a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The great social movements of 20th century America were movements for inclusion of excluded groups into political life, citizenship.  The two exemplary movements were Abolitionism, which brought voting rights to the former slaves, and Women’s Suffrage, which brought voting rights to women in the 1920s. Each extended the rights promised in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to people who had been left out of the basic covenant “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  In the post-WWII period, the Civil Rights Movement and the  Women’s Liberation Movement (“second wave feminism”) each took a second step: to achieve specific laws that would assure equality beyond the political and electoral domain, and particularly in private enterprises and in private spaces, from clubs to schools and  universities, from places of employment to religious institutions. Civil rights followed from political rights.

These two movements make it very clear what the goals of social democracy should be. The foremost goal is to secure citizenship and equality in the political domain for all, universally.  The second is for the citizens to secure social and economic justice for all citizens. The definition of social justice should reference citizenship. That is, for people in a social democracy social justice means that the state –representing all citizens—makes sure that everyone has the opportunities and the support to become fully capable and active citizens.  For those who were once politically excluded, this will require special reparative attention, as the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement members argued (and as was never successfully argued by or for Native Americans or many immigrant sub-groups, and which is very problematic in the case of all children below voting age). The more secure and universal citizenship is, the more able the citizens will be to secure social justice for all –something that takes a long time and ceaseless effort because the social-economic domain is so full of flux and change, so susceptible to economic ups and downs and shifts and social trends like reorganizations of family life. And because those who have privilege in the social-economic domain seldom take responsibility for what their privilege means to others, when it harms others or blocks their way to a good life.

To take the key example of what this conceptualization means:  all must have preschooling and schooling and post-schooling education not just for literacy and numeracy, and not just for their own individual well-being, but for being able to be citizens, either through direct political participation or by forming opinions and getting the opinions represented by elected leaders, locally and nationally. People need to be able to vote with the good of all in mind, not just their individual or group self-interest. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s how clearly committed our ancestors then were to this conceptualization: “In the United States the greatest thrust of education is directed toward political life; in Europe its main aim is to fit men for private life.”

Or take another example: this conceptualization implies that all must have good, prevention-oriented, life-long healthcare, not just for their individual health and well-being, but so that they grow up to be physically and mentally healthy people who can participate as citizens for all their lives, knowing that they do not have to fear growing old without support.  Universal public education and universal healthcare are not “socialism” (as their current American opponents say); they are among the key ingredients of social democracy or what was known in the early 19th century as republicanism, and now sometimes (in the arcane Political Science departments) as civic republicanism.

State policies for social justice ultimately serve the political well-being of the state –its representativeness, its commitment to maintaining free speech and assembly, its separation from religious institutions and beliefs. In short, its Constitutional guarantees.  One of the key tasks of our leaders and our public intellectuals should be to make this basic universalist principle clear, and to help people understand what can happen when it is neglected or repudiated, lost or lost sight of, or when people are actively opposing it as secessionists. The principle might be called: the priority of the political.

I will come back to this educational task in later posts, but I want to suggest here that 20th century history has shown us basically two ways that this greater goal of political well-being can be repudiated. Exponents of  these two ways appeared as  “the right” and “the left” during the Age of Revolutions (and particularly during the French Revolution), and then they appeared again as  “the capitalists” and “the socialists” in the late 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. (A third repudiation gained ground a the end of the 20th century –“the theocrats”—or religious nationalists and supranationalist, but I will talk about this more in a later post.)

One way (from “the left”) for the priority of the political to be repudiated is that those struggling for social justice put the needs of a particular group first and declare social justice for them (rather than political equality) to be the ultimate good.  Thus the revolutionary Marxists of the fin de siecle called for a period of “dictatorship of the proletariat” (with an assist from revolutionary intellectuals, who were to provide the theory for revolutionary dictatorial practice) to further social justice for the working class. The goal was worker ownership of the means of production, which would bring about redistribution of the wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie and fair distribution of any future products. Not a bad goal, but one rendered impossible by the anti-political idea that the state could just  “wither away” after social justice was achieved. The theoretical assumption was that accumulation of wealth was the root of all evil, and if this root could be torn out, people would not need protection from evil –they would not need, for example, the protection of state laws.

