Isegoria

Socialism is a fundamentally aristocratic movement, Mencius Moldbug argues:

Finally, we need to recognize perhaps the most distinctive and subtle quality of socialism, which is that socialism (again in origin, though this quality disappears in the nasty end stages) is a fundamentally aristocratic movement. Moreover, it is aristocratic in the Carlylean sense: the actual meaning of the word, rule of the best. Socialism, always in origin and perpetually in the true democratic state which still contains a competing Right, is the alliance of the smartest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most beautiful.

The Left is the faction of the professors, the scientists and the scholars, the cognitive elite. It is the faction of the true ultra-rich, the old money, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Fords, and their trustafarian hipster junkie grandchildren. It is the faction of the journalists and the bureaucrats, the activists and astroturfers — the wielders of power. And, of course, it is the faction of movie stars and other celebrities, who for all their flaws have climbed a long greasy pole. The closer you get to the top in a democratic society, the more pervasive socialism becomes.

So Carlyle said to his readers: England is going to the dogs. A new aristocracy is needed to replace the old, stultified, dying hereditary caste of land and title. This must be an aristocracy of merit and service — a true nobility. It must cast aside the dogmas of laissez-faire and be unafraid to govern, to garden, to intervene and improve.

And indeed, the Christian Socialism of the Fabians and Progressives, rooted not only in Carlyle but in Ruskin and Morris and Dickens, developed precisely along these lines. Its goal was to improve society, both physically and morally, through the energy and nobility of the State. And indeed it outcompeted all major competitors. There is no school of Carlyleans today, but every school that isn’t a madrassa in Qom is a school of progressivism.

And the trouble was: it was all wrong. The results were exactly opposite the original intent. The poor were not morally uplifted and converted into gentlemen; they were degraded and converted into savages. A new underclass of unprecedented human degeneration appeared below the proletariat. The New Jerusalem did not arrive. New Babylons, new Haitis, new Armageddons beyond words, enormous Megatherions all, slithered up on their great bellies.

Probably the closest most Americans have come to idealizing slavery, Mencius Moldbug says, without of course knowing it, is in the good press that large Japanese corporations once got for maintaining a policy of lifetime employment:

Lifetime employment and slavery are, of course, practically synonyms, and indeed the same phenomena of reciprocal loyalty and dependency were said — repeatedly, in my memory, in the ’90s on NPR — to emerge. Right down to the company uniform and song.

He considers this a “Carlylean” bond, although a rather weird one to the Western eye.

When we abandon our centrism, Mencius Moldbug argues, we see that there are only two logically consistent choices for our political belief — Carlyle and Alinsky:

What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right, which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the direction of increasing disorder. It is especially valuable to have a clear definition of this polarization, which seems to have evolved independently so many times in history. David Axelrod would surely get along with the Gracchi, and Pinochet with Sulla.

Since most people do not know the Carlylean theory of order, but most do know the Alinskyist theory of disorder (I won’t be surprised if my daughter is introduced to “activism” well before kindergarten), there is an obvious temptation here. The temptation is to derive the Carlylean theory by simply reversing its equally-uncompromising Alinskyist dual. Thus, everything bad is good, and so on. For example, the ultimate act of good government is to shoot into a mob.

While this approach can be useful in an absolute emergency, I would encourage readers to at least be very careful with it. The practice of defining the Right by reversing the Left can lead one to idolize persons and practices who, in the true Carlylean cosmos, are quite unworthy. It is definitely not for the apprentice necromancer or candidate Sith Lord.

The case of democracy, Mencius Moldbug argues, is a case in which the jury has heard only from the defense:

Year after year, generation after generation, democracy’s lawyers trot out an ever-changing dog’s breakfast of alibis, character witnesses and Harvard scientists, all singing one tune: the ironclad innocence and stellar nobility of the defendant, who is no more and no less than Gotham’s finest citizen. As for the prosecutor, his corpse has been rotting in the men’s room for years. Sometimes the bailiff, who has a ninth-grade education, a Tennessee accent and a drinking problem, picks up a few pages from his brief and reads them out of order.

But is the trial over? It is all but over. The jury is utterly sold. If they could adjourn and assign the defendant the keys to Gotham for life, they would. They are not even aware that there is a trial. They think they’re deciding whether to award a gold medal or a platinum one. But alas: the verdict of history is never, ever in.

When Thomas Carlyle — the reactionary who called economics the “dismal science” — passed away in 1881, Walt Whitman — America’s radical “poet of democracy” — declared that British thought without Carlyle would be like an army without artillery.

Odd. Mencius Moldbug takes this as a jumping off point for discussing why Carlyle matters — and why most of us have heard little or nothing about him:

People still read Whitman, but not Carlyle. There’s a reason for this. It’s not necessarily a good reason.

