A few weeks back, I received an email from an old friend who wanted my opinion on something he had been told by a neighbor: his neighbor informed him that John Kerry was “a Communist.” I didn’t know how to respond at first.
I wasn’t sure if my friend was genuinely curious about whether there could be some truth to this accusation or had written to point out how bizarre things can get during a political campaign. I talked to him by phone a few days later and discovered it was the latter. Whew! I don’t have to worry about him going around the bend.
John Kerry a Communist? Egads. He and his wife live like European aristocrats, in a world of plush mansions and yachts, off money both of them married into. Still, this is an issue that is worth some discussion. One hears the “Communist” label thrown about carelessly quite often, especially from callers on talk-radio shows. I have heard it applied to Susan Sarandon, George Soros, Jane Fonda, the Clintons and a host of Hollywood-types.
I don’t mind political short-hand. No one expects us to go into a lengthy dissertation every time we use the terms left and right, conservative and liberal. But making the charge that someone is a Communist without proof is counter-productive. It makes the accuser look kooky. The culture wars must be waged intelligently as well as vigorously.
Am I saying there are no Communists in positions of influence in the United States? No. There are many Marxists on the faculties of our universities, especially in the history and social science departments. But some other label is required for the political and media figures we are talking about. All leftists share certain beliefs and aspirations with Marxists, traceable to their common Enlightenment roots. But not all of them subscribe to the specific view of history and vision for the future that define what it means to be a Communist.
Actually, it would not even be accurate to call the “progressives” in Hollywood and Washington “democratic socialists.” While these folks are willing to accept a higher level of taxation for their favorite social programs, they aren’t about to grant the government the power to expropriate their bank accounts and redistribute them to the poor. Can you picture Jane Fonda or Ted Kennedy signing on to the idea that they and their heirs will live in government housing projects and stand in line with the masses for whatever medical treatments the government can fit into its budget? Where would tummy tucks and chin lifts be slotted on that list?
Hollywood enjoys its limousines too much to be plotting to bring about a day when proletarian mobs take to the streets to expropriate the private property of the upper classes. In a revolution of the proletariat, wealthy homes in Georgetown, Chappaqua and Aspen would be among the first to go. George Soros has no intention of seeing his penthouses transformed into rooftop basketball courts.
Nor do most of them share the atheistic convictions that are at the heart of Marxism. Except for Soros, I can’t think of many prominent people on the Left who express an outright hostility toward religion. On the contrary, they tend to praise religious belief when it manifests itself in support for their preferred social programs. The Left reacted in a positive way to the religious element in the careers of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr. and war protestors such as the Berrigan brothers. Their hostility for religion is reserved for those times when religious convictions threaten their agenda, such as on abortion and homosexual marriage. An informed Marxist, on the other hand, would oppose religion at all times, as a matter of principle.
There is one area where the trendy leftists agree with Marxists: They share an animus against the nation-state system and a preference for world government. But a preference for world federalism does not make you a Marxist, not in and of itself. For Marxists, the end of the nation-state system has to be part of the world revolution carried out by the “workers of the world” and their dictatorship of the proletariat. Soros and the Clintons want people like Kofi Annan and UN bureaucrats managing their world federalist system, not the leaders of trade unions and factory workers.
So, where does this leave us? If these trendy elites aren’t Marxists, what are they? There must be some explanation for why they reflexively blame America first, favor greater government control of the economy and oppose traditional values. Consider the following, from George Orwell’s essay on James Burnham. Orwell is summarizing Burnham’s description in The Managerial Revolution of the rise to power in the 20th century of a new ruling class, one that will replace the aristocrats of Europe’s old order. This new elite wants to reshape the world, for what it considers idealistic motives, but its members have no intention of relinquishing their money and power as part of the process. They are not egalitarians; they are not Marxists. They champion a hierarchy, what they consider an aristocracy of talent that will give them the power to remake the world to their liking. Of them, Orwell said:
Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society…will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
Orwell continues:
Burnham…maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or “the classless society,” or “the Kingdom of Heaven on earth,” are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves.
To illustrate his point, Orwell calls our attention to how left-wing intellectuals made excuses for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is, he argues, a phenomenon that speaks volumes:
If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly Russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the “managerial” class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the USSR and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English Russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.
Is Burnham right? At the very least, he offers us an explanation for how people with great wealth and power can spend their lives talking about sharing their wealth and decentralizing power when they have no intention of doing either. And for why the champions of freedom of expression became the enforcers of political correctness once they took charge of our universities: they got their hands on the whip.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)