by Ben Shapiro
And human beings did find meaning in the new systems.
But the new systems of thought, unchecked by the old morality, unconstrained by the willingness of single individuals to stand up to the collective, could only end one way: in blood. The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.
The most obvious example, of course, came in Germany. The regime of Otto von Bismarck was characterized by its embrace of romantic nationalism, which culminated in the unification of Germany—and Bismarck’s subsequent focus on Kulturkampf, the “cultural struggle” for German solidarity. That struggle led Bismarck to crack down in fascistic fashion on German Catholics, whom he saw as a threat to his autocratic rule. The National Liberal deputy Georg Jung summarized the principle of Kulturkampf well in the Prussian Landtag in May 1875:
Gentlemen, anyone who believes in our day and age that he must carry his religion around with him, anyone who feels obliged to wear a particular dress, who swears grotesque vows, who bands together in herds, and who, when all is said and done, swears unconditional loyalty to Rome, the bitterest enemy of our young German and Prussian glory—such people can have no place in our state. This is why I say: away with them as fast as possible.41
This was an early indicator of evil to come in Germany. And it was combined with collectivist redistributionism and the rise of an oligarchic regulatory regime. This combination, however, was seen as a model for a new sort of state: Woodrow Wilson praised Bismarck’s system in 1887 as the “most studied and most nearly perfected,” and noted approvingly, “Almost the whole of the admirable system has been developed by kingly initiative.”42
Romantic nationalism continued to animate the German national experience. Its chief expositor, ironically enough, was the British-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who warmed to Germany after hearing the romantic nationalist music of Richard Wagner, the ardent anti-Semite and virulent critic of “Jewishness in music”—the title of Wagner’s most famous anti-Semitic tract. In that tract, Wagner posed the supposed rectitude and depth of Germanness directly against the evil of the nefarious Jew, stating, “Emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities.” Jews, said Wagner, were “alien,” their speech characterized by a “creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle,” their music artificial and plastic; even conversion from Judaism could not relieve them of such characteristics (Felix Mendelssohn is Wagner’s specific target of ire).43
Chamberlain not only bought fully into Wagner’s volkisch view—a populist romantic nationalism—he became friendly with Richard’s nasty widow Cosima, and expanded Wagner’s dichotomy between Jewishness and Germanness into an entire worldview. That worldview took full effect in his bestseller, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. In it, Chamberlain characterized world history as a titanic struggle between the Aryan races and the Jewish race. The book made Chamberlain an intimate of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who adored it. Wilhelm was reportedly taken with Chamberlain’s notion that “the Germanic race alone was the most vital and that the present and future belonged to the German Reich, which was its strongest political organism.”44
This philosophy embedded itself in the German psyche. When Germany surrendered after World War I and the Kaiser was ousted in a coup, romantic nationalism did not dissipate: it was buried lightly under the soil, where it festered. In the aftermath of World War I, the German national myth of the “back-stabbing” outsiders who had given away a battle victory spread far and wide. Germany had been betrayed, the logic went, and only a united Germany, beyond democracy and liberalism, could rise again to defeat its enemies.
It burst forth in full bloom with the Nazis.
The Nazi regime promulgated the most extreme romantic nationalism in world history—hundreds of thousands of Germans united in lockstep, cheering wildly at the sight of a dictator, greeting each other by hailing Hitler, hanging pictures of the Führer over their mantels. All of it was an obvious attempt to create a cult of personality, but it drew on deep-seated romantic nationalism embedded in the German mind since before the days of Wagner. Hitler himself had been entranced with that nationalism when as a teenager, he heard Wagner in Vienna. As Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw writes, “He wanted to become himself a new Wagner—the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist.” And he also imbibed deeply from Chamberlain, finding inspiration in the volkisch movement: “extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, and mystical notions of a uniquely German social order, with roots in the Teutonic past, resting on order, harmony, and hierarchy.”45
As the Weimar Republic collapsed, and with the threat of transnational communist agitation on the move in Germany, romantic nationalism became paramount in Germany. Philosopher Martin Heidegger embodied the feelings of millions when he urged his students in 1933, “May you ceaselessly grow in courage to sacrifice yourselves for the salvation of the nation’s essential being and the increase of its innermost strength in its polity. . . . The Fuhrer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law . . . Heil Hitler.” Hitler merely channeled the widespread belief that German Sturm und Drang could only be recovered through an emphasis on the essence of “Germanness”; Heidegger wrote in 1929, “Either we restore genuine forces and educators emanating from the native soil to our German spiritual life, or we abandon it definitely to the growing Jewification.” In pure pseudoscientific language, he added that Germans had to realize “the fundamental possibilities of the essence of the originally Germanic race.”46
The appeal of such ideals may be confusing, but George Orwell brilliantly summed them up in a 1940 essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”47
The romance of tribe, as we will see, didn’t end with the fall of the Nazis.
