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    Printouts of Progressivism

    by

    This article was commissioned by Law and Liberty as a response to an essay by Jay Nordlinger entitled “‘We Will burn and Loot and Destroy’: The Weather Underground and Its Legacy.” My response was published on March 23, 2021.

     

    Revolution means regime change. Rulers, ruling institutions, the purposes of the country and its way of life: Revolutionaries aim at removing and replacing all of these with, well, themselves. If they reckon that they can do so nonviolently (1980s Central European nations and South Africa, 1950s France, 19th century England) they’ll do it that way. If not, not (America 1776-81, France 1789-93 and periodically thereafter Russia, Italy, Germany, China in the last century). The United States has seen one peaceful and successful revolution inaugurated by Progressives early in the 20th century, consummated in the New Deal and extended ever since. Its peacefulness was no guarantee of its justice, however, any more than the violence of the Founders’ revolution issued in tyranny.

    Except for the War for Independence, violent revolutionaries have failed in America, consistently, with the partial exception of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. The Weathermen count among those failures, I am happy to remark. Revolutionary violence is their “legacy” in the sense that they have passed it down to a subsequent generation—and, unexpectedly, to their enemies, as well.

    Jay Nordlinger has assembled all manner of explanations folks offer for the two most recent surges of revolutionary violence. Recalling the Weather Underground, these explanations range from circular vaporing about the Zeitgeist (the late 1960s was “an extreme time”) to rationalization sans reason (they were only “young dreamers,” Martin Luther Kings of the pipe bomb), to pop sociology (they got together in groups, you see, and one wild thing led to another). Analyses of our own “extreme time” invoke the well-worn mantra of ‘race, class, and gender’ grievances with respect to the ‘Left,’ and pretty much the same thing on the ‘Right,’ with victims and exploiters reversed and Trump erected as lightning rod in the eye of the storm.

    As Nordlinger kindly understates it, revolutionaries of the past half-century have proved “impatient of democratic processes,” unlike their Progressive predecessors. Most obviously, this has happened because while by definition (indeed tautology) all revolutionary violence aims at regime change, this violence aims at changing our  regime, the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism. But why the impatience?

    When explaining themselves, contemporary revolutionaries claim that the American regime is neither democratic—controlled by capitalist paymasters, saith the ‘Left,’ or an internationalist ‘deep state,’ saith the ‘Right’—nor genuinely commercial—’free enterprise’ having produced nothing but servitude in the one narrative, or jobs lost to overseas sweatshops, according to the other.

    It’s easy to pick out pieces of truth from all these explanations. But they all overlook the obvious. Revolutionary violence in contemporary America results from the nonviolent triumph of Progressivism itself. Whether the revolutionaries appropriate the name for themselves or abominate it as a synonym for “Legion,” they are unintended printouts of the regime Progressivism made.

    American Progressivism has had a doctrinal element and a structural one. Doctrinally, Progressivism derives from the moral crisis seen in 18th century Europe. Where does morality come from? For centuries, of course, the answer was “God.” From Machiavelli to the French Encyclopedists, ‘the moderns’ had challenged the teaching of Christianity; whether ‘Enlightened despots’ like Frederick the Great or ‘Enlightened democrats’ like Tom Paine, many of the most prominent politicians and polemicists had ruled out God as the source of moral principles, whether tacitly or explicitly. Many of these men substituted what they called ‘natural right’—often amounting to little more than utility—for divine right.

    But nature as the source of morality soon came under attack. If, as the Enlighteners claimed, nature is little more than matter in motion, how do you derive right from that? David Hume, who answered that question by saying you can’t, inclined to explain morality as a set of customs; others (Rousseau, Adam Smith) chose natural sentiments; still others, utilitarianism stripped of natural right. The theory that proved most persuasive to the university professors who educated subsequent generations of preachers, politicians, and writers itself came, sure enough, from a university professor. As is well known among university professors, G.W.F. Hegel argued that moral and political right come from the course of history, which he explained as the rational unfolding of the ‘Absolute Spirit,’ the animating principle of all that exists. According to this doctrine, all that has happened (generally, if not down to the details) happened according to the impersonal and irresistible ‘laws of history.’ There is nothing above and beyond ‘History’—very much with a capital ‘H.’

