No True Communism

As the estimable Mr Moldbug famously put it, America is a communist country.

This is one of those statements that, on first glance, strikes you as ludicrous. And then you dig a little more, and it seems funny and has something to it, but still seems over the top and wrong. And then you dig a little more, and suddenly you're not so sure any more.

Then one day, you find that 'communism' is a pretty concise explanation for lots of the crazy stuff you see going on around you. And you try to mention this to people, and they look at you like you've wandered off the deep end.

Which perhaps you have - the internet is a wild place.

Then again, communism itself is partly to blame here. It's not like Marx spelled out exactly how his society was going to work in detail, meaning that the label necessarily has a lot more ambiguity than, say, a mercentilist or a right-to-life supporter.

And yet, when someone declares that America is a communist country, it doesn't prompt a mental response of you trying to haggle over exactly what Marx might have meant, and which of the ambiguities of what policies should be classified where in terms of mapping American political thought to a somewhat-light-on-specifics political system.

Not at all. Rather, trying to swallow "America is a communist country" at the first attempt is like trying to drink a tumbler of whisky all in one go. They do it in the movies and look cool. You try it at home, it burns your throat and you throw up.

But among the various ways I've tried to explain this idea to people, here's a surprisingly powerful one.

Consider the following list of policy proposals and aims. It's long, but bear with me.

We'll call this one, Candidate A

-Work to eliminate national oppression, national chauvinism, discrimination and segregation

-Fight against all racist ideologies and practices

-Fight against all manifestations of male supremacy and discrimination against women

-Fight against homophobia and all manifestations of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people

-Implement a $15/hour minimum wage for all workers

-Implement national universal health care

-Oppose privatization of Social Security. 

-Increased taxes on the rich and corporations

-Strong regulation of the financial industry

-Regulation and public ownership of utilities

-Increased federal aid to cities and states

-Opposition to the Iraq War and other military interventions

-Opposition to free trade treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement 

-Nuclear disarmament and a reduced military budget

-Campaign finance reform including public financing of campaigns

-Election law reform, including Instant Runoff Voting

Okay, with me so far? Imagining a hypothetical Candidate A?

Now, he's about to square off against his challenger, Candidate B. What policies does he favor?

-Racial justice

-Fight for affordable housing

-Fight for women's rights

-Fight for LGBT equality

-Make college tuition free and debt free

-Get big money out of politics and restore democracy

-Create decent paying jobs

-Implement a $15/hour minimum wage

-Combat climate change to save the planet

-A fair and humane immigration policy

-Work to create an AIDS and HIV-free generation

-Empower tribal nations

-Care for our veterans

-Medicare for all

-Strengthen an expand social security

-Fight to lower prescription drug prices

-Fight for disability rights

-Support historically black colleges and universities

-Reform Wall Street

-War should be the last option

-Real family values

-Improving the rural economy

-Make the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations pay their fair share

So John Q. Normie looks at that list, and thinks: well, look, the first guy seems to push things a bit further on nationalising healthcare, but then again the second guy wants medicare for all, which seems like basically the same thing. The second guy talks a little more about veterans and the family, but it's hard to know what exactly that means. In terms of policies where they differ, the first guy wants nuclear disarmament and the second guy wants free college, but is this because they sound like they'd vehemently disagree with each other over this, or just that they didn't think of the other one's talking point first? The first guy somehow sounds more angry than the second, even though they both talk a lot about fighting. Perhaps it's just the spin doctoring that the second guy is fighting for stuff, and the first is fighting against stuff. Do I want the friendly guy, or the passionately fired up guy? Geez, I don't know who to pull the lever for. Does it really make a difference?

Enough suspense. Let me reveal the identities of our two candidates.

Candidate B is Bernie Sanders, taken from his issues page

Candidate A is the Communist Party of the USA, taken from Wikipedia's summary of their ideology. If you don't trust them, you can get it straight from the source too.

Actually, I cheated ever so slightly, by leaving out the one aim in the opening sentence from the wikipedia entry that does sound like classical communism

Struggle for the unity of the working class 

That might have set off your radar. But the rest of the stuff is how they plan to struggle for the unity of the working class.

The obvious point here is that it is pretty damn hard to distinguish the two lists. You could use this to simply say "Ah ha! QED, Bernie Sanders is a communist!".

While true, that's not the interesting part here.

The first interesting part here is that the vast majority of Americans, and the vast majority of Bernie Sanders supporters, do not consider Sanders' policies to be examples of communism. They just consider them as examples of slightly left of center Democratic Party politics. In fact, if you accused the average Bernie Sanders supporter of being a communist, they would likely either scoff, or get offended, or both.