Because Whitman’s point of view — about as close as it comes to NPR avant la lettre — is so easy for the good citizen of 2009 to masticate, his introduction to Carlyle may be the best available. You see, the basic reason Carlyle is not in your high-school English reader, whereas Whitman is, is that Carlyle was what, here at [Mencius Moldbug's own blog, Unqualified Reservations], we call a reactionary. (Whereas Whitman is a progressive, or in 19th-century parlance a radical.)

Let us examine Whitman’s introduction to Carlyle:

All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were distasteful to [Carlyle] from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were marvellous.

For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate aim of political and all other development) — to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties — and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds — seem never to have entered Carlyle’s thought.

It was splendid how he refused any compromise to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most potent voice and figure, one seems to be carried back from the present of the British islands more than two thousand years, to the range between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of him:

He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers.

To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpassed conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect.

What was your reaction to Whitman’s argument against Carlyle?

Was that reaction, by any chance, “um?”, or “what?”, or “okay,” or “sure, I guess?”

For example, when Whitman castigates Carlyle for not realizing that democracy will “gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum,” or “perfect legislators and executives,” or (best of all) train its own voting citizens “on a large scale” to be every year wiser and more well-informed, did your soul leap up and shout: “very true, Mr. Whitman! And we of 2009 know just how true it is!”

Perhaps he lays on the sarcasm a bit thick, but it’s hard to deny that Whitman’s arguments are plainly wrong.

Mencius Moldbug urges a return to the classical European tradition of political thought:

This is a deeper, faster and colder river than the American democratic tradition, which largely rejects all pre-American political thought — even the Greeks and Romans, whose opinion of democracy was much the same as Carlyle’s. “Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons.” That would be you, O worshiper at the altar of the People.

Libertarians, those who believe that minimal government is good government, should consider metrics for the weight of the State — and they might be surprised by what they find:

One obvious such metric is the ratio of governors to governed, ie, civil servants to serfs.

And who is the grand champion in this category? I have not run the numbers — but one strong candidate must be the British Raj, in which a century ago 250 million Indians were governed by 1000 Englishmen. Without computers, etc. If we could apply the same ratio to the New California, which admittedly is a big if, it would be the size of a large startup. Minimal enough for ya?

Mencius Moldbug enumerates the virtues and vices of libertarianism as a candidate for a replacement government after a “reboot”:

First: Libertarianism correctly identifies one pathological symptom of the 20th-century state: sovereign bloat. The government is way, way too big. It employs too many people, it intrudes into far too many things, it makes far too many rules. This cannot be healthy. It isn’t.

Second: Libertarianism is no mere geekfest, because it can claim genuine experience in power — broadly speaking, the middle to late 19th century in both Britain and the United States. Cobden and Bright were not victorious in all their causes, but certainly in many. Mill and Spencer were not Mao and Marx, but they were remarkably influential. For example, I know for a fact that San Francisco once had eleven independent, private cable car companies, so I know that private transportation systems can work in the real world.

Third: Libertarianism appeals to the most basic human political belief, the desire for personal independence. It is impossible to give words like freedom or liberty negative connotations. Thus, libertarianism should be popular as well as desirable.

Having acknowledged these virtues, let us see the vices.

First, libertarians often argue that libertarianism is a moral necessity. Through various Jesuitical tricks of the tongue, your Rothbardian is always deriving ought from is. The merits of Hume aside, I have seldom found this approach an effective means of proselytizing. You’ll note that socialists, too, believe that socialism is a moral necessity. There are a lot more socialists than libertarians.

Second, if we disregard the possibility that it is divinely ordained, libertarianism fails as a reboot vehicle because it is an outcome rather than a design. The assertion that the New California will be libertarian is like the statement that the bridge you are building will stay up. Will it? How do you plan to make it do so? The United States was supposed to be libertarian, too, and we see what happened to that.

Other than an unhealthy fascination with overlapping jurisdictions, an even more unhealthy fascination with actual anarchy, and a healthy distrust of democracy, libertarianism contains no ideas at all on the subject of constitutional design. It cannot be interpreted as an instruction sequence for a reboot.

Third, even as an outcome, libertarianism reduces to tautology. Suppose you are a libertarian. You must, therefore, believe that libertarianism is (generally) prudent government. That is, a prudent government is likely to be minimal and confine itself mostly to achieving security. I am happy to agree with this as well.

But in this case, why not just insist on the whole shebang — prudent government? If we can write some magic incantation that restrains the New California from any un-libertarian act, why not write the incantation slightly more broadly, and restrain it from any imprudent act? Is there some reason that one incantation would work, and another fail?

