Early last week I got my knickers in a twist reading Stu Cvrk’s “Individualism vs. Collectivism” at American Greatness. Not because I disagreed with his ideas, but because I have a problem with “individualism” and with “collectivism.”
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The point is that humans are social animals. We live in society. There is no such thing as an “individualist” society. All societies are “collectives”, since every society is a collection of humans. And all societies are “socialist” in the sense that they are composed of humans that are social animals.
Let me be clear. Our lefty friends have stolen the ordinary ways of describing human society and turned them into political weapons against their enemies. What else is new?
The difference between left and right today is that lefties still believe that government force can make society better — perfect, even — and righties believe that cooperation outside the government zone of force does a better job, and that government force, from government programs to government “information control,” usually Makes Things Worse.
Earth to lefties: Politics is the mere continuation of war by other means. Because politics is force, government is force. So for our lefty friends to call their politics of force “collectivism” or “socialism” is a lie. And not just a lie to us, but a lie to themselves.
I say we need better names than “individualism” and “collectivism.”
So, our lefty friends believe in power, in force. And that’s going to create heaven on Earth.
But whatabout us? What one word can characterize what we believe and what we do? Problem is that we cannot use any of the words that lefties use to cloak their anti-social ideas in a “decent drapery” of society and community. We must be better.
Here are a bunch of candidate words that point to where I want society to go — and not because I order it, but because I hope that in the future people will practice them because they give life meaning and purpose.
Stewardship, civility, optimism, enterprise, respectability, virtuosity, conventional, integrity, fidelity.
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This last week I finally got around to reading JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s pretty gruesome. Life has been rough on the hillbillies, a story of poverty from “day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.” And now, with Great Society welfare, the will to work an eight-hour day has almost disappeared among the poorest. So what made the difference for Vance — apart from Mamaw? It was basic training in the Marine Corps. That’s where he learned discipline, responsibility, “giving it my all,” how to open a bank account, and how to “shop around for a loan.” Call it teaching life skills, or building character, or learning to be a man: something they don’t teach in government pre-K thru grad school.
And so JD Vance climbed out of hillbilly rage, learned to be a man in the Marine Corps, learned to navigate the world of influence at Yale Law School, got to meet Peter Thiel and the tech lords, and vaulted into the Vice-Presidency.
But then I read a piece about “How Communism Kills Kindness.” It’s about Simon Leys’ book Chinese Shadows that described how Mao’s cultural revolution destroyed kindness in China, because if you weren’t all-in for the revolution, you were an enemy. Guess what: Leys was a socialist until he saw the horror of the cultural revolution. Here in the U.S., our DSA kiddies think it is okay to kill healthcare executives, and argue “over whether [Charlie Kirk] deserved to be mourned.” In other words, politics destroys kindness, because in politics you are either for us or against us.
So are our DSA kiddies, crying “felon” or “racist” or pushing the latest “-ism,” turning into Mao’s Red Guards? Stay tuned.
Every Reign of Terror exhausts itself in the end, and the real question is what comes next, afterwards. Is it Napoleon and twenty years of war, or can we all get back together, all friendly like?
We may hope for the poet of our age to compose an epic of our recent trials, complete with heroes and villains and faithful dogs. After the glorious victory against the forces of evil, kindness resumes, and people return to convention and value integrity and fidelity once again. And government is reduced to a whiny Gollum complaining about his “precious.”
That’s what the Inklings constructed after the horror of World War I. And that was before Hitler, before Stalin, before Mao’s Red Guards, before the DSA kiddies.
All I want is for our poet to coin a word to symbolize how the world ought to be. After leftism.
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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