The Socialist Investor

As I write, on October 4, 2018, it’s increasingly likely that Kavanaugh will ascend to the Supreme Court, despite the certainty that he lacks a “judicial temperament” and the distinct possibility that he’s a black-out drunk who tried to rape a 15-year-old girl. It also appears he lied under oath, at least about the severity of his drinking problem. Oh, and he also believes that his problems are a result not of his own actions but of a plot against him by the Clintons. So we can check the box for “believes in lunatic conspiracy theories.”

He also has never argued a case in court.

For all the supposed power of the #metoo movement, it cannot touch Kavanaugh. And for all the supposed power of the US Senate, they too are unable to stop him, although it’s absurd that Kavanaugh should be confirmed. There must be hundreds of other Republican judges who do not believe in conspiracy theories, who have never tried to rape a 15-year-old girl, and who do not drink to excess. And most of them are probably veteran litigators.

This is a collision of value systems. There’s the #metoo ethos, which is ultimately rooted in the Christian idea that humans are “but a little less than angels,” with the all dignity and autonomy implied. We are the “crown of creation,” and we have the political and social rights to prove it. Or so we believe.

On the other side of this collision of values is the billionaire mindset (no need to stretch the word “values” too far) which stems from the classical idea that only the powerful and famous—emperors and heroes—have lives worth living. In other words, only billionaires and those they smile upon have rights or any personal autonomy.

It might seem simple to choose another Republican judge, one who measures his words and actions carefully. But Trump and Republican senators are insisting on Kavanaugh, precisely because he lacks a judicial temperament, is an unbridled alcoholic, and respects neither the truth nor the rights of others. He is exactly what they are looking for as an exemplar. They are asserting that his actions are acceptable, even honorable, as a way of justifying behavior that is common among the rich and powerful. They are tired of living in the shadows, pretending to hold the values of the majority.

Ordinarily in this blog I try to go easy on individuals, mostly because I believe our problems stem from a bad system, not bad people. But sometimes the mistakes and shortcomings of an individual can shed light on that system.

The #metoo movement cannot stop Bret Kavanaugh, partly because many reasonable people have qualms about its lack of due process, but mostly because billionaire capitalism does not value human dignity, and refuses to accept the #metoo ethos.

But surely the #metoo movement has some cards to play? It might have had, but it has weakened itself by (largely) avoiding the issues of class and power. The accepted narrative emphasizes the gender aspect, with class and power discussed only superficially. So it was not well-positioned for a showdown with billionaire capitalism. If this is a matter of bad men then there are men everywhere, and who can say which men are bad, and which good? But if this is a matter of a bad system then things are clearer—because there’s only one system.

The Republican response is perhaps more interesting than the #metoo movement’s missteps. The rage of Kavanaugh, Graham and Trump, and the endlessly repeated echoes of that rage on Fox News, et al, all resemble narcissistic anger.  Trump himself said he had been the victim of such false accusations “many times.” And despite his own admissions on the Access Hollywood tape, these accusations are false. They are “false” in the sense that they interfere with his narcissistic sense of himself and of the universe.

Likewise, Susan Collins—who probably believes she is far more truthful and realistic than the President—believes that Foster was assaulted, but not by Kavanaugh! If the billionaires need a Republican Senator to speak nonsense, she will speak nonsense without hesitation or shame.

And the way a good teacher will illustrate a theory with multiple examples of its application, Trump also doubled back to link the furor of Khashoggi’s disappearance to the accusations against Kavanaugh.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/politics/donald-trump-saudi-arabia/index.html

The lesson couldn’t be clearer: any accusation against a billionaire (or those that represent their interests, like Kavanaugh) is false, or almost certainly so.

The Saudis must be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—by an investigation they partly control. Then maybe Trump will believe it—or not.

Certainly Trump—at long last—will face criticism from evangelical Christians for defending such a heinous crime:

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/17/17990268/pat-robertson-khashoggi-saudi-arabia-trump-crisis

How did we end up here? Part of this situation is covered by billionaire socialization (see “The Very Rich are not like You and I”) and part of it is the political weakness and insecurity of the billionaire class. Conservatives have always tended to support existing hierarchies, in the absence of compelling reasons for change, but this is an especially critical issue now, as American billionaires struggle to consolidate their control.

The billionaire states we see today were all established where autocracy or oligarchy is the historic norm. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia are the major examples.

There’s no case of a real billionaire state emerging in a country with long-established democratic institutions. That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, but it would be a revolutionary change—and the citizenry would probably experience it as such. That won’t stop Trump and the Koch brothers and the rest of the Republican Party from trying, but they have their work cut out for them.

The billionaire movement has decided to defend and strengthen hierarchies everywhere, while simultaneously undermining democratic institutions and norms. Americans must learn to support hierarchies unthinkingly, because otherwise rule by billionaires will always be unacceptable to the majority.

And 17-year old football players attempting to rape 15-year-old nerd girls without consequence is part of the high school hierarchy that most of us have experienced.

And putting a defensive, petulant blackout-drunk on the Supreme Court has the effect of reducing the public’s respect for the judiciary. The public naturally asks, that guy?

So insisting on Bret Kavanaugh despite rational alternatives was a two-fer for the billionaire movement. They reduce support for the judiciary while sustaining an unjust social hierarchy.

And after all, if billionaire capitalism can destroy the earth’s climate without accountability then it can certainly grope and choke some 15-year-old girls. When Trump said he could walk up to any woman and grab her pussy, he was only being honest about the sexual reality of billionaire capitalism.

What the #metoo movement is doing is objecting to one aspect of capitalism’s power without recognizing or mentioning that this power is much larger and more destructive than rape and sexual harassment, as terrible as those are.

In a way, the #metoo movement is almost complicit. By focusing on sexual assault and harassment, it may create the impression that our other problems are less serious, and less systemic.

I understand that the #metoo survivors are often deeply wounded and alienated by their experiences, and they just want to somehow fix this one thing that makes their lives a misery.

But however traumatized and alienated one may be (and I know a bit about this), healing will never occur without insight and perspective.

And the insight and perspective we need here is that our civilization and our planet are being destroyed by billionaire capitalism. And systemic sexual assault is part of that destruction.

 

In upcoming blogs I will discuss how socialism in the 21^st century might work. But before venturing down that path, I am duty-bound to point out the hazards of discussing any political system.

Political theories tend to cause suffering, often on a mass scale. Fascism, communism, nationalism, the divine right of kings, theocracy in all its forms, and even liberal democracy have led to intensely destructive wars. Some (not all) political ideologies have led to concentrations camps, police states and mass murder.

It might be that people take political ideology seriously only when they are under social or economic stress; therefore, an otherwise peaceful and secure society would be unlikely to split along ideological lines. However, as an American living and writing in 2018, I need not waste thought on stable and unified societies.

And although political theories tend to cause suffering, a society with no particular shared beliefs is driving a lonesome highway with the headlights off. And those shared beliefs will necessarily include political ideals. So as hazardous as political theorizing may be, the alternative may be even worse.

Political ideologies, and Left movements in particular, suffer from reification. Marx posited that class struggle determines history. The struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages, for example, led to the ascendancy of capitalism. And if you adjust the focus just right, it does appear that something like that was happening….at times.

But there was a lot else going on as well. Was the Swiss Confederation a bourgeois institution, or a peasant one? Perhaps both?  This isn’t a minor question, since the Swiss did much of the actual fighting required to discredit the medieval aristocracy.  Switzerland was the lab where local democracy and a flattened class structure were tested for all of the West.

Then again, it’s easy to see the Reformation as a largely bourgeois movement, but the Bohemian landed aristocracy and the Basque merchants are counter-examples. There were certainly peasant Protestants—the Waldensians, for example—and there were plenty of landed aristocrats in France who were Huguenots (Henry IV, the founder of the House of Bourbon, was the most notable, although to secure his crown he eventually converted to Catholicism: “Paris is worth a Mass.”) We may see Protestantism as a bourgeois movement because the bourgeois Protestants were mostly the ones who survived the religious wars—they had the economic resources to resist. The Huguenot aristocrats and artisans were swept away, and likewise the Bohemian nobility and peasants. The Counter-Reformation did its work well. Protestantism came to be dominated by the British and Dutch, with their dynamic economies.

And it’s possible to view the rising prosperity of the late Middle Ages and early Modern era as involving an amalgamation of the nobility and merchant classes. The merchants were eager to buy estates, and the gentry were not averse to investing in overseas trade. This is quite clear in England, where the titled aristocracy was small in numbers and by necessity had to socialize and intermarry with wealthy commoners. While a title of nobility might be prestigious, the English lords had to deal realistically with the economic and political power of the merchant class, who were often their neighbors and cousins. And big landowners who were not members of the nobility had little reason to shun rich merchants—they could only improve their credit score, so to speak, by having a few merchants as friends or in-laws.

In other words, the concept of “class struggle” is in fact an approximation, and ignores the fact that human beings often form political, religious and social alliances across class boundaries.

For an example of how destructive it can be to reify the concept of class struggle, consider the Tet Offensive in 1968. The communist plan was to attack everywhere, which they believed would lead to a mass uprising among the urban population. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had good intelligence and realized that the urban population was deeply dissatisfied with the Thieu regime. But the urban population did not rise up; it did not in general favor an NLF takeover. For one thing, eight or nine years into the Viet Cong’s armed struggle, most urban dwellers who favored the communists had already joined them in their rural strongholds. For another, much of the urban population simply opposed any autocratic government, particularly one that might persecute Buddhism.

