America's Left and Right
by William Palumbo
The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America is thought to be a watershed in American politics. For many of his supporters, it represents a new beginning; indeed, according to President-elect Obama himself, now is the time for “a clean break from a troubled past.” Those words were used in his speech addressed at our current economic situation. How would the so-called right and left understand this, and what sort of watershed may we be expecting?
I do not believe it is presumptuous to assume that when most people imagine a “new course” they picture something positive like a sunrise; a new day in which we shall vanquish bad habits and unnecessary fetters at once. To his supporters on the Left, these emotional evocations or personal equivalents I presume are likely. Republicans, on the other hand, may view this as thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration; an attack on our recent past. While I feel quite confident that the Left’s New Day will turn stormy, the Right should be wary of dismissing Obama’s comments as pure political rhetoric.
When you cut through the argot of modern American politics a funny thing happens: Left and Right, as if dancing the tango, elegantly switch places, reverting back to their Continental roots. While this may appear a curious linguistic phenomenon, the obvious reason lies in our nation’s founding, partially a byproduct of the Enlightenment, or liberal, era. (Our founders, however and importantly, did not show the hostility towards God that characterizes Enlightenment thought and language.) To be a conservative American, therefore, implies a certain dedication to the principles of classically liberal society. Over the course of more than 200 years, American conservatives have added unique characteristics that contribute to our modern understanding of the word, including a strong, perhaps at time overly strident, insistence on politically supporting religion. Nevertheless, the Right in this country has much in common with the Continental Left, the commonality rooted in a respect for the individual.
Where then does the modern American Left derive its origins? There are many sources, but the most pertinent and dangerous ideology from which it spins its worldview is Continental Socialism, itself of French and German origin. The semantic confusion did not start with Americans; it was the European Socialists (and later Communists and Fascists) that perverted the original meanings of freedom, liberty, and equality. Whereas a classical liberal (and an American conservative) view these words from a perspective of negative freedoms, i.e., what government cannot do, the Socialist twists these words into a new, narrower ideology of economic security; in the American Liberal’s worldview, our rights are not negative, but positive: they are material comforts which government must provide. The provision of these comforts allows one to operate “freed” from the chains of material restraints. The European experience in the 20th century, with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and, although not geographically European but certainly European in their intellectual roots, the Russian Communists, is history’s completed experiment in centralized government planning of an economic system.
Many, particularly those on the American Left, would like to naively believe that socialism’s association with dictatorship, oppression, and war are superficial, strictly incidental and historical. Socialism, they contend, can flourish without these negative aspects, providing ample economic security to large populations by redistributing the wealth from those with “too much” to those with “too little.” Unquestionably I agree that stealing from a wealthy man and giving to his poor neighbor will improve the poor neighbor’s lot, though the morality of theft seems to me an undisputed violation of natural rights. To justify these immoral means, the Socialist focuses on the ends, and in doing so puts in motion a perpetual system of morally indefensible excuses that have a perverse appeal, primarily through perpetual class warfare.
What does this have to do with Obama’s promise? The prophet of the socialists and would be Communists was Karl Marx, a German economist who viewed history through his own specious “scientific” approach. To Marx, capitalism, with dependency on human freedom, was the last stage in economics before the final stage: Communism. Capitalism’s decline, that “break from a troubled past,” is inevitable because of the exploitation of labor, a paradox for classical economists; it is to be replaced with material equality under Communism. The American Left, either out of ignorance or expediency, does not recall that the end of capitalism means also the end of liberal society. Marx and other prominent socialist thinkers, as well as the Frenchman and classical liberal Alexis de Tocqueville, held that socialism and freedom are irreconcilable.
President Bush has, I contend, through his effective nationalization of the financial industry and its corollaries, unwittingly begun a transformation of American society from largely capitalist to socialist, and left his nascent, misguided policy in the hands of a man who appears, at least to my eyes and ears, an adherent to Marxism. American society is the freest, most tolerant, and most productive in world history. Is this tradition and lifestyle one from which we wish a clean break? The election of Obama may be a watershed, but not necessarily the one we want. We must stop Obama’s destruction of our economic system at every turn.