Meanwhile, concurrent with the rise of romantic nationalism in Germany, the ideals of collectivist redistributionism took precedence in the East. The end of World War I marked the final breath of the tsarist regime in Russia—and with it, the rise of Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) had spent his entire life in pursuit of socialist revolution; he’d been arrested and exiled for it. He spent most of the First World War dreaming of the inevitable Marxist revolution that would unite class against nation and overthrow the existing order. But when the opportunity arose in his homeland, Lenin quickly shifted his activity toward the formation of a revolutionary vanguard in Russia, embracing and championing the passionate violence of Marx that Fabianism had subsumed.
Marx himself had not been averse to the possibility of violent revolution. In 1848, writing about revolutions taking place within the Austrian Empire, Marx stated, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”48 And, of course, Marx had concluded his Communist Manifesto with a call to arms: “their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”49
Drawing on Marx’s writings about armed revolution, Lenin suggested a revolutionary terror, to be followed by “true democracy”—a dictatorship of the proletariat. Sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders, Lenin wrote in 1917, “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.” Instead, Lenin sought on the one hand “immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democrac
y for the money-bags,” and on the other hand, “a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.” Freedom required tyranny; tyranny was freedom.50 The terror of Stalinism began with the terror of Leninism; historian Richard Pipes states, “It is difficult to convey the vehemence with which Communist leaders at this time called for the spilling of blood.” Grigory Zinoviev, one of the original members of the Politburo and later to be executed by Stalin after a show trial, bragged about the launch of the so-called Red Terror: “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” As Pipes points out, this constituted a “sentence of death on 10 million human beings.”51
Stalin would carry Lenin’s bloody legacy further, of course—by the end of his life, Stalin was responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people under his rule, including five million people during the forcible starvation of Ukraine for agricultural collectivization from 1931 to 1934 alone.52 And in China, Mao Tse-tung would bring Stalinism to a new audience, in the process murdering some sixty-five million human beings, the vast majority during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”—an attempt to reshape human beings by collectivizing their property and returning them to the soil. He did, but only as corpses—somewhere between thirty and forty million people died of starvation. Mao openly bragged about “bur[ying] alive 46,000 scholars.” During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s forces committed atrocities upon intellectuals—and mirroring the USSR’s gulags, Mao built a system of laogai that housed tens of millions of dissidents over the decades.53 Today, the North Korean gulag state mirrors the glorious heritage of its communist predecessors.
While it is easy to revile the deeds of the Russian communists today, it is important to note the esteem in which they were held at the time. Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up the crimes of the communists and repeating their propaganda, even though he knew that they were slaughtering their political opponents. Some seven decades later, the Times executive editor finally admitted that “the work Duranty did, at least as much of it as I’ve read, was credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”54 It wasn’t merely the press. As Jonah Goldberg notes in Liberal Fascism, “Nearly the entire liberal elite, including much of FDR’s Brain Trust, had made the pilgrimage to Moscow to take admiring notes on the Soviet experiment.” The experts were at the wheel in Moscow, these officials believed; as Stuart Chase, the father of the New Deal, stated, the communists didn’t worry about grubby money. Instead, they were motivated by “the burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth which flames in the breast of every good Communist.” John Dewey found the USSR wondrous, as did most of the top officials in the American labor movement. W. E. B. Du Bois gushed, “I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.”55 Until the USSR’s fall, many on the mainstream Left believed it to represent a viable ideology.