But Le Duan and his supporters in the Hanoi government could not envision a “third answer” in their analysis of the urban population’s views. Either the urban population favored the NLF or they favored the Thieu government, and clearly there was little sympathy or support for Thieu.

Perhaps some of this error was simply wishful thinking, but it’s reasonable to suppose that the concept of “class struggle” might interfere with grasping a complex political situation in which class was not the most important factor. Even where class is important, people may nevertheless perceive their interests differently from what a Marxist analysis would indicate. A fair number of South Vietnamese peasants would have preferred a non-Thieu, non-Marxist alternative.  If LBJ had run for president of South Vietnam, how many votes would he have gotten?

On the other hand, the concept of “class struggle” does indeed shed light on many situations. It might be impossible to understand the history of France or Spain without this concept, to take a couple of examples.

It’s interesting to note that Marx and Engels were quite aware of the dangers of reification, particularly with the over-arching theory of historical materialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism#Warnings_against_misuse .  Marx described historical materialism as a “guide for study” which would have been big news for the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—who were accused and sentenced for “revisionism” during the twentieth century. Marx’s big theory, the model of historical change on which all of Marxism rests, was seen by Marx himself as a starting point or framework for deeper inquiry, which would obviously include re-visiting some of the original assumptions of historical materialism, if the evidence so indicated.

In other words, part of the founding ideology of Marxism was a recognition that historical materialism itself might be wrong or incomplete.  The Communist Party has never accepted that, to say the least. Even differences in the implementation of socialism (e.g., Trotskyism), have resulted in summary executions, so questioning historical materialism itself—or suggesting it was only a starting point—was clearly out. “Reification” is almost too weak a term to describe this process.

Another example of reification would be Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor. Anyone who has ever worked at a repetitive, low-level job will recognize the process of de-humanization and psychological dislocation involved.

And yet….people often love their jobs, even difficult and alienating ones. Simply being able to do something can be a powerful and dignifying experience. Pouring concrete for hours in Texas heat, trying to beat sundown, is difficult in the extreme, but at the end you feel relief, even joy. Whatever use the building is put to, whatever success or failure the people who occupy it experience, that concrete will serve its purpose. Your endurance and labor will live on in it.

So Marx captured one aspect of capitalist labor, but not all of it.

I could point out reifications on the right-wing, but it’s hardly worth the trouble, right? References to “market forces” almost uniformly ignore the fact that some markets are inefficient, for example the market for healthcare in the US, in which lack of information is a key problem. But it is difficult to distinguish between reification and straight-up propaganda when it comes to right-wing arguments.

So what does reification mean for socialists in the twenty-first century? It means that our arguments, goals and policies must be everywhere linked to, and based upon, specific examples. If we complain that capitalism is undermining public health then we must also say: through opiates, tobacco, high-fructose corn syrup, pollution and lack of timely medical care. And when we say that, we must also propose specific counter-measures—a ban on HFCS and much higher taxes on tobacco, for example, and universal healthcare specified in painstaking detail.

A problem with reification is that specifics are often neglected, as we saw above with the Tet Offensive. A serious estimate of urban support—of people actually willing to fight for the NLF–would have yielded a number too small to matter strategically; however, that estimate was apparently never made. If you believe you understand the vast sweep of history—including the future—you may become so intoxicated that you forget to ask the right questions, you forget to order the right tractor parts.

And after we anchor our arguments with specifics, we must think critically, always searching for counter-examples to our own assertions, always seeking alternatives to our own explanations.

So, two guidelines: first, link our arguments and observations to specifics, and second, always search for counter-arguments and alternative explanations: our theories should be as robust as we can make them.

And to link this argument to specifics, I refer the reader to “At the Kroll Opera House,” and the history of the SPD. The pragmatism of the SPD—whose first thought at dawn was to help the people—and its attention to detail is what I’m getting at here. The best check on reification is to constantly test our theories against reality.

And lastly, we must practice ahimsa. As I pointed out earlier, most political theories lead to human suffering. Given this, we must keep harmful words, thoughts and actions at arm’s length. God knows our righteous indignation is thoroughly justified, but still—for the good of the people, always for the good of the people—we must practice restraint and compassion. We should speak clearly and passionately about the suffering that capitalism causes, but we must avoid hatefulness, which is “something like” emotional reification.

Life is vast, and our enemies may yet turn to friends.

The reader should note that this isn’t just about breast-feeding; the Trump administration has come to the defense of junk food, soda and vital medicines priced too high for much of the world’s population.

And this also isn’t just about one American president; as I pointed out in “A Greater Power,” this disregard for human life and health is inherent in capitalism, due to the socialization of both managers and workers. The people inside the system are socialized to either deny, rationalize or simply not see the human damage done by their enterprises. These people are not acting freely and they cannot see clearly; they are constrained by their socialization.

The only way to limit the destructive effect of capitalism is through countervailing forces and institutions: laws, political parties, religions (at least back when the likes of Gladstone and Martin Luther King walked the earth), unions, environmental groups, scientific associations, universities and schools of medicine and public health, good teachers and good parents.

Ultimately, we rely on the intellectual and spiritual vitality of our people, reflected in their political will. When Christ said, “You are the salt of the earth,” I believe he was speaking of this vitality—or of similar virtues. The complete quote is:

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.”

To trade off the lives of 800,000 infants a year for higher profits for Abbot and Nestle is a considerable loss of saltiness. And to threaten others who are reluctant to go along is even worse.

This was such a shameful deed, even the Russians opposed it.

Today I find in the news an extraordinary story about Trump’s summit with Putin, in which he behaves like the head of a Russian client state.

Everyone is appalled of course, and Republican leaders in Congress hazard a bit of mild criticism. They will take no action to stop him or limit his power—impeachment is out of the question.

Of course, if this were Obama or Clinton, they would be preparing impeachment charges now. Now, is this mere partisanship, or is there a more substantial reason for Republican passivity in the face of behavior that is not quite treason but is definitely in the neighborhood?

Of course, most Republican officials are concerned about national security to some extent. A few of them, like John McCain, care a lot. But the overriding priority of the Republican Party is the concentration of as much wealth as possible into as few hands as possible. And Trump is very much in favor of that, and if the Republicans retain control of Congress in the mid-terms, they may be able to squeeze another big tax cut out of the budget, and they need Trump around to sign it. This tax cut would of course be funded by cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as every-increasing debt.

And Putin himself is in favor of concentrating wealth in the hands of his billionaire class as well, so, although he’s obviously a threat to the US and its allies, he’s also an ideological brother to the entire Republican Party.

It’s a very uncomfortable situation for Republican Congressmen. Trusting Putin clearly doesn’t feel natural to most of them, but he is on their side in the battle that matters most: the fight to destroy democracy and establish a Billionaire State.

These Congressmen grew up in the same country as the rest of us, heard the same stories about Washington and Jefferson and Ben Franklin in school, and learned to revere the same flag and Constitution. Betraying that tradition to establish an oligarchy of narcissists must provoke second thoughts, especially when it’s coupled with becoming a Russian satellite state.

But—I predict—betray it they will. Trump is clearly not qualified to be president, and he may be dangerously unstable, but they will support him because he will sign any tax cut bill that’s put before him, and because he has put together a political coalition that can—just barely—maintain a hold on power, for now.

This is not cowardice or a failure of will—this behavior is the logical outcome of a political movement that has as its highest priority the ever-increasing concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Yes, maybe protecting the country from foreign enemies is somewhere in their top ten priorities….but far below the concentration of wealth.

And Vladimir Putin shares their highest priority, because he may be—as I mentioned in “Kasparov Gives Us a Hint”—the richest person in the world.

A reasonable question might be, “Why not let the billionaires rule? Aren’t most societies ruled by the rich and privileged?”

In the recent defense prepared by Trump’s lawyers we have the answer to that question:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/us/politics/trump-lawyers-memo-mueller-subpoena.html

And a comment on that defense by a former deputy attorney general:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/mueller-trump-executive-power.html

Following Trump’s lawyers’ logic, if a president accepted a large bribe from Kim Jung Un or murdered a hooker—or a Supreme Court justice—on Air Force One, any investigation by the FBI, or any federal agency, could be quashed by presidential order. A president who can commit crimes without accountability can obviously imprison or assassinate political opponents at will. Trump’s lawyers are arguing against the existence of American democracy and in favor of a dictatorship instead. Even Putin might hesitate to openly claim such expansive powers.

Their arguments, viewed within the context of American traditions, are almost laughable, particularly coupled with Trump’s subsequent claim that he has the power to pardon himself. The wording of this pardon might be interesting: would he pardon himself for anything, including things he might do in the future?

It seems likely that the development of this argument was guided by Trump himself—or perhaps his attorneys were motivated by a desire to please a tyrannical boss.

But as absurd as it is, obviously this idea makes sense to Trump, and at least some of the people around him. And there are no howls of outrage from Congressional Republicans, either. How can that be?

