28 October 2015

David Brooks, Socialist?

"Basically, we've got to get socialist," David Brooks writes in the New York Times this week. That's interesting coming from one of the house Republicans of the paper's op-ed page, but Brooks is quick to say that he doesn't mean what you think he means. "I don’t mean the way Bernie Sanders is a socialist," he clarifies, "He’s a statist, not a socialist." About Sanders, at least, I suspect Brooks is correct, if by "democratic socialism" Sanders means that elected politicians will run the economy rather than the working class. Brooks, however, probably thinks all socialists, except himself, are statists, since the pejorative American understanding of socialism is that the state runs the economy. I don't know what's more audacious about Brooks: that as a Republican he just wrote that "we've got to get socialist," or that he feels free to redefine "socialist" to serve his own purposes. For what it's worth, for Brooks, or anyone who takes his advice, to be a socialist means having to "put the quality of the social fabric at the center of our politics." That translates not into greater democratic regulation of the economy but more of the moralism Brooks has been offering recently. Once upon a time socialism was identified, fairly or not, with the dread doctrines of "free love" and a desire to abolish the family as a bourgeois institution. Now, Brooksian socialism preaches "no single parents!" while advocating more charter schools. To be fair, he also advocates expanding public-sector early education programs; that's one of the "things Democrats like" he includes in his hopeful program for bipartisan "socialism." But rather than probe deeper into the idiosyncratic socialism he'd like to hear advocated by "a sensible version of Donald Trump" -- why don't you speak for yourself, David? -- I want to figure out what "socialism" really means.

Somebody had to coin the word sometime, right? And they presumably knew what they were talking or writing about, right? Well, researchers tell me that the word "socialism" is around 200 years old, and that while it first appeared in Italian, it didn't start to catch on until it appeared in French in the 1830s. A paper called the Globe started using it in a roundabout way, one writer asserting that he no more wanted to sacrifice "socialisme" to "personnalite" than to sacrifice vice for versa. I don't know enough intellectual French to know for sure, but I'd guess that personnalite translates to "individuality," if not something more like "individualism." The writer, presumably, is looking for that balance of individuality and fellowship utopians have striven for ever since. "Socialist" was being used occasionally in English by 1833; the term was identified initially with the "utopian socialist" Robert Owen, and was quickly identified pejoratively with "community of goods, abolition of crime, of punishment, of magistrates and of marriage." Community of goods, as practiced in voluntary communities like Owen's, seems to be essential to the definition. As far as I know, no such thing is advocated by Sanders, much less Brooks. For the latter, socialism may as well be the science of socializing people to be good bourgeois citizens. Looking back again, however, the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, the 1888 volume from which I take many of the quotes above, consistently identifies socialism with ownership of the means of production, etc., by "the community as a whole," not by "the state." Inevitably, socialism came to be identified with "statism," as Brooks puts it, if only because state power seemed inescapably necessary, once socialists gave up on voluntary utopian collectives, to the achievement of socialist goals. Bolshevism made matters worse by empowering a political class -- the vanguard party -- to run things for the workers' benefit, whether the workers liked it or not. Democratic socialists like Sanders are by definition more accountable to workers in their capacity as voters, but it can still be asked whether genuine socialism need be statist in the ways implied by Brooks, whether is must be hierarchically professional or totalitarian in its designs on individuals. Whatever socialism Brooks himself espouses probably isn't even half-assed, but such is our political environment today that some readers probably will conclude that Brooks, a critic of Trump and the Tea Pary, has only now confessed what they suspected of him all along.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does socialism have to be statist? No. It can be whatever the community (however that term is defined) decides it is. But the real answer is that, yes, it must be because the average human being can't be trusted to act reasonably, logically, and possibly against his/her own self-interest for the good of the community. If or when humanity ever manages to control or rid itself of its reliance on instinct and begins to truly operate on reason rather than self-interest, then socialism (or any other -ism) can work the way it is ideally meant to work.

"The fault is not with the stars, dear Shakespeare, the fault is with ourselves."

Samuel Wilson said...

Isn't reasonable (or "enlightened") self-interest the ideal, rather than a choice between reason and self-interest? In any event, reason requires agreement on a first premise before it can accomplish anything. We can hope that a useful first premise follows from the human condition itself but history so far argues otherwise. The big question is whether reason entitles the reasonable to subjugate or tame the unreasonable, whether reason trumps "freedom" as many still understand it.

Anonymous said...

Well, I suppose that depends on whether you want to forced to convert to a religion, under threat of torture and death; to claim acceptance of a ludicrous fairy tale as the all-encompassing truth.

Samuel Wilson said...

But then it's not reason that entitles you but self-defense. The real question is whether reason entitles someone to "convert" those who simply refuse to agree with him.

Anonymous said...

Then the question is whether we, as civilized, intelligent beings, should have a right to force "reason" down the throats of the unreasonable. Since the future of humanity is what is at stake, then the answer must be "YES". Religion is unreasonable. Even moderate religionists refuse to accept certain facts as those facts might call into question the veracity of their holy scripture. Religion must be purged, stamped out of the human experience if humanity is to have a chance to achieve our potential. Fear of some imagined infantile sky despot should NOT EVER be a deciding factor in policy planning. And those who feel it should, should NOT be allowed a voice in politics. That is the choice they should be given: Allowed to live their lives in accordance with whatever set of bronze-age superstitions they choose and have no say in governance, or give up their "belief" for "knowledge" and a voice in their future.

Samuel Wilson said...

It's interesting that you envision your antagonists as primarily religious. The tougher question down the line is whether we can assert a similar right to apply reason forcefully to those whose creed is "Freedom!" when the future of humanity is at stake.