Three Socialisms

Margaret L. Snyder

When my 17-year-old son asked me what was really the difference between Communism and Fascism I was stumped. I am not a political scientist and flailed around for an answer along the lines of well, think of the political spectrum as wrapping around a sphere, where extreme left and extreme right come together. This was a few years ago and it is curious how a question like that will stick in your head and you keep turning it over, waiting for a better answer to suggest itself.

Now I am reading Joshua Muravchik's recent book Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism and I can tell my son (well, except that he has read the book too) that the answer to his question is: not that much (except that in practice, Communism turned out to be deadlier, as measured by number of deaths inflicted).

Heaven on Earth traces the history of socialism through the lives of individuals significant in its development: Babeuf, Robert Owen, Engels, Eduard Bernstein, Lenin, Mussolini, Attlee, Nyerere, Deng, Gorbachev and Blair. There is also a chapter on Gompers and Meany, which I trust will be an informative account of how American organized labor saved us from the worst of Communism. Muravchik never loses the thread of narrative, which makes for gripping reading, though I have to wonder what kind of compromises he had to make in selecting material to keep that thread.

Mussolini started out as a socialist and Muravchik shows many parallels between his thought and methods and those of Lenin. Socialism, you will recall, began as an internationalist revolutionary idea. Early socialists held that national entities were meaningless, that workers the industrialized world over had a common cause and would one day rise up together and nationhood would be eliminated. When WWI came and workers marched off to defend their respective homelands, some socialists perceived a flaw in the theory. Mussolini was one of these. Hence, national socialism, wherein the disenfranchised would rise up to declare the greatness of their nation.

In both Russia and Italy the disenfranchised largely failed to rise up. So both Lenin and Mussolini concluded that the revolution would be FOR the masses, but not BY the masses. They held that the masses were too ignorant to see their own interests and it was up to the socialist leaders to bring about "a heaven on earth" on their behalf.

At this point it is hard not to be struck by a further parallel: the one between these two socialisms and what we now call liberalism in the United States. What we now call American liberalism also features an intellectual elite (political, educational, judicial), which makes decisions about what is good for the "common folk", who are regarded as incapable of directing their own affairs and making the proper decisions about their lives.

On the one hand, it is not hard to find evidence that this may be true. On the other, it is not hard to see how in many cases, it has been liberal policies that have brought us to this pretty pass. Several decades of creating a dependent class of impoverished families consisting disproportionately of single mothers and their children; several decades of rendering irrelevant the men who should have been supporting those families; several decades of pursuing self esteem as a major goal of education; several decades of fostering a sense of entitlement about everything from school lunches to health care to at least a B+ and it is not surprising that the "masses" have forgotten how to look after themselves and conduct their own lives with dignity.

So it is that liberalism has taken away the self-respect of whole classes of people. It has done so by the same elitist mentality that characterized the two vilest socialisms of the twentieth century.

Most people who consider themselves liberals consider their motives to be pure, and I don't doubt that they are. But by their attitudes and policies, they encourage dependency on the state and ultimately do much more harm than good.

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Margaret L. Snyder
memls01@moravian.edu