|
|
Marginalizing Conservative Ideas
By: David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 01,
1998
PEOPLE WHO IDENTIFY WITH THE LEFT often ask the
following question: How is it possible for decent
human beings not to be progressive like us? How can
they not share our concern for social justice or the
better world we are attempting to create? The
answers offered by progressives are that ignorance
clouds the understanding of others and that social
privilege blocks their human responses. In the eyes
of progressives, their conservative opponents are
prisoners of a false consciousness that prevents
them from recognizing human possibility. This false
consciousness is rooted in the self-interest of a
ruling class (or gender, or race), which is intent
on defending the system that secures its privilege.
In other words, opposition to progressive agendas
grows naturally from human selfishness, myopia, and
greed. To progressives, theirs alone is the vocation
of reason and compassion.
The Right has questions too: How is it possible for
progressives to remain so blind to the grim
realities their efforts have produced? How can they
overlook the crimes they have committed against the
poor and oppressed they set out to defend? How can
they have learned so little from the history their
ideas have engendered?
Progressives have a false consciousness of their
own. Being so noble in their own eyes, how could
they not be blind? But this blindness also springs
from an insularity created by their contempt for
those not gifted with progressive sight. As a
result, radicals are largely innocent of the ideas
and perspectives that oppose their agendas. The
works of von Mises, Hayek, Aron, Popper, Oakeshott,
Sowell, Strauss, Bloom, Kirk, Kristol and other
anti-socialist thinkers are virtually unknown on the
Left excluded from the canons of the institutions
they dominate and absent from the texts they write.
This silencing of ideological opponents in the areas
of the culture the Left controls has led to a
situation which one academic philosopher lamented as
"the collapse of serious argument throughout the
lower reaches of the humanities and the social
sciences in the universities." The same judgment
cannot be made about the excluded conservatives who
are forced by the cultural dominance of the Left
(and by the historic ferocity of the radical
assault) to be thoroughly familiar with the
intellectual traditions and arguments that sustain
it. This is one reason for the vitality of
contemporary conservative thought outside the
academy.
Following the collapse of the socialist empire the
marginalization of conservative ideas in the
academic culture has been so pervasive that even
those conservatives whose analyses were dramatically
vindicated by the events continue to remain
hopelessly obscure. As far back as 1922, Ludwig von
Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that
socialism would not work. Socialist theorists, he
wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic
realities that would eventually bankrupt the future
they were creating. These included the
indispensability of markets for allocating
resources, and of private property for providing the
incentives that drive the engines of social wealth.
Moreover, socialists showed no inclination to take
seriously the problems their schemes created:
"Without troubling about the fact that they had not
succeeded in disproving the assertion of the liberal
school that productivity under socialism would sink
so low that want and poverty would be general,
socialist writers began to promulgate fantastic
assertions about the increase in productivity to be
expected under socialism."
As close as any analysis could, Von Mises warning
anticipated the next 70 years of socialist history.
Under the Soviet Unions central planning, the
Kremlin rulers were indeed unable to allocate
resources rationally, or to promote technological
innovation, or to replace the profit motive with a
viable system of non-monetary "social" incentives.
As a result, the socialist economy was unable to
keep abreast of the technological changes that would
catapult the West into the post-industrial era. The
socialist economy could not even create sufficient
growth to feed its own people. Once the breadbasket
of Europe, Soviet Russia under socialist planning
became a chronic importer of grain, an economy of
forced rationing and periodic famine. The effect of
socialist order was exactly as Von Mises had
predictedthe generalization of poverty and the
crippling of productivity, so that Russia was unable
to enter the information age and compete
economically with the West.
Although history has dramatically confirmed Von
Mises analysis, and just as dramatically refuted his
left-wing opponents, his intellectual contributions
are as unrecognized today as they were before the
Communist fall. While the intellectual tradition
that gave rise to Von Mises insights is marginalized
in American universities, and its paradigm ignored,
Marxism and its variants flourish. The profusion of
Marxists on university faculties is, in fact,
unprecedented, and the theories that Marxism has
spawned now provide the principal texts for the next
generations. While Von Mises writings are invisible,
the works of Stalinists, ignorant of the most basic
economic realities of how modern societies function,
are familiar to most undergraduates. In the
humanities and social sciences, the discredited
tradition of Marxism has become the intellectual
well-spring of the main schools of current academic
theorycritical studies, cultural studies,
historicism, structuralism, post-modernism, and
radical feminism. The comparable schools of
conservative and libertarian thought are hardly
extant within university walls.