And yet here we are. The Communist Party of the USA is claiming pretty much the same list as their policies.

If you're someone who thinks America is not a communist country, this is quite a conundrum.

The answer which I suspect most of the aforementioned group will instinctively choose, is to say that the CPUSA is wrong. We've learned about communism, it's only about central control of the means of production. The rest of it shouldn't be there.

To which I respond: be careful before you go down that path. Are you really saying that the Communist Party of the USA is insufficiently communist? Are you saying you know better than the Communist Party of the USA what actually constitutes communism? These guys have a pretty long and storied history going back to 1919. They walked the walk when it comes to supporting the Soviet Union when it was still in business. Hell, they're still shilling for Madura in Venezuela right now, even as the whole country is starving to death. They seem pretty darn serious to me.

And they say that communism looks a lot like Bernie Sanders. They too support democracy. They too call themselves socialist.

But there's a second thing to note.

The CPUSA is not exactly looking to take over the mainstream, remember. That's why they insist on calling themselves not just communist, but Communist. They're aiming at the fringe left. Even Wikipedia, hardly a bastion of reactionary thought, labels them as "Far Left".

The point is, presumably they'd like to distinguish themselves from the leftist wing of the Democratic Party, otherwise why bother? Why go to all the hassle of getting ridiculed as a Communist and then just end up agreeing with the Democrats?

There are two leading hypotheses here.

The standard one is that this is all subterfuge. They really do care entirely about the single issue they're not trumpeting, namely seizing the means of production, and the rest is entirely bogus and a hook to get people in the door.

Perhaps. In that case, you'd probably conclude they're rather dense, if their "hook" is that if you join you'll agree with the Democrats on everything but face widespread mockery from your friends and family.

The alternative one is that they genuinely have difficulty distinguishing themselves from the Democrats. They've just done what Moldbug joking referred to in his post: for "workers and peasants", read "Blacks and Hispanics". As I wrote about a while back, the story of the latter half of the 20th century is that cultural marxism beat out economic marxism. They've just moved slightly with the times, but other than that don't see a big contradiction.

Not that they couldn't emphasize more the seizing the means of production. Admittedly they're already seizing the utilities, but they could talk about other stuff too.

No, the problem is that when you want them to flesh out the rest of their program, after the means of production are seized, that's when it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish them from the Democratic Party. The means of production are seized! We control the commanding heights of the economy! What else would we like to get done?

The answer, apparently, is Bernie Sanders.

And why is that?

At the bottom of the rabbit hole lies one answer: because America is a communist country.

The pill is large though, and your gag reflex is strong. It can't be. There must be some other answer.

Read on, or read it again, and ponder.

The Puritan Hypothesis Personified

We live in a period where Whig history is the only history that most people know. The west conquered the evils of Nazism and racism, and is moving towards a progressive utopia. People don't know the term 'Whig history', but they know the idea alright.

To me, the best summary of Whig history comes from our modern secular saint, Martin Luther King, who summed it up thus:

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

The history of this quote is a fascinating one.

The MLK quote is actually a paraphrasing of a longer quote by Theodore Parker, who said:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

I'd never heard of this guy before. I actually came across this while looking up the MLK quote as part of writing a different post, but ended up down this rabbit-hole instead.

The reason is that the story of Theodore Parker seems almost shockingly tailor-made to support Moldbug's puritan hypothesis of leftism - that it is primarily an offshoot of mainline American Protestantism that came out of New England Puritans, and over time gradually morphed to replace God with Social Justice.

First off, where would you guess that Theodore Parker was born? Where else, but Massachusetts! Lexington, MA, to be precise.

And for some reason, it wasn't a big surprise to find out that the rest of his life story fits almost eerily into place.

He was an ardent abolitionist, living from 1810 to 1860.

If I told those facts alone, what might you guess about his education and profession?

Would you guess, perhaps, a Unitarian Universalist preacher who had both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University?

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

Even his ancestry is exactly on point:

His paternal grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. 

Remember this the next time conservatives are revering the founding fathers. Their descendants, both literal and intellectual, are leftists. Skip the standard Jefferson and Washington hagiographies and read some Thomas Hutchinson instead.

Among his colonial Yankee ancestors were Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, and Deacon Thomas Parker, who came from England in 1635 and was one of the founders of Reading.

East Anglia, East Anglia, where have I heard that name before?

That's right, it's from David Hackett Fisher's book 'Albion's Seed'. It's where the English Puritans came from before they moved to Massachussetts.

But so what, a skeptic may say. Who cares about his background if he was able to perfectly capture the importance of aiming towards what is just and right?

