Archives for September 2017

Jean-Francois Revel (with the assistance of Branko Lazitch): How Democracies Perish. William Byron translation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring/Summer 1985. Republished with permission.

 

In 1970 the literary succès de scandale in Paris was a polemics entitled Ni Marx, Ni Jésus. Written by socialist pamphleteer Jean-Francois Revel, it owed its scandalousness to one remarkable thing: it was pro-American. Throughout the previous decade, anti-Americanism had numbered among the few sentiments uniting most of the French elites—whether the ‘Right’ of Algérie Française, the Gaullist center, or the various elements on the ‘Left.’ Dismissing all these elements as reactionary, Revel buoyantly asserted that in the 1960s “the only revolutionary stirrings in the world have had their origins in the United States,” and the question of whether or not “the revolution of the twentieth century” will spread “to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it first succeeds in America.” Without Marx or Jesus appeared in America a year later, supplemented by a properly friendly and skeptical “afterword” by Mary McCarthy and an “author’s note” in which Revel generously observed that “in the United States if the classical Left [as represented by Miss McCarthy) does not believe the new revolution is serious, at least it does not try, as in Europe, to stop it in order to be right.”

Americans today who remember the book remember it vaguely They remember Revel as a friend in a bad time, the time when anti-Americanism had become fashionable in America itself. They seldom remember Revel’s argument, and in some ways that is just as well. He made some sensible, astringent criticisms of those who imagined that the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the ‘Third World,’ or Scandinavia could bear a democratic revolution to the oppressed victims of capitalism. But he suffered delusions of his own, calling for “the abolition of international relations” by the establishment of a world government. This government would enable humanity to equalize economic and social conditions, stabilize the birth rate, preserve the environment without ending material progress, and free everyone from “sexual repression” (the latter program being “undoubtedly one of the surest signs of an authentic revolutionary struggle”). If this “total affirmation of liberty for all in the place of archaic prohibitions” sounds rather more like anarchism than anything that could establish a government, it must be said that Revel almost saw this: “We do not need a political revolution so much as an antipolitical revolution.” Even the American “hippies” were not sufficiently egalitarian and libertarian for Revel’s world. He fretted that they disliked technology, which brings material abundance to the masses; worse still, they tended toward religiosity. But at least the American ‘Right’ posed little serious threat. After Goldwater’s defeat, conservatism was surely dead.

A decade and a half later, Revel has abandoned many of his leftist illusions and most of his optimism. How Democracies Perish begins, “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The contemporary world has become an “implacable democracy-killing machine” with components within both democracy and totalitarianism. Revel describes four of these components.

First, modern democracy directs energies inward, whereas totalitarianism directs energies outward. Democracy “tend to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” Democracy succeeds in the pleasant task of improving its own material life. It fears the consequences of opposing its enemies because it would thereby risk souring its own agreeable existence. It even finds that “it is easier to win concessions from yourself than from the enemy.” Totalitarianism fails to improve its own material life and must therefor turn its attention elsewhere. “War is central to [the Soviet Union’s] ideological system,” as well as to its economic and political structure.

Second, modern democracy “treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its own principles,” notably that of toleration. Modern democracy tends to blame itself for its own enemies, internal and external, and generates “an industry of blame.” With not a single ideology but dozens contending inside it, modern democracy expends much of its energy on contestation as it were with itself. It has difficulty defending itself against real enemies. “Even conservatives seldom risk naming the threat of totalitarianism as the greatest menace of our time, for fear of seeming fanatical” and thus offending the modern ethos. As a consequence of this, democratic politicians, “whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues’ substance”—that it, about reality itself. While looking hard at its own current faults, modern democracy often minimizes the faults of leftist totalitarianism, dismissing them as mere ‘stages’ of progress. This suggests that modern democrats often accept the premises of progressivist historicism underlying totalitarian belief and practice. Indeed, “the socialist cause was forged within the democracies themselves in the nineteenth century.” Totalitarianism treats its opponents as enemies, subversives. It never blames itself fundamentally or comprehensively, but limits “self-criticism” to the sort of corruption-baiting one finds in Pravda letters-to-the-editor. It generates an industry of propaganda governed by a single, all-encompassing ideology. But it firmly subordinates propaganda to political calculation, also governed by ideology; any mistakes of perception occur only insofar as the ideology fails to explain reality. But because its ideology encourages power-worship, it often perceives political reality quite acutely—as devotees will. While judging its enemies by their current faults, totalitarianism judges itself by its own alleged future. It can judge its enemies most severely because, according to leftist totalitarianism, its enemies have no future.

Third, contemporary democratic government no longer governs. “The democratic state has stuffed itself with more responsibilities than powers,” a weakness that causes political and social fragmentation. One might say that America retains Madisonian faction while trying to act like a welfare state. Our enemies need not divide us in order to conquer, for our divisions are already here to exploit. In their foreign relations, modern democracies also accept “responsibility”—that is, blame—without sufficient power to govern, or at least channel, the course of events. Democratic politicians vacillate and react; time is rarely on their side. Totalitarian government does not merely govern but tyrannizes. It exercises power without “responsibility” and imposes unity upon its subjects. Democrats falsely imagine that this repression and the misery it causes must eventually halt a totalitarian regime’s expansion. But “the notion that whoever holds power must clear out because his subjects are discontented or dying of hunger or distress is a bit of whimsy that history has tolerated wondrously few times.” It is a notion that “can only occur to a democrat,” who earnestly desires the world to be other than it is (no harm in that) but then confuses his desire with reason. Totalitarians plan, decide, and act; they “can afford to wait,” convinced that time is on their side.

