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So, you have probably seen the news about the former White House intern’s book about her relationship with President Kennedy. 

I hate reading about stuff like that. The only book I can recall reading that comes close to being described as a “tell-all” about such personal things is I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. He was one of my favorite singer/songwriters, and indeed it was a very interesting book, but I still felt dirty reading the parts about Zevon’s sordid personal life.

I believe that character does matter for politicians, don’t get me wrong. And when a current politician is found out to be involved in such a personal scandal, it is worthwhile to investigate, and the public deserves to know about it. The Newt Gingriches of the world may object, but such is the price you pay when running for office.

Some object on the grounds that this story is rather old news. Well, yes, but I like history, and I believe it’s important that the truth about historical events be told. I don’t believe in censoring such information to preserve people’s reputations. So, there’s no harm in bringing it up now.

But with all that said, it kind of bothers me that people are so fascinated by the story. I guess because it feels so shallow to me, I can’t help but feel that the press coverage of it is a bit much when you consider the relative unimportance of the story. It’s not like it’s news that Kennedy had affairs; it’s just news that now we have a detailed account of one of them. And frankly, I find it kind of weird that anyone would want the details.

It does, however, confirm my long-held opinion that Kennedy was rather overrated as a President. I always felt he was too cavalier about serious matters–e.g. nuclear war–and this kind of corroborates that. But there was plenty of evidence for that already, in my opinion.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post on the topic of the Civil War and slavery. He raises a lot of good questions and receives lots of interesting and useful comments. If you’re into history, it’s a pretty good read.

(And, for those interested, here is a post that I did a few weeks ago that touches on some points that are related both to these questions, and more directly, to Ron Paul’s general thoughts on the Civil War.)

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One of the things I have noticed in my reading about Otto von Bismarck–which is, let me emphasize, not at all thorough–is how much his style of politics reminds me of President Obama’s. He was a master of compromise, deal-making, and piecemeal political maneuvering. He was very pragmatic in his decision making, much as Obama is.

Politics nowadays are much less hospitable to this sort of thing than they were in Bismarck’s day. The motto of the Republican freshman class of 2010 was “No compromises.” There are fewer and fewer deal-makers in either executive or legislative capacities Such hard-line stances and theatricality are the hallmarks of politics today, and it is a small wonder; as I have said, such tactics favor the somewhat unpredictable charismatic authority of which Max Weber wrote. For instance, as described in a 1989 article by Peter Boyer:

The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders –permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But [Newt] Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, [Emphasis mine] began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority. 

At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House.

So do the politics of Weber’s “legal authority” give way to “charismatic authority”. (Frankly, though, Gingrich is not very charismatic. But he thinks he is.)

 The pragmatism, compromise and negotiation aspects of politics are not very interesting to people today, and so they do not pay attention to them, and so politicians do not emphasize them. Of course, it was not interesting to people in Bismarck’s time, either, but there was no medium like television to bias things in favor of the charismatic. Thus, people’s judgments were based more on who accomplished what.

It is also the case that Bismarck functioned in a very different political environment than does Obama. It was not a democratic state, and Bismarck was himself was fairly hostile to democracy. The pool of people who could elect or appoint Bismarck to things was far smaller than the same is for Obama. Yet, the art of politics as practiced by both men seems to me to be very similar. Bismarck may have been accountable only to the Kaiser, whereas Obama is accountable to the entire U.S. voting population, but in terms of what they each had to do to keep their employers happy, they use much the same techniques of statesmanship.

What’s interesting about Obama is that he is also a very charismatic man, but still seems to have a very calculating and realistic mind. This is a very rare quality, as most charismatic politicians rely purely on their instincts, their passion, for their power, and as such seem like “loose cannons” to all those not taken in by their personalities. Sarah Palin is an example of this.

Another way of combining charisma and technocratic maneuvering is simply to have one person specialize in the former and one in the latter running on the same ticket. This was basically what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did. Bush provided the charismatic “everyman” charm to get elected, Cheney provided the political know-how to accomplish their ideological goals once in office.

