Neo-Stalinism, Proto-racism, and Competition

To the left, to the right, there’s nowhere to turn. The center recedes in either direction.

The common denominator in both Stalinism and racism is that they are supremacist and imperialist. Whereas the racists claim superiority based on birth, or genetics, the Stalinists claim the moral high ground and lord it over others. Because both philosophies are supremacist, they can do what they wish with inferiors. The racists kill you or enslave you just because you’re an inferior, whereas the Stalinists invent some kind of due process to justify killing you or enslaving you, accusing you of being “an enemy of the people” in the classic context, but there are many kind of enemies and moral inferiors today.

Religion also is supremacist and imperialist. Why do you want to proselytize me? Proselytization is conquest, by definition. Why do you want to spread the word of God? Let God speak to me if he wants to, but who are you? Maybe I don’t want my soul to be saved?' And so on. Any belief that must be spread, and must be accepted, is imperialistic, by definition. The common term for both big religions and big political theories is simply competing universalisms, and what they all advance is hegemony.

It is not racism per se that concerns me here. No one in respectable circles accepts any tenet of racism. It is not the “neo-Cons” who concern me here, nor so-called political correctness that is of concern. It is neo-Stalinism that troubles, because it is ascendant.

The neo-Stalinists (and others on the authoritarian Left) claim that nationalism is racist – that’s mostly a marketing ploy. The neo-Stalinists can claim to lead the war against an “ism” that no one in respectable circles endorses anymore in any case. As they say in the Southern United States, that’s “mighty white” of the neo-Stalinists.

But it’s certainly useful to denigrate nationalism as a form of racism because nationalism is a competing hegemony. The neo-Stalinists, who are not a card-carrying membership organization, but simply identify themselves by their behavior, attack nationalism because it competes with them. The Social Democrats in Europe, and the Progressives in America, also attack nationalism, and they are not necessarily Stalinists – indeed, many in Europe suffered at the hands of Stalinism. Nevertheless, if nationalism can sometimes be portrayed as a form of racism, then Social Democracy, which when it is imposed on people, can easily slide into Stalinism.

In fact, the danger of the authoritarian Left absorbing the democratic Left is well known – it’s called “consolidation of power.” Vietnam had various factions resisting France and America, but the Communists consolidated power, including evicting, jailing and slaughtering resistance groups that wouldn’t go along with program. If you want to take over anything – a country, or the world – you get rid of the competition. Lenin's “Defense of the Revolution” in the early days of Soviet rule in the former USSR was nothing but a consolidation of power for the Communist Party, and European Christian Democrats, who are sometimes castigated as racist, are not wrong in saying the Defense of the Revolution contributed to a backlash that led to the rise of fascism and Nazism between the world wars.

The Beloved always exists, and in the world of competing universalisms the Beloved is the death of the competition. The death of America is the Beloved for critics of America – if America is number one, then you are number one if you destroy it. King of the Hill. Alpha male. Predator, not prey. If the predator – what you perceive America to be – is vulnerable, then it is really prey. It makes no difference if America really is a predator, or if America is after “you.” It is the Beloved. Destroy it, and you are complete.

"Competition" is an important word here. Just as one religion attacks another religion that is in competition with, one political philosophy attacks another that is in competition with vis a vis the affectoin and loyalty of people. Think Darwin – competition is the true dialectic in history. The Left attacks the Right, and vice versa, because that’s the competition. The Islamists attack America and Britain, and vice versa, because that’s the competition.

Marxism and radical politics sometimes are denigrated as secular religions, and rightly so. All have a theory of the elect, for example, a class of people who have special privilege and special knowledge of the way things are, and the way they're supposed to be (e.g., dominance in both the empirical and normative realms). Good leadership is one thing, but you can't get more anti-democratic than accepting a theory of the elect.

Christianity, Islam and the Social Democrats all follow the Abrahamic narrative – there was an unspoiled age of innocence, perhaps called the Garden of Eden; then there was some Evil that fell upon the face of the Earth, and all will be good when the vestiges of Evil are erased. This is why, for example, the Social Democrats and, in the USA, the Progressives, talk all the time about racism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and Zionism and capitalism – remove these evils, and all will be good again, a Paradise on Earth. The Marxists follow the Zoroastrian narrative, however – there is an ongoing battle between Good and Evil, between the proletariat and big capital, and we find ourselves in the middle of the process. Even if the outcome is inevitable, and Good will triumph over Evil (because religion is teleological, the future determines the past), we still have to go through the motions. It is a catastrophically wrong dialectic that the Marxists believe in, though at least it is a dialectic. But Darwin had the true dialect - there is competition and someone survives and someone doesn't. There is no reward or Paradise or anything of the kind - there is just survival. There is no justice - there is just survival. Might does not make right - might just makes might.

Liberalism is harder to pigeon hole. Most modern people in the West have a “live and let live” attitude, e.g., they accept pluralism, which is a hallmark of liberal politics, but also the non-authoritarian Left. It’s not just a normative value; it means, ‘I’m not going to try to conquer you and you’re not going to try to conquer me. We’re not in competition with each other.’ This is a real modus vivendi; it’s very pragmatic. Certainly, liberalism in the traditional sense accepts all this, as does the democratic Left. (Where George W. Bush and Tony Blair shock is that they are going to make people be Liberals – it’s a kind of extremism of the center.)