Let’s think about what our Constitution implies (or assumes) about the life experience of our elected leaders. Clearly, unless our leaders grew up dealing with others on a basis of equality, they will be unlikely to compromise easily and they probably won’t understand the separation of powers.

No one can rule in a democratic spirit without the experience of social equality, of standing in lines, of giving reasonable answers even to unreasonable questions, of avoiding conflict when possible and of finding a compromise when conflict does arise, and of apologizing when called for—or graciously accepting an apology when offered. Living with social equality means that you are constantly reviewing your own actions and words, to make sure you get what you are due without violating the rights of others. This is why the democratic constitutions of Latin America (in the old days) did not work. The people who wrote those constitutions believed in democracy as much as Jefferson and Madison did, but the underlying social structure of extreme wealth and poverty socialized everyone to autocracy and obedience (or defiance and violence). Only the very poor related to each other on a basis of equality, but of course they were seldom in a position to lead, Benito Juarez notwithstanding.

People do not believe in the balance of powers unless they’ve experienced them in everyday life. People who have never stood in line will instinctively resist democracy.

This is why people used to say that a large middle class was essential to democracy. Middle class people generally relate to each other as equals and they are also educated enough to provide leaders, hence Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman. Also, they are seldom alienated enough to support revolution, but they are usually not wedded to the system the way the wealthy are, so they will support change that makes sense to them.

In the 1950s, even the wealthy seldom had servants. So they had to stand in line, had to deal with the clerks at city hall by themselves, and if they wanted the city council to do something, they had to write them a letter or go to the meetings—just like members of the middle class. And even the ones who could afford a servant or two had to do those things. You could hardly ask your gardener to take care of a parking ticket for you, for example.

But let’s think about our modern situation. If you control a fortune of a certain size—let’s say $100,000,000—and you make on average 7% on your assets, that is, $7,000,000, then you can afford a staff. You can afford to pay an experienced attorney a retainer to deal with any situation that resembles a conflict, or which requires reading skills—at say $50,000 per year. You can hire a nanny for your children, a housekeeper (or two) to clean, cook and shop, a gardener/handyman so you won’t have to do yard work or routine household repairs, etc., all for perhaps $300,000 per year. You could also afford a good security service, even an on-site security guard at night. A full-time personal assistant would also be within reach.

And if your $100M fortune includes a business you have to manage, there will be employees you can use to run errands or do other tasks for you.  If you buy a new personal computer, the IT manager will set it up for you. If you run the business yourself, you might have to deal with customers or suppliers or regulators, or you might be able to delegate those tasks.

Or you could hire a manager for $200K per year to handle the entire business side.

If you develop a drinking or drug problem, you won’t need to go to AA or NA and listen to others’ problems. You can afford private therapy or upscale rehab with gourmet food.

By the time you’re finished with this process, your reality principle is in tatters; you rarely have to confront a problem yourself. And you can no longer deal with people realistically, either. In an increasingly fragmented and isolated society, you are the leading edge in isolation. If you go to church, they will most assuredly pester you for money, and you will eventually either lord it over them or leave. If you date anyone, trusting their motives may be difficult. As with church, there’s the temptation to either dominate or withdraw.

Even if you go to parties with other rich people, you probably won’t bond with them either. If most of your conversations are with employees who have to feign interest in your views, how will you ever learn to charm a stranger?

Facing opposition is a particular challenge for the rich. Any sort of face-to-face disagreement, unmediated by lawyers or security guards, is a rare experience for them, and they often react as if they are confronting the French Revolution.

Recently Macron called Trump up to complain about the tariffs Trump had placed on French products. Trump reacted very badly, Macron held his ground, and the scene reportedly got ugly. This is of course not how a rational person (that is, someone socialized to middle-class values) reacts to an ordinary business disagreement. But for 99% of Trump’s adult life, he’s heard nothing but adoring agreement. Macron’s behavior was shocking to Trump: he thought Macron was his friend!

My example above assumes a fortune of $100,000,000. If that sum is increased tenfold or a hundredfold, then the problems increase accordingly.

The extreme concentration of wealth in our economy results in a class of powerful and narcissistic individuals with weak reality principles. The exception to this is, of course, the billionaires who run highly technical businesses, like Larry Page or Tim Cook, whose job it is to think about rapidly changing technology and how to drive their businesses using those changes. They cannot afford to allow their reality principle to atrophy, although it does happen even among tech leaders. Carly Fiorina had some shocking lapses, and Ken Olsen in his later years was not reading the headlines.

Most billionaires are like Trump: he learned a lot about the hotel business when he was in his twenties and thirties, but since then it’s been all deal-making and self-worship.

Again: the concentration of wealth socializes the very rich into highly unrealistic narcissists; this makes them almost unfit to live in a democratic society, much less lead it. Trump is of course the poster child for this phenomenon, but consider Michael Bloomberg, who seems like an intelligent and well-meaning individual.

Every four years he floats the same trial balloon to the same media outlets: that he is considering running for president as an independent. The country is tired of partisan gridlock, people need a new face, a new vision—they need Bloomberg, free of special interest influence and partisan taint. And then of course—he doesn’t run. Because no one cares, and no one would vote for him; there is no surge of support. But he (and his staff) never learn. The timing isn’t right, they tell themselves. They can never admit to themselves that Michael Bloomberg is politically irrelevant. The reporters go along because the stories require no time to write—they have them archived, after all—and because it’s traditional to print whatever billionaires have to say.

But in Bloomberg’s mind, he’s a VVVIP, and the people around him every day treat him that way. Bloomberg himself appears unaware of the actual political situation. And that’s how an intelligent billionaire sees the world.

Within the social bubbles that surround billionaires, and those of lesser wealth, there is no accountability. As Yeats wrote of kings:

And drunk or sober live at ease
Where none gainsay their right,
And keep their lovers waiting,
Keep their lovers waiting.

Their lovers may have recourse to divorce court, if a pre-nup doesn’t tie their hands, but ordinarily a billionaire is untroubled by accountability. If he refuses to pay a debt then it will often be written off, and his credit rating of course is meaningless; if a billionaire humiliates or assaults an employee or family member, he will rarely go to jail or pay any settlement large enough to be inconvenient. And likewise for violations of environmental or safety regulations.

A rich man or woman can still get into trouble for fraud, as Bernie Madoff and Martin Shkreli prove, but only if they steal large sums from—of course—rich people.  (Although Elizabeth Holmes miraculously walked.)

I won’t mention bankruptcy court, because when the rich file for bankruptcy, they tend to benefit. It’s their creditors who feel the sting of accountability.

Nevertheless, run-ins with regulators and law enforcement have a significant psychological effect on the very rich; they resent these events bitterly, and the concepts of narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage seem to describe their response. We see this almost every day with Trump, and also with Harvey Weinstein and Martin Shkreli. They experience being questioned or accused as Louis XIV might experience lese majeste—as an intolerable insult.

And given their everyday lives, being held to account must be a terrible shock. If your parents were adoring pacifists who never corrected your behavior, then one day someone may slap your face or handcuff you and take you to jail. And you will experience this as an assault on your very being—the world is not supposed to treat you this way, no matter what you do.

And within their social bubbles, what the rich say is the Absolute Truth. So when they encounter a different version of the truth—based on science, for example—outside their bubble, they tend to see that as an infringement on their rights. Hence climate change denial, the war against endangered species, etc.

You might say, hasn’t it always been this way? Haven’t the rich always been this self-centered? Not exactly, at least not in America. I searched for a parallel to Trump from the old days, and John Jacob Astor IV shows some similarities.  He inherited great wealth and made money in New York real estate.  He was widely derided for his triviality—his nickname was “Jack Ass-tor.” And his infidelity led a New York court to grant his wife a divorce, a rarity at the time.  He aggravated the scandal by then marrying a woman 29 years his junior.  Melania, by comparison, is 24 years younger than Donald.

And yet, in Astor’s defense, he volunteered for military service in the Spanish-American War and actually went to Cuba, where the danger (especially from disease) was not trivial; he was also an inventor: he patented a bicycle brake, a “pneumatic road improver,” and a turbine engine; he wrote a science fiction novel and he had an interest in family history.

And most of all, John Jacob Astor IV sat stoically smoking on the deck of the Titanic, allowing lower-class women and children to board the lifeboats ahead of him. When his body was recovered, there was cash in his pockets equivalent to $95,000 in 2018 dollars, and yet he made no effort to bribe anyone. John Jacob Astor IV had an existence that transcended his class and its privileges.

There were three differences between Astor and current billionaires:

Astor experienced significant ostracism as a result of his divorce and subsequent re-marriage. Some sense of Christian morality was still alive among the rich at that time. Astor seems to have borne this humiliation without public complaint, perhaps implicitly admitting his fault.

Astor had a sense of masculine duty that was stronger than his sense of privilege. When Astor’s pregnant wife boarded the lifeboat, Astor approached the deck officer and asked permission to accompany her, as she was in “a delicate condition.” The deck officer said there were no exceptions to the “woman and children first” rule, and Astor did not push it.  He may have been gripped by mortal fear, but he turned away and sat quietly smoking as the ship sank.

Astor had a sense of patriotic duty, perhaps tinged with noblesse oblige. He financed a volunteer battery of artillery in the Spanish-American War, without serving as its commander. The unit went to the Philippines; Astor himself went to Cuba. Now, there may have been some prestige value, some ego-gratification—but Astor didn’t have to do that. He paid for the uniforms, the training, the caissons, the guns (!) and presumably the horses, more or less as a gift to his country.

