Are there two kinds of leftism? I was prompted to ask that question by a colloquy between Megyn Kelly and Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. (The betrayal is common knowledge and the fodder of many a web post; for example, “Democrats See Ordinary Americans as the Great Unwashed” and “You and America’s Unaccountable Class“.)
Leftism in the United States was for many decades a movement aimed mainly at the redistribution of income from the have-lots to the have-littles. That kind of leftism was central to New Deal legislation in the 1930s, especially the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, the latter of which guaranteed the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as striking.
Later legislation, most notably the Taft-Hartley Act, diluted the Wagner Act somewhat. But the Social Security Act has been augmented by increasingly generous old-age benefits, the addition of Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and the addition of prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. There is also funding of and subsidization of housing — at all levels of government — which has expanded to encompass homeless persons and, most recently, illegal immigrants.
Today’s leftism — which synchronizes with the Democrat Party — certainly contains elements of what is now called “redistributive justice”, but it is far more than that. It encompasses actions that leftists of old (or most of them) wouldn’t have contemplated:
Flood the country with illegal immigrants with the aim of converting them to voters who will ensure a permanent Democrat majority.
In the name of “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), raise up “persons of color”, sexual deviants, violent criminals, and (generally) those who are less intelligent, capable, or diligent by rewarding them for being what they are, and by doing it at the expense of persons who are white, East Asian, heterosexual, law-abiding intelligent, capable, and diligent. (The negative aspect of raising up favored groups isn’t openly admitted, of course, because to do so would expose its corruptness. Members of non-favored groups who support raising up are either ignorant of the consequences, tormented by misplaced guilt for being what they are, or wealthy and secure enough to avoid the consequences.)
Increase the power of government for the sake of enforcing policies that the purveyors believe to be for the general good, whether or not they are scientifically sound or economically beneficial.
Use government power — in collusion with corporate and media power — to decree that certain policies are beyond debate, and to harass, suppress, and even criminalize those who dare to “deny” (i.e., question) the official “truth”. (This is straight out of the Hitler-Stalin-Mao playbook.) To date, the subjects that government and its cronies have or are striving to enforce include (but are far from limited to):
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- massive redistribution of income, directly and in kind, with the consequence of significantly lower economic growth;
- discouragement of the more intelligent, more capable, and more diligent members of the populace, with the same consequence;
- promulgation and enforcement of policies that reduce the well-being of most Americans — most notably the anti-scientific doctrine of human-induced climate change, and the futile and vastly counterproductive response to Covid-19;
- deliberate (and sometimes incidental) undermining of beneficial social norms, including but not limited to marriage, religion, sanctity of life, and dignity of work; and
- anti-Americanism and pusillanimous behavior toward enemy regimes, beginning with the Korean War and continuing through today’s behavior toward China, Iran, and Iran’s proxies — coupled with heedless, needless, and costly provocation of Russia (the Eurasia of the saga) — and accompanied by the willful (relative and absolute) weakening of America’s military might.
If this all reads like something out of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Theory and Practice of Oligarchichal Collectivism — the fictional book that plays a central role in the novel — you can chalk it up to Orwell’s keen but fallible understanding of human nature.
I say fallible because, even though Orwell was a leftist of the old-fashioned kind, he seemed to believe that some kind of economic leveling could be managed without harm to liberty or prosperity. He, like other old-fashioned leftists, could not (or chose not to) see that economic leveling means greater and greater government control of greater and greater swaths of the economy.
Further — and this is the crucial part — liberty cannot survive economic interventions by government. Friedrich A. Hayek put it this way in part 16 of Liberalism :
There is, however, yet another reason why freedom of action, especially in the economic field that is so often represented as being of minor importance, is in fact as important as the freedom of the mind. If it is the mind which chooses the ends of human action, their realization depends on the availability of the required means, and any economic control which gives power over the means also gives power over the ends. There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under the control of government, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly, etc. This is the reason why governmental direction of all economic activity, often undertaken in the vain hope of providing more ample means for all purposes, has invariably brought severe restrictions of the ends which the individuals can pursue. It is probably the most significant lesson of the political developments of the twentieth century that control of the material part of life has given government, in what we have learnt to call totalitarian systems, far‑reaching powers over the intellectual life. It is the multiplicity of different and independent agencies prepared to supply the means which enables us to choose the ends which we will pursue.
The accretion of power by government in order to attain economic ends necessarily involves the use of that power to ensure that the populace is aligned with those ends, and with the resulting restrictions on liberty. Power-lust breeds power and more power-lust. The only way to put a stop to it is to overthrow the existing order and strive to prevent its resurrection.
In Madison’s words:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. [The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788]
But men are not angels — not even those who profess goodness. Look at history. Look around you. Look into your soul.
The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.
Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.
See also “Election 2024: The Bottom Line” and “What Happened to America?“.
Politics and Prosperity 