Fourth, you’ll note that libertarianism is a sort of formula for government. To the orthodox believer, whatever the question, free trade is always the answer. I will buy “generally,” but I will not buy “always.” Prudence does conflict with libertarianism, and prudence must win.

No job worthy of a human can be removed from human hands. And the task of governing is perhaps the most human of all, which is why Shakespeare wrote all those plays about kings. Show me someone with a formula which can replace a human, and I will show you a quack. To get any job done right, find people who are good at it, and give them both authority and responsibility. Government is not exempt from this basic observation.

But divided-authority regimes often find themselves adopting these quack formulas, because such organization is constantly in search of agreement between contending factions. It is always easier for A and B to agree on a decision formula, than to award the decision to A or B. Indeed, any division of authority involves some such formula — for instance, to implement Montesquieu’s good old separation of powers, we must define “legislative,” “judicial” and “executive.”

Fifth — and worst of all, though most subtly — libertarianism will always fail as a revolt against progressivism, because libertarianism contains, at its core, a shard of pure Left. This gives it power, or the semblance thereof. But it is a mistake, like using the Ring against Sauron, and just as fatal.

Cobden and Bright were Radicals, ie, leftists. The party of the left, on the bottom, or on the top is always the party of chaos. Out of power, it vandalizes; in power, it tyrannizes. All leftist ideologies generate power — the believer implicitly joins a coalition, whose goal is to wield collective force. This is basic chimpanzee politics.

Since the simplest form of power is the power to destroy, leftist forces tend to come to power in a a flurry of institutional destruction. But since some things do need destroying, it is easy to identify positive side effects of the process. This must not be mistaken for evidence that leftism is a good idea.

Manchester liberalism, as a branch of the English Radical tradition, was an ideology of the left. It generated its power through an economic attack on the old landed aristocracy of England, including any and all medieval economic and political survivals. Once that aristocracy, which had guided the sceptered isle to its position as the queen of nations, was fully vandalized and liberal intellectuals were firmly in the saddle, libertarianism no longer helped the Radicals achieve power, but prevented them from gaining more. It was thus a liability, not an asset, and thus it disappeared. So did Britain’s greatness, of course.

Mencius Moldbug describes government’s three general decision sources:

1. Popular Tradition – Republican
2. Corrupt Interests – Bipartisan
3. Official Expertise – Democratic

Briefly, he says, they all suck:

First source: popular tradition. Among uneducated white people, ie Republicans, there remains some hazy folk memory, vague, idealized and distorted, of the way California (and America in general) was governed when it was a synonym for prosperity etc. This tradition was once a governing tradition, equipped at the top end with an elite that had the talent and experience to rule. You can see it in, say, the McKinley administration, or as late as the Harding-Coolidge reaction. San Francisco is covered with wonderful, wildly incongruous, Late High American Fascist statuary from this era.

Regardless of their merits as a governing caste, the people who erected these statues are dead. Their modern equivalents, such as any are, are no one’s definition of a new ruling elite. Michael Savage is no Chauncey Depew. Any system of thought that must tailor its clothes, even reluctantly, to this audience is unlikely to turn out a suit that fits well on the truth.

Like the political thought of the late Unionist era, modern mainstream or “neo-” conservatism is an endless goldmine of truths, half-truths, insights, myths, and evasions. Conservatism can be very informative. It should not be swallowed as a pill. It requires processing and filtration. Like anything, however, it is easily believed in its entirety by fools. And a lot of fools vote.

The increasingly proletarian nature of the modern conservative movement produces a corresponding puerility, fatal to any attempt at sovereign gravitas. This pattern of prolation is seen everywhere in the late Right: the decline from Robert Taft to Sarah Palin, Enoch Powell to Nick Griffin, Metternich to Hitler, Sir Edward Carson to Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair. Is this the meme train you want to be on? Is this the mandate of heaven, or the manhole to hell?

Second source: corrupt interests. Venality is by no means inconsistent with good government — indeed, the quality of government in the UK seems to have declined almost in lockstep with personal conflicts of interest. Britannia became mistress of the world in an era in which both offices and elections were regularly bought and sold. Personal venality, for all its faults, tended to unify the interests of office and officeholder, and often increased responsibility.

But corruption today tends to consist of institutional conflicts of interest, which exhibit none of this benign quality. Besides, not even UR is perverse enough to idealize corruption. We will leave this decision source condemned by definition.

Third source: official expertise. By far the most significant source of decisions in the modern American system of government is something called public policy. In the 20th century, it was discovered that the task of governing, thought in all previous centuries to be an art requiring wisdom, talent and experience, is in fact a science, like chemistry or card-counting. This set of sciences is often described as the social sciences, a slippery name if I ever heard one.