And all three of these differences point to a sense of being part of the human race. The same rules of Christian morality, masculine duty and patriotism that applied to all men also applied to the very rich, like John Jacob Astor IV. Whatever their wealth and power, they had roughly the same obligations as the poor and the middle class.

The rich today are obliged to do nothing. Of course some of them—Bill Gates—work to benefit all of humanity, but he’s not obligated to do so, and that’s a key point. The rich have no social duty.

The modern rich simply grow richer. Since their weak reality principle undermines their business skills, they mostly concentrate their efforts on obtaining tax cuts, regulatory breaks and subsidies.  If they seek public office, it’s almost always to benefit themselves and their class. The days when Nelson Rockefeller and John F. Kennedy governed with a fine disinterest are in America’s rear-view mirror.

The modern rich are conspicuously absent from the military, and they only serve diplomatically when they buy ambassadorships through campaign donations. They do not lend whatever expertise they have to think tanks or, when retired, teach in either universities or in poor school districts.

Their connection to other Americans is weak and thin. There is no Andrew Carnegie, who remembered working 12-hour days as a child.

It shouldn’t be necessary to mention this, but these same individuals, if socialized differently, might be humanitarians, scientists, scholars and poets. There is nothing inherently wrong with most of them. And there are individuals who make an effort to transcend being merely rich.

But socialization is powerful, and most people go along.

The rich live in a way that is destructive for all of us, even for themselves. They have inadvertently created a spiritual and intellectual desert from which most of them cannot escape.

This is why we cannot allow billionaires to rule—they are no good at it, due to their socialization as unrealistic narcissists. We see examples in every headline, every tweet, especially now, in June 2018. Trump believes that tearing children away from their parents at the border is a great idea—or if it isn’t, it’s the Democrats’ fault. He believes a trade war is “easy to win”; he believes Kim Jung Un “loves his people.” And Trump is not too much of an outlier; he is a fair representative of his class.

A long time ago our ancestors created democracy because they had learned, from bitter experience, that the rich and powerful could not be trusted to rule for the good of all.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

I don’t want to address the Jordan Peterson “phenomenon,” but I would like to comment on his views on hierarchy:

“So he was radicalized, he says, because the ‘radical left’ wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. In his book he illustrates this idea with the social behavior of lobsters. He chose lobsters because they have hierarchies and are a very ancient species, and are also invertebrates with serotonin. This lobster hierarchy has become a rallying cry for his fans; they put images of the crustacean on T-shirts and mugs.

The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. ‘The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,’ he said.”

First, let’s deal with the competence issue. There are many hierarchies in our society, but if most hierarchies correlated with competence, then Dilbert would never have been funny, and Ethelred the Unready would have had a different nickname. And if our political hierarchy is based on competence, then why does the most powerful person in the world believe that climate change is a hoax?

The idea that competence correlates with hierarchies may be true sometimes (in a good teaching hospital, say, or in a well-managed tech company), but we can never take it as a given. It’s an undeniable constant of civilization that sometimes people are highly competent at acquiring power (or inheriting it) and profoundly incompetent at using it. And competence itself cannot be used to justify hierarchies in the absence of broader considerations. Eichmann was a highly competent administrator, but his abilities only led to suffering.

Second, Peterson is using a kind of logical sleight of hand here to justify the gender, class and racial hierarchies that he grew up with, or which his grandparents grew up with, and which he longs for. He’s saying that hierarchies are the “natural order,” which I suppose means that most societies have hierarchies, and there may be enduring reasons for that—a fair enough point—and so the hierarchies currently under question, such as male supremacy, are legitimate. But the legitimacy of any given hierarchy cannot be inferred from the fact that hierarchies have been around for a long time and may be a permanent feature of human life.

Because an appeal to the “natural order” of hierarchies could certainly justify Stalin’s Soviet hierarchy or the hierarchies of Mao Zhe Dong or Pol Pot, and I doubt Peterson means that. He’s only talking about hierarchies of which he approves, you see. But this “natural order” idea cuts both ways.

Third, Peterson is dodging the most important question we can ask about any hierarchy: is it legitimate?  Because hierarchies don’t usually exist without a rationale—maybe they do among lobsters, but seldom among human beings. “The King was chosen by God,” or “CEOs are really smart,” or “the Mandarins are trained to rule for the benefit of all,” are examples. And this rationale often amounts to an ideology, and the content of that ideology is telling. Peterson can wave his hand at the hierarchies of the past, but he’s blurred out some important considerations.

For example, in the 1540s, Henry VIII was King of England, not quite an absolute monarch but feared as if he were. Three centuries later, Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States, and in wartime he wielded power not far short of absolute. So, two hierarchies, both with individuals at the top who wielded almost absolute power. The situations sound similar—and yet, these two hierarchies were quite different, just as the societies that gave rise to them were different; they differed in their values, their political systems, and their vision of the future. The mere fact that a hierarchy exists means little. But the ideology and values on which a hierarchy is founded mean a great deal.

Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed every death sentence issued during his administration—desertion, falling asleep on watch, murder, mutiny and rape—and he often commuted the sentence or pardoned the offender. Such a process would have been inconceivable in sixteenth century England, where by one estimate 72,000 were executed during Henry VIII’s reign, about 2.5% of the population. Whatever the exact number, contemporary accounts portray a country where life was cheap.

These two societies—the United State in the 1860s and England in the 1540s—had distinctly different values, and the behavior of their respective hierarchies reflect that. When two societies differ noticeably in the value they put on human life, we can be sure that they are dissimilar in other ways as well.

A hierarchy founded on the self-interest of the elite, or on some mystique of superiority, is not at all the same as a hierarchy founded on a sense of shared responsibility.

What does it look like when a hierarchy loses its legitimacy? The Reformation occurred because the Catholic Church lost its legitimacy, and the resulting wars were destructive in the extreme. The Church’s efforts to retain its position by force only led to problems later on. Spain remained Catholic at the cost of modernity, and France remained Catholic—barely—but the Church’s close association with the monarchy tended in the long run to discredit both. After the French Revolution the Church’s position was permanently weakened.

By the 19^th century the Church’s social position in Italy was captured by Mark Twain, who, dazzled by the gold and silver and fine artwork of an Italian cathedral, ran into an aggressive crowd of beggars on the street outside. “Why don’t you rob your churches?” he asked them. And the most law-abiding Protestant could hardly have blamed them if they had. At that time, the more power the Roman Catholic church had in a country, the more beggars there were.

And in parallel, absolute monarchy lost its legitimacy as well, although this too was a process of centuries. From the execution of Charles I to the massacre of the Czar’s family was 269 years, ten or eleven generations. And even when monarchs were no longer absolute, the power that remained to them might still be problematic. George III was a constitutional monarch, for example.

I should point out that hierarchies do not lose their legitimacy for no reason, and the reasons often involve the hierarchy pushing its advantages too far. The rampant corruption of the Church before the Reformation—the luxury and immorality in Rome, the sale of indulgences—had largely undermined the Church’s support even before Luther was born.

And likewise with the divine right of kings. Although kings and even the Church had long held that the monarchy’s legitimacy depended on divine favor, they generally didn’t make an issue of it when confronted with reality. King Richard the Lionheart is quoted as believing in the divine right of kings, but of course he fought three wars against his own father, so he clearly didn’t believe Henry II ruled by divine right.

For Richard, divine right was just a talking point, but Charles I took it seriously. When he overrode established custom and imposed taxes without Parliament’s consent—and justified this by divine right—he had gone too far. An irresponsible king who could impose taxes without approval from the House of Commons was a threat to the economy of England.

When a hierarchy begins to lose its legitimacy, this leads to social and political instability, but it also opens the door to change. Modern democracy was created by de-legitimizing the monarchy, the Church, and the aristocracy. And associated with those hierarchies—supporting them and being supported by them—was an authoritarian family structure.

The moment when hierarchies fall is a key moment in the history of our civilization, of our people, of the human race. We see that with particular clarity in the news today from Ireland, the most Catholic of nations, where the abuses of the Church finally discredited its position on abortion:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/world/europe/ireland-abortion-yes.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The moment always comes when William Tell refuses to bow to Gessler’s hat, and when he removes the second arrow from its quiver. In the legend, Tell is shackled hand and foot, and sentenced to life in prison. He is transported by boat to his prison, but a great storm comes up and his guards fear they will all drown unless William Tell is freed and takes the helm; Gessler is reluctant, but facing death, he finally agrees. Tell steers the boat nearly to shore and then escapes by leaping onto a rock.

I am talking here not so much about the semi-historic figure, but about the William Tell who lives in each of our hearts, the indomitable one who is kept in chains until there is a crisis so great that he alone can meet it. However meek and passive we may be, that one is still there, deep within our minds. Do we feel that our ability to love is imprisoned?  Our capacity to lead our people into the light? To forgive the worst crimes against us, to dance, to box skillfully, and to defy the cruelty of this world with grace and daring?

The moment always comes when our spirit overflows; it may seem impossible, it may seem as if the moment of change will never come, as if our souls are buried a thousand miles deep in the earth. But that moment will come, never doubt it.