Ironically, and horribly, enough, this Marxist vision has time and again –most dreadfully in the Soviet Union—led to a strong state, in no way withered. The envisioned dictatorship of the proletariat turns into one-party dictatorship that attacks political life, that suppresses democracy, that makes citizenship useless. In its extreme form, which is totalitarianism, the strong state declares its citizens useless and starts eliminating them, group by group, starting with any intellectuals who might have a tendency to question.

From the other direction (“the right”), there was also an assumption that people did not need a democratic state. And there was also a plan to privilege a particular group. Again, the result was that a strong state emerged.  The extreme example in this direction was Nazi Germany, and it, too, became a totalitarian regime.

Despite the fact that Hitler’s party was called the National Socialist Party, it had nothing Marxist about it and was implacably, obessionally opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution. Hitler allied himself with German industrial capitalism and espoused the idea that capitalism, growing more and more powerful, would bring prosperity to the German people, who had (like himself) suffered dreadfully in the First World War and in the Depression. (The social democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s had been cut off by the Depression, as the Progressive experiment of the 1920s in America was cut off by American overseas imperial adventures and by the Depression.)

Hitler’s grip on the German people was reinforced tremendously in the early 1930s, after he became Chancellor, by the economic improvements his alliance with German industrialists like Krupp brought to the middle class and even parts of the working class. Unemployment diminished, inflation decreased. Their improved lives seemed to many Germans in the 1930s proof that “all our boats will rise together” and “profits will trickle down” and “unregulated capitalism will serve the good of all” –the slogans of American neo-conservative economic theory in the 1980s, as translated for general consumption by Ronald Reagan. The industrial buildup toward World War II increased the impression among the majority of Germans that what was good for the industrialists was good for the people –and, as Hitler insisted, good for the Aryan people. The chief internal enemies of the Aryan industrial march to prosperity for all were the Jews, the “international Jewish conspiracy,” the financial conspiracy that was supposedly undermining everybody Aryan. Rightist regimes need such an internal enemy and such a conspiracy theory.

The state, in this Nazi program, was not supposed to wither away, it was supposed to morph into the corporate state, a state controlled by a group of corporations coordinated in their growth by a Board, so to speak, of their heads and the head of state. No need for the apparatus of parliaments or for any representative government. “Emergency laws” –like the 1933 Ermächtigungsgesetz that brought Hitler to power–could be enacted with the rationale that they were good for the people, meant to relieve their distress. The root of all evil in this scheme is democracy itself (and any financially successful group not allied to the Aryan industrial Board, like the Jews).  Eliminate democracy with a one-party dictatorship and nothing stands in the way of state-corporate capitalism.

In America, people across the political spectrum are anti-totalitarian. They reject both Nazism and Soviet Communism (or anything thought to be Soviet or under Soviet influence, anything “socialist”). But not very many aim their objections at the anti-political foundations of both regimes; the ways in which both wanted to eliminate politics– defined as the free actions and expressions of opinion of the people and their elected representatives.

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets were the enemy because they were anti-capitalist, not because they were anti-political. The Nazis were the enemy because they were anti-Semitic, not because they were anti-political. To this day, the controlling political discourse in America is about opposition to socialism and opposition to anti-Semitism—although this last has now morphed into opposition to a religion, Islam, held to be anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. There is hardly any ability to see the essence of Nazism, which was its anti-political state-corporate capitalism.

It seem to me that there are few who sound the alarm about hostility to politics in America now because hostility to politics has become the air we breathe over the period of our second civil war. We overlook it while we are all complaining about our governments. We are not complaining over the loss of political life that makes these governments so dysfunctional.  When American leftists go on about fascism in America they just sound wild and crazy to most Americans, who consider themselves opposed to anything having to do with Nazism and cannot recognize an “emergency law” like the Patriot Act of 2001 when they see one.  But perhaps the alarmists would get a more sympathetic hearing if they made it clear that what they are really sensing is a widening anti-political, anti-democratic streak in American political life. Something very unpatriotic and secessionist in people of left, right, and center who call themselves suprapatriots.

For example, when a majority of our Supreme Court recently declared that corporations, which are for historically particular technical reasons classified economically as individuals, but are certainly not voting citizens, can spend whatever sums they wish on  election campaigns, they struck right at the heart of our democracy and our Constitution. Corporations can buy candidates now, legally. A majority of our own Supreme Court has repudiated the conditions in which ‘one citizen, one vote’ has any meaning.  This was a  secessionist act.

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