Well, perhaps it might do to know exactly what the "justice" was that he thought the universe was bending towards. Because it looks an awful lot like "leftism".

First up, feminism! From Parker himself

"The domestic function of the woman does not exhaust her powers... To make one half of the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made"

and from the mouths of others

Stanton called his sermons "soul-satisfying" when beginning her career, and she credited him with introducing her to the idea of a Heavenly Mother in the Trinity.

I'm no Christian, let alone a biblical scholar, but I apparently missed the Heavenly Mother part of the Trinity.

But don't strain yourself too hard trying to reconcile it, as Parker was pretty upfront about his perversions of Christianity. Next up, trying to bowdlerize the Bible to take out anything he perceived as inconvenient, leaving a mush of vague sentimental spiritualism:

  “I preach abundant heresies,” he wrote to a friend, “and they all go down—for the listeners do not know how heretical they are.” For years he had wrestled with the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by 1837 he was wishing “some wise man would now write a book…and show up the absurdity of…the Old Testament miracles, prophecies, dreams, miraculous births, etc.’”

In 1841, Parker laid bare his radical theological position in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the scriptures of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth. In so doing, he made an open break with orthodox theology. He instead argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus’s teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other forms of their conveyance did not. He stressed the immediacy of God and saw the Church as a communion, looking upon Christ as the supreme expression of God. Ultimately, he rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience.

The Bible is all a metaphor filled with mistakes and superstitions, just go with what you feel, man. But I'm still Christian, don't you know.

It will not come as a shock to find out that Parker's successors felt less bound to utter the last part. But Parker himself was definitely ahead of the curve, as you have to be when you're deemed heretical by the Unitarian Church (of all organisations).

By contrast, if you want to find out what someone thinks who actually does take the bible literally and cares what it says about slavery, read Robert Dabney's 'A Defense of Virginia'. In it, you will find over 100 pages of exhaustive yet fascinating discourse on what exactly the Bible has to say on the slavery question, and it's probably not what you'd think. Dabney was well acquainted with men like Parker, and skewered them wonderfully:

The Socinian and skeptical type of all the evasions of our Scriptural argument has been already intimated. If the most profane and reckless wresting of God's word will not serve their turn to make it speak abolitionism then they not seldom repudiate its authority. One of their leaders, long a professed minister of the Gospel, declares at the close of a train of tortuous sophisms that if he were compelled to believe the Bible countenances slavery he should be compelled to give up the Bible, thereby virtually confessing that he had never been convinced of the infallibility of that which for thirty years he had been pretending to preach to men as infallible. Others more blatant and blasphemous when compelled to admit that both the Bible and the American constitution recognized slavery exclaimed "Give me then an anti slavery constitution, an anti slavery Bible, and an anti slavery God!" 

This is almost exactly what Parker did.

And even outside slavery, the list of causes Parker supported is almost straight out of modern leftist orthodoxy

As Parker's early biographer John White Chadwick wrote, Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views. He "denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 'to protest against this most infamous war.'"

Let's just count up how many modern leftist causes this guy managed to hit - blacks, hispanics, pacifism (of a sort), education, feminism, criminals, poverty, hating the rich. Parker loses points, however, for not having the foresight to also agitate about homosexuality and the environment. Had he been slightly more visionary on these fronts, he'd be a shoo-in for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.

But still, justice! Who can forget that famous arc of justice, to which the moral universe is inevitably tending?

Well, it might not hurt to examine how exactly Parker advocated pushing that moral universe on its way, because he certainly wasn't interested in letting the universe work things out in its own due course. Parker was unusually far-sighted in terms of how he applied leftist aims too. Behold a life full of civil disobedience, incitement to violence, funding of guerrilla violence, and general Alinsky-style agitation:

He wrote the scathing To a Southern Slaveholder in 1848, as the abolition crisis was heating up and took a strong stance against slavery and advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Parker worked with many fugitive slaves, some of whom were among his congregation. As in the case of William and Ellen Craft, he hid them in his home. Although he was indicted for his actions, he was never convicted.

Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird. He's the Bill Ayers of 1850.

During the undeclared war in Kansas (see Bleeding Kansas and Origins of the American Civil War) prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, Parker supplied money for weapons for free state militias. As a member of the Secret Six, he supported the abolitionist John Brown, whom many considered a terrorist. After Brown's arrest, Parker wrote a public letter, "John Brown's Expedition Reviewed," arguing for the right of slaves to kill their masters and defending Brown’s actions.

Obviously, the South were the untrammeled instigators of the Civil War through their reckless secession. They should have just stuck around to deal with guys like Parker who advocated for terrorism and slaves murdering their masters. Be reasonable, Southern slave owners!