    Marxian socialism and Spencerian capitalism take Hegel and made him empirical. They retain ‘History’ and its supposed iron laws. As has been exhaustively documented by scholars of the history of ideas, the American Progressives who took over U.S. university faculties in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted these doctrines and ‘democratized’ them. No dictatorship of the proletariat for them; no Social-Darwinist struggle for survival, either. They preferred a gradual but determined walk towards egalitarianism, a walk undertaken with the consent of the governed, not a forced march. Leaders of opinion—Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK—not leaders of battalions would show us how to ‘get on the right side of History.’

    To aid in this, and to consolidate ‘progress,’ they instituted a ruling structure, the equally well-known administrative state, a centralized bureaucracy that would regularize and regulate the new regime. Bureaucratized and state-subsidized universities, staffed by Progressive teachers and administrators, would train both the leaders and the functionaries of the new regime, often interlocking with business corporations—themselves now extensive and often international bureaucracies. Undemocratic? Of course—even aristocratic or oligarchic (‘meritocratic’ to its friends). But, as Tocqueville had seen a century earlier, bureaucracy imposes a “soft despotism” that readily arises out of a democratic-egalitarian civil society.

    The revolutionary violence of the past fifty years or so has resulted in what liberty-minded economists like to call the unintended (though far from unforeseeable) consequences of both Progressive doctrine and Progressive institutions. Such violence aims at the destruction of private property and persons—specifically, “members of the ruling class,” as one radical group put it.

    With ‘History’ on one’s side, violence is easy to justify. If, according to the doctrine of historical fatalism, human beings have no innate rights, then they are expendable. The Weathermen and their allies made this obvious in both deeds and words. Wherever radicals ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have seized state power, the butcheries multiply. On the ‘moderate’ side of the continuum, extremists can eliminate their enemies by means of harassment and censorship—’cancellation.’ More subtly, but no less tellingly, Noam Chomsky warns that violence is wrong not because it’s immoral, a violation of human rights, but because it’s tactically inept, “a major gift to the Right”—a mistake, but only a tactical one. Bad publicity. If your enemies are destined for History’s dustbin, they only have rights so long as you are not yet in a position to show them that they don’t. And don’t forget to decry ‘bullying’ in the meantime.

    As for the excesses of extremists in practice, one may, understandably, wonder at the folly of the Capitol Hill ‘stormers’ taking selfies (real revolutionaries don’t do things like that) or Antifa-ites rampaging in Portland, one of the most socialist-sympathetic cities in America. Such wondering will cease if you recall Tocqueville’s analysis of the Jacobins. Old Regime France was one of the earliest examples of the centralized modern state, the one in which the monarch no longer claimed the status of first among his aristocratic equals but enforced recognition of his absolute sovereignty, gathered the aristocrats out of the countryside into the palace of Versailles, and replaced them with administrators beholden to himself. As result, no one in France had any practical experience in politics and government. There hadn’t been any real citizens in France for more than a century, even among the aristocrats. When the revolutionaries overthrew their rulers and took over, “impatience with democracy” soon infected the democrats. The guillotine proved so much quicker. Like the Jacobins during the Reign of terror, today’s looters, bombers, and burners can’t even govern themselves. By its top-down, centralized way of ruling, the administrative state weakens the practices of self-government, eventually wiping out the knowledge of how to do it and corrupting the moral capacities needed to do it in a civil and sensible way Like the Marxist ‘consciousness’ it imitates, ‘wokeness’ turns citizens not so much into sleepwalkers as sleep-rampagers, somnambulists of self-righteousness.

    The original American Progressives proceeded peacefully, profiting from the contrast between themselves and the violent anarchists and socialists that made the 1890s and early 1900s a time of heightened social violence. They took control of the education system, as recommended by men like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey. The doctrines and political structures they fostered in that system have gradually weakened the system itself. When the New Leftists of the 1960s retooled themselves as schoolteachers in the 1970s, they followed the Progressives’ tactics, abandoning the notion that ‘democracy is in the streets’ and bringing their own version of democracy into the classroom. The revolutionaries who have learned New-Left doctrines in those classrooms now devour both their own children, in the abortion mills, and their own parents, first in academia, then in every other dimension of American life. In that sense, today’s extremists do carry on the legacy of the violent portion of the Sixties Left.

    Churchill in the Sudan: War and Statesmanship

    by

    Winston S. Churchill: The River War An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan. James W. Muller, editor. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2020.

     

    This review originally appeared in City Journal on April 30, 2021.