Jordan Peterson is wrong not to teach his young followers this truth. You want to restore the spirit of masculinity to our culture? There is no version of masculinity worth discussing that merely insists on privileges. A real man is one who protects and helps his people, who loves the truth the way he loves sunlight, and who is willing if need be to sacrifice himself, in small ways as well as large.

And historically this has sometimes meant the overthrow of hierarchies.

Why has socialism failed to transform Western civilization?

The short answer is that socialism hasn’t completely failed to change civilization, but the effect hasn’t been transformative. Old age pensions, universal healthcare and various measures to support families with children have been widely adopted. Labor unions are still relevant in some places.

But the full promise has not been fulfilled. There have been several reasons, which I list in descending order of importance.

1. Authoritarian socialism or communism. There has been no instance of authoritarian socialism that wasn’t a humanitarian disaster. The reasons that authoritarian socialism developed are doubtless complex, but it does seem that a country has to have a functioning democracy and the norms of a civil society before socialism is introduced. Socialism depends on the premise that individuals have a responsibility to society, and people who grew up in, say, Czarist Russia may have had trouble internalizing that premise, since they didn’t vote or otherwise have any control over the direction of their country. Short of re-socializing the entire nation, the Soviet Communist Party had to resort to autocracy to get anything done, not that it seemed to mind in the least.
2. Socialism assumed that replacing capitalism would be simple, and actually more efficient economically, by eliminating the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism. This was a serious mistake, aggravated by the fact that capitalism itself was learning how to moderate the boom-and-bust cycle. Socialism had no appreciation for the dynamism of capitalism, for its innovative side. Over time the democratic socialists learned somewhat better, but they struggled to find the right balance between protecting people from capitalism while still allowing capitalism the flexibility it needs to create wealth. And they still do.
3. Socialism often failed to appreciate the role of productivity in improving capitalism. Socialism does have something unique to offer capitalism, something capitalism cannot do for itself, and that is to improve worker productivity on a scale that few companies can imagine, and on a timeframe inconsistent with most corporations’ business plans.
4. Socialism became associated with anti-clericalism and atheism. Although the churches in Europe were shameless in their defense of capitalism and even of absolute monarchy, socialism didn’t need to fight that battle, and they failed to recognize the spiritual benefits of religious practice. The liberals handled this issue more adeptly.
5. Socialism adopted bureaucratic state methods uncritically. It was truly a child of the nineteenth century in this respect.

But the big problems were authoritarianism and a failure to confront capitalism in a realistic way. Capitalism does have some notable strengths, and replacing it completely was a costly mistake.

The history of socialism from, say, 1848 to 1949 is one of dramatic victories and defeats, of tragic mistakes and incredible resilience. Like World War II, this history is difficult to grasp in its entirety—it is too much to hold in your head without consulting notes. From Spain to China, the struggle for socialism became the struggle for humanity at large. For the human race to reach “the broad sunlit uplands” of the future, in Churchill’s phrase, we had to free ourselves from absolute monarchies, from titled aristocracies that monopolized wealth and public office, from fascism, military rule, theocracy and dictatorships of all kinds, and from colonialism and intensely hierarchical social structures—particularly the class structure that resulted from the industrial revolution, with its extremes of poverty and luxury.

We had to free ourselves, in short, from political and social arrangements that rested on force or fraud rather than on the responsible and uncoerced consent of the people.

And socialism took the lead in this struggle from 1848 to 1949. It also tragically and famously fell victim to governing based on force, as with Stalin and Mao Zedong. Not that authoritarian socialism is simply a matter of a few personalities gone astray.

Still, even communism has some honor to claim. Without the Soviet Union, by 1949 the Nazis and the Japanese would have controlled Eurasia. Think what that would have meant for humanity.

But there were also examples of socialist parties that were not authoritarian. The most interesting example is the SPD, which was founded in 1863—before Germany became a unified nation. It was often the object of repression. From 1878 to 1890, for example, meetings to discuss socialist ideas were illegal, and yet the SPD continued to grow, by running its candidates as independents. In fact, it became the largest party in the Reichstag by 1892. It grew more influential in subsequent years, becoming a cultural movement. From Wikipedia:

“In the states of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Hesse, and Baden, the SPD was successful in extracting various socio-political and democratic concessions (including the replacement of the class-based electoral systems with universal suffrage) through electoral alliances with bourgeois parties, voting for parliamentary bills and state budgets. In the Reichstag, the SPD resorted to a policy of tactical compromise….. In 1894, the parliamentary SPD voted for a government bill for the first time ever. It reduced the import duty on wheat, which led to a reduction in the price of food. In 1913, the votes of SPD parliamentarians helped to bring in new tax laws affecting the wealthy, which were necessary due to the increase in military spending.^[6]

The Social Democrats gave particular attention to carrying out reforms at the local level …. which intensified after 1945. The establishment of local labour exchanges and the introduction of unemployment benefits can be credited in part to the SPD. In 1913, the number of Social Democrats on municipal and district councils approached 13,000. As noted by Heinrich Potthoff and Susanne Miller,

‘Here, and in their work in the administration of industrial insurance, in community employment offices and courts of arbitration, lay one of the roots of the gradual penetration by the Social Democrats of the imperial German state.’

As Sally Waller wrote, the SPD encouraged great loyalty from its members by organising educational courses, choral societies, sports clubs, and libraries. The party also ran welfare clinics, founded libraries, produced newspapers, and organised holidays, rallies, and festivals. As also noted by Weller, they played a role in shaping a number of progressive reforms:

‘The SPD also helped promote Germany’s extensive system of welfare support giving Germany the most comprehensive system of social insurance in Europe by 1913. They pressed successfully for …… the secret ballot (1904) and payment of MPs (1906), which permitted lower middle and working-class men, with no other income, to put themselves forward as deputies for the Reichstag. In 1911, they supported measures whereby Alsace-Lorraine was given Reichstag representation and universal male suffrage at 21 years was introduced. They also successfully resisted the taxation proposals that would hit the working man harder and promoted progressive taxes….’

And in this from historian Richard M. Watt:

‘The political and organizational success of the Social Democrats had enabled them to demand and obtain a respectable body of legislation incorporating social reform, outlawing child labor and improving working conditions and wages, to the point where the German Social Democratic Party was the model for socialist parties in every other nation, and the German worker the most envied in Continental Europe.’ “

This success was all the more remarkable because the SPD never achieved an absolute majority in the Imperial Reichstag….and the Reichstag had only limited powers. Most critically, it lacked the power to dismiss or select ministers. Nevertheless, a Reichstag with good ideas always had a chance to influence public policy, and the SPD never ran short of good ideas before 1914.

The SPD was formally committed to revolution, and the Imperial German state concentrated most power in the hands of the Kaiser and his inner circle; some of the Kaisers believed in the divine right of kings. Neither the SPD nor the monarchy accepted the existence of the other, and yet they played a game of parliamentary chess for decades., in which the SPD was generally successful beyond all expectations. It consistently focused on what the German people needed, and on what could be done within the existing system. Then the SPD worked year after year for change on specific issues. They never abandoned their principles, and they never failed to change their tactics as circumstances required.

They even convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II to care about the working conditions of miners—and the Kaiser used that issue against Bismarck, ousting him in 1892. So the SPD even brought down their most powerful adversary.

In 1914, however, the SPD gave way to nationalism. In the run-up to the war they transferred funds to Switzerland in case the party were outlawed in Germany and had to continue operations abroad. They organized demonstrations against the war and there was talk of a general strike. But in the end the SPD voted money for the war and went along. This had far-reaching effects for the SPD, Germany and the world.

What went wrong? Or was this the best option available? It seems that the SPD forgot that for Germany to progress politically sooner or later it had to become a republic or at least a constitutional monarchy. The SPD had become so skilled at ameliorating the German class structure that it forgot the need for more basic changes.

And the SPD leadership, like German public opinion in general, saw the war against Russia as a defensive one which Germany could not escape. German Socialists hated and feared the Czar for his treatment of political dissidents and Jews.

On the other hand, no German Socialist wanted war with France. And yet Germany declared war on France, and the SPD voted money for an invasion of that country.

Amazingly enough, the SPD, which had been so masterful at negotiating with Imperial Germany during peacetime, did not ask for anything in return for its support for war. It might have asked for a constitutional monarchy after the war, with a cabinet entirely responsible to the Reichstag. If the government had accepted, then the SPD could have told its membership that a constitutional monarchy accountable to the people was worth fighting for. And likewise, if the Kaiser had refused, the SPD could have called a general strike against a Kaiser bent on war today and on absolute power forever.

In any case, the party’s support for the war resulted in a deep split in the SPD and the founding of the German Communist party and other far-left groups. That split weakened the German Left and ultimately made it easier for the Nazis to take power.

It’s one thing to reject violent revolution as a means of change, but it’s something else again to assert that basic change is optional, and that incrementalism will always work. A general strike in 1914 probably would have resulted in the suppression of the SPD, but at least the Left would have remained united, and when the war turned into a disaster, people would have remembered that the SPD tried to stop it.

After WWI, a republic was proclaimed and a revolt by the Communists and the Spartacists, another far-left group, was suppressed by an SPD government, using right-wing Freicorps paramilitary groups. This involved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of summary executions.

