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The Revolution Was by Garet Garrett
I never said they weren't better off. I simply said that they still have problems even with capitalism and a free-market economy. And they are still lagging behind Western Europe.
Me personally, I say long live communism. It is a novel idea, but I hope that free-market US type economies and societes don't dominate the world, because if they do, the world would be polluted and exhausted within 5 years at best. Our current economic and societal model is unsustainable even with just one US.
The Revolution Was by Garet Garrett
(cough) Nock (cough)
The welfare-warfare state has dominated American politics for some time. What defines the demarcation between the two main political factions in this country is either a greater affinity for welfare or for warfare. Heretics in either party are those who diminish the import of the party's main affinity or who express sympathy for the other party's main cause de celebre. Those who see socialism at the gate ignore that which is covered with moss and now considered an American ins ution behind them. Those who see a frightening new epoch in American history with a hard militarist turn ignore the last six decades. All in all it would be amusing if it weren't so painfully real.
A simply outstanding essay. Thanks for posting this, MB.
Until it was too late few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: "Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law... so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Cons ution and within the forms of law."
Not even a New Dealer any longer maintains that the four steps directly involving gold, namely, the seizure of it, the repudiation of the government's gold contracts, then the confiscation of the gold, and lastly the devaluation of the dollar, were necessary merely as measures toward national recovery. In the history of the case there is no more dramatic bit of testimony than that of Senator Glass, formerly Secretary of the Treasury, who in April, 19', rose from a sick bed and appeared in the Senate to speak against the Inflation Amendment. He said:
"I wrote with my own hand that provision of the national Democratic platform which declared for a sound currency to be maintained at all hazards.... With nearly 40 per cent of the entire gold supply of the world, why are we going off the gold standard? With all the earmarked gold, with all the securities of ours they hold, foreign governments could withdraw in total less than $700,000,000 of our gold, which would leave us an ample fund of gold, in the extremest case, to maintain gold payments both at home and abroad.... To me the suggestion that we may devalue the gold dollar 59 per cent means national repudiation. To me it means dishonor. In my conception of it, it is immoral... There was never any necessity for a gold embargo. There is no necessity for making statutory criminals of citizens of the United States who may please to take their property in the shape of gold or currency out of the banks and use it for their own purposes as they may please. We have gone beyond the cruel extremities of the French, and they made it a capital crime, punishable at the guillotine, for any tradesman or individual citizens of the realm to discriminate in favor of gold and against their printing press currency. We have gone beyond that. We have said that no man may have his gold, under penalty of ten years in the penitentiary or $10,000 fine."
And when the "gold eases" went to the United States Supreme Court — the unreconstructed court — the judgment was one that will he forever a blot on a certain page of American history. The Court said that what the government had done was immoral but not illegal. How could that he? Because the American government, like any other government, has the sovereign power to commit an immoral act. Until then the American government was the only great government in the world that had never repudiated the ward engraved upon its bond.
"We must hate," said Lenin. "Hatred is the basis of Communism." It is no doubt the basis of all mass excitement. But Lenin was not himself the master propagandist. How shall the forces of hatred be mobilized? What are the first principles? These are questions that now belong to a department of political science.
The first principle of all is to fix the gaze of hatred upon one object and to make all other objects seem but attributes of that one, for otherwise the force to be mobilized will dissipate itself in many directions.
This was expounded by Hitler in Mein Kampf, where he said: "It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category. As soon as the wavering masses find themselves confronting too many enemies objectivity at once steps in and the question is raised whether actually all the others are wrong and their own cause or their own movement right.... Therefore a number of different internal enemies must always be regarded as one in such a way that in the opinion of the mass of one's own adherents the war is being waged against one enemy alone. This strengthens the belief in one's own cause and increases one's bitterness against the attackers."
Lasswell and Blumenstock, in World Revolutionary Propaganda, define propaganda as "the manipulation of symbols to control controversial at udes." Symbols they define as "words and word subs utes like pictures and gestures." And the purpose of revolutionary propaganda "is to arouse hostile at udes toward the symbols and practices of the established order."
It may be however that people are so deeply attached by habit and conscience to the symbols of the established order that to attack them directly would produce a bad reaction. In that case the revolutionary propagandist must be subtle. He must know how to create in the mass mind what the scientific propagandist calls a "crisis of conscience." Instead of attacking directly those symbols of the old order to which the people are attached he will undermine and erode them by other symbols and slogans, and there others must be such as either to take the people off guard, or, as Lasswell and Blumenstock say, they must be "symbols which appeal to the conscience on behalf of symbols which violate the conscience."