     

    The Nile is the river in question. Without it, no war. “It is the cause of the war,” Churchill writes. “It is the means by which we fight, the end at which we aim.” On the Nile, the British could run their formidable gunboats into their enemy’s territory, upriver to its stronghold at Khartoum, itself located at the geostrategic chokepoint where the Blue and White Niles meet: “the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean Sea.” Just as the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, connected Europe to Asian ports beyond the ‘Mideast,’ so the Nile, originating in smaller rivers that flow into Lake Victoria far to the south of Egypt and Sudan, connects Europe with the heart of Africa. Americans will think of their great Mississippi River, which allows farmers in the Midwest to ship their produce to the Gulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of the world. Today, when it’s easy to imagine that we live in ‘cyberspace,’ Churchill reminds us that geography matters.

    Since the Nile flows from the great lake north through the deserts of Sudan, “the Sudan is…naturally and geographically an integral part of Egypt,” and “Egypt is no less essential to the development of the Sudan.” In the 1890s, politics (especially religious politics) had sundered that geographical and economic union, with war as the consequence.

    At the time of its conquest and annexation of Sudan in 1821, Egypt was itself part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by an Ottoman-appointed viceroy or “khedive,” Muhammad Ali, an Albanian who had served as an officer in the imperial army. But throughout the century the empire had weakened—almost proverbially, ‘the Turk’ was ‘the sick man of Europe’—and both Great Britain and France vied for influence there. In 1883, the Brits intervened in Egypt to suppress a nationalist revolt. “Shortly after,” Churchill recalls, Muslims in Sudan proclaimed an Islamic regime, captured Khartoum, killed a much-respected British envoy named Charles Gordon, and pushed the Egyptians out. Such jihadi movements in West Africa dated back to the eleventh century, so this was a perennial threat, one that persists to this day.

    By the 1880s, the British regime itself had changed, gradually, from the mixed regime of Edmund Burke’s time to an increasingly democratic republic. Gordon’s murder spurred calls for revenge from the now-powerful general public, though Churchill never lets his reader lose sight of the geo-economic and geopolitical calculations motivating Parliament and Downing Street. In 1896, an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener began to move south along the Nile. Some two decades later, during the Great War, Kitchener would prove inadequate to high command in twentieth-century military conditions, but in 1890s Sudan, he understood exactly how to proceed—in a word, methodically. Kitchener’s “organizing talents” were unsurpassed in his time and place. “Much depended on forethought, much on machinery; little was left to chance.” The river supported gunboats, which the British had and jihadis had not. The flat land could support a railway, so Kitchener built one, taking care to install telegraph lines for instant communications. “Fighting the Dervish was primarily a matter of transport.” By the end of 1897, when the railroad was completed, “though the battle [for Khartoum] was not yet fought, the victory was won.”

    In inaugurating the reign of modern, experimental science in England, Francis Bacon had called for “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Little need be left to chance, he contended, although much usually is. Kitchener was a Baconian through and through. Faced not only with jihadis but with epidemics and famine, but fortified with the world-mastering products of modern science for transport, communication, and warfare, he and his men soldiered on and overcame. “In nearly three years of war nothing of any consequence went wrong.” How many military commanders before or since can have that said of their campaigns?

    Nor was it all a matter of machines. Kitchener and his officers showed the qualities of mental and moral discipline to keep at it, not to outrun their technological capabilities, which would have exposed their soldiers unnecessarily to the counterattacks of what Churchill often praises as a courageous, resilient, and smart enemy. The “stony cheerfulness” of the British officers kept the few British, many Egyptians and many Sudanese soldiers steadily on the path to victory. Crucially, the officers respected their men. “There is one spirit which animates all the dealings of the British officers with the native soldier. It is not only seen in Egypt; it exists wherever Britain raises mercenary troops. The officer’s military honor is the honor of his men…. The British officer of native corps is never known—on duty or off duty, officially or in private, before or after dinner, by word or implication—to speak disparagingly of his men.” As a result, the men esteemed (and consequently obeyed) their officers.

    Kitchener himself, admittedly more stony than cheerful, nonetheless encourage this spirit in his subordinates. “Few generals have the good fortune to know their subordinates. Of all the advantages enjoyed by Sir Herbert Kitchener in the campaigns on the Nile, this was the greatest. Such “mutual confidence” makes not only obedience but also “beneficial disobedience possible.” Churchill means that Kitchener’s officers could countermand the general’s orders if some new, unanticipated circumstance arose, deploying their own intelligence and daring to fit any occasion. Method, yes; roboticism, no.