Of course, you may think this is all just incidental to the original quote with which we started - the guy liked justice, even if in other arenas of his life he was a bit extreme.

But it turns out these ideas aren't incidental to the main point. They are in fact the essence of the idea. Here's the full context of the quote, from quote investigator

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

In the context of everything he did and said, it is hard to read the last line as anything but a threat.

This was in 1853.

12 years and 620,000-odd corpses later, America had done a lot of trembling alright.

This is the context of the famous MLK quote with which we began. You will find a version of this quote on the MLK memorial in Washington D.C., which tells you how much the idea has become a source of bipartisan inspiration.

And this, incidentally, is the second Parker quote lightly paraphrased by a modern secular saint, and memorialised in Washington D.C. The other is even more famous. Parker, as well as agitating for violent overthrow of slavery, was a big fan of democracy:

A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people

And so at last, we see an odd correspondence between the old and the new.

For in fact,

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

in practice means

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward leftism. 

Which could be ever-so-slightly rephrased as:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.

Indeed.

When stripped of the marketing, Parker, MLK and Moldbug can all agree on the trend, even if they disagree on how they feel about it.

It's not for nothing that they carve it in marble in Washington D.C.

Cognitive Dissonance Judo and the Surprising Malleability of Beliefs

There are few things in this world more stable than a man’s self-image.

You might think, perhaps reasonably, that values and core beliefs are the heart of man – what’s right and wrong, how he ought to act.

You might think, if you’re more scientifically inclined, that facts are the core – bare understanding of the basic reality of the world from which people figure out the rest.

But the psychology of cognitive dissonance doesn’t work that way.

What is stable, rather, is the conception of self. Usually, but not always, this is based on flattery and conceit. I am clever. I am pretty. I am moral. I am loved by those around me (or at least those of good character and judgment).

Whatever you like about yourself, in other words.

And the rest of reality – morals, beliefs, the whole lot – typically gets fitted in around that.  This isn’t to say that morals don’t actually matter, of course. Just that in this fallen world we live in, men make their rationalistions in quite predictable ways.

A beliefs-centred view says that a man starts with morals – that it is wrong to commit adultery, for instance. Believing this, he refuses to cheat on his wife. Having not cheated on his wife, he views himself as a good man and a good husband.

A self-image-centred view says that a man begins with the view that he is a good man and a good husband. He has a tentative view that adultery is wrong, and because he is currently satisfied with his wife (and also because there is no convenient way to have an affair with someone hot), he doesn’t feel the need to cheat on her. Having not cheated on her, he affirms the view that refraining from adultery is an important moral issue, and a key part of what makes him a good husband.

As long as a man doesn’t commit adultery, it’s very hard to tell these possibilities apart.

But what happens when a man’s marriage starts to deteriorate, and he ends up cheating on his wife?
The beliefs-centred view is a Dostoyevsky novel. It says that he will be wracked with guilt, and view himself as being an immoral and unworthy person.

The self-image centred view says that, rather, he will update his views on what is right and wrong to maintain his self-image. Having committed adultery, adultery must not be so bad after all, at least in the circumstances when he has done it. Perhaps it’s okay if the marriage has already broken down. Perhaps it’s okay as long as nobody finds out. Perhaps it’s okay if they were going to get divorced anyway. The beliefs about right and wrong can change. The only thing that can’t change, however, is his view of himself.

Like all models, this simplifies reality. Some people, especially the more introspective and intellectually honest, really do get wracked with guilt after doing bad things. Dostoyevsky didn’t imagine it out of whole cloth.

But looking at the world, how many husbands having affairs seem to be wandering around like Raskolnikov, torn up over their infidelities and unable to get up from bed? Is it more or less than the number that seem to have a spring in their step about finally getting laid again, and don’t seem much troubled by the fact that this flies in the face of the solemn vows they took years earlier?

And all of this has a lot to do with the leftist holiness signaling spirals that seem to characterize the early 21st century so vividly.

In order to gain status over one’s rivals, and signal ever greater fealty to the principles of progressivism, modern society has the need to change one’s opinion suddenly on all sorts of matters, firmly and publicly committing to the new zeitgeist and denouncing those not on board with the program. Cognitive dissonance being what it is, the targets of progressive ire are always those recalcitrants not on board with the current program today- the kulaks still to be beaten. The targets are definitely not the exact same progressives, like themselves, who in prior years held exactly the same views as the reactionaries they now denounce. Ever hear Bill Clinton being publicly seeking forgiveness for signing the Defence of Marriage Act? Ever hear liberals renounce themselves for voting for Barack Obama in 2008 when he opposed gay marriage, even as they renounce those who vote for politicians supporting religious conscience exceptions on gay marriage today?