Despite the fall of the USSR, the desire to find a new meaning in the collective remains, both in the United States and abroad. The romanticism about communism has never truly died on the American Left—in 2017, the New York Times ran op-eds about why “women had better sex under socialism,” “when Communism inspired Americans,” and why “socialism’s future may be its past.”56
Today, we hear about the wonders of Chinese central planning—the great strength to be found in organized economies, the rising power in the East. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regaled readers in 2009 with tales of China’s mastery: “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One party-autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”57 None of it is true over any serious length of time, but the desire for collective purpose and collective capacity runs strong.
In fact, it runs so strong that Stalin remains an incredibly popular figure in Russia, decades after his death and half a century after his monstrous crimes against humanity were fully revealed. In 2017, a poll by the Levada Center showed that a plurality of Russians named Stalin the most “outstanding” person of all time; modern Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, says that Stalin was a “complex figure,” adding that “excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways Russia’s enemies attack it.”58 Even victims of Stalin’s crimes miss the power and glory that came with collectivization of purpose. In her Nobel Prize–winning oral history Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich quotes a former communist factory worker imprisoned and beaten half to death by the regime. A year later, he was released. Then, during World War II, he met his interrogator, who told him, “We share a Motherland.” As an old man, this cruelly wronged man said, “People always want to believe in something. In God or in technological progress. . . . Today it’s the market. When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music—even their toothbrushes are imported. Their shelves are lined with empty cans of Coke and Pepsi. Savages! . . . I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”59
The deep-seated need for collective purpose and capacity found its outlet in the United States in bureaucracy, the movement away from a government answerable to the population and toward a government run by so-called experts. But these experts weren’t experts on human nature, it turns out: instead, they used science as a catchword for political priorities that maximized centralization. In the realm of economics, this meant the rise of a federal government dedicated to the proposition that unfairness in life could be rectified through central planning. During the FDR administration, economic policy was set from the top; ignoring the injunction by economically laissez-faire thinkers that no set of individuals can know more than the entire market at large, FDR and his cadre of geniuses lengthened the Great Depression by nearly a decade by manipulating the currency, setting wages and prices, and bullying those who objected into silence. As Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA concluded, “The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”60 Those misguided policies included FDR setting the price of gold based on his lucky number. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary, “If anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.”61
Ironically, as Cole points out, “The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and lawmakers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes.”62
The enthusiasm for central planning led to particularly dark results in the areas of race and sex. Many of the most prominent proponents of the social science movement were devotees of so-called race science, the pseudoscience that suggested that all disparities were due to inborn traits—and that the future of a society lay in its willingness to find a “solution” to the problem of “undesirable” populations. This pseudoscience led many of those same “humanistic” thought leaders to propose eugenics as a solution to societal ills. As historian Thomas Leonard writes, “The roster of progressives who advocated exclusion of hereditary inferiors reads like a Who’s Who of American economic reform. . . . They were joined by the founders of American sociology.”63 Among these figures were Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote a letter in 1913 stating, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. . . . Some day we will realize that the prime duty the inescapabl
e duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”64 Wilson pushed for compulsory sterilization of those with Down’s syndrome in 1907, and signed a compulsory sterilization bill as governor of New Jersey in 1911.65
Holmes, a Supreme Court Justice, was a philosophical pragmatist and devotee of Dewey. His 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell resonates down the ages for its evil embrace of state sterilization of supposedly unfit populations: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”66 Fully sixteen states embraced eugenic sterilization during the 1920s and 1930s; over the coming decades, the states would sterilize sixty thousand people.67
In 1922, author Harry Laughlin proposed compulsory sterilization of millions of Americans; in return for calling for generational death of the physically and mentally disabled, as well as alcoholics, he received an appointment as expert for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization for the Congress. He also testified on behalf of dramatically restricting immigration. In his book, he created a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law.”68 Two decades later, Karl Brandt, chief Nazi medical officer and Adolf Hitler’s personal doctor, cited Laughlin and Buck in his defense at Nuremberg.69