For every class of decision a modern government makes, from diplomacy to economics to issuing fishing licences, there exists a caste of scholars in the social sciences, carefully selected for their race, gender, intelligence and/or political reliability, who use the methods of science — which, as you may know, split the atom and put a man on the moon, and is absolutely infallible — to divine the correct public policy. None of these professors is in any way, shape or form responsible for the success or failure of these policies — generally the latter. I swear I am not making this up.

Moreover, our scholars have mastered the instruments of public communication. They are treated as generally infallible sources by individuals known as journalists, who tell the public (or those of the public who still listen to them, rather than Michael Savage) what to think, hence how to vote.

This third decision source is in general the primary positive force in government today. Public-policy scholars generate a set of policy options, which can be promoted or resisted by the first two means. Even corruption, being sly by definition, inside the Beltway generally goes cloaked in the form of scientific public policy. Policy also flows into the legal system, of course, through the invisible cloaca of case law. Because its power is not seen as power per se, it can seep in through every crack.

It is here that we must part company with many of our naive, but reasonable, readers. If you are an educated progressive of normal, moderate opinions, you are probably operating under the belief that the basic problem with the system of government you observe, whose bad results are by now apparent to all, is that the third source (which is proper and legitimate) is constantly being thwarted and frustrated by the first and second (which are improper and illegitimate).

Au contraire, mon frère! America has been in the grips of the third source — the logothetes, the scientocrats, the professional planners of men — for three quarters of a century. The true rulers of our country are the professors, the journalists, the mandarins. Any feeble twitch of resistance from the continent squirming in their talons is promptly magnified, through these exquisitely sensitive and powerful information organs, into the most hideous and awful oppression. Leading you to the belief system above — so convenient to this mode of mastery.

And in this age — the age of the New Deal and the Brain Trust, neither yet ended — what has become of America? Well, for example, before the Brain Trust, Detroit was America’s fourth largest city. After 75 years of progressive public policy, it is a charred, savage ruin. Who, exactly, is responsible for this? Herbert Hoover? The Liberty League?

Inasmuch as the first and second sources — politics and corruption — have played a significant role in the period, that role has often been to moderate, test and restrain the river of lunacy flowing out of the ivory tower. But the net effect of these sources remains negative, because their continued existence — however minor — allows a regime which is predominantly that of public policy and social science to evade responsibility for its own epic incompetence, as demonstrated obviously and beyond any doubt by actual results.

While the continuity between John Stuart Mill and Barack Obama may not be obvious, Mencius Moldbug says — considering as their preferred policies are almost opposite — it is there:

The policies changed. But the movement is one. 19th-century Radicalism and 20th-century progressivism are unified by a single force: the collective quest for power.

19th-century Radicals favored libertarian policies because they faced an ancien regime which still, to some extent, existed. This was the old regime of Throne and Altar, of mercantilism, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism, imperialism and colonialism — in a word, Toryism.

When Toryism was a reality rather than a bugaboo, liberals could only seek power by destroying it. Thus they sought to cut off its air supply, destroying its sources of profit: protectionism, venal offices, chartered companies, and so forth. They favored rigorous economies of government, and other such ideals quite foreign to the modern liberal.

As they gained power through these aggressive measures, the liberals entered government itself. Thus their interests naturally shifted, toward enlarging and empowering the State. A State that had become “us,” rather than “them.” And thus, the Left went from libertarian to statist.

Thus when we look at policies, which as good democrats we should, we see a discontinuity. But when we look at power structures, which as good reactionaries we must, we see a continuity.

The key is to remember that the Left, at all times, is an adaptive phenomenon. If it were a conspiracy (organized by — the Jews) it would not be Left, but Right. Right is organized; Left is distributed.

The Left is the alliance of all those who seek power through the mind — intellectuals, basically. The Right is the factious and impotent collection of all those who seek to resist the Left, by any means — corruption, or violence, or propaganda, or (seldom, very seldom) the truth and nothing but the truth.

Thus, there was no one in 1900 who said “okay, guys, enough with the libertarianism, our work there is done. Now let’s bring on the statism.” At all times, the Darwinian dynamic of the Left has favored those ideas which brought their thinkers power.

In the 19th century (and before), that power was the power to destroy the ancien regime. Victory in this task naturally brought authority to the destroyers, who established a regime of their own. The ideas of power then became expansive ones, and liberalism pulled its 180.

Left-libertarian Michael Strong (Be the Solution) argues that liberal is neither Left nor Right and wishes that more Leftists would face up to illiberal Leftism’s failures. He cites lifelong-socialist Robert Heilbroner’s acknowledgment from near the end of his life:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that’s hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the ‘natural’ system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

Mencius Moldbug had always seen this quote cut off after the first sentence. He dubs the last bit Heilbroner’s Law.