Such a method is effective, or at least, it would have been effective if their ideology itself had been more sound. As it was, it paved, the way for six years of Republican dominance. (After the 2006 election, they lost  much of their ability to implement their agenda.) 

The point is that Obama is actually, in a sense, a much older style of politician than we ordinarily see, even though he appears to rely on his charisma for his appeal. And obviously, Obama is very different ideologically and morally from Bismarck. I am addressing only his technique as a statesman here.

Lastly, I want to remind readers again that I am only an amateur historian, and therefore may be mistaken about things. If I have made any error or debatable assertion, please tell me in the comments. Benjamin Disraeli and William Thomson are both claimed to have said: “The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.” I write these posts mainly in the hope that a blog post is the second or third best way.

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I loved the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Dead Money, which is about a heist in an ancient casino called the “Sierra Madre”. I therefore assumed it was based on the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which I’ve heard about but never seen. However, Dead Money writer Chris Avellone tweeted when someone asked him about this that it was based more on the book that inspired the movie.

I hadn’t even known that the movie was based on a book. So, I decided to find out about the book, and maybe pick it up if it sounded good. But then, I got to reading about the book’s author, “B. Traven“. His life is quite fascinating–or more accurately, the theories about what it might have been like are. It seems he was something of a mysterious man. (I guess I should know, right?)

I won’t attempt to summarize all the ideas people have about who he might have been, but it’s quite intriguing. I don’t know how much of it is common knowledge to you, but I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about something so interesting before.

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Here’s an extensive and fascinating article by Peter Birkenhead at Salon about Confederate nostalgia. I’ve been thinking of doing a post about this topic for some time now, but it’s going to take me a while to write it. In the meantime, though, this is a very interesting piece.

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After the Industrial Revolution, people began to wonder if there wasn’t something that could be done about all the poor working people around. Some people thought it was cruel that humans should suffer so; other people thought it ruined the look of things for all the non-poor people. But the point is that people decided that perhaps something ought to be done about all this poverty–usually something in the way of redistributing wealth somehow. Most of these people ended up being called “Socialists”. These Socialists then organized to try to take political power.


Take the case of Germany. In the late 1800s, Otto von Bismarck was facing a political threat from the socialists. So, what did he do? According to Wikipedia—which is, of course, not a valid source, but I shall use it anyway—he “introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance.”

He did this to thwart the Socialists, and it seems he succeeded. Nevertheless, if the point of socialism really is to improve life for the poor workers, it would appear that this was actually a victory for socialism. Maybe it wasn’t everything they had hoped for, but it was better than what they had had before. 

Does this make Bismarck a socialist? Before answering, notice the similarity to the case of Theodore Roosevelt recently under discussion on this blog. In broad strokes, it seems to me that both the circumstances and the policies of Roosevelt and Bismarck are practically identical. 

The Socialists were against Bismarck the whole time, and this is certainly a major piece of evidence against his Socialism. Indeed, the fact that the Socialists and T.R. disliked one another was how the John Nichols Nation article exonerated him of Socialism.

Bismarck and Roosevelt both professed to be totally against the Socialists. But of course, they could have been lying. Politicians often say things like “I am not a crook!” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” when these things are not true.

And unlike those lies, where some actual objective evidence can prove them to be lying, in this case the question is purely a matter of what is in their minds. No one but Bismarck and Roosevelt can tell for sure what they really thought of socialism.

Of course, even if they both secretly thought that socialism was the best thing that could happen to the world, they probably didn’t secretly belong to a Socialist party. Thus, there can be no smoking gun to prove that they were Socialists.

All that they can be judged on are their actions. In both cases, their actions served to weaken the political faction called “Socialists”. However, they might also be said to have advanced the political philosophy called “socialism”. The only way to prevent the Socialists from getting power was to give them some of what they wanted. Bismarck himself is supposed to have said “Politics is the art of the possible.”

Actually, that isn’t the only way to prevent socialists getting power. There is also the General Pinochet way, which is to kill them. Pinochet may have been the most anti-socialist politician in the history of the world, because he took his economic policy from the Libertarians and his police policy from the Fascists. 

