Super Tuesday, indeed. Do people still say “Harrummph” as they did
in the old cartoons? If not, we need to
do something about reviving the custom.
Those of us who have been trying to follow the course of the nomination
process in the Democratic Party find ourselves in the curious position of discerning through the dawn’s
early light that the choice has effectively been narrowed down to two geezers. You have one crabby old man who thinks that
the source of most of our ills is a system rigged in favor of “millionaires and
billionaires” and one vague old man who says that 150,000,000 Americans
have been killed by guns in recent decades.
He is the one who won Super Tuesday and is once again the leader of the
pack. Apparently ours is indeed the age
of big data.
A crabby and vague old man like
myself will perhaps be especially alarmed by the prospect before us. We have had many chances to consider the
credentials of Mr. Biden, and I would
prefer someone else. In our household
there were once high hopes for Senator Warren, who came in fourth in her native
state and third in the state she represents in the Senate. That means, in practical terms, Senator
Sanders, a career politician who in a forty-year career has maintained his
progressive purity at the relatively small cost of never achieving much
else. One of my sons, who commands my
admiration and respect, is an enthusiastic backer of Bernie; and that alone is
enough to make me take him seriously.
For me the first problem is that Sanders claims to be a Socialist,
subgenre democratic Socialist; and it
is far from clear what he means by that.
The pundit Paul Krugman insists that Sanders isn’t a Socialist, but just likes
to say he is.
In the most recent “debate” Mayor
Bloomberg (a third geezer) chided Senator Sanders for his Socialism, which he
regards as a failed system. “We’re not
going to throw out capitalism. We tried
that. Other countries tried that. It was called Communism, and it just didn’t
work.” Mr. Sanders’s riposte was “Cheap
shot!”, and indeed there is a whole rhetorical industry devoted to the search
for a significant distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism”. Before going there, as we say, one might
point out that the absurd format of these so-called debates does little more than
provide an arena for cheap shots. It
also encourages the fantasy, rarely acknowledged by the candidates, of a nearly
omnipotent president who can single-handedly, by ukase, achieve free college,
emissions reductions, “comprehensive immigration reform” and more or less any
other mighty feat that enters his or her head.
Mr. Sanders, though presenting
himself as the polar opposite of our current President, has a similar penchant for impolitic praise of
tyrants. So he has praised the late
dictator Fidel Castro for doing some “good things” alongside the bad “authoritarian”
things Sanders disapproves of.
Specifically, he organized a literacy campaign. Since according to the political theory
dominant among Cuban refugees and large swathes of the Republican Party, it is
impossible that Castro ever did anything good in his life, Sanders is feeling
some heat for his attitude. Such is the
Manichaean passion of partisanship. But
I doubt that anyone has performed
only evil acts. Read the story of the
Jongleur de Notre Dame. Hitler, our
chosen icon of evil unalloyed, did all sorts of good things. So did Josef Stalin. For instance, he won World War II, and you
might want to give him some credit for that.
One still has to point out that
coercion does not cease to be coercion just because you can tolerate or even
applaud its effects. And coercion is a
prerequisite to Socialism. Among dozens
of explications of Socialist coercion I
recommend especially the brief and lucid chapter “Why Socialism?” with which
Martin Malia began his magisterial The
Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994). The bosses of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics were unaware that it was a “cheap shot” to call themselves
Socialists.
I happen to have been reading
Alexis de Tocqueville this week, and he has acute remarks that are relevant
here. Socialism may rightly be called an
alien idea in America. It is a manufactured political theory or what
de Tocqueville called a “general idea” in his chapter “Why the Americans have
never been as passionate as the French about general ideas in politics.” He thus amplifies: “The Americans are a
democratic people who have always taken charge of public affairs themselves,
and we [French ] are a democratic people who for a long time could only dream
about the best way to conduct public business.”
Unlike Sanders, de Tocqueville was not terribly keen on the
“revolutionary” idea. Of course his family had
actually lived through a Revolution and was probably prejudiced by the
guillotining of many close friends and family members in 1794.
It is obvious that Senator Sanders
has spent some considerable time dreaming “about the best way to conduct public
business.” I’ll take his word for it
that democratic Socialism eschews all
authoritarianism, let alone the mass murder that has characterized Socialism’s
more notable twentieth-century forms.
But it does take a certain testy audacity, to say the least, to insist—with
scant attention to detail and none to costing--upon a behemoth of a nationalized
universal health care program the first requirement of which is the destruction
of a vast and complicated private insurance system interlaced with most of the
nation’s industrial and economic life.
The
purposes for which our government was established are clear enough in the
founding documents. They are “to form a
more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
This is an agenda of liberation, not the blueprint for the imposition of
a “general idea.” A joke that has
survived since the “Red Decade” of my birth has as its subject a Communist
agitator orating to a crowd of workers on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. “My friends,” he said, “Come
the revolution, you will have strawberries and cream!” But a skeptical kibitzer shouted out: “What
if you don’t like strawberries and cream?”
“Come the revolution,” retorted the speaker without missing a beat,” you
will like strawberries and cream.”