This is an analytic statement and makes it sound extremely complex. Really it is quite simple. For example, if the propagandist said, "Down with the Cons ution!" — bluntly like that — he would be defeated because of the way the Cons ution is enshrined in the American conscience. But he can ask: "Whose Cons ution?" That question may become a slogan. He can ask; "Shall the Cons ution be construed to hold say it is." And that creates an image, which is a symbol He can ask: "shall the Cons ution be construed to hold property rights above human rights?" Or, as the President did, he may regretfully associate the Cons ution with "horse-and-buggy days."
Therefore, capitalism, obliquely symbolized by the money-changer scourged out of the temple, was entirely to blame; capitalism was the one enemy, the one object to be hated. But never was it directly stacked or named; always it was the old order that was attacked. The old order became a symbol of all human distress. "We cannot go back to the old order," said the President. And this was a very hateful counter symbol, because the old order, never really defined, did in fact associate in the popular mind with the worst debacle in the history of capitalism.
It was never the capitalist that was directly attacked. Always it was the economic royalist, the brigand of the skyscrapers, the modern tory — all three hateful counter symbols. The true symbols of the three compe ive systems in which people believed were severely let alone. The technique in every case was to raise against them counter symbols. Thus, against the inviolability of private property was raised the symbol of those who would put property rights above human rights; and against all the old symbols of individualism and self-reliance was raised the attractive counter symbol of security.
Both the subsidies to agriculture and those to labor came out of the United States Treasury, and since the money had to be borrowed by the government and added to the public debt, you would hardly say the solution was either perfect or permanent. But from the point of view of revolutionary technic that did not matter provided certain other and more important ends were gained. What would those other ends be? One would be the precedent of making the Federal government divider of the national income; another would be to make both the farmer and the union wage earner dependent upon the government — the farmer for hie income and union labor for its power. Neither the farmer who takes income from the government nor the union wage earner who accepts from the government a grant of power is thereafter free.
Two years later the President was saying to Congress: "In thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power." Who had opposed this extension of government power? He asked the question and answered it. The unscrupulous, the incompetent, those who represented entrenched greed — only these had opposed it. Then he said: "In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets, of an economic autocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."
There, unconsciously perhaps, is a complete statement of the revolutionary thesis. It is not a question of law. It is a question of power. There must be a transfer of power. The President speaks not of laws; he speaks of new instruments of power, such as would provide shackles for the liberties of the people if they should ever fall in other hands. What then has the government done? Instead of limiting by law the power of what it calls economic autocracy the government itself has seized the power.
This was not a specific problem. It was rather a line of principle to which the solution of every other probem was referred. As was said before, in no problem to be acted upon by the New Deal was it true that one solution and one only was imperative. In every case there was some alternative. But it was as if in every ease the question was, "Which course of action will tend more to increase the dependence of the individual upon the Federal government?" — and as if invariably the action resolved upon was that which would appeal rather to the weakness than to the strength of the individual.
And yet the people to be acted upon were deeply imbued with the traditions and maxims of individual resourcefulness — a people who grimly treasured in their anthology of political wisdom the words of Grover Cleveland, who vetoed a Federal loan of only ten thousand dollars for drought relief in Texas, saying: "I do not believe that the power and duty of the general Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering.... A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.... Federal aid in such eases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our National character."
Which was only one more way of saying a hard truth that was implicit in the American way of thinking, namely, that when people support the government they control government, but when the government supports the people it will control them.
The fourth line was a doctrine invented and promulgated by New Deal economists — the doctrine of perpetual unlimited public debt. What difference did it make how big the debt was? It was not at all like a debt owing to foreign creditors. It was something we owed only to ourselves. To pay it or not to pay it meant only to shift or not to shift money from one pocket to another. And anyhow, if we should really want to pay it, the problem would be solved by a rise in the national income.
Many infuriated people wasted their time opposing this doctrine as an economic fallacy. But whether it was a fallacy or not would be entirely a question of the point of view. From the point of view of what the New Deal has called the fetish of solvency it was a fallacy. But from the point of view of scientific revolutionary technic it was perfectly sound, even orthodox. From that point of view you do not regard public debt as a problem of public finance. You think of it only in relation to ends. A perpetual and unlimited debt represents deficit spending as a social principle. It means a progressive redistribution of wealth by will of government until there is no more fat to divide; after that comes a level rationing of the national income. It means in the end the cheapening of money and then inflation, whereby the middle class is economically murdered in its sleep. In the arsenal of revolution the perfect weapon is inflation.
(And all of that was before the war, even before the beginning of the defense program.)
This was posted in the OP-ED Section. The NYT lets stupid republicans post dumb in the OP-ED section all the time (like the grand daddy neo-con Bill Kristol). Cato makes it seems like this is official stance of the NYT.
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