputable
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to get classified as promoting “hate” by the SPLC.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
By the way, did you know that the media assault on [McCarthy] was in fact CIA-orchestrated?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions.
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
ever since the New Deal
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
It didn’t even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
This, however, didn’t translate into having his policies implemented.
Britain has regime changes they’re just peaceful.
As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Um… Orwell? :)
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
You know, I’ve got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
The thing is, it’s not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn’t irrational in any useful sense.)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That’s a pretty huge more-or-less.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.