When Will Socialists Make Better Arguments Against Capitalism?

Bestor writes that in 1848, Webster’s American Dictionary defined socialism and communism as variants of agrarianism: 

Communism, in turn, was described as “a new French word, nearly synonymous with agrarianism, socialism, and radicalism.”

Bestor explains that one of the reasons “agrarianism” “was unequal to the linguistic burdens which the new century was laying upon it,” was that “agrarianism stood for the equal division of property, whereas many nineteenth-century reformers were proposing not to divide property, but to collect it, or put it in a common pool, or socialize it. To express these new ideas, a new vocabulary was needed.”

When the vast majority of Europeans and Americans worked in agriculture, agrarianism made sense as a term for, well, socialism. But with the Industrial Revolution unfolding, and mass urbanization radically transforming society, people needed a new word for the same idea, but it needed to be capacious enough to include schemes for workers to take ownership of the new means of production.

This is a very useful addition to, and illustration of, something I’ve been arguing for a long time: There are very few new ideas. What’s new is technology. The wheel, gunpowder, the cotton gin, the steamboat, the telegraph, TV, and the birth control pill: These are often the biggest drivers of “new” political arrangements. But because intellectuals love the idea that ideas drive history, they give outsized credit to “new” ideas rather than the changed facts on the ground wrought by technology. And just to be clear, the idea of “socialism” didn’t start with agrarianism either. As Bestor notes, the idea of property owned by the “community” (another word that was used to mean socialism in many contexts) long predates the word “agrarianism.” It’s just that movements dedicated to that idea were often named after the religious sect or leader who proposed them. “Specific labels, derived from the names of leaders, from places, from religious dogmas, or from external peculiarities, sufficed,” Bestor writes. “There were no communists; there were only Anabaptists, or Diggers, or Shakers, or Labadists, or Herrnhuters, or Rappites, or Zoarites.” 

Fun side note: Zoarites, by the way, were not some sect in ancient Mesopotamia, they were German Protestant religious refugees who set up a utopian commune in Zoar, Ohio, in 1817, and often went by the name Society of Separatists of Zoar. I bring this up as a fun little anecdote to throw at people like Vice President J.D. Vance and Sen. Eric Schmitt who would have you believe their German or European ancestors—from whom they inherited their “Heritage American” status—were not necessarily all entrepreneurial, free-market pioneers hewing from the New World wilderness a capitalist idyll that is the essence of “white culture.”

Anyway, the real source of the “idea” of socialism didn’t come from text or scripture, but from a DNA sequence. Friedrich Hayek (and Charles Darwin and a zillion other people) argued that in man’s natural environment tribal organization was an evolutionary advantage. Cooperation was a necessary survival strategy. Rugged individualism was a good recipe for getting eaten by a lion or starving to death. 

This explains why socialism—and all of the synonyms for it—are so hard to defeat. It keeps coming back the same way hunger always returns, no matter how much you eat in one sitting, or how sick you get after eating a spoiled meal. 

I honestly don’t understand why some left-wing intellectuals hate this claim so much. If anything, claiming that we are wired to be socialists would help their cause. It may be a naturalistic fallacy, but it’s a compelling one all the same. But there is something about saying human nature is real, and that it therefore imposes limits on what is politically possible, that really irks some intellectuals. The annoyance can take many forms. Some think to acknowledge human nature is to implicitly endorse everything from eugenics to phrenology. Others think that if you talk about the crooked timber of humanity, you’re trying to sneak in arguments against utopian or near-utopian radicalism (and, well, that’s mostly true). 

Which brings me to another book I’ve been working through: Hayek’s Bastards, by Quinn Slobodian. His claim is that the new right is really the intellectual offspring of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (and an array of mainstream “fusionist” thinkers). “Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,” Slobodian observes—correctly. But he uses this as a damning commentary on “neoliberals” and conservatives of every stripe. 

If he lays out what his own understanding of human nature is, I haven’t gotten to it yet. But believing that there is a human nature is his primary evidence that the current crop of anti-liberals, white nationalists, and other racists, cranks, and goldbugs (and crypto cranks) are, as the title suggests, “Hayek’s bastards.”

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the book, but his main thesis strikes me as just wildly unfair both to Hayek and Mises, and therefore just plain wrong. I cannot recommend highly enough Phil Magness’ review in Reason. Magness is no friend of the whackjob right, but he also has an encyclopedic knowledge of intellectual history, catching Slobodian making some really damning errors in his reading of Hayek and Mises. I won’t get into the weeds—again, read the review—but suffice it to say that any effort to draw a line from  the quintessential small-l liberal Friedrich Hayek to all the various forms of illiberalism and nationalist-populism raging today requires drawing that line with so many curlicues and figure-8s that it just looks like a ball of yarn. It’s a bit like saying Christian nationalist militias are “Jesus’ bastards.” You can make the case, of course, but not without committing the same sins of misinterpretation as the militants themselves.

