Socialism has become popular again in certain U.S. political circles. Openly avowed socialists, such as New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, exercise an inordinate amount of influence in the Democratic Party. The leftist journal In These Times featured a headline in January 2021 that read “Congress Has More Socialists Than Ever Before in U.S. History.” In Gallup’s 2020 poll, 45% of respondents said they would vote for a qualified socialist candidate for president. In a more recent Axios/Momentive poll, 51% of respondents between the ages of 18-34 had a positive reaction to the word socialism.
The late French philosopher and intellectual Jean Francois Revel at the height of the West’s detente with the Soviet Union wrote "The Totalitarian Temptation" (1977), in which he proclaimed that the world was “evolving toward socialism,” something that at the time he favored: Not the “socialism” of communist regimes, but instead a global, world-wide socialism built upon capitalist foundations. In the book’s first chapter, he identified the obstacles to socialism as communism and the nation-state. True socialism, he wrote, “can only take root in capitalism and develop by outgrowing--not destroying--capitalist civilization, while preserving its two cornerstones: the capacity to produce, and political, individual, and cultural freedoms.” This was the only road, he wrote, to achieve “democratic socialism.”
Yet the bulk of Revel’s book showed that “democratic socialism” was an oxymoron, an empirical impossibility due to what he called the “totalitarian temptation.” Revel’s error was in believing, in his words, that “the goal of politics is human well-being, the greatest good for the greatest possible number,” when history teaches that the goal of politics is to obtain and maintain political power.
Power elites and totalitarianism
Niccolo Machiavelli and his intellectual followers taught us that most politicians -- not all but most -- enjoy wielding political power over others. Political leaders claim to rule or govern in the name of the people and on the people’s behalf, but in reality their primary concern is to stay in power. (There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule -- but they are exceptions). What Revel’s book explored were those political leaders that want, or surrender to the temptation, to “wield the powers of a tyrant.” This temptation to tyrannical rule, Revel wrote, was a “wish from which none of us is free.” “Certain personalities,” he explained, “bloom only when exercising absolute power. Some know they are incapable of reaching the top, or indeed any position of influence, except in a society where zeal in the service of tyranny can substitute for talent; others, endowed with great talent, cannot bear any limits on the authority that accrues to them because of that talent.” Revel wrote that “[t]he desire to escape pluralism, rather than its acceptance, is the norm in man’s history.”
Revel believed that the totalitarian temptation had two main components: the political expression of “the struggle for economic justice and the improvement of life in general” and “the desire for totalitarianism among elites.” The totalitarian temptation manifests itself when “those in power are convinced they hold the absolute Truth and represent the only legitimate political interest,” Revel explained. The power elites “consider it their right and duty to impose their truth by any means, no matter what the public may think, or better still, by preventing the public from thinking at all.” Revel writes that totalitarians reason as follows: “[W]hy should I permit freedom of opinion when it will only propagate error and impede the functioning of the one true social and moral order?”
Revel invoked Czech dissident Milovan Dijlas in ascribing these motives to a “new class,” an oligarchical elite that seeks to control the cultural, social, and political life of the nation. Such regimes pass themselves off as “progressive” but their principal goal is power, not the betterment of society.
McGovern candidacy start of 'sociocultural' revolution
Interestingly, in the Foreword to the the American edition of the book, Revel noted that the United States was then in the midst of a cultural and social revolution that would someday lead to a political revolution. Such a revolution, he wrote, “starts at the grass roots of the sociocultural system.” Politically, it first manifested itself in the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972. And Revel noted that although McGovern was soundly defeated at the polls, the cultural and social revolution had clearly begun to affect the United States. The revolution, he wrote, develops slowly and “works through the depths of society.”
Here, Revel was prescient. The cultural and social revolution that he sensed in this book actually began in the 1960s, worked its way through U.S. cultural, social, educational, and political institutions during the next several decades, and won the “culture war” by default. By the time conservatives recognized what was happening (Republican candidate Patrick J. Buchanan tried to warn the country at the 1992 GOP Convention), it was too late. Liberalism and progressivism, dominated -- and still dominates -- America’s cultural, social, educational, and political institutions. And those institutions have become even more powerful and more prone to the totalitarian temptation -- witness the outsized influence of far-left social media platforms and mainstream media outlets that unabashedly promote the cultural and political left, and have no qualms about censoring, smearing (or just ignoring) voices on the cultural and political right; or the outsized influence of government officials and bureaucrats who during the pandemic have issued decrees that effectively suspend or trample on constitutional rights.
At the end of his book, Revel expressed the fear that the “totalitarian temptation may well prove more powerful than the yearning for socialism, [and] the hatred of capitalism violent enough to make acceptable the destruction of freedom . . .” What he failed to recognize was that the desire for true socialism was integral to the totalitarian temptation. It is not state power, but only the limits on state power -- constitutional and institutional -- that preserve our freedoms.
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