And yet, despite the SPD’s failures in 1914 and 1919, and its considerable loss of credibility, particularly among the left-wing public, and the intense hostility to the SPD by German nationalists, the SPD continued to succeed at incrementalism. It just had too many good ideas to ignore:

“As noted by Edward R. Dickinson, the [1918] Revolution and the democratisation of the state and local franchise provided Social Democracy with a greater degree of influence …. than it had been able to achieve before 1914. As a result of the reform of municipal franchises, socialists gained control of many of the country’s major cities. This provided Social Democrats with a considerable degree of influence in social policy, as most welfare programmes (even those programmes mandated by national legislation) were implemented by municipal government. By the Twenties, with … the reformist and revision element dominant in the SPD, Social Democrats regarded the expansion of social welfare programmes, and particularly the idea that the citizen had a right to have his or her basic needs met by society at large, as central to the construction of a just and democratic social order. Social Democrats therefore pushed the expansion of social welfare programmes energetically at all levels of government, and SPD municipal administrations were in the forefront of the development of social programmes. As remarked by Hedwig Wachenheim in 1926, under Social Democratic administration many of the country’s larger cities began to become experimental “proletarian cooperatives.”^[25]

Protective measures for workers were vastly improved, under the influence or direction of the SPD, and members of the SPD pointed to positive changes that they had sponsored, such as improvements in public health, unemployment insurance, maternity benefits, and the building of municipal housing.^[26] During its time in opposition throughout the Twenties, the SPD was able to help push through a series of reforms beneficial to workers, including increased investment in public housing, expanded disability, health, and social insurance programmes, the restoration of an eight-hour workday in large firms, and the implementation of binding arbitration by the Labour Ministry.^[27] In 1926, the Social Democrats were responsible for a law which increased maternity benefit “to cover the cost of midwifery, medical help and all necessary medication and equipment for home births.”^[28] “

The SPD was so successful that the Nazis could only compete through assassination and street violence. A number of SPD officials were killed before the Nazis took control in 1933, and the German political system was not outraged—nor was international public opinion.

After the Reichstag Fire Hitler outlawed the Communist Party and pushed an Enabling Act through the Reichstag, giving him absolute power. Since the Reichstag building had burned, the meeting was convened in the nearby Kroll Opera House. When the vote came, there were S.A. troopers present to intimidate the deputies. That is, some of the most murderous thugs in history were on the floor to ensure that the vote went Hitler’s way.

All the Communist deputies and 28 of the SPD deputies had already been arrested or were in hiding. This suppression was accomplished with the active help of the German court system.

Every political party voted for the Enabling Act—the Zentrum (a centrist Catholic party with the stated purpose of representing Christian values in politics), the DNVP (a conservative nationalist party with a Prussian mystique and an appeal limited to Protestants), and all the smaller parties voted for the Nazi dictatorship—except for the SPD.  The final vote was 444 in favor, 94 opposed.  All of those opposed were members of the SPD, which voted unanimously against the Enabling Act. Every other party voted unanimously for it.

Only the SPD chairman, Otto Wels, spoke against the Enabling Act. He said:

“At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible … From this new persecution too German social democracy can draw new strength. We send greetings to the persecuted and oppressed. We greet our friends in the Reich. Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage with which they maintain their convictions and their unbroken confidence guarantee a brighter future.”

The SPD deputies, whatever their mistakes and illusions, still had the hearts of heroes—and Deutsche Helder at that.

Let us pause here to square up the accounts of history. Once the Enabling Act had passed, World War II was inevitable, and the fate of European Jews was settled. And it must have been apparent to most in the Kroll Opera House that war was the likely outcome.  The fifty million (or so) who would die in World War II might have felt a chill, as if someone had walked across their grave.

Catholicism, Protestantism, nationalism and the German judiciary were all “weighed in the balances, and found wanting.” The Army and the industrialists had already been compromised. Every major institution in Germany (aside from the SPD and the Communists) actively supported giving Hitler absolute power. This wasn’t mere complicity.

Only the socialists tried to block the path between fascism and the future.

Afterwards, the SPD leaders and officials either fled the country or were sent to concentration camps, where thousands died. Some went underground in Germany. The SPD was formally outlawed a few months after the Enabling Act passed. There was an SPD exile group, which fled first to Prague, then to Paris, and finally to London.

And yet after WWII ended, the SPD re-emerged in Germany in 1946 and began taking over municipal governments. The Americans—indeed all the occupying powers, including the USSR—did not want the socialists to have any real power, but their efforts were useless. The CDU had to adopt many of the SPD’s proposals, and the Americans had to accept that the SPD was part of the landscape.

The CDU/CSU was really just the pre-war Zentrum party, but because of Zentrum’s support for the Enabling Act and their overall complicity with the Nazis, it had to be “re-branded.” The reader may note that the SPD had no need to change its name.

And if you read the history of Germany since WWII, what you come to realize is that the modern German state—and culture—are largely the work of the SPD. The socialists created modern Germany; even when they didn’t have much power, they had the rare ability to set the agenda and to influence others: Bismarck (on old age pensions), Kaiser Wilhelm II (on worker safety), and Zentrum and the CDU on a wide range of issues.

And they did this in a country cursed with absolute monarchy, and with an aristocracy that was proverbial for its harshness, where fascism reached the height of its power and efficiency, with an entire array of adverse social and cultural conditions: patriarchy, high alcohol consumption, social isolation, racism, anti-Semitism and militarism. And yet out of that, the socialists created modern Germany.

The SPD’s influence was like “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” in Flannery O’Connor’s words.

 I started this essay with the question: “Why has socialism failed to transform Western Civilization?” And I was looking for a set of mistakes or errors in thinking when I asked that question.

And yet socialism has transformed Germany, and other countries as well. And while I do believe that authoritarian socialism was an enormous and tragic mistake, perhaps I wasn’t asking all right questions. “What did socialists do wrong?” is a good question, but so is “What did they do right, and how can we build on that?”

The SPD did a lot right, and their faith and courage in the midst of disaster are not the least of it.

(All quotes from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wels )

to keep the Irish from ruling the world.” This old joke is an invitation to introspection.

What did God create to keep progressives from leading America? How did the Left, which set the national agenda from the mid-‘50s to mid-‘70s, end up muttering over a glass of warm beer in the corner?

Was it identity politics?

The problem with identity politics is not that it annoys the white working class but that it uses a nationalist template for liberation. Nationalism stresses the differences between groups; socialism emphasizes the similarities. To create a unifying and humane vision—a socialist vision—is simply impossible if the starting point is a set of intensely nationalistic identity movements. They must agree on common goals, and they’ve never thought about what they have in common; they must trust each other, but there’s no ideological basis for trust. Nor is there any particular pressure for mass action; the inward focus on shared identity and its complexities often seems sufficient.

If this weren’t the case, the need for “intersectional feminism” (for instance) would not exist.

To take a contrary example, the different ethnic groups in the US were able to unite against fascism during World War II because they shared attitudes toward democracy, the rule of law and the New Deal. The differences between Irish and WASP, between the Midwest and the South, between white and black were simply less important than their shared opposition to fascism, which is saying something. Supporting Britain, which shared somewhat similar traditions of representative government, was easy enough, but ultimately the war wasn’t about helping Britain, it was about protecting America’s vital strategic interests and her ideals.

However, in Canada the situation was different. The unifying values were not strong enough to bridge the nationalist divisions. The coherence and unity of the US war effort was lacking in Canada, which was in such of state of crisis over conscription that the Prime Minister feared civil war and the ultimate annexation of Canada by the US.  The only group in Canada that whole-heartedly supported the war effort were those that “identified with the British Empire,” a minority. So Canada was fighting a war based on the dubious strategy of “helping” Britain, rather than protecting its own interests—or attempting to save civilization from fascism.

Do progressives today resemble the US in World War II, or Canada?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944

 

Was it the false fond notion that the problem with capitalism is unethical capitalists?

I have written about this in “A Greater Power,” but the problem with capitalism is….capitalism. Capitalism depends upon a particular form of socialization, in which large numbers of workers and managers learn to see every decision and every event in economic terms. If all the banks and factories and markets disappeared, and all the money evaporated, people who were socialized to capitalism would re-create the system using blue jay feathers as money. Indeed they could not do otherwise—any alternative would be literally unthinkable for them.

But this socialization blinds us to any other consideration, including even the value of human life. This blindness leads to unethical—tragic—actions, of which capitalist socialization is the cause. Unethical people don’t stroll in and take over capitalist enterprises; if capitalism needs people to behave unethically, it will train them to do so, and train them so well they won’t even see how dreadful their own actions are.

And the idea that the problem with capitalism is an ethical problem is truly a fatal error, because this idea is extended into every other question as well. Once social and political issues are seen as primarily ethical, then the difference between progressives and (say) centrists is seen as the difference between the pure and the impure, when in fact progress seldom happens without a good working relationship between Left and Center.

And of course this mistake only aggravates the problem with identity politics. Identity movements emphasize differences. What difference could be more dramatic than an ethical difference, between good and evil? So we end up in a Manichaean hall of mirrors, seeing extreme evil everywhere, and never questioning our own purity.

There’s plenty of evil in capitalism without falsifying its source or the role individuals play in it.

Was it the idea that with the right ideology, governing would be a detail?

