Behind enemy lines Ideal?

Author: Andrey Tolstoy

Since 1985, The Darwin Awards have been conferred on "people who ensure the long-term survival of the human race by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." In 1998, a German zookeeper named Friedrich Riesfeldt was honored for suffocating under nearly two hundred pounds of elephant feces. Riesfeldt had served the constipated beast 22 doses of animal laxative and was administering an enema when the medicine took effect. This is roughly how I visualize our Republican columnist's tirade on socialism and America last week.

There are many ways to misunderstand the world, and politics is just one of them. Unfortunately, practitioners in the field are convinced that using graphs and obfuscated jargon makes them scientists - even though the predictive capacity of their discipline ranks somewhere between that of palm-reading and sorting tea leaves - which makes it all the funnier when they bicker with one another, and all the funnier when it's a curmudgeonly Young Republican introducing "forced equality [i.e. civil rights], equitable distribution of resources among the proletariat [i.e., single mothers], and the submission of the populace to the will of the government [i.e., representative democracy]" to the freedom-loving end of his boot.

To make sure we're on the same page: socialism is the belief that certain groups and individuals are disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control - disenfranchisement, social prejudice, geographic location - and that because private organizations have no material incentive to help them, the government should assume responsibility. In fairness to the elephant in the room, he isn't the first unemployed intellectual to misappropriate these otherwise reasonable ideas - Karl Marx beat him to it by suggesting they were a means to achieving communism. But deriding the failure of North Korean socialism has no more academic merit than applauding the success of North Korean neoliberal capitalism. Irrespective of what ideology Kim Jong Il purports his government to represent, he remains at the head of a totalitarian dictatorship. No more, no less.

The great problem of social science is not at the level of ideas, but at the level of taking credit. None of these crackpot theories are truly predictive, but because there are so many of them out there, a small percentage can claim scientific success in any given situation. Notice how colonialism, Nazism, mercantilism and other bankrupt ideologies fell simultaneously with the regimes that espoused them, yet the United States' rich history of racism, social inequality, decimation of indigenous peoples, financing of foreign dictatorships, torture and other crimes continues to be sublimated in favor of the illusion that for the past two hundred years there has been some sort of commitment to principles. I agree, let's call a spade a spade, but let's not call every bad spade socialist, and every good spade American. U.S. hegemony is currently challenged by the rise of international actors whose ideological base will praise their success as testament to the inherent values of their culture or social/political/economic system. And when the going gets tough, whatever mammal they identify with most will start grunting and farting about national principles being forsaken. No nation's creed is failure.

Fifty-some years ago, a junior senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy described his communist witch hunt as "Americanism with its sleeves rolled." The world was different then, and communism was a fairy tale the Soviets used to enlist ideologically vulnerable well-wishers into their spy network. McCarthy's activism did nothing to supplement the work of U.S. intelligence agencies, and only created a culture of exclusion, intolerance and paranoia. It was an embarrassing time when one set of beliefs was temporarily declared un-American and forced thousands into unemployment because of hearsay and rumor. Understandably, it chills my blood a little when I read the elephant say, in reference to the supposed third wave of socialism, "We are AMERICANS. We need to start acting like it."

We'll start by writing a declaration of independence and keeping our slaves.