The need to stay high status trumps the need to stick to one’s beliefs, so the old views get jettisoned. But part of one’s self-image is usually also that one is honest and upright, someone who believes things for good reasons, not a craven fool with no fixed principles who shifts his beliefs with the merest breeze of public opinion. And so having changed views, people are positively eager to forget that they ever held their previous views. Since bare facts about the world are also easy to manipulate in the service of self-image, this turns out to not be hard to do.

As part of my low level troll’s entertainment of provoking leftist cognitive dissonance, I enjoy sometimes asking progressives enamored of the latest fashion, such as transgender bathroom rights, exactly when they started caring about this issue, and why. They almost never have an answer to this. It may be only two years ago, but their mental distortions of ego-preservation are such that these origins are shrouded in mystery, and their own previous worldview is utterly inaccessible to them. What they think now, they must surely have always thought. The alternative would be to admit that their motive for joining this latest moral imperative (even if the current stance is presumed to be correct and virtuous) in fact rests with far baser motives – following fashions, fear of being denounced themselves, signaling their virtue.  And admitting this would defeat the whole purpose.

Sure, when pressed, they can’t think of any actual conversations they held or actions they took on the crucial issue of bathroom policy before, say, 2014. But this was only because they simply hadn’t yet fully comprehended the scale of the injustice. This lack of comprehension until the New York Times came knocking might itself seem to be a blight on their moral record, but rest assured this kind of introspection is highly unusual, and nobody but the most reactionary cynics like myself is in a hurry to point it out either.

Provoking cognitive dissonance is fun, but it won’t change anyone’s mind. If you want to at least have a chance at that, you can’t fight self-image, you need to use it to your advantage. This is the judo strategy – using an opponent’s own momentum against him.

One way to do this is to force progressives to consider that they may not always be the one getting to do the judging, and will one day themselves be the judged.

In other words, take a progressive interlocutor, and ask them the following hypothetical:

Progressive causes change over time. For a long time, nobody cared about gay marriage, then all of a sudden they did. That’s fine. Let’s merely posit the following – that this process will continue. In other words, in 20 or 30 years’ time, it seems likely that progressives will have found some new moral point that they care about passionately, but which people today don’t care about at all. Who knows what it will be specifically, but assume that they will feel about it as strongly then as you, my progressive friend, feel about gay marriage now, and they will see the absence of this cause as a huge injustice. If you need to make it concrete, pick fringe views on some cultural trait and substitute it as needed as the possible change –allowing polygamy or adult incest, breaking up the family unit, lowering the age of consent to 12, mandating veganism, whatever. To be ideal, it has to be something wacky that you’ve probably never thought of, like giving the vote to children, rather than something you’ve already encountered like veganism.

So our progressive of 30 years’ time feels as strongly about this as you do today about gay marriage. You, on the other hand, believe everything that you currently do today. They will view you exactly the same way that you view people who opposed gay marriage in 1986 – as unbelievably hateful and bigoted, part of a society-wide cruelty that is almost unfathomable.

And at last, we have our question. Who’s right in this argument about voting ages or adult incest? Are you, dear progressive, hateful, bigoted and disgusting in ways you don’t even understand today, on issues that you’ve barely given any thought to, for reasons you can’t yet guess? Or is the progressive of 30 years’ time merely taking on extreme views that disrupt a reasonable and understandable social compromise today?

If it’s the latter, are you willing to commit every one of your current views to paper (no matter how infrequently you ponder them) for all the world’s future employers to see, and defend them when the social zeitgeist changes? You might get to be the Brendan Eich of 2025, fired for having an insufficient commitment back in 2016 to the cause of extending US citizenship to everyone on the planet or whatever.

At this point, one is left with only a few options.

Either one actually writes a blank moral cheque to the progressives of the future and says ‘Yes, I am hateful! I am bigoted in ways I don’t even understand! Forgive me, President Chelsea Clinton!’.

Or one admits that these changing views are not actually crucial moral issues, but in fact moral fads and fashions that people follow for reasons other than the inherent justice of the causes at issue. This, if acknowledged, begins the descent down a rabbit hole that ends up a long way from modernity.

Or one says ‘No, I’m pretty comfortable with how society is currently arranged, and don’t wish to upend everything for the whims of the progressive elite of the future’.

In the third instance, congratulations. You’re now a gay marriage opponent in 1986.

Whether this will actually change minds, of course, is far more doubtful. But I have gotten flashes of introspection out of this line of questioning, which may at least somewhat cause them to think twice about the next great trend. That’s the hope, anyway. The path to understanding is rocky and circuitous.