Let’s take a simple, close-to-home example (at least for me): the effort to pass single-payer healthcare in Colorado in 2016. This was an effort staffed almost entirely by Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Here’s an excellent rundown of the issues, by Dylan Mathews of Vox:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/14/16296132/colorado-single-payer-ballot-initiative-failure

As good as this article is, I need to add some details on the funding side. The Colorado income tax is a flat tax calculated from your taxable federal income. So it’s only as progressive as the federal tax is. Proponents of amendment 69 took a mostly-flat tax system and made it worse. The impact on middle-income self-employed people was a particularly hard sell, because the self-employed were on the hook for the entire 10% payroll tax. Even if you had no insurance and wanted badly for single-payer to pass, the initial shock of the tax increases might have been too much for your family budget.

And the impact on Medicaid recipients (who currently pay nothing) was impossible to justify, in my mind. They too were subject to the payroll tax. Why didn’t they get an exemption? Since this was structured as an amendment to the state constitution, there was no easy way to correct that mistake.

Also, amendment 69 super-ceded Obamacare at the state level, which meant they assumed that all the funds previously going to Obamacare would be diverted to the state healthcare system. There was no indication that this was legal or that Congress or the President would agree. This was a “then a miracle occurs” sort of funding provision.

There was absolutely no effort to make the funding side more progressive, or to introduce new sources of revenue (a fracking tax, for example, would have been an easy sell).

The tricky questions of limiting costs—particularly payments to providers—and of funding for abortions were mostly ignored.

There was of course no effort to involve the Democratic Party in the drafting of this proposal. The Sanders people in Colorado apparently now view themselves as another identity group. Some of their mistakes were rookie errors, but you don’t learn from those if you view your natural teachers as your enemies. Fortunately, some of the people involved (not all) seem to have learned that working with the Center is not only a vital tactic, but that centrists have something useful to add to the discussion. Centrists, like old-fashioned conservatives, still retain the valuable ability to add up a column of numbers correctly and to sometimes understand the implications of the sum.

The story of amendment 69 is an almost textbook case for how to fail as a progressive movement. Colorado could use a better health-care system, but some good has already been done, particularly in reducing the number of uninsured, by Obamacare. Might we perhaps build on that partial success? No, of course not, because it isn’t “single-payer.” That’s the answer. But Medicaid is single-payer, and the majority of the people in Obamacare are covered by the Medicaid expansion.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/15/rand-paul/medicaid-expansion-drove-health-insurance-coverage/

So Obamacare does contain a significant single-payer component.

As the Vox article hints, a better approach might have been to create a public option available to individuals and to employers within the Obamacare structure. This would probably have involved additional funding, and it might have required a lawsuit—but not as much funding or as many lawsuits as amendment 69 would have needed.

To govern means to prioritize and to communicate. To prioritize means (a) to be conscious of your values and (b) to have a strong reality principal. To communicate means (a) to listen with empathy and (b) to allow grace to flow into your words.

And in a democracy, every citizen governs.

I personally did not vote for amendment 69. It was a complex issue, but one argument was this: Obamacare is doing some measurable amount of good in Colorado, and to divert those funds into the amendment 69 system would probably do less good. That was a consideration of governing, and not of ideology.

 

Was it a lack of history, of storytelling?

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed she tells of modern American poverty, circa 2000. It detailed her three-month odyssey of living on minimum wage jobs. The implied history, the lost Golden Age, was her parents’ middle-class life in Butte, Montana. Ehrenreich was born in 1941, so this was the late-forties and fifties. She talked about how her parents were able to live comfortably on working-class jobs. Piano lessons, trips to the library, Sunday dinners, all that.

In her description, she never once mentions the historical struggle that led to that comfortable existence—and she was born in 1941. The phrase “New Deal” never occurs in her book, and neither does “FDR.” She never mentions the Earned Income Credit, which materially helped the working poor, passed during Clinton’s first term. (She also never mentions Black Like Me, from which she borrowed the conceit for her book.)

The lack of any information in this book about Ehrenreich’s grandparents’ lives, of the early lives of her parents, is jarring. Once upon a time, everything was wonderful, the world glistened like dewdrop, and then NAFTA happened—appears to be all the historical backdrop deemed necessary for her readers.

It’s like Ralph Nader wrote a history book and borrowed Stalin’s airbrush to eliminate the incorrect elements of recent American history.

So it’s not exactly a “lack of history” but more a falsification by selective omission, at least in some cases.

 

In left-ish circles, if I bring up the idea that we need a better sense of our movement’s history, a woman will sometimes say, “what about her-story?” which, since I’ve heard that before, irritates me, and I want to say something cutting in response.

But I keep silent, and persist.

 

When I was growing up, everyone had a story that related to FDR, the Great Depression, and World War II—and at the policy level, that meant socialist and anti-fascist measures. My mother, for instance, who was in high school during World War II, told the story about the day she came home from school. No one was at home; both her parents were working in war industries. She was 16, and after a snack, she started doing her homework in the dining room. The electricity went off and a green light filled the house. This was Oklahoma, and she laid down on the floor, waiting to die. She heard the tornado tearing up houses nearby, but then the sound receded. After a short while, the radio came back on, announcing that FDR had died.

My father, who was older, remembered that business conditions and farm prices declined after the 1929 stock market crash, but that the situation seemed retrievable. So in the spring of 1930 they planted their crops, mostly cotton, and expanded their dairy cattle operation. My father was nearly 12, but of course he was a hardened farm hand by then, like most boys his age in that Texas county. They watched the price of cotton decline all summer long. When the cotton crop ripened, my father said, “It wasn’t worth picking, but we picked it anyway.” They were homeless in a matter of weeks. Three years later, he went to an army base, lied about his age and joined up. Three years after that, his term of enlistment over, he joined the CCC because it paid $30 a month, $3 more than being in the army. He believed FDR was a great man.

No one today tells these stories about the sixties and seventies, but it’s not for lack of material. Even the Occupy movement seems like a dream now.

There is, I believe, a specific reason for the Left’s current a-historical stance, and I’ll illustrate with a little story.

In 1970, when Nixon invaded Cambodia, there were massive protests all over the country—not just in Washington or New York. This was a new development—people were pouring out of their homes and demonstrating in their own cities. There was a distinct feeling that the situation had gotten much more serious and out-of-control.

In Austin, Texas, anti-war organizers applied for a permit to demonstrate. The city officials brought in the state, since Austin is the state capitol. The governor referred the issue to the Texas Rangers, an organization with a legendary history and not a lot of expertise in negotiation.

The Rangers said, you can’t march.

The anti-war protestors said, we’re marching.

The Rangers said, if you march, we will shoot to kill.

We are marching, was the response.

At some point the governor got involved again. He turned the issue over to the Texas Highway Patrol, which negotiated the route and timing and so on to everyone’s satisfaction.

The march began. There were 50,000 marchers in a town of barely 100,000 people. The march was on a weekday, down Congress Avenue, the main street south of the state capitol. There had been no real anti-war protests involving more than a thousand or so  people anywhere in the state up to that time.

Congress Avenue was six lanes wide and the protestors filled it up, curb to curb, like a river.  At first the marchers were fairly silent. People in office buildings pushed toward the windows. Construction workers stopped to watch. People along the sidewalk stood still.

Suddenly aware of being watched, the marchers began to shout to the workers, “Join us! Join us!” The route was lined with big buildings, and the sound reverberated, rattling the windows.

It took a minute or two for the workers to absorb what they were being asked to do. Then, like lights coming on, their hands lifted, flashing peace signs to the marchers. The construction workers grinned at each other like bad boys in school, and they too flashed the peace sign to the demonstrators.

 

I believe that part of the reason this story, and others like it, don’t get told today is because the true history of progressive movements is configured around moments of transcendent unity, around the moment when you cry out “Join us!”, the moment when you ask strangers to become your brothers and sisters. The New Deal, World War II (which was a war against fascism), the Civil Rights movement, the first Earth Day, the hippie movement, Obama’s election, the Occupy Movement, the Women’s March and the upwelling of resistance to Trump.

And that is not the history of identity movements. Identity movements do have their place, but they cannot, by their nature, unite great numbers of people at decisive moments.

And when you cry out “Join us!” then you imply that if your listener walks toward you and takes up the cause, then it becomes their cause as much as yours, and they are equal partners in the future. No identity movement can make that promise.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/opinion/unicorns-of-the-intellectual-right.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

There are three points I would like to make about the Williamson-Atlantic controversy. First is the most obvious one: that free speech is not an absolute entitlement. If people dislike what you are saying, or if they believe your views are irrelevant, then they will not hire you to write for them, and they will not read your columns however you manage to publish them. They can’t put you in jail—that would be unconstitutional—but they can hold you in deep contempt and refuse to have anything to do with you. That’s part of what free speech means.

Or, they may aggressively oppose you at every turn. If you show up to speak at a campus, then students are perfectly free to heckle you and chant during your speech. They don’t owe you a respectful hearing—-Lincoln and Douglas were both heckled during their debates, and are you more deserving than they?

Aggressive audience participation is most definitely a part of the democratic tradition, and anyone who pretends that the audience is supposed to just sit there and listen to disagreeable nonsense—for the sake of politeness, of all things—without protest or heckling should be ashamed of themselves. As Walt Whitman put it, “There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.”