Pinochet is useful because he is the very model of an anti-Socialist. Bismarck and Roosevelt clearly both fall short of the Pinochet standard. True, they frowned upon–even regarded as illegal–the actions of August Bebel and Eugene Debs, respectively, but unlike Pinochet did with his Socialists, they did not actively work to eradicate their policies. They did not implement them either, but rather they compromised with them.

If you deal in absolutes, like American Icons Darth Vader and Ayn Rand did, then Bismarck and Roosevelt are both socialists, because they compromised with socialism and thus must be forever designated “Socialists”. Any compromise is evil, in this view.

On the other hand, if you don’t do that, you’d have to conclude that they were at most moderate socialists, and maybe that they weren’t socialists at all, but were just put in a difficult position. And you’d probably say they handled it fairly well, all things considered.

The conclusion I reach is that they both were moderately friendly towards the socialist philosophy, but not the Socialist party. What does this ultimately mean? Well, to begin with, it suggests the possibility, horrifying to some, that there may have been something in that socialism stuff.


Socialists would say that this is so, and that things would have turned out even better for Bismarck and Roosevelt if they had only had the guts to go “Full Socialist”, instead of these puny half-measures. Others would say instead that this proves the triumph of “centrism” and compromise.

In the end it’s difficult to really people under terms like “socialist” or “capitalist”. As the character Kreia says in the game Knights of the Old Republic II, when asked if she is a Jedi or a Sith: “such titles allow you to break the galaxy into light and dark. Categorize it. Perhaps I am neither, and I hold both as what they are: pieces of a whole.”


NOTES

Much of the information in this post concerning Pinochet and Bismarck is based on my reading of Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money.

Apologies for the fonts being messed up on this post. I’m not sure what happened there.

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John Nichols at The Nation writes of how Fox News dealt with Obama echoing Theodore Roosevelt in a speech. In brief, some Fox pundits asserted that Roosevelt was a socialist. Nichols writes in rebuttal:

“Roosevelt, in his ‘New Nationalism’ speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, did outline an agenda that supported the establishment of programs like Social Security and Medicare, protections against discrimination, union rights and expanded democracy. In effect, he was arguing for what, under his fifth cousin, Franklin, would come to be known as “the New Deal.”

Some of those proposals were promoted by the Socialist Party in the early years of the twentieth century, which certainly made arguments in its platforms for safety-net programs. But so, too, did moderate Republicans and Democrats. After the ‘Gilded Age’ of robber barons and corporate monopolies, there was mainstream support for tempering the excesses of laissez faire capitalism.”

The people who have been called “socialists” have many different ideas, and the major commonality I can see is a belief that something ought to be done to alleviate poverty. If this is the definition, then Roosevelt was a socialist. If, on the other hand, socialism means wanting the workers to seize the factors of production then Roosevelt was not a socialist. And if socialism is believing that the government should reallocate resources–as many Conservatives seem to think it is these days–then Roosevelt, along with virtually every other person in history who ever ran a country, was definitely a socialist.

Still, it is significant that Roosevelt’s policies were similar to those of socialists at the time. Maybe he was merely a pragmatist, and found that the easiest way to thwart radical socialism was to allow for moderate socialism. Does that make him a socialist? I don’t know; I think it makes him a practical politician.

To my mind, T.R. was something of a market socialist, though I think before anything else he just wanted a powerful United States, and was just willing to do what it took to make that happen. I don’t think he was really invested in socialism. But I will admit that, on the face of it, the “New Nationalism” agenda seems like it have made the country closer to being Socialist than it had been previously.

You may decide for yourself if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

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This post is going to be a little different from what I normally do. Usually, when writing about history especially, I try to research things very carefully before I post them. This time, however, I can’t really do that because what I want to talk about is so complex a subject it would take me a whole career’s worth of work to be sure of everything.

Instead, I’m just going to use the facts I already know, and give my opinion on this subject as an amateur student of history. If you find errors, please point them out to me in the comments. I realize I’m risking making an idiot out of myself, but in my (again, amateurish) reading, I’ve come to have one or two ideas. Obviously, if I find any information in the future which contradicts what I say here, I shall correct it ASAP.

