“Revolution Forever” mural in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash
I remember the shock of recognition I got reading liberal Raymond Aron’s critique of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.
The ideal of a society in which each would choose his gods or his values cannot spread before individuals are educated to collective life. Hayek’s philosophy assumes, by definition, the results that the philosophers of the past considered as the primary objects of political action. In order to leave to each a private sphere of decision and choice, it is still necessary that all or most want to live together and recognize the same system of ideas as true, the same formula of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free, it must be.
Put differently, in order to have the effect he had, Hayek had to shunt certain things that people worried about into the background. Liberals of his time – like Keynes – worried about where you drew the line between too much government and too much market. Though he conceded the need for government, Hayek was silent about how much you needed. And, while he’d occasionally concede that a very basic safety net might be OK, that was in order to get it out of the way and get back to the idea that for all intents and purposes, when you got to choose between more and less government, you’d choose less. A completely evidence free move. And a stupendously successful one.
And after being in the ascendent for a few decades, those things that people worried weren’t so great about markets are now coming at us thick and fast. Instability, inequality and social atomism. Hayek didn’t tell us these tendencies were illusory, he just behaved as if they could be ignored. And here we are.
Anyway, I thought of this when I read this article in Quillette which bemoans a similar tendency, but with the opposite ideological flavour in our culture. It’s been true, at least since the McCarthy years began receding in the rear view mirror that in the mainstream of our culture, people’s previous involvement with left extremism gets a pass while their involvement with right-extremism doesn’t.
Fascism remains the bogeyman of modern Western political culture. As historian Stanley G. Payne observes, “No major modern political phenomenon has been so thoroughly discredited and obliterated as European fascism was in the 1940s. Yet the f-word was never buried, for it had achieved a demonic status like no other, making it very useful in partisan polemics.” To label someone a fascist is to disqualify them from civil discourse entirely.
Despite its comparable—or in some respects greater—destructiveness, communism is rarely invoked with the same moral urgency. Given that fascism and communism represent the most extreme manifestations of Right and Left respectively, and that both left deep scars on the European continent, it is unsurprising that many politicians and intellectuals retain historical or nostalgic affiliations with one or the other…
The party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d’Italia, is often described as “post-fascist.” Similarly, coverage of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale often highlights the fact that among the party’s founders was former Waffen-SS member Pierre Bousquet. Yet how often have you heard that Meloni’s principal rival, the Democratic Party, traces its lineage back to the Italian Communist Party, which was once faithful to Stalin? How frequently is it mentioned that French President Emmanuel Macron has cooperated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man with a Trotskyist past?…
In Eastern Europe, many nominally social democratic parties are in fact the rebranded heirs of communist regimes, often with enduring ties to old security structures and foreign intelligence services, particularly Russia’s. These connections imply serious strategic and security concerns… Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, intellectuals and political figures who were loyal supporters of and sometimes collaborators with communist regimes have seamlessly rebranded themselves as advocates of liberal democratic values, without ever renouncing their prior allegiances…
Political parties evolve, of course. It is not only a natural but a welcome trend for former communist parties to transform into moderate factions. But it should also be seen as a positive development when parties with far-right origins adopt more moderate stances…
But these examples only underscore the asymmetry with which fascism and communism are treated. Associations with fascism are considered an enduring stain, while associations with communism are forgivable past errors. This imbalance has profound consequences for democratic legitimacy and ideological pluralism. When right-leaning parties are treated as suspect by default, scrutinised through the lens of historical guilt, and constantly expected to repudiate long-disavowed associations, the Overton window is constrained from shifting in a rightward direction…
Neither Fratelli d’Italia nor Rassemblement National advocates fascist policies today. These parties do not reject the democratic framework, they are not authoritarian, neither do they promote militarism, call for a corporatist state, or espouse radical nationalism. The relentless emphasis on their fascist roots serves a political function: to block the revival of ideas that, until quite recently, were widely accepted across the democratic world. Policies centred on national sovereignty, the primacy of domestic citizens in welfare or immigration policy, preservation of national culture and scepticism toward supranational governance were once mainstream positions…
In their recent book, Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right, Tamir Bar-On and Jeffrey M. Bale document how academic discourse about the radical right has been shaped by what they term a “Brown Scare.” According to Bar-On and Bale, this Brown Scare operates by reclassifying once-commonplace political views as “radical right,” while downplaying or ignoring genuinely extremist ideologies—chief among them, Islamism…
throughout history, the norm in most parts of the world has been for particular human groups to create political entities and states that advance their own ethnic, cultural, and social interests. … Conversely, it is extremely rare to find polities that privilege the interests of foreign or minority ethnocultural groups at the expense of their own majorities, as is increasingly becoming the norm in modern Western “multiculturalist” societies…
Together, these tendencies have created a political compass that only points leftward. Moderate right-wing parties are expected to shun cooperation with those further to their right, no matter how electorally significant or democratically legitimate they may be. Left-wing parties are under no comparable obligation…