Socialism and Occupy Wall Street

Progressive nitwit Matthew Yglesias has this at The New Republic, "How Occupy Wall Street Is a Rational Response to a System That’s Failed" (via Memeorandum).

Yglesias' (idiotic) essay is part of the series, "‘Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street,’ A TNR Symposium." I read Fred Siegel's piece earlier, which is much better, "Occupy Wall Street and the Return of the McGovernites":

The editors of The New Republic are wiser than they know in trying to keep their distance from the Zuccotti Park protesters. In their zeal to recapture the spirit of the 1960s, the Occupy Wall Streeters are replicating the very processes that produced the current crack-up of liberalism. But if the editors arrived at the right conclusion, they came to it by a false path, one which has produced a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of American liberalism.

The core of the TNR editorial lays out what in principle is an honorable and essential difference between liberals and radicals. Unlike radicals, “liberals,” says TNR “are capitalists.” But that underlying premise of the editorial is belied by the historical record.

Herbert Croly, the founder of TNR, understood himself as a radical for whom the use of the then uncommon term “liberal” was merely a euphemism for an American sort of socialism. Croly spoke of his seminal book, The Promise of American Life—the founding document of American liberalism—as “socialistic.” It’s true that it was only in the 1930s that many at TNR openly referred to themselves as socialists. But looking back, in 1931, Edmund Wilson argued strongly for liberals to give up Croly's "gradual and natural approximation to socialism" and to embrace socialism openly.

The period from roughly 1950 to 1970 was the anomaly. It took the concussive effects of the Communist conquest of Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two to temporarily pull liberalism off its socialist path.

The radicals of the 1960s deployed their justified opposition to the Vietnam War to blind themselves to the consequences and meaning of statism and Stalinism. Their aggressively willed ignorance produced the 1972 McGovern platform which re-wrote the traditional program of the European socialist parties in the American language of rights. Employment, educational quality, and housing were to become matters of right subject to the power of judicially supervised bureaucracies.

Since then the distinction between liberalism and anti-capitalist radicalism has been continuously effaced by the rise of a vast regulatory state staffed, in part, by public sector unionists. Statism in America eschewed a European-style ownership of the means of production. Rather its aim has been, in the name of good and defensible causes such as a cleaner environment, to run as much of the economy as possible through government, directly and indirectly. The upshot is that the American percentage of GDP devoted to government has reached European levels. And by and large liberals approve of this trend. According to a February 2010 Gallup survey, 53 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of liberals have a positive image of socialism. The Gallup findings were backed up by a December 2010 Rasmussen survey which found that 42 percent of Democrats—the people whom former Presidential candidate Howard Dean described as “The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party”—think that the government should manage the economy completely.

More at the link.

One of the things about American socialists (radical progressives) is how vehemently they deny their essential commitment to socialism (radical progressivism). I like how Siegel speaks truth to power: American "liberalism" really is socialism. Some of the major writers of the 20th century had no qualms about applying the proper terminology. But since socialism is deeply unpopular in the United States --- at least those policies explicitly labeled socialist --- the left must adopt evasive language and ideological misnomers. Matthew Yglesias claims he's "liberal" but he's one of the biggest mainstream socialists writing today.

Anway, Siegel doesn't go far enough with his analysis. He lamely piles on the attacks on Wall Street, when we know that the same bureaucratic explosion he elaborates is what brought about the housing crash in the first place. (See, "Wall Street Did It?") Big government socialist statism is killing us. Folks like Matthew Yglesias have their fingers on the triggers, or on the meat cleavers, be that as it may.