The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

[via Brad DeLong]

Commenting, free speech and open debate

I don't much like to blog about blogging, but db0's recent Jr. High tantrum prompts me to speak. It's notable that db0 didn't complain about my "censorship" when I banned idiot creationists, uptight philosophy sophomores or torture apologists. He's hardly acting out of high-minded principle; he's just pissed that a) he personally was banned and b) that we used to be friends, kind of, and we aren't anymore. And his assertion that I'm not interested in the "facts" is ludicrous; I rejected his comments precisely because they didn't contain any actual facts. And even though db0 has known for a while that I advocate a role for the state in communism, it's only when he personally has been offended that he slanderously labels my position "Maoism".

(He might be drawing an inference from my reporting on and opinions about the controversy between Sunsara Taylor and the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, but that no more makes me a Maoist than it does PZ Myers. I'm reporting on the controversy because I think Sunsara is right and the EHSC is wrong, and because Sunsara is my friend. I refuse to self-identify even as a Marxist, much less a Maoist, and I have never advocated substantial compliance with "Mao Zedong thought". That I might have some positions in common with Mao doesn't make me a Maoist any more than vegetarian, teatotalling nonsmokers are Hitlerists.)

But there's a larger point here.

I and no other blogger has any obligation whatsoever under the principles of free speech and open debate to publish any comment. I have no obligation to even respond to any comment other than one that corrects a provable error of fact.

The principles of freedom of speech and open debate are served by everyone being able to have the same sort of platform that I myself have, and blogs are indeed free from Google, Wordpress and others. Some people want to publish and respond to a wide variety of comments, good for them. Some, such as Andrew Sullivan, don't publish comments at all. Some, such as Paul Krugman, publish comments but the author rarely responds. Some, like PZ Myers, restrict only spam, but the social milieu tends to suppress certain points of view. All of these models are perfectly legitimate from the perspective of free speech and open debate.

Some venues say or imply they want open debate, but don't actually afford open debate. But their sin is hypocrisy and dishonesty, especially when they conclude that their hypocritical "support" of open debate proves by omission the substantive failure of opposing positions; they do not sin against free speech.

I'm very open and explicit that I don't want comments and that I moderate them arbitrarily. If you think I'm wrong about some point, you're perfectly free to criticize me on your own blog in whatever terms and in whatever manner you please. I won't send you a DMCA takedown, I won't lobby to have your blog banned, suppressed, put behind an adult content filter or removed from an aggregator. I won't even suggest to my readers not to read your blog. (I don't know about your readers, but if mine aren't adult enough to make their own decisions about what to read or not to read, I'm not much interested in keeping them.)

This blog exists, though to publish my arguments, my thoughts, my opinions, my speculation. It is, openly and by design, all about me. You have no more right to publish your thoughts here, even in the comments, than you do to sleep on my couch. And the fact that I reject comments that I find repetitious, stupid, trivial, without substance, rude or that just happen to irritate me on a bad day doesn't make me an enemy of free speech or open debate.

Still not interested...

...in Jr. High School drama. I tried to handle it privately, but to no avail.

The problem is not that db0 disagrees with me. I published his disagreement. The problem is that he's just plain stupid not nearly as intelligent or perspicacious as he thinks he is, and I lack the patience and mental calmness to deal with other people's arrogant mediocrity.

Oh, and he's a liar too: I've never called myself a Maoist.

Imperialism and finance capitalism

Krugman on Finance mythbusting, third world edition:

Since the early 1980s there have been three big waves of capital flows to developing countries.

The first wave was to Latin American countries that liberalized trade and opened their markets in the wake of the 80s debt crisis. This wave ended in grief, with the Mexican crisis of 1995 and the delayed Argentine crisis of 2002.

The second wave was to southeast Asian economies in the mid 90s, when the Asian economic miracle was all the rage. This wave ended in grief, with the crisis of 1997-8.

The third wave was to eastern European economies in the middle years of this decade. This wave is ending in grief as we speak. ...