The Nazis tried to create a Darwinian ethics - survival of the fittest as a moral imperative - and it didn't work. Why? Because there is no normative context in Darwinian thinking. That's one way we know it is an empirically-based theory, not normative theory. Competing universalisms pretend to be moral. In general, using normative constructs is the cover story many people use to get what they want, and no religion or political movement has a patent on this technique. Hiding behind normative constructs is a common means of advancing one's interests and, in the extreme, hegemony.

Conquest based on religion is well-known. But it’s neo-Stalinism that concerns me today. Just like racists who think they can harm you and do what they will with you because they are superior, the neo-Stalinists can intimidate because they have the moral high ground. It’s fascinating, and it’s not just an “ends justify the means” argument, either.

For example, there’s a rough consensus among many people as to what the evils of the world are today – extreme disparity in income, extreme disparity in outcomes, continued wars, starvation and disease, and so on. Many groups may say that, in effect, if you’re against these horrible things, you must be for this or that group. That’s a pretty standard campaign stump speech in most democratic circles. The neo-Stalinists go further – they’re going to make you follow them; because they have the moral high ground, they don’t have to ask your permission for anything. Just like religions that burn people at the stake for heresy, neo-Stalinists invent phony due process to punish their victims, not merely argue against them. It’s supremacism, not democracy.

Josef Stalin famously asked once, “How many tanks does the Pope have?” No, the neo-Stalinists don’t have tanks, either. What they mostly have today is a very successful finger-pointing and scapegoating methodology, along with real power to set the research agenda on college campuses, to stall an academic career by refusing publication of a journal article or vetoing an unwelcome academic appointment or sabotaging tenure altogether, and to influence editorial content in mass media by the proliferation of expert sources. This point about what is usually called "the campus Left" cannot be overemphasized: Most sociological research today seems intent on identifying this or that bad outcome, then looking for its intersection with someone or something you want to blame for that bad outcome. Compare how the eugenics people and the modern leftist sociologists treat the same kind of data. Do you have some crime data? Just link that with the people allegedly perpetrating the crime, the eugenicists would say. Politically leftist sociologists can say, however, not so – ‘Here’s the intersection of crime and poor living conditions.’

Liberal sociologists must not be confused with Social Democrats, Marxists, Progressive or neo-Stalinists, however. Neo-Stalinists will simply retrofit the bad outcomes to theory. If minorities or women are doing poorly in this or that measure, then it must be because, and only because, of racism and sexism. Go back in time far enough and you’ll find evidence of racism or sexism, hence that will be deemed the root cause of things, just as racists and eugenicists can go back in time and link blacks or Jews to every crime in history, if they connect enough dots, that is.

Neo-Stalinism is no different than proto-racism in this kind of argumentation. If there are bad outcomes in the world (and there are), and if you use the interconnectedness of things to find some intersection between the bad outcome and the root cause of said outcome, you can blame anyone you want for anything. It’s just like the kid’s game of “the six degrees of separation.” That’s how neo-Stalinists link bad outcomes to racism, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and so on, it’s how eugenicists used to link bad outcomes to “the Negroes,” or to “the Jews,” and so on. But using the interconnectedness of things to insinuate any cause and effect is self-contradictory. If everything is interconnected, then the putative cause itself is connected to something else, to many other things, and cannot be a simple causative agent in its own right.

Liberal social scientists at least generate hypotheses that are empirically testable – improve living conditions for poor people or people of color, for example, and see if outcomes improve. Provide more education, if deficits in education are seen as a problem, and see if outcomes improve. And so on. The hard Left just rules out alternate hypotheses a priori – only studies that conclude racism, sexism and so on are the root causes of evil are acceptable. It’s more than the reductionist fallacy; it’s a tautology.

Neo-Stalinism and proto-racism have something else in common - each posits evil exclusively on the supply side, which fits in well with finger-pointing, scapegoating and blaming "them," or what I like to call "they, them and those people." Many thinkers have written about the concept of "the other" and of "the evil one," but unless they're linking this insight to that of supply side versus demand side, the analysis is incomplete. For example, think of pornography. "They" are the pornographers, supplying pornography. But where is the demand side in all this? There may be evil in the world; if so, there is a supply side and a demand side for it. Emphasizing only the supply side is both racist and Stalinist.

Does the US Constitution protect Americans from neo-Stalinism? It protects people from Christianity – there is no state religion, and people cannot be compelled to adopt Christianity. Ditto for Islam, or Judaism, or any other religion in America. Ditto for monotheism per se, though some in Washington, on the right, indeed don’t seem to understand this. But does the US Constitution protect writers and thinkers and academics who are guilty of what the old Soviets liked to called deviationism and obstructionism and reaction, which are all equivalent terms to the religious concepts of apostasy and heresy.

The use of the concept of free will is another proto-racist tactic neo-Stalinists use. The people who allegedly do all the evil in the world have free will and consequently are culpable for all the bad outcomes, but their victims have no free will and hence are blameless for everything, including blameless for bad choices. Yet Darwin trumps Marx again. A few million years of human evolution should guarantee that we all have free will, or none of us do. Just like there can be no master race, there cannot be two races of human beings on the Earth, one that is completely hapless and can only react to inputs, and the other a willful, intentional predator class they preys on the former.

There are certainly people who do evil, and there are victims of that evil, but the moment the neo-Stalinists link certain behaviors exclusively to certain people they have become racist themselves.

Again, think Darwin. The appeal of any competing universalism is just this: Why be the alpha male when you can be the Lord of the Universe on Earth yourself? You just have to take over the planet, not some crappy little herd of four-legged animals. That's what competing universalisms are all about, in Darwinian terms.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.