Provincial idiocy

[fpb]

MEMO: To all American conservatives.

If you want to get anywhere with anyone, you have to get the hell out of your own ignorance comfort zone. To wit, you have to stop talking as though everything that can be called socialism must, by that alone, be the same thing as the perversions of Lenin and Mao. Every European democracy has experienced decades of Socialist (Social Democrat or Labour, if you prefer) rule, and while I have nothing but contempt for such people as Zapatero of Spain or the Norwegian Labour Party, only the most moronic of ignorami could possibly equate them with the murderous rabble that tore Russia apart long ago and feasted upon Cambodia's blood. That sort of talk, which is universal in American conservative circles, makes it simpy impossible for Americans to understand Europe; even those among us who voted for Berlusconi, Merkel, Sarkozy or Aznar would laugh in the face of any American who insisted - as you people happily insist to each other, taking irresponsible pleasure in reinforcing each other's ignorance and prejudice - that even Zapatero is anything comparable to a tyrant. Worse still if, God help you, you take the suggestions I have seriously seen them waved about the blogosphere, that tyrants such as Salazar or Pinochet are better than democratically elected socialists - even if incompetent. If you insist on this sort of talk, I can promise you that you will remain nothing but bogeymen and hate figures to all Europeans, including conservatives, and most if not all citizens of democratic countries from India to Japan and from Argentina to Canada. America is the only democracy in the world in which it is assumed that a socialist cannot be a democrat. This is an instance, not of democracy, but of provinciality and groupthink. And I do not have to have any sympathy for socialists to say so: all I need is a little common sense.

Comments

[baduin.livejournal.com]

I have discovered recently a new hobby, made possible by the Internet: collecting remnants of old utopias. Because utopias do not disappear completely. Each receding wave leaves puddles and tide pools, filled with strange sea creatures - very often with strangely distorted shapes.

The religious utopias, which survive usually in America, the great natural preserve of Protestantism, are longest-lived, but also most changeable. For example the murderous Anabaptists of the XVI century live on today in the shape of the innocuous and quaint Mennonites and Amish. Instead of the desire for future utopia, they live still in the XIX century.

That strange change of progress into regress into the past is not uncommon also in more secular movements. For example the French monarchists: in XVI century the most progressive force in the world, now still repeat Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! and support various pretenders to the throne.

The Trotskyite tradition is surviving still in the English Science Fiction. The Romantic Nationalism found refuge in the Republican Party: George W. Bush was perhaps the last Romantic Nationalist, ending the long line of such fighters for freedom as Byron, Garibaldi, Kossuth, or Dombrowski.

Classic XIX-century style libertarian are easy to find; they even managed to generate the radical wing of Anarcho-Capitalists. The communists are lying low in the West, but in Nepal they quite recently managed to overthrow the king.

I have however one problem: how to classify you, Mr. Barbieri. Your indubitable enthusiasm, visible for example here, and also when discussing racial and colonial matters, would seem to suggest you belong to one of those groups. But to which? Your socialism, to be honest, seems rather moderate and not at all utopian. You are both socialist and Catholic. This would suggest some variant of corporatism - but you seem to dislike President Salazar.

If I were not afraid of offending you, I would classify you as an anti-Fascist. But obviously, no intelligent man can support a merely negative doctrine - in addition, opposing an utterly defeated and eliminated world-view. Therefore I must confess myself baffled.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Call me a Catholic. And being an anti-Fascist is something more than a passive passion in Italian political tradition: it means standing in the tradition of the Founding Fathers of our republic. But this item was not about asserting anything except a demand for intellectual honesty. For the record, I dislike most of what Obama is trying to do. However, it is perfectly within the range of democratic politics around the world, and to say otherwise will only make American Conservatives look ridiculous in the eyes even of people who should be their natural allies.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

I think you are attempting an impossible project.

In the years since I have become a Catholic, I have noticed my own political views transforming from the recognizable (in my own case, I was once essentially a Libertarian) into something which is really hard to classify in conventional terms. It may not be a universal experience, but I have noticed something similar happening to my mother after her own conversion, and in a number of other cases besides. That isn't to say that there is a particular "Catholic" politics which we have all aligned ourselves with: it is more that Catholic teaching has a peculiar tendency to run contrary to the central dichotomies assumed in political labels.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In fact, contrary to popular belief, Catholic teaching tends to result in a fantastic range of individual views. It was GK Chesterton who said - and he was not the only one - that a Catholic party as such is impossible, because Catholics agree about the Church and Sacraments, but not about anything else. With each of them, the Catholic philosophy is a reagent which, dropped into the elements of inherited or acquired political views, produces the most extraordinary results. Even in theology, Catholicism amounts to a vast number of schools - Thomists, Jesuits, Rosminians, Augustinians, Byzantines, etc etc etc - each of which is quite distinct and often in strong disagreement with all others. People talk of Scholatiscism as if it were something united, but Scholaticism included both the realism of Thomas Aquinas and the nominalism of William of Ockham - two incompatible philosophies. And in our times, the formation of Christian Democrat parties in Europe has resulted, not in unified wholes, but in one of two things. Either, as in the Netherlands or in Germany, the party took a definite line, in which case it quickly ceased to be Christian except in name. Or, as in Italy, it strove to represent the whole arch of democratic Catholics from left to right, in which case it became not a party, but an unwieldy coalition of individual groups. Before their collapse, the Christian Democrats of Italy had the incredible institution of "currents" or mini-parties, at least a dozen of them IIRC, with their own party conferences and leaderships!