...there’s no striking evidence that capital flows have been a major source of economic success. [emphasis added]

2010 midterm elections

Sayeth the prophet:

Because [Republicans] aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

Did I call it or did I call it?

The Democrats will probably take the White House and Congress in 2008 no matter what they do, but they've handed the Republican party enough ammunition and control over the political narrative that the 2008 administration and Congress will be completely ineffectual. The Republicans will take Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012.

I made a number of other predictions in that post. Let's see how I'm doing so far (remember, the original was written before the current depression).

Specifically we will see from the 2008 Democratic government:

Continued occupation of Iraq: Check
Military hostilities against Iran: Not yet
Corporatist control of the mass media: Check
Loss of more primary manufacturing capacity: Check
Erosion of the middle class: Check
Collapsing housing prices: Big Check
Devaluation of the currency: Not yet, but inevitable
No substantial change to the employer-insurance health care system: See below
More working Americans without health insurance or adequate health care: Missed this one; see below
More concentration of wealth in the top 1% and even more in the top 0.1%: Check
More erosion of basic constitutional civil liberties: Check
Update: more erosion of abortion rights: Check

We will not see:

Repeal of FISA or its amendments: Check
Repeal of the Military Commissions Act: See below
Restoration of habeus corpus: Check
Universal or even near-universal health care: See below
Cessation of torture as military and police policy: Maybe; See below
Any substantial action on global warming: Check (so far)
Ratification of the Kyoto treaty or any comparable international action: Check
Any high-level member of the Bush administration being held to criminal account: Check (with the possible exception of Scooter Libby, which was pure tokenism)

Health Care: It looks like some form of "universal" health care may pass; I really didn't think the Democrats would get even this far. On the other hand, it's about the weakest, half-assed "universal" health care imaginable, and women's reproductive rights have not only been ignored but actively rolled back. Krugman is cautiously optimistic but only because he believes something is better than nothing; and the most one can say about this plan is that it's better than nothing.

Military Commissions Act: The MCA was found unconstitutional. Technically it was not "repealed", but I did expect the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Torture: While there's no evidence that the military under the Obama administration is actually torturing people, Obama has gone out of his way not to abjure torture as at least a policy option.

Still and all, not too shabby a predictive effort for a guy without access to Lexis/Nexis.

Barack Hoover Obama

Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again by Kevin Baker:

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. ... Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

According to Baker, Obama more closely resembles Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover was a Republican, though; If Obama fails as spectacularly as Hoover (for the same reasons that Hoover failed: not being quite radical enough in a situation that demands radical action) his failure will only strengthen the Republican party.

[via Brad DeLong]

The power of the industrial proletariat

According to Angry Bear, United States "service employment is about 112.5 million versus 11.7 million in manufacturing." This number should not encourage those socialist organizations counting on the industrial proletariat (i.e. manufacturing workers) as the forefront of a revolution.

Conditions do change.

Ownership and privilege

Ownership, all ownership, is privilege. Privilege derives from the roots privi-, private and -lege, law: privilege is, either literally or metaphorically, private law. My wife and I own a car. Therefore there is a private law letting the two of do things with my car that no one else can do. She and I are legally permitted to drive it to the store whenever we please; you and everyone else are legally prohibited from doing so. She and I don't have this privilege "because of" our ownership; our ownership is this privilege.

An obvious corollary is that just the simple fact of privilege is not necessarily bad. It's not necessarily good, either: we have to look at the details of each particular privilege — how it is obtained, who has it, to what it is applied, and most importantly its effect on the well-being of actual human beings — to come to an informed judgment on the desirability of that privilege.

All ownership, all human privilege, is to an important degree socially constructed. While I physically possess my car, physical possession is not the be-all end-all of ownership. If my neighbor were to merely appropriate my car, a large body of armed, uniformed police would (at least if I caught them on a good day) come down on his ass like a ton of bricks. This propensity of the the police to enforce this kind of ownership is a social construction: they do so because of ideas, ideas in people's heads, ideas written down in statutes and legal precedents, and the ideas about how to use those written-down ideas to focus the coercive activities of the police. These social constructions are not objective in the sense of mind-independent: if all of the relevant mental properties were to vanish, the social construction would vanish in the same sense that a house built of legos vanishes when you disassemble the house.