Fourth, modern democracy is at most a neo-imperialism, that is, an economic imperialism. The gains it makes can therefore be threatened by totalitarian insurgents, without their violating “international law.” Totalitarianism is a true imperialism, seizing territory and direct political power along with economic power. Its gains cannot be threatened militarily without violating ‘international law.’ This is true even if those gains were made ‘illegally,’ as “sooner or later de facto power is accepted as rightful power.” ‘International law,’ then, is more than a bit of a fraud, a more useful fraud to totalitarians than to modern democrats.

Revel uses imagery, rhetoric, some facts, and clear deductive logic to show how these four components function. Deductive logic proves especially useful because democrats “eagerly believe the Communists’ pure propaganda, reserving their skepticism for the genuinely revealing doctrinal statements,” which “they dismiss as mere talk.” (He recalls that the French ambassador in Berlin yattered about “détente” with Hitler in 1937, and that the ambassador’s hapless successor excitedly supposed the existence of “hawks” and “doves” among the Nazi elite). In fact, totalitarian doctrine, ‘Right’ or ‘Left,’ has been the only consistently reliable guide to totalitarian action. Because totalitarianism attempts to unify theory and practice (but does not unify either with its rhetoric) its doctrine and the (often unstated) logical deductions therefrom tell us more than pages of data. For example, given the propensity of Communist subjects to flee their countries, “the only way to convince oneself and the rest of humanity that the socialist system is best is to see to it that there are no other systems.” Totalitarian imperialism serves first of all to convince; this is what it means to claim (as Leninists do) that there is a logic of history. It is a ‘logic’ that only real logic can expose—in both senses of that word. The ‘logic’ of history has military consequences. The Soviets’ alleged fear of encirclement, “the greatest strategic farce of modern times,” is inexplicable strategically. But not politically. “Let’s be logical: the only way for the Soviet Union to make certain its borders are not threatened, that they are fully secure, is to have no borders at all or, if you prefer, borders that coincide with the entire world.” One can call this paranoia, but it must be said it is a most purposeful paranoia, consistent with the allegedly dialectical progress of ‘History.’

To counter totalitarian imperialism, modern democracies have constructed the edifice of ‘détente,’ an attempt to elevate a condition between states (the word means relaxation of tensions) to the status of a principle, a ruling idea. Its purpose is clear enough: peace. But the means of obtaining genuine peace by the means of ‘détente’ elude democrats’ eager grasp. The “principle that inspired the first massive transfusion of Western aid to the Soviet Union after 1922” prefigured the economic principle of “détente”: “East-West trade will civilize Communism.” In the 1920s, “after several years of Western liberality, what really happened was the forced collectivization of the land, extermination of the peasants, purges and the Great Terror of the 1930s.” The results of similar Western liberality in the 1970s were less spectacular but far more damaging to the world as a whole. They included a massive Soviet arms buildup, domination of large sections of Asia and Africa, increased use of espionage and terrorism—all accompanied by a reversal of Khruschev’s ‘de-Stalinization’ at home. Faced with this contemptuous exploitation of their hopes, the democracies find it impossible to reduce trade with the Soviet Union for more than the briefest periods. They tell themselves that such a punitive action might only anger the Soviets. Once again, Revelian logic clears the artificial fog that makes these movie-set props believable. “Either Western economic cooperation is negligible to the U. S. S. R., which makes the whole theory of détente absurd, or it’s important to the U. S. S. R. and suspending it would be an effective sanction.” Not a supremely effective sanction, to be sure: grain embargoes cannot extract Soviet divisions from Afghanistan. But sanctions can at least make our own economic system, for whose health many democrats care more than anything else less dependent upon the actions of enemies who care neither for democrats’ comfort nor for that of their own subjects.

Given all this, Revel has earned his pessimism. His suggested policy changes, stated in necessarily general terms, seem rather weak. Two are negative: do not fear war because the Soviets avoid it when they see the possibility of losing; make no concessions without “manifest, equivalent and palpable counter-concessions.” Centrally, he suggests “mainly” economic reprisals against “any Soviet encroachment.” He would supplement this with espionage and some propaganda. Perhaps these suggestions might turn out to be more effective than they appear; up to a point, one might even say, “the more Soviet conquests, the more burdens for them and the more targets for us.”

But the problem remains. Democrats prefer not to target their enemies at all. The democratic character itself finds tyranny seductive and deadly. Plato’s Socrates describes the scion of democracy, his appetites sated, driven by the “sting of longing” to be “the leader of the idle desires that insists on all available resources being distributed to them”: “this leader of the soul takes madness for its armed guard and is stung to frenzy. And if it finds in the man any opinions or desires accounted good and still admitting of shame, it slays them and pushes them out of him until it purges him of moderation and fills him with madness brought in from abroad” (Republic IX, 537b). The problem of educating the young democrat to defend himself against those who would use his desires to serve tyranny remains the problem for those who cherish liberty. It is an increasingly formidable problem. Modern tyranny, totalitarianism, distinguishes itself from ancient tyranny in part because it is not so innocent of philosophy. So far as a polemicist may educate, the pessimistic Revel guards modern democrats from the tyrannical sting of longing, making amends for the earlier, dreaming Revel who let himself unguarded.