What I find interesting about Slobodian’s jihad on the “neoliberals” is how much it conforms to Hayek’s insights about human nature. Slobodian is not alone—there’s a whole cottage industry of intellectuals who insist the real point of libertarianism or neoliberalism or whatever term you want to use for limited government, free exchange, individual rights, and (most emphatically) property rights, isn’t what proponents of these ideas have written and said for decades. It’s racism, eugenics, nationalism, and the usual parade of horribles. (For instance, Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, tried to lay all manner of right-wing crimes at the feet of James M. Buchanan and public choice theory).

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the people Slobodian goes after are horrible (though not all of them), and I’ve fought with, or attracted the ire of, quite a few of them over the last 25 years. But what I think is most striking about the scorn he heaps on champions of freedom is how, well, tribal it is. A lot of left-wing intellectuals are married to the idea that capitalism (for want of a better term) is the source of all evils in the modern world. So any new (or very old) evils they encounter must be blamed on capitalism. 

Slobodian isn’t antisemitic and neither are, I assume, most intellectuals who play this game. But the structure of the argument is analogically similar to antisemitism. Bad things happen in the world. The  Jew-haters then reason backwards from those bad things to blame Jews for it. 

This approach reminds me a little of one of my favorite quotes from the Progressive Era. Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the foremost leaders of the Social Gospel movement, was a well-intentioned man who believed in a kind of left-wing Christian socialism that held capitalism and small-l liberalism in utter contempt (he insisted that “individualism means tyranny”). Paraphrasing the prophet Elijah’s line, “The God that answereth by fire, let him be God,” Rauschenbusch said, “The God that answereth by low food prices, let him be God.” Put somewhat uncharitably, Rauschenbusch’s view is that God’s existence or credibility depends on a system that gets rid of profit-seeking in the grocery business. “If our idea of God won’t give us lower food prices, we’ll find another interpretation—or some other god—that will.” (Sidenote:  I still chuckle at former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s explanation for why he left the Episcopal Church and joined the Congregationalist Church: the Episcopalians opposed his plans for a bike path.). 

The sort of cart-before-the-horse thinking that starts with the conclusion that if something is bad it must be someone else’s fault is deeply atavistic. It’s the same tendency we often find on the right that assumes every bad thing in the culture can be traced back to Marx or the Frankfurt School. When in reality, the fault lies not with the intellectuals, but with ourselves, i.e., with human nature. 

The drive for socialism is the same drive for nationalism. It’s the same natural tendency to divide the world into us and them, good guys and bad guys, good races and degenerate ones. And the urge to heap all of the sins of the new nationalists and socialists on the right on thinkers who clearly argued against both socialism and nationalism is just more tribal demonization of the other. “The God that answereth ‘capitalism is racist,’ let him be God.”

The girls have been enjoying their sleepover at Chez Kirsten. It’s been quite a dogpile at times, and Scout, who’s staying at Kirsten’s, isn’t exactly psyched about the pecking order. But Zoë keeps everyone in line. The slightly worrisome news is we have to take Pip to the vet this week, which she will hate, to have a mass identified on her bladder. It might be nothing, but we gotta find out. Fingers crossed. We hit our quota on animal health hardships this year, and I love that silly spaniel (in case you couldn’t tell).  I can’t wait to see my girls, especially the human puppy who will be home.

Member Name: Cynthia Suprenant

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: Followed Jonah Goldberg, David French, Kevin Williamson. Still do. I learn so much from them and all The Dispatch writers, editors, and contributors.

Personal Details: Nothing much. Just a small, wrinkly, old Catholic lady with short hair and sensible shoes.

Pet’s Breed: Golden Retriever 

Pet’s Age: 10.5 years old

Gotcha Story: Had Golden Retrievers for 35 years. The beauty, kindness, warm eyes and temperament—I’m not sure I could do without it in my life. 

Pet’s Likes: Being patted. Cuddling. Finding offal in the woods. Carrying small animals, gently, within his jowls. Cookies. Being patted. Did I mention cuddling?

Pet’s Dislikes: He’s not a fan of shotgun blasts, fireworks, or big thunderstorms. He’s not afraid of them—he’s sincerely honked off at them.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: Usually, I can spy a little tail sticking out, or a certain set of his muzzle. But he made it indoors recently with a living, bewildered, and apparently unharmed vole. When I said “Drop it,” he did.

A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: Nobody’s said that about him. Not even me, with a vole scurrying through the kitchen.