There are two kinds of privilege: direct and indirect. Direct privilege is like my ownership of my car. Indirect privilege is some consequence or emergent property of a direct privilege. A supervisor is directly privileged to dismiss his subordinates; it's a privilege because his subordinates cannot dismiss their supervisor, neither individually nor en bloc. This direct privilege gives rise to various indirect social privileges: in many environments a supervisor can, for example, be rude or obnoxious in ways that subordinates cannot, without fear of reprisal. This is an indirect privilege because we don't explicitly construct the privilege of supervisory rudeness; it is a consequence of and emerges from the direct privilege of firing.

Commenter cornucrapia challenges the element of the privilege of the owners of capital over the owners of labor power as an essential feature of capitalism*,**. He offers an alternative definition:

Capitalism - an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.

He and I are saying the same thing, though: individuals have ownership over capital, and therefore they have some sort of privilege. But what kind?

*This is exactly the sort of conversation I want to have on the blog. We concede nothing of substance to each other out of "respect", but show each other the respect of each assuming the other is a sincere, honest, well-intentioned person eager to discover the truth.

**It's important to note too that capitalist privilege is socially constructed and separate and distinct from commodity relations: commodity relations do not directly and inevitably entail capitalist privilege.

The direct privilege is, of course, the ownership of capital. Capital comes in two forms. First, there's physical capital: the machinery, tools, buildings and other physical things employed in the production of some commodity. There's also the labor capital, all of what what the capitalist must pay to the workers before the commodity is produced and finally exchanged for some price. This ownership is the direct privilege of the owner to produce what he pleases, at the rate he pleases, and exchange the products with whom he pleases for the price he pleases. But what of the indirect privileges this ownership?

First, a production surplus must be concentrated to employ as capital; a surplus equally distributed to the population will mostly be directly consumed. Second, capital is physically necessary to produce the physical things all human beings need — food, housing, clothing, etc. — to survive and prosper.

We must take a closer look at cornucrapia's definition of capitalism, specifically: "[O]wnership of the means of production ... [is held] chiefly by private individuals or corporations." In a trivial sense (and one I'm confident cornucrapia does not intend) ownership of everything is by physical necessity invested in individual human beings. What else could own things? Dolphins? Orangutangs? Rocks? Trees? The Pythagorean Theorem? Cornucrapia (and those establishing this definition of capitalism) must intend something more specific.

The above definition explicitly compares individual and corporate ownership with cooperative and state ownership. Capital also must be concentrated to be effective. We can therefore reasonably interpret this definition in two ways. First, capital is owned by individuals and corporations in its concentrated form; it is not owned by all of those individuals who have physically contributed their personal surplus to the creation of the capital. All working people (and almost all people work, or can and want to) contribute a productive surplus that can be concentrated into capital, but under capitalism as defined, all working people do not "cooperatively" own the capital.

By contrasting private ownership with state (or governmental) ownership, the above definition makes a substantive formal separation between the organ of socially acceptable direct physical coercion (the state or government) and the ownership of capital (the private capitalist). This element exempts the owners of capital from being coerced by the government. Nobody likes to be coerced (even the police loathe those who police the police), and in a perfect world we'd like to rely on voluntary cooperation, but we need some form of coercion (at least under present conditions) for people to act in their mutual benefit instead of their individual benefit*. Therefore, a corollary to this definition is that capital is employed for the individual or private benefit of the owners, without regard for the mutual benefit of everyone in a society.

*This is a very subtle point of ethical philosophy. Read my essays on ethics, Meta-Ethical Subjective Relativism, and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The products of capital and industrial production are necessary to for most everyone to survive; at today's levels of technology non-industrial production can support only only a fraction of the present population. By definition, the owners of concentrated capital can produce and exchange these products as they please, exempt from social controls. It therefore follows that the owners of capital have indirect privilege over the very survival of the population, and there is no systematic compensating privilege for the workers, the owners of only their own labor power.

Thus the individual, private ownership of capital creates a de facto indirect privilege of the capitalist class.