The right to talk back to an oppressor is basic. Mockery and defiance of cruel or plainly false arguments is one way people express their love for the truth.

Granted, a nice civil speech with questions held until the end has a comfortable feel to it, and I like that sort of event myself. But the audience is never under any obligation not to protest or heckle or talk back, just as the speaker is never expected to necessarily respect the audience or avoid lying. How many speakers in this country have claimed that Obama was born in Kenya, without being forced to leave the podium?

A respectful hearing has to be earned. You don’t get that just because you arrived in a limo. Likewise, Kevin Williamson doesn’t get a job with The Atlantic just because.

Secondly, in Williamson’s case, what possible good can come from publishing his views? The theory of free speech is that many of us have some light, and that by freely debating the issues reasonable people will separate the wheat from the chaff—and at times a compromise or even a synthesis of opposing viewpoints will emerge.

But Kevin Williamson has advocated the death penalty for women who have abortions. What possible use can this genocidal fantasy be, and what good could come from debating it? Williamson has excluded himself from reasonable discourse, and that is part of the process of free speech producing wiser policies—-by debating alternatives to difficult issues (like abortion) we learn to exclude obviously bad ideas, and we often exclude their proponents as well.

Free speech implies no mercy for bad ideas, because the purpose of free speech is to find the best ideas through open debate. We don’t practice free speech to make everyone feel important and valued—quite the contrary, because many people will inevitably feel ignored and even humiliated by this process, just as Kevin Williamson must be feeling this evening, on April 9, 2018.

American history is littered with the debris of ideas that were tested by debate and events and found wanting: slavery, the gold standard, prohibition, isolationism, McCarthyism, and perhaps someday even billionaire capitalism, if the gods smile on our cause.

The idea of the death penalty for abortion is certainly one of the shortest-lived of our bad ideas. There is no constituency for killing, what, fifteen to twenty million women? That would certainly teach everyone—once and for all—to value life, wouldn’t it? I expect Kevin Williamson feels himself vastly superior to the Khmer Rouge.

In mathematics, we call this “reasoning to a contradiction.” If we assume that the pro-life movement is truly motivated by a respect for life, and if in the process of pursuing their goal of eliminating abortion they advocate the execution of millions of women (incidentally leaving any children the women already have orphaned, and any children they might bear in the future unborn), then we’ve reasoned to a contradiction: our original assumption is incorrect, and the pro-life movement is not motivated by a respect for life. Or at least Kevin Williamson isn’t.

His short-lived career outside the bubble of right-wing journalism is actually an example of how freedom of speech should work. He and his ideas have now been discredited and this lends focus and context to the ideas that remain current.

Because free speech is something we all practice, and we all benefit from. It’s a system, not a “right.” Sure, part of the system is that individuals can’t be jailed (or “hanged,” in Williamson’s elegant phrasing) for speaking their minds, but the individual part of free speech is only part of the picture. The collective part is the concluding and decisive part of free speech, where we say: “the solution to abortion, if there is a solution, isn’t anything like what Kevin just said. Let’s think of something else, and never mention his name again.”

That is free speech.

Because, although individuals can’t be silenced by the force of law, in effect individuals can be—and sometimes must be—silenced by the judgement of public opinion. If your nonsense is too offensive or tiresome then people stop listening. And that’s an essential part of freedom of speech, as Kevin is finding out right now.

Thirdly, there’s the asymmetry of Williamson’s career inside the right-wing echo chamber and his career outside it. Within, there was no accountability for bad ideas—Williamson rocked along for years working for the National Review without either his editors or readers (if any) pushing back against his femicidal daydreams.

Why didn’t Williamson get slapped down by the National Review? Basically, it’s because free speech, as I’ve described it, doesn’t exist inside the right-wing media bubble. It sort-of looks like free speech, but it’s just propaganda. Because propaganda has no self-correcting mechanism—public opinion never steps in and says, “STFU!” when the rhetoric gets too savagely inhumane or transparently false. Propaganda is just a top-down narrative with no ability to differentiate between good and bad ideas.

And how did the right-wing bubble lose the capacity for free speech? After all, the people who inhabit that world weren’t born unreasonable, and they probably had teachers or parents who respected the truth in some way or another.

What happened was that the right-wing bubble developed different priorities than society at large. And these priorities dictate different values. Inside the bubble, anything that furthers the concentration of wealth is “good.” This includes the care and feeding of the political coalition that supports tax cuts and other economic privileges for the very wealthy, and this coalition includes many people who don’t care about tax cuts, but who do care about abortion. Now, anyone who follows politics has known for decades that probably nothing will ever be done about abortion, least of all by the Republican Party. But, to keep the coalition together, the National Review and the rest of the bubble have to sometimes pretend to care about abortion. And they have to change out the rhetoric to keep it fresh, right?

Bear in mind that the coalition supporting the concentration of wealth has a narrow base of relevant opinion-makers. The average anti-abortion Catholic or evangelical need never read or approve of Williamson’s proposals—in fact they would probably reject them as too extreme—but as long as Archbishop Chaput and the fanatics at Operation Rescue (or whoever) approved, Williamson saw only smooth sailing.

And that’s why there’s no true dialog between left and right in this country. Dialog exists where there are shared values but different opinions about how to realize those values. But the right-wing today views the concentration of wealth as the highest value, and any social or political force that opposes the concentration of wealth—even indirectly—as evil. This means that the right-wing does not share values with anyone outside the bubble. Furthermore, when conservatives venture outside the bubble, as Williamson did briefly, they experience normal rough-and-tumble free speech as unspeakably harsh and unfair. “Why are liberals so hateful?” they ask themselves.

And if we look at specific issues, where is the common ground between those who believe climate change is a hoax and those who believe it is a serious threat to the environment and to civilization? What values do these two groups share? What sort of synthesis or compromise can emerge from a debate between those two points of view?

Where is the common ground on education or health care? Abortion? Immigration? What about inequality or the breakdown of majority rule?

Everywhere you look, there is a lack of common values. Kevin Williamson’s effort to legitimize femicide as a “pro-life” position is just one more example. Who can take that point of view seriously, other than as a threat of mass murder?

The following article refers to a recent attempt to establish Billionaire Capitalism in South Africa, for the benefit of the Gupta family and Jacob Zuma himself.

This is a beautifully concentrated example of the methods and goals of Billionaire Capitalism. There are several points worth emphasis:

If democracy exists, it must be corrupted and discredited. The Guptas prospered because of government corruption and a lack of accountability, and they fell because the South African people demanded accountability—in other words, because there is a democratic culture in South Africa.

The role that divisive racial propaganda played. This effort “set race relations in South Africa back by 10 years,” which is saying something. South Africa was destabilized to the point where there was talk of civil war entirely from a propaganda campaign originating outside the country (in the U.K. and India) without any unusual political conflict over issues.

That one set of billionaires (closely linked to massive government corruption) scapegoated another set of billionaires (who were not connected to the government) for black poverty. While black poverty in South Africa is a complex issue, there’s a clear consensus that not enough progress has been made, and that government corruption is a significant part of the problem.

What is the difference between these two sets of billionaires? The first set—the Guptas—were intimately linked with Jacob Zuma and the ANC. Much or all of their wealth came from government contracts. The second set were mostly white billionaires who were not close supporters of the government. But there is a deeper difference. The Guptas practiced Billionaire Capitalism in the sense I’ve used it in this blog (see “Kasparov Gives Us a Hint”), of using political power to concentrate wealth aggressively in the hands of the few. The billionaires targeted by the Guptas were not trying to use government power to establish a Billionaire State—they had little influence on Zuma, and whatever their plans for making still more money they didn’t involve a government takeover. So not all billionaires participate in what I’ve termed Billionaire Capitalism—some just try to make money.

The Guptas’ campaign was so outrageous that we may forget to ask the most obvious question: what did they hope to achieve? Possibly they were just trying to change the subject from their own and Zuma’s corruption, which was receiving a lot of attention in the South African press.

But the most likely answer is that they wanted massive expropriation of white property in South Africa, much of which would end up owned or controlled by the Guptas themselves. Of course, this would probably result in civil war and/or the expulsion of the white population. No doubt many lives would be lost, with severe long-term effects on the South African economy and its social fabric. For one thing, driving out or killing 4.5 million or so whites would alienate South Africa from the West, resulting in a degree of isolation and condemnation similar to what the country experienced under apartheid.

Modern South Africa is founded on an agreement between Mandela and de Klerk: majority rule but no arbitrary seizure of property. Naturally the particulars of this agreement were difficult to accept for both sides, but it kept the peace and allowed the South African economy to grow, even if the wealth created was distributed unequally. Although little was done to help the rural poor, an urban black middle class was created, and it did prosper.

At the time, it gave both sides a path forward. And the current situation, however frustrating it is to the poor, is not without potential, not without hope.

The Guptas, to further their own goals, were willing to destroy the relative racial peace created by Mandela and de Klerk.

This is, ultimately, what Billionaire Capitalism means. It is willing and eager to destroy or corrupt any institution or tradition that stands in the way of concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. It often exploits and exaggerates racial or regional or class differences, to the point of fomenting actual violence.

The saving grace here is that the Guptas’ plan failed because South Africans saw through it.