Why Does It Seem That Academics Are So Much More Likely To Like Anti-Democratic Ideologies Than Democracy? - Hate Mail

There are few things more guaranteed to raise a wailing whine on the left than to diss Marxism. You'd think that Marxism was some great moral force rather than the system under which more people were murdered than under Nazism, under which hundreds of millions, going into the billions were deprived of their rights, enslaved, sent to work-death camps,... continuing today in such paradises as North Korea and China.

Let me break this to you, yet again, what you and I were taught, that communism was the polar opposite of fascism was a lie.  It was a lie made under the absurd theory that verbiage about economics was more important than people getting murdered by the millions.  It takes a completely decadent and corrupt academic culture to ignore that mountain range of bodies while concentrating on the stated intentions about how the greatest mass murderers in history were going to manage their economy.   But that is exactly what almost all of political "science" has done, what all ideological assertion on that point in the past century is based in.  That such academic, so-called experts were willing to overlook the mass murder and concentrate on the money tells you everything you need to know about them, their motives and their minds.  It also provides one of the best reasons academics have ever given for normal people to reject and ignore their proclamations about everything.

The dead giveaway of the moral equivalence of Marxism with Nazism and other fashions of fascism lies in the behavior of Marxists who were quite OK with even the Nazis at times.   Stalin's pact with Hitler caused Communists in the United States and elsewhere to do a 180 turn and go from being vehemently anti-Hitler to sounding like American businessmen who said he was someone they could do business with.   If you read what they were saying during the brief period after the pact was signed until Hitler did what anyone with the ability to think would know he would do, invade the Soviet Union, it was a stream of double-talk so as to be amazing.  And if you want to talk about the opponents of Stalin among Marxists, it was about the same time that the first of the Trotskyite defectors to American domestic style fascism were inventing neo-conservatism.   Now we have the example of Putin and the Russian oligarchs, many of them from the old Soviet ruling class who are probably the biggest promoters of neo-Nazis and neo-fascism in Europe and here.

In the past decade or two I've come to have to face the extremely unpleasant fact that much of official modernism was created by people who were very enthusiastic for fascism.   Many icons of modern art and literature were wildly enthusiastic about fascism in the early 20th century even up to and during World War Two.  Some of them were also extremely ignorant and stupid, such as Gertrude Stein, some of them were intellectual icons, Yeats, Pound, etc.*  Though I will say that music was somewhat less prone to it.

What is an equally unpleasant thing to face is that at least as many intellectuals in my generation and that immediately preceding it were enthusiastic about the Communists in their various guises.

It is amazing how large the percentage of academics in the West, especially among English speakers, have been entirely more enthusiastic about anti-democratic ideologies than they have been for egalitarian democracy and how their promotion has not kept them from being considered admirable and emulable and published in the mutual admiration networking of the small journal set and even in wider markets of journalism.   It's a lot harder to think of academics who were as staunch in their advocacy for democracy without wavering into quasi-fascist or Marxist accommodation than it is academics who have been enthusiasts of forms compatible with dictatorship.   The resultant magnification of the sins of democrats and the obscuring of the far more massive sins compatible with their chosen anti-democratic system has had a real effect among the educated and would-be educated classes.

I suspect a number of things are at work, first is the widespread snobbery of the academic class, who love to believe themselves to be a number of cuts above the hoi polloi or "the masses," as pointed out in the thing which got me slammed.  Another is the fetish for total, complete closure of "theory" in a neat, tidy totalistic system.   I remember hearing an old, blue-stocking, ex-Stalinist who left the old Communist Party several years after Khrushchev tried to consolidate his power by revealing a few of Joseph Stalin's massive crimes.   When Khrushchev did that, it was final permission for Communists to admit to what had been denied by them since it first become known in the 1930s, that Stalin was a mass murderer and much more.  When asked in the 1970s how she had remained in an explicitly and rabidly Stalinist party even as the crimes of the Communists were fully known, she said the wanted "a more logical kind of government" than boring old American democracy provided.

The old lie that Marxism was the good form of dictatorship and it was the polar opposite of Nazism was one of the most transparent of commonly asserted lies in the 20th century.  Hitler opposed Marxism because Marx was a Jew and his theoretical system was a rival form of dictatorship.  Both were, though, opposed to egalitarian democracy which is the polar opposite of both of them.   Politicians and political systems and theories are most honestly distinguished based on how close they get to egalitarian democracy as opposed to dictatorship.  Egalitarian democracy is the polar opposite of all dictatorial systems, if you want to chart that on a line instead of in reality which is far more complex than can be graphed in that way.  Though it's a lot harder to come up with some tidy little thing that can fit into a small journal or a magazine article or get taught in an intro class for three credits.   Poly-sci is largely bull shit, as is economics.   Real politics can't fit into an academic school or major.

*  Overt fascism under the American language guises of "federalism" "originalism" and even often disguised as "civil libertarianism" is rampant among the academic and scribbling class of the United States.  Not to mention the babbling class I wrote about earlier, below.

Update:  Let me guess, you've never read Suasn Sontag's piece, have you, you read about it.  As it is, dopey, I'd figured out at least that much more than a decade before she wrote it and I was a lot younger than she was.  It was just about twelve years earlier that I heard the dopey blue-stockings mentioned above and I already realized what she said was a crock of crap.  I remember thinking when I read Sontag's brave declaration against communism, MADE DURING THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION was her attempt to remain au courant.  Here is how it was later described in The Nation:

That this would be a relatively uncontroversial thing for someone—even someone on the left—to say today is a testament to how flat our historical thinking has become. The intellectual climate of 1982—Reagan and Thatcher ruled, and it was still several years before glasnost and perestroika—meant that Sontag’s comments created a firestorm. In the best of our tradition, The Nation reprinted Sontag’s remarks and opened its pages for comment from other prominent intellectuals of the left, like current Nation editorial board member Philip Green (“If Susan Sontag really needed to learn from the right, that was her problem, not ours”); the longtime (self-described) liberal anti-communist Diana Trilling (who called Sontag insufficiently scrubbed of the Red-tinged trace); Phillip Pochoda (“I, for one, should hate to see Sontag, long one of the most valued assets of the American left, allow herself to become caricatured as Norman Podhoretz with a human face.”); and Christopher Hitchens (“Let us be charitable and assume that she was trying to galvanize an audience by deliberate exaggeration.”). In a follow-up editorial, The Nation dug up a few noteworthy Reader’s Digest headlines from the period in question—i.e. “What is a Communist?” by Whittaker Chambers—but, fortunately, now you can go through our own archives here to see what we did write about communism and the Soviet Union between 1950 and 1970. (Or, since there is no reason those should be the operative years, you might read our two-part series by Bertrand Russell from 1920, headlined on the cover, “I went to Russia believing myself a communist, but…”)

I'd never "believed myself a communist, but...."  I've always been an egalitarian democrat and a Democrat.  I never had any problem figuring out that not only the various American communists where hypocrites and liars, unlike so many of those who wrote and produced The Nation, even some who declare it today, I never thought the Maoists of "Progressive Labor" were anything but a bunch of scum who didn't care about millions of people getting murdered when they weren't Europeans.

Update 2:  "my point about Sontag is that she was an atheist"  If that was your point it's even stupider than most of what you mistake as relevant.  You're a total asshole and an atheist, it's totally irrelevant to the fact that you're lazy and stupid as well.