Automation, unemployment and the market economy

Could Advancing Job Automation Technology Cause Structural Unemployment?:

[A] very large percentage of jobs are, on some level, essentially routine and repetitive in nature. ...[A]s both hardware and software continue to advance, a large fraction of these job types are ultimately going to be susceptible to machine or software automation. ...

It seems to me that, as automation penetrates nearly everywhere, there must come a "tipping point," beyond which the overall economy is simply not labor intensive enough to continue absorbing workers who lose their jobs due to automation (or globalization). Beyond this point, businesses will be able to ramp up production primarily by employing machines and software--and structural unemployment then becomes inevitable.

If we reach that point, then I think we also have a serious problem with consumer demand. If automation is relentless, then the basic mechanism that gets purchasing power into the hands of consumers begins to break down. As a thought experiment, imagine a fully automated economy. Virtually no one would have a job (or an income); machines would do everything. So where would consumption come from? If we're still considering a market (rather than a planned) economy, why would production continue if there weren't any viable consumers to purchase the output? Long before we reached that extreme point of full automation, it seems pretty clear that mass-market business models would become unsustainable.

Communism and individual rights

In his retrospective of communism, Fred Halliday writes:

… underpinning these three ideas – “state”, “progress”, “revolution” – lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension – whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class – was defended. However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of “rights”, is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others.

Halliday is simply wrong here. If he were making an empirical case, if he were to say that historical communist governments lacked an independently articulated ethical dimension, that these historical governments crudely defined an ethical dimension only of winning power for a party leadership, etc. — and if you cherry-pick the empirical data — he might have a point. But at the theoretical level, about the ideas underpinning "state", "progress" and "revolution", he's just wrong.

Before we can actually refute Halliday's position, we have to understand it: a difficult task. What precisely does he mean by the "lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension"? What is an "ethical dimension"? Why does it need to be "independently" articulated? And what does Halliday believe an ethical dimension be independent of?

Halliday clarifies his position, referring to "the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion." It is seems clear here that Halliday is speaking primarily about a legal system and the underlying philosophy of law: the law is is nothing more or less than explicitly articulated criteria applicable to the uses of governmental coercion.

All well and good: there's much to legitimately criticize in formal and philosophical communist legal systems. But it would be simple nonsense to imply that these flaws stemmed from a lack of theoretical concern for the well-being of individuals, an ethic limited to "winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a mythified working class." And the idea of winning power for a party leadership as an instrument of achieving human well-being goes only as far back as Lenin. Indeed there is little talk at all about revolution (and how to achieve it) in the earliest days of Utopian socialism, to which Halliday presumably refers to by socialism's 200 year history. Halliday must (if we are to interpret him charitably) mean by "rights" something not really directly related to human well-being and how to achieve it.

Chris Bertram interprets Halliday as claiming that communism promotes a (bad) Consequentialist ethic in unstated contrast to a (presumably good) Deontic ethic. But deontic ethics are at best a shortcut to consequentialism under limited, imperfect information and at worst a delusion.

Betram notes that Western, capitalist, ethics are just as philosophically consequentialist as communist ethics, theoretical or historical. (Which is not to say that those thoroughly indoctrinated into and accepting of Western judgments of consequence would agree with theoretical or historical communist judgments.) John Stuart Mill, for example, makes an entirely consequentialist argument for freedom of speech in On Liberty: we ought to have freedom of speech because such freedom will help us get at the truth*, and merely speaking an incorrect or reprehensible idea causes only trivial damage. A strictly deontic argument for freedom of speech would hold that freedom of speech is good regardless of the consequences; even if someone could call up Cthulhu by uttering magic words, we should not prevent him lest we abridge his freedom of speech.

*We don't have to make any argument at all for the value of truth: no one wants to be deluded or lied to.

On this interpretation, Halliday criticizes communism for failing to buy into the delusion that there are such things as deontic individual rights. This argument has no more power than the Christian argument that we should believe a God exists — even if no God actually exists — so that the fear of punishment in the afterlife will keep us moral.