George Rebane

In debates on governance and other issues between what we today call the Right and the Left, we observe an interesting use of semantic camouflage that has been in practice for at least a century in the American public square.  The Right and its various political candidates proudly proclaim their socio-political ideologies under labels such as conservative, libertarian, capitalist, free-marketeer, and even rightwing.  And this no matter if they run/serve as Republicans or Libertarians or some other splinter rightwing political party.  The same can be said for the public proponents of these same ideologies that range from the private voter through national media pundits to humble political commentary bloggers like me.  We all wear our tenets on our sleeves.

This is not the case with candidates from the Left.  Starting late in the 19th century, the intellectuals of the Left began to discern that a more, shall we say, nuanced sales pitch was required to sell their brand of collectivism to the voting public, no matter if they were Marxists, progressives, socialists, communists, … .  And after some early successes in installing such forms of governance and the inevitable tragedies that were then visited on the suckered populations, the Left largely abandoned the ‘nuanced’ phase of their promotions to ones of subterfuge, dissembling, and outright lies.

(A humorous sidelight here is that often a Leftist who is labeled a ‘socialist’, ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’, … will rear up, and not only deny membership in such a benighted cohort, but actually accuse the labeler of name-calling, smearing him, or an outright attack on his character which will brook no such pejoratives.  And as a conservetarian, I may be forced to agree with him, at least in principle.)

In America this policy was implemented in spades as the American Communist and Socialist Parties became the buffoons and off stage noise makers in our political dramas.  No Leftwing politician expecting to get elected advertised his true collectivist ideology.  Instead they ran as democrats (and Democrats), softly selling class distinctions and promoting a ballooning government into every quarter of our economy and personal lives.  Their populist fodder for the public ear was the ever present disparity of incomes and wealth that occur in a growing free market, capitalist society.  Class envy, as later confirmed by Kahneman and Tversky (q.v.), is a staple of human nature to be exploited, and exploited in spades.

The banner that the American Left marched under was ‘democracy’ pure and simple, and also destructive.  Their power base became the masses of the ignorant poor and uneducated led by prominently visible intellectual elites.  Slogan voting for policies that vilified the wealthy became the order of the day.  And it started working well enough to cause the late celebrated author and intellect, Upton Sinclair, to observe, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.”

In other countries far Left movements have won over the gullible and downtrodden public through backdoor ruses like advertizing themselves as ‘agrarian reformers’ and similarly resonant labels until they got voted in and then ran up the flagpole their version of the hammer and sickle.  (The well-read will instantly recognize its wider portents for the rest of the European Union.)  But here I want to stick to our onshore strategies for promoting various forms of egalitarian utopias.

Today it behooves the Left in America to continue hammering the blessings of democracy that are showered equally across the land by a strong central government.  An important component of this sales pitch is to keep our citizens’ focus firmly within our borders.  This means that the failure of overseas socialist/communist economies and causes of public dissatisfaction/strife must either be ignored or the ideological sources of their ills covered up and/or misrepresented.

A typical and powerful method used by learned Leftists at all levels is what we may call the ‘All or Nothing Definition’ (AND).  A current example of this is the imminent debacle of Greece’s default on its sovereign debt.  Greece is and has been a deeply corrupt and socialist country that has all but demolished its private sector.  However, the socialist cum communist roots of the country’s problems must not be aired in the United States; those labels must be challenged at every level when the Greek situation is discussed.  Greece is failing for sundry other reasons, but no attribution to collectivism as the cause can be tolerated

So how does the American Left accomplish this?  A most effective means that works on the inattentive is to impose AND into any such discussion that reveals, say, ‘socialism’ as a causal factor in a nation’s failure.  The Leftwinger will immediately demand a formal definition of ‘socialism’, and receiving such, will in great indignation point out that the so-labeled nation does not implement every last tenet of ‘socialism’ in its current form of governance.  Ergo, using ‘socialism’ to describe the country is nothing but ‘dog whistle’ polemics or some form partisan histrionics promoted by the Right to advance their own agenda.  It is not really ‘socialism’ until every last tenet of that ideology is checked off and accounted for – so there!

Playing the AND gambit effectively derails the main thread of the debate/discussion onto a sidetrack of semantics and other ideological esoteria.  The problem with that tack is that it equally derails most of the useful historical appellations used to identify and successfully summarize the ideologies of countries, movements, and prominent figures.  Applying AND makes mincemeat of all such definitions.  For example, most people with a three-digit IQ would readily admit that the USSR, Red China, Cuba, … were/are communist countries.  But applying AND would allow any college freshman to do a little online research, and point out which of the formal Marxist-Leninist principles of communism were not fully met in each of these authoritarian states.  This in itself demonstrates the intended subterfuge of introducing AND into a debate which one cannot master by merit.

The corollary to AND, let’s shorten it to CAND, is to challenge their counterpart on the basis that if something satisfies a couple, or even just one, of the tenets of, say, ‘communism’, then the entire mantle of that form of governance – lock, stock, and barrel – is bestowed on a country, county, or country cousin.  All of us have heard the Leftwinger throw in the CAND red herring with something like, ‘Well, since the British government runs a national healthcare system, then that means you’re telling us that Great Britain is a communist country.’  This is pretty strong stuff for the light thinkers in the audience, and as often as not carries the day by switching the conversation to an irrelevant siding where the parties now try to clear up the silliness of the CAND gambit.

The bottom line of AND and CAND usage by the Left is that revealing any path toward, or the inevitable/imminent arrival at, a correctly labeled collectivist destination must be summarily denounced and diverted.  For all collectivists know and fervently embrace what Upton Sinclair told us – the unmarked paths to socialism and communism must be laid through heavy thickets which promise to open into idyllic meadows of milk and honey, but first we must all press on together just a little farther.

(Related pieces from RR's 'The Liberal Mind' can be found here, here, and here.)