Political Philosophy: Part Five

 The fifth in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. In this post, I will cover the eclipse of self-managed working class organisation by statism.

Part Five: Progressives, Fabians, and Bolsheviks: the state against the people

It is common among American liberals to claim the Progressive movement as part of their heritage. In this telling of history, the likes of Theodore Roosevelt are champions of the working class who fought against concentrations of privilege. This narrative becomes especially problematic when the Populist Party of the 1890s is also included as an ancestor of modern liberalism – the Democrats’ Populist-backed 1896 presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, was labelled a “Jacobin” and a “Bolshevik” by Roosevelt. In The Age of Reform, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote one of the best accounts of the differences between Populism and Progressivism, and differentiated between the bottom-up radicalism of the former and the top-down style of the latter – though he went overboard with his portrayal of the Populists as cranks and conspiracy theorists. The Progressives were generally drawn from the elites, justified their ideas using the language of straight-laced bourgeois moralism, and were hostile to popular self-organisation.

Prior to the Progressive Era, most major American cities were run by some form of Democratic Party machine. These machines were not an ideal way to govern a metropolis – they were corrupt, monarchical, and clientelistic, and had mixed results in governing their fiefdoms. One of their advantages, however, was that they allowed people of lesser means (and especially of non-Anglo ethnicity) to band together and use their numbers to overcome the advantages of wealth and notability possessed by elite politicos. (The most famous such machine, Tammany Hall in New York, was founded at the same time as the Democratic-Republican clubs mentioned in an earlier post.) By instituting such changes as at-large voting systems and independent agencies, Progressive reformers weakened the machines. Irish, Italian, and Jewish politicos lost power to Ivy League-educated Anglos, and African-Americans and Hispanics were pre-emptively prevented from following the same path to political power taken by other ethnic groups.

(For a first-hand account of the valuable social capital which political machines provided to working class and migrant constituents, the memoirs of Tammany veteran George Washington Plunkitt are an entertaining read.)

Like so many negative trends in American politics, the Progressive takeover of working class self-organisation had a trial run in Britain. When founded in 1884, the Fabian Society took its name from a Roman general who used delaying tactics to win a battle, something which was seen as a metaphor for the Society’s support for gradual reform. Its actual thought, however, betrays something different. Early Fabian publications advocated imperialism, eugenics, and slum clearances, and used the language of racial hygiene and mercantilism. They shared these fixations with the Progressives across the Atlantic, who helped to turn the United States into an imperial power (via the Spanish-American War) as well as the centre of pro-eugenic thought and activism.

Between the 1930s and 1960s, when the Puerto Rican struggle for independence was at its height, American authorities enacted a number of measures aimed at reducing economic and population pressures – most notably Operation Bootstrap, which promoted emigration to the mainland, and forced sterilisations of Puerto Rican women. Although eugenic policies were carried out across the United States, Puerto Rico was singled out in particular, and the use of eugenics to artificially reduce its population was often advocated using racist language. (An internal document circulated within the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s called for the elimination of all Puerto Ricans.) Puerto Rican women were often sterilised without their consent, and were prevented from accessing information about birth control.

The sterilisation program was established during the New Deal era, when Rexford Tugwell, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest allies, was the appointed Governor of the island. The infrastructure, expertise, and propaganda which fuelled the effort were supplied by foundations such as the aforementioned Rockefeller Foundation, corporations such as Proctor and Gamble, and lobby groups such as Planned Parenthood. Although eugenics fell out of fashion after the Second World War, the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for Malthusian ideas has never abated – the Club of Rome, one of the world’s most prominent pushers of climate change hysteria, was founded in 1968 at the Lake Como estate of one David Rockefeller. It is little wonder that over the course of the twentieth century, ‘left-wing’ came to equal ‘big government’, but the constellation of political forces which inflicted eugenics on Puerto Rico could not be said to be left-wing, at least not in the sense that the radicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood the term.

It wasn’t only in the democratic world that supposed progressives were using the power of the state to suppress emancipatory movements from below. After taking power, the Bolsheviks began behaving the same way as the Progressives, the New Dealers, and the Fabians. Articles began appearing in the official press promoting the production-line methods employed by Henry Ford. Leon Trotsky, whose reputation as being a less authoritarian communist than Stalin is surely undeserved, sent in the Red Army when the sailors revolted at Kronstadt in 1921. It seems that once handed untrammelled state power, previously progressive movements absorb the mentality of the former elites, and begin to see their role as oppressing and disciplining the working class, as well as destroying any alternative sources of social capital which threaten their monopoly on the allegiances of the people.

The urge of the technocrats to micromanage the lives of the people continues today under the guise of ‘green’ politics and the nanny state. The former poses as a left-wing ideology, yet downplays the importance of economic inequality in favour of a Malthusian narrative of overpopulation. In addition, its critique of public works projects helps to reduce demand for public goods, something which can only mean a political climate more favourable to conservatism. As for the increasing remit of the nanny state and its arguable transformation into the ‘bully state’, it is the inevitable outcome of the Bull Moose-Fabian-Bolshevik style of politics.