Now then, let’s talk about the Soviet Union. Conservatives I know frequently point to it as what happens when “leftism” runs amok. Are they right?

First of all, as some readers may know, I try to ignore the right-left spectrum and examine politics using the framework of Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Materialism.  But where does the Soviet Union fit in to this model?

Let me begin by saying that Karl Marx’s theory was anti-nationalistic and, in the sense I mean it, anti-materialistic. While it is true Marx called his philosophy a “materialist conception of history”, what I mean by “anti-materialist” is that he opposed the concentration of material wealth through greedy, capitalistic means. He sought rather to redistribute material wealth to improve people’s lives. As he and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

“[A]s soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” 

And as they wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got…

National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

This mixture of anti-greed and anti-nationalism immediately put his philosophy at a strategic disadvantage, for it was forced to combat both of these forces at once. However, it was fundamentally a cosmopolitan, universalist endeavor, to improve life for people the world over. This was the motivating idea even after Marxism had taken over Russia and formed the Soviet Union. The anthem “The Internationale” signified this, as did the slogan “Workers of the World, unite!”

But then something very interesting happened. In the 1920s, Mussolini was getting lots of attention for his system of “fascism”. As Jonah Goldberg (among others) pointed out in one of those rare correct observations that make him such a frustrating writer, Mussolini had dreamed up fascism when he noticed that appealing to nationalism made it more popular than adhering to the usual internationalist tendencies.

I don’t think this escaped Stalin for one minute. He noticed what Mussolini was doing and began to imitate him. Fascism swept Europe in the ’30s, and the Soviet Union was not spared, though it tried to seem as if it had been.

It was Stalin, then, who fundamentally destroyed any meaning Communism may have had; by changing it into more of a Russian-nationalist movement. By shifting the nature of the State to what was essentially an ultra-collectivist form of what we might today call “fascism”, Stalin rendered it a mere exercise in the pursuit of Power, without real philosophical significance. It was not quite an ultranationalist movement, given Marx’s foundation, but nor was it an international movement. After Stalin took power, it was similar to many of the other governments in Europe at the time, but unlike Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, its leader was not even “honest” about its true nature.

(It was for these Nationalist reasons, also, that Leon Trotsky was exiled from the party. Trotsky remained a committed Internationalist kind of Marxist, and hence had no place in Stalin’s Government.)

This led to all sorts of confusion, especially in the way of liberal intellectuals feeling a need to defend (or deny) certain actions taken by the Soviet Union despite the fact that it really wasn’t on their side.

Nationalists will claim I am only saying this to excuse the cosmopolitans from responsibility, to claim that they do not deserve blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. They will claim that I am using a tautological reasoning system whereby all people who do bad things are automatically, by the fact itself, nationalists.

Well, I have deliberately tried not to do this. There were genuinely internationalist communists who committed atrocities. And the Communist system seems to lead almost inevitably to authoritarian systems of government, whatever Marx may have intended. And those sorts of systems usually lead to atrocities, no matter who is in charge.

Those who wish to point to the Soviet union as a failure of the “left-wing” may still do so, for it was a cosmopolitan idea that gave it philosophical power. However, in the event, it was a failure largely because of its susceptibility to being taken over by nationalistic forces.

What if there hadn’t been any nationalist shift? What if Trotsky had gotten rid of Stalin? Would it have been a Heaven on Earth, as some people desperately wanted it to be? Very unlikely. It is clear that the allocation of resources under the Communist system was very flawed. This would have been a problem, sooner or later, no matter who was running the show. Might there have been fewer casualties resulting from the Soviet Union’s actions? Possibly so.

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Foolishly, I watched the Republican debate last night. There was little of interest said, but perhaps the most useless question was about Newt Gingrich’s statement that the Palestinians are an “invented people”.