It is hardly necessary to add that no serious
attempt has been made by progressive intellectuals
to re-visit Von Mises critique. Or to come up with
answers that would justify the respect now accorded
to the bankrupt intellectual tradition of the Left,
or arguments that would warrant this revived
commitment to a discredited faith. Given the verdict
of history on the socialist experiments, Von Mises
works and others that derive from the tradition of
classical liberalism should provide the central
texts of any respectable academic discourse. Instead
they are so marginal to the university curriculum,
it is as if they had never been written.
In contrast to Von Mises fate, Stalinist
intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm,
and Walter Benjamin have become icons of the
left-wing professoriate, their writings re-issued in
scholarly editions, their texts well-thumbed by
undergraduates, and their ideas developed and
refined in doctoral studies. Despite its dismal
record of collusion and failure, the tradition of
the Left is intellectually dominant in the American
university today in a way that its disciples would
never have dreamed possible thirty years agoas
though the catastrophes produced by its ideas had
never taken place.
Von Mises of course is not alone. His disciple,
Friedrich Hayekto take another representative
exampleis equally obscure in the academic culture.
The theoretical edifice Hayek created is, like Von
Mises, as comprehensive as Marxs, and has been
vindicated by the same history that has refuted
Marxist ideas. Hayek has even been awarded a Nobel
prize in economics. Yet the name Hayek is all but
absent from the discourse of the Left, and from the
academic curriculum the Left has designed.
Typically, Hayeks mature works on capitalism and
socialism are rarely if ever mentioned in the broad
intellectual culture, their arguments never
confronted. The average college graduate is
acquainted with whole libraries of radical
blatherthe re-packaging by third-rate intellects of
discredited Marxist formulas in the works of bell
hooks, Frederic Jameson, Derrick Bell, Andrew Ross,
Richard Delgado, and Catharine MacKinnonbut has
never opened a text by the most important figures of
twentieth-century social thought.
An ideological omerta is the Lefts response to its
vindicated critics, especially those who emerged
from its own ranks. It is an intellectual version of
Stalins efforts to transform his political opponents
into "unpersons," in order to obliterate their
influence and ideas. The historian Aileen Kraditor,
once a star in the firmament of the academic Left,
is a less prominent intellectual figure than Von
Mises and Hayek, but no less illustrative of the
method by which the Left deals with its critics. The
books Kraditor wroteThe Ideas of the Woman Suffrage
Movement, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism,
and The Radical Persuasionwere once routinely cited
by Sixties progressives as models of the scholarship
radicals produced. But then Kraditor had second
thoughts and departed the radical ranks. As a
pioneer in feminist scholarship, Aileen Kraditor
would have been a prime candidate for high honors in
todays academy. But she had the bad judgment to
become an anti-Communist and to write a book
puncturing the radical illusion. As a result, it is
as though she had never existed, and never written.
Based on her own experience as a member of the Party
during the height of the Cold War, Kraditors last
book set out to describe the intellectual world-view
of American Communists. Jimmy Higgins: The Mental
World of the American Rank and File Communist,
1930-1958 is the definitive study of its subject.
Yet, despite an explosion of academic interest in
the history of American Communism, Kraditors work is
almost never referred to and almost never cited, its
insights never engaged by the academic community.
Instead, Communist sympathizers like Princetons
Ellen Schrecker and NYUs Robin D.G. Kelley, have
become preeminent academic authorities on the
historiography of American Communism, while Aileen
Kraditor has been made an unperson in the
intellectual culture.
This politically motivated censorship and
self-enforced ignorance insulates the Left from
uncomfortable encounters with former comrades and
necessary truths. Defectors from the radical ranks
quickly discover that their ideas are ignored and
their realities erased. It is the way a bankrupt
intellectual tradition enforces its academic rule.
The unwritten law of the radical intellect is this:
Once the revolutionary idea has been called into
question, the questioner must cease to exist. In a
democracy, this extinction may be accomplished by
personal smear or ideological exclusion. But it is
required in order to preserve the faith. To the
religious mind, the thought of Gods death is
unthinkable.
David Horowitz is the founder of
The
David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of the
new book,
One Party Classroom.
|