    Abdallah ibn Muhammad, ruler of the Sudanese caliphate, had 50,000 Dervish troops at Khartoum. To call their defense of the city against modern weaponry “mad fanaticism” is “a cruel injustice,” Churchill insists. “In a few seconds swift destruction would rush on these brave men,” but through no fault of theirs or that of their general, who had given them “a complex and ingenious” battle plan. The trouble was that he had based his plan “on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of modern weapons.” He simply had no way of knowing better. “Why should we regard as madness in the savage what would be sublime in civilized man?”

    Not that Churchill wastes sentiment on the Dervishes. The war resulted in “the destruction of a state of society which had long become an anachronism—an insult as well a a danger to civilization,” depending as it did on slave trading, bound together by “mutual fear, not mutual trust,” and a religious ideology Churchill does not hesitate to denounce as veering from “frenzy” to “fatalistic apathy”—precisely the extremes that the English had learned to shun after their own vicious civil warfare in the seventeenth century. The war brought “the liberation of a great waterway” from the Khalif’s tyrannical regime, opening the possibility (a hope which would prove over-optimistic) of “the foundation of an African India” for Great Britain, and at any rate, and more soberly, “the settlement of a long dispute.”

    Very well, we might ask, a century-and-a-quarter removed, “why should we care?” The British Empire has gone the way of the Ottomans—even if, fortunately, the Brits haven’t gone the way of the Turks.

    Churchill, for starters. As early as his mid-twenties, when he wrote the book, he knew how to tell a story and paint a picture—especially one he played a role in, having arrived in Sudan in 1899, fresh from fighting the Pathans in the mountains of India. His description of the thrill of going into battle with the enemy will put to rest any questions of why men have always been drawn to war, even as he insists, against jingoes, that “war, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would undertake” without serious reason.

    That sense of balance, of holding up contraries for dispassionate consideration, stands as witness against those (very much like his eventual ally, Franklin Roosevelt) who take Churchill to have been an unthinking imperialist, and against those who take him for a racist. On the latter point, he is far more critical of Islam than of Muslims, and he rates the black Sudanese soldiers above the Arabs in terms of their battle readiness under modern conditions. Under pre-modern conditions, when Muslims conquered their way into Africa, “the dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.” As for his white countrymen, he remarks their own occasional descent into savagery, especially in their abuse of helpless captives after some of the battles and in the mutilation of the Dervish commander’s corpse. He views both sides with some irony, reporting that Kitchener’s latest advance so “created a panic” in the capital of the caliphate that “all business” came to “a standstill,” so much so that “for several days there were no executions”; as for his fellow modern ‘whites,’ they must learn the military lessons of the Sudan campaign, lest “the science of human destruction…fall behind the general progress of the age.”

    Churchill was indeed an imperialist, but his critics seldom meet his argument for imperialism. Throughout the modern West he sees young men who belong to “the only true aristocracy the world can now show”—the aristocracy of “brains and enthusiasm.” What will these young men do? In the United States, they go into commerce building great business corporations. In France and Germany, they go into the military. In England, they venture “to the farthest corners of our wide Empire, and infuse into the whole the energy and vigor of progress”—ending slavery in the Sudan, for example, building irrigation systems, railroads, and other infrastructure that will benefit men and women who might otherwise fall prey to squalor, disease, “war, slavery, and oppression.”

    The ambitions of continental European ‘aristocrats’ would lead to two world wars; the ambitions of the young Brits and Americans would lead to prosperity and better government—albeit not without serious problems, of which Churchill is well aware. And this leaves out the ambitions of the young Arabs the imperialists fought and the young Russians who would soon set about imposing another form of empire.

    Given the ambitions of the young—their will to rule and their ability to take rule—which of the available imperialisms do you prefer? If you say, ‘none at all,’ then you do not understand the intelligence and ambition of youth. And as for the ameliorating humanitarian sentiments which derive from Christianity real or ‘secularized,’ consider: “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” Without a strong arm, humanitarianism stands no chance against enemies who despise its softness.

    Finally—and speaking of civilization—the production of this book itself upholds it. The publishers have given us two beautifully turned-out volumes, restoring the original maps and drawings omitted from the editions that followed the first. The volumes are a pleasure to read and to hold. For his part, the editor had scrupulously retrieved the original text severely truncated in the subsequent editions. He has also written a fine introduction that gives Churchill’s readers a helpful overview of his long and complex (if unfailingly lively) narrative and has inserted well-chosen, carefully researched footnotes explaining conditions familiar to Churchill’s first audience but lost to us. In these things, publisher and editor alike share a bit in an old British triumph, which is as instructive for us now as it was for Churchill’s countrymen then.