In one of those outbursts that he specializes in Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee for the US Presidency, called his Democrat rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “Communist.”
Since I doubt that Ms. Harris has anything but the faintest notion about Communism, a zombie ideology that went out of fashion decades ago, I think the Republican standard-bearer was off the mark.
Off the mark but not totally wrong insofar as the Democrat champion implicitly identifies with a strand of politics dating back to Plato, a strand of which Communism is one of many variations.
In political philosophy this is called collectivism.
Plato, at least in his magnum opus The Republic, depicts the ideal society as one ruled by those who know best with the mission to look after the populace from cradle to grave. All that people have to do is obey the rules and enjoy the good life offered by ruling philosophers.
Aristotle, in contrast, focuses on the individual who is, with the exception of occasion when gods intervene, master of his destiny.
Aristotle is wary of the masses and large societies. In fact, he is worried that a city that grows beyond 100,000 inhabitants may face trouble.
The settlers who created the United States were closer to Aristotle’s cult of the individual than to Plato’s collective utopia. They came to the New World as individuals or in groups too small to try to impose a collective identity on others. They were farmers who became path-finders, trailblazers and eventually nation-builders, always operating as individuals and coming together only in emergencies and exceptional circumstances such as fighting enemies.
The state-structures that the Founding Fathers erected were also meant to intervene in exceptional circumstances.
Two of the first five presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, served as ambassadors respectively to the Court of St. James and Versailles where the individual’s identity was summed up as subjects of the monarch.
Adams and Jefferson along with most other early builders of the United States promoted the idea of a small government. Even then, they called it “the administration,” a neutral term that excluded transcendental pretensions.
Nevertheless, it was inevitable that in a world of nation states with centralized wielding of power and collectivist illusions, the newly created US would not remain unaffected by the modus operandi prevalent all over the world.
A series of wars with England, Mexico and the Spanish Empire highlighted the necessity of collective action in a nation that didn’t even have standing army.
The War of Secession highlighted the necessity of collective action to preserve the union but also created collectivist habits that would not fade once the emergency had ended.
William Jennings Bryan’s campaign against the gold standard laced with rhetorical flourish about helping the poor and curbing the rich contained faint but distinctive echoes of collectivism.
The need to raise huge armies during two world wars that ended with victory, further popularized the concept of collectivism.
The stock market crash of the 1929s boosted the attraction of collectivist action in a non-military emergency. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, inspired by Keynesian economics, was the first major show of collectivism in American politics.
Partly thanks to its apparent success, it broke the mental dam that had kept collectivist ideas out of US politics outside emergencies.
It was further boosted after World War II and the entry into the American political sphere of concepts such as welfare state, industrial democracy, liberalism (which in American political lexicon means being on the left) progressivism, social market, the third way and even socialism.
Though the US ended up having a small Communist Party with a limited circle of sympathizers, mainly among the literary and artistic elites, Communism never became a major force in American politics.
As Communism is supposed to be successful in developed industrial societies such as the United States, Lenin wondered why America remained indifferent to its message.
Some historians suggest that this was due to the US elite’s success in portraying Communism as a military-security or even an existential threat illustrated by the “reds under the bed” witch-hunt of the 1950s rather than a rival view of the world.
My guess is that the US was vaccinated against Communist collectivism because of the tragedy that spanned seven decades in the Soviet Union. Without that, Communism might have had a better chance in seducing more Americans.
In the 1920s and 30s, other forms of collectivism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, also found admirers in the US but never gained a popular base.
In literature, there were American writers such as Mark Twain, HD Thoreau, James Fennimore-Cooper, Herman Melville and Jack London, who chose the theme of the individual as hero while others like Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, John Ds Pasos and Erskine Caldwell veered towards social-realism.
In politics, the US took a sharp turn towards collectivism under President Lyndon Johnson with features such as positive discrimination, communitarianism, feminism and the early ramblings of environmentalism.
Fast forward, President John Kennedy’s “Ask not..” rhetoric, perhaps inspired by Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” designated the individual as one who ought to do something for the state rather than query what the state does for him.
Bill Clinton’s election slogan “It’s the economy stupid!” was a rehash of Marx’s belief that the economy provides the infrastructure of society with politics as the superstructure.
In his 780-page autobiography, Barack Obama mocks critics who suggest he may be a “closet socialist.”
He then reveals his attachment to collectivism, praising “the collective spirit, a thing we all wish for, a sense of connection that overrides our differences.”
He adds: “Regulatory state has made American lives a lot better”-words that echo Benito Mussolini’s declamations about the big corporatist state that redistributes the fruits of national endeavor.
Hilary Clinton, too, built her presidential message on the collectivist mantra of “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Over the decades, the traditional American cult of the individual as hero has lost much of its aura, being replaced by a new cult of the victim who is owed apology and compensation.
Whether Trump likes it or not, collectivist tropes are now deeply anchored in US politics with large constituencies, especially among ethnic minorities and millions of new immigrants mostly from the so-called “Third World” where the state is the secular Baal that decides everything.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney once noted that almost half of all Americans depended on federal handouts and perks one way or another and thus wouldn’t vote for a candidate who argued for a smaller state and the cult of the individual as hero.
Well, they didn’t vote for him.
