One of the things I like to do is understand the minds of our lefty friends. If you have studied The Science, you know that socialism doesn’t work, the administrative state doesn’t work. And last week, with the Clancy decision, we learned that feminism doesn’t work. Correction: we actually learned that back in the 19th century, when the life of the First Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft smashed up in a trainwreck until rescued by William Godwin, A Man.
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So it was fun to read Michael Barone writing about the biography of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin. There’s a quote from Grigory Zinoviev, one of the top leaders in the Bolshevik Revolution.
“We go forward to the complete elimination of money,” Grigory Zinoviev explained to German socialists in 1920. “We pay wages in commodities. We introduce trolleys without fares. We have free public schools, free, if temporarily poor, meals, rent-free apartments, free lighting. “We are realizing all this,” he went on, “very slowly, under the most difficult conditions. We have to fight ceaselessly, but we have a way out, a plan.”
Bless his heart. It worked so well that Lenin had to restore capitalism with his New Economic Policy in 1921.
And now we have DSA Wonder Zohran Mamdani, who ran for mayor of NYC on the following issues:
- Free and fast city buses
- Rent freeze
- Free universal child care
- Public groceries
- Taxing the wealthy
How’s that going, Zohrie baby?
I’m reading and blogging a PDF of a book on our modern world by Björn Merker, Perishing Promise, about how the cultural model of late Victorian England got demolished by the Marxist left. One of his notions is that Marx became a socialist because he didn’t like having to work for a living after Daddy died and his widowed mother stopped his allowance. Hey, Katie Wilson and Zohran Mamdani: this you?
Is that the real meaning of the left? Privileged rich kids that resent having to get a joh?
Another thing I wonder about is Gramsci’s famous Long March Through the Institutions. There’s a take on this on X right now. My take is that the lefty march through the institutions of the last century has turned out to be a fabulous way to demolish those institutions. I’d say that everything from universities to criminal justice, Lindsay Clancy, has been demolished by our lefty friends.
And the reason is pretty simple. Human institutions are not meant to be vehicles of lefty politics. They are best understood as imperfect ways of negotiating the needs and hopes and failures — and above all, conflicts — of humans, short of the dead-end political domination of Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Islamist Iran.
In his Perishing Promise, Björn Merker calls our lefty friends “partisans of overthrow.” He means that, for the left, the revolution that started with the French Revolution is “unfinished.” If only we do the revolution right this time, Antifa, then the world will fundamentally transform into a perfect world of peace and justice.
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Could we modify that phrase a little? To me, our lefty friends are not “partisans of overthrow” but “fantasists of overthrow.”
Dear lefty friends. If you think, after the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi Revolution, the Mao Revolution, and all the minor league contributions from Castro and Chavez and Uncle Tom Lefty, that “revolution” or “overthrow” or “march through the institutions” can ever end in anything other than bloody Armageddon, then it’s time for you to seek serious mental health assistance.
Björn Merker makes a fundamental point in Perishing Promise. In the Victorian era in Britain, from 1819 to 1901, population doubled and real per-capita income tripled. Merker comments:
Needless to say, to undergo the greatest change in methods of production since the introduction of agriculture, and to do so in the span of less than a century (roughly from 1790 to 1840), is bound to entail considerable social disruption.
But it didn’t lead to political disruption. How come, you expert activists and Gramscian marchers? How come you chaps didn’t accept the history – that explains what happened — or The Science — that explains why? Oh, we know why. It’s because
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
And Trump-world is a hell-world of oppression and injustice and suffering. Hey, even Elon Musk wants to feel less suffering.
He said he spent years in a state of continuous emergency where every waking hour was consumed by the feeling that everything was about to collapse.
I guess there are two ways of dealing with suffering. You can wave the magic wand of free stuff and spill the blood of millions. Or you can switch into what Grimes called Elon’s “demon mode” and solve the problem that is driving you crazy.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
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Image: Public Domain