First of all, this statement has almost no relevance to anything. The group that calls themselves “Palestinians” will continue doing what they have been doing, regardless of what Gingrich says. Gingrich said that the Palestinians “are in fact Arabs”. Well, that doesn’t alter anything meaningful. In that case, the people formerly known as Palestinians will just say it’s part of Arabia and that “Arabia’s for the Arabs”. (Where have I heard that before?)

But what is an “invented people”? Perhaps an even better question is: what is a non-invented people? For instance, you could argue that Americans are an “invented people”, coming as they do from all different parts of the world. One might even wonder if the American identity was invented so the colonists with an interest in opposing the British Empire could have a label to unite under. But that would be very cynical, so I will not pursue it.

I am hard-pressed to think of a people that was not, to some extent, “invented” for the purpose of presenting a united front in pursuit of something. That does not mean that all such groups are equal, of course, because some groups have been united in the pursuit of noble goals, and others in the pursuit of ignoble ones, but whether “a people” is invented and what it was invented for are completely different questions.

President Reagan, who is much admired by all the participants in the Republican debate, including Gingrich, once said:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” 

Just so. People will unite when faced with an external threat, or, if not a threat, then a common problem. Arabs who may have very little common may easily be united by their shared desire to take what land Israel currently possesses. This does not, of course, make them “right” or “legitimate” or in any way give them some sort of moral advantage. But they are going to do it anyway, so to actually solve the problem requires a bit more serious thought than Gingrich seems to have applied.

I’m pretty sure you will come to the same conclusion regardless of your opinion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It does not matter whether they are an invented people or not. No matter what your answer to this is, it changes nothing about the actual situation. Newt Gingrich’s statement is almost meaningless, except that it reveals he doesn’t much like the Palestinians, which everyone already knew, because that is a standard Republican position.

Which begs the question: why is everyone talking about it?

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I have never actually read an entire work by Oscar Wilde. I’ve read quotes of his, like everyone has, but never an entire piece by him. So, I decided to fix that and so I read his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism recently.

It’s an excellent work, and somewhat depressingly, seems but for a few topical references like it could have been written yesterday.  Granted, it is very idealistic, perhaps even naïve, in the ease with which he forecasts creating a socialist Utopia, but the problems he identifies are quite familiar.

It is curious to compare Wilde’s line of thinking about the importance of alleviating poverty to free people for artistic endeavors, and the use of welfare today. For instance, I understand that Britain has been undergoing welfare reform similar to that implemented in this country by President Clinton. The emphasis in these reforms is placed on increasing incentives to work, and ensuring that those on welfare take jobs.

I am not sure what Wilde would think of this. This passage from his essay, in particular, springs to mind:

“I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”

(As George Orwell pointed out in his review of this essay, in the 20th century Socialists did just this.)

The point of welfare reform is to see to it that welfare is a stop-gap measure to help people out while they try to go back to work. That’s not the goal Wilde had when he looked at poverty. Not that I wish to imply he’s right. He was an idealistic, dreamer/poet. And he’s been dead for over a century. It may very well be that the people reforming welfare have a better idea of how a modern society ought to work than Wilde did.

Wilde wanted people to be free to exercise their minds and imaginations; to be freed from the pain of poverty to use their minds. He wanted to cultivate an artistic and intellectual society through socialism; and more specifically, the abolition of private property.

But, of course, we know better nowadays. The abolition of private property does not usher forth a Utopia, it only destroys incentives. The part of Wilde’s essay in which he warns “If the Socialism is Authoritarian… then the last state of man will be worse than the first” is, ironically, a description of the Soviet Union thirty years before it was created.  Clearly, if nothing else, socialists utterly failed at the implementation phase. At worst, their plans were inherently flawed.

So, as I see it, there are two facts that emerge from this essay. Firstly, it seems, in my opinion, to describe problems which are still visible in the world at present. Secondly, it proposes solutions which we, knowing what Wilde could not, recognize as either impractical or not solutions at all.

Which leaves only the questions: are the problems outlined by Wilde still present in modern society and if so, what other solutions are there?

P.S. It may also interest readers to compare the ideas in Wilde’s essay with those espoused by the bygone authors discussed in this post.