Two Flavors of the Same Poison

Matt Yglesias notices totalitarian foxes inside the 'progressive' henhouse

How old were you the first time you saw the movie Patton? My cousin Mark Huber and I must have been 10 or 11 when my dear Aunt Pat took us to see it down at the Greenbriar Mall near Atlanta in 1970. As boys growing up, all of us kids — me, my brothers, our neighbor Danny Holland, everybody — loved “playing Army,” as we called it. The 1960s were the original heyday of G.I. Joe. Many of us were the children of World War II veterans, and also had relatives who served in Vietnam (as did my Aunt Barbara’s husband Casper Ellis), so “playing Army” was one of our favorite recreations, rivaled only by “playing Tarzan” and “playing Batman.”

At any rate, my Aunt Pat must have reckoned that going to see a true-life story about a World War II general would be an enjoyable afternoon for Mark and me, but I remember afterwards her describing her shock at Patton’s strong language. She was a nice Southern Baptist lady, stunned by the amount of profanity in the PG-rated movie.

What caused me today to think about Patton — both the Oscar-winning film and the actual general it portrayed — is something Matthew Yglesias wrote recently. The reader might be scratching his head, wondering what on earth could connect the tough old WWII tank commander to a Harvard-educated pundit like Yglesia. Be patient, however, and we’ll get there. First, here is what Yglesias wrote:

There are many open, full-frontal assaults on liberalism. Conservatives, fascists, and communists have all attacked different aspects of liberal values to different ends — from free markets to individual rights to freedom of expression to democratic self-government. In the postwar era, liberalism came out on top. But there are no permanent victories.

Modern liberalism was experienced at fending off challenges that announced themselves at the front door, but one of the most successful anti-liberal challenges crept through the side gate. Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism. These ideas fooled us in part because they were so poorly understood even by those arguing for them.

In this essay, I’m using “liberalism” in the philosophical sense: the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice. The illiberal ideas I’m critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups — particularly racial, gender, and sexual identities — as the real subjects of politics, see “neutral” rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals. …

Most of the people spouting these phrases and churning out the takes had no more familiarity with the source texts than I did. They were giving us a copy of a copy of a Tumblr post paraphrasing a summary of something Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote, not faithfully reconstructing the core ideas in their original context.

And these disembodied memes represented themselves to a somewhat older cohort of progressives as natural extensions of basic liberal commitments to tolerance and human equality, rather than the challenge to liberal individualism that they genuinely are.

One of the signature developments of the new woke discourse was the sentiment that “it’s not my job to educate you” and that asking probing questions was a form of trolling called “sealioning,” so it was often difficult to press people advancing novel claims with unusual vocabulary exactly what they meant. But it is actually my job to educate you, so when conservative activist Christopher Rufo launched his crusade against what he characterized as “critical race theory” in American institutions, I thought it might be good to read about it. …

There’s a lot to unpack there, and it’s unfortunate that the rest of Yglesias’s argument is paywalled, but even this truncated introduction tells us a lot about the nature of the problem Yglesia is trying to cope with. To begin with, when Rufo and other conservatives speak of critical race theory (CRT) as being Marxist in its origins, they aren’t joking; it’s not a slur or “McCarthyism” but an accurate analysis. And like every other variant of Marxism, CRT is fundamentally a totalitarian belief system.

Because he is a liberal Democrat, Yglesias’s reading of history is different than my own. The flourish with which he says “liberalism came out on top” after WWII is his stealthy way of giving Democrats credit for what he considers, and believes his readership will consider (as of course I do) a great success. Because he is so much younger than me — he wasn’t even born when Ronald Reagan was first elected president — Yglesias knows of “the postwar era” only what he has been taught by his teachers and professors, or read in books and magazines written by other liberal Democrats who share his particular set of partisan and ideological prejudices.

Understand that I mean to encourage Yglesias, rather than to criticize him. However, pointing out the limitations of his background — his youth, etc. — is necessary to explain why Yglesias was blindsided by the discovery that identitarianism has taken over the Democratic Party, and that the totalitarian nature of CRT and similar belief systems represents an existential threat to the type of liberalism that he embraces.

Patron saints of American liberalism — FDR and Harry Truman in 1944.

In the mental universe where Yglesias dwells, the only permissible criticism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Trump is that they weren’t liberal enough. Among his peers in the contemporary Democrat-aligned punditocracy, Yglesias could not mention these two erstwhile heroes of liberalism without adding caveats about their shortcomings when measured by 21st-century liberal standards. Never would it occur to someone like Yglesias to read and take seriously the criticisms of FDR and Truman written by their contemporary opponents on the Right, or by such conservative authors as Amity Schlaes. The blunt facts about Communist penetration of the U.S. government during the FDR/Truman years? “McCarthyism!”

Perhaps it is unfair to accuse liberals like Yglesias of deliberate ignorance — of simply refusing to investigate any argument that might prove them wrong — but there are times, and this is one of them, when I recall the book title that Sir Kingsley Amis famously suggested to Robert Conquest: I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.

Communism has never ceased to be a danger, no matter what Communists may call themselves in an attempt to deceive us, and if you do not recognize Critical Race Theory as a species of Communism, who is to blame for that? As with so many others of his generation — he was a third-grader when the Berlin Wall came down — Yglesias seems never to have studied the Cold War, at least not from the perspective of those who were committed to opposing Communism (as nearly all Americans used to be). Which is why I wonder if Yglesias has ever taken the time to examine the argument made by Friedrich Hayek that Nazism and Communism were, as I have said, two flavors of the same poison. That’s one of the main points Hayek made in his 1944 bestseller, The Road to Serfdom. Contrary to what most liberals (then and now) believe, Communists were not just “liberals in a hurry,” and Nazism was not a “right-wing” phenomenon akin to American conservatism. As different as Stalin and Hitler were, both were the products of the basic socialist idea, i.e., all-powerful government.

What do we call a government that has the power to control prices and wages, to redistribute income in accordance with the ideology of the ruling party? Is this is not the fundamental basis of totalitarianism? The other aspects of totalitarian rule — censorship, banning opposition parties, etc. — are all ancillary to the economic power wielded by such governments. Without economic liberty, there is no liberty at all.

Hayek saw that Western liberals, despite their “democratic” commitments, had begun eroding economic liberty in such a way that they could be said to have taken the first steps down the path toward totalitarian nightmares. The “illiberal ideas” that now concern Matthew Yglesias are but another expression of the same tendency — and here we may usefully quote the very illiberal writer Curtis Yarvin: “Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he always swims to the Left.” Liberals are forever vulnerable to this problem of failing to recognize any threat from the Left, which is how Soviet agents were so easily able to penetrate the Roosevelt administration.

Returning then to Patton: During a period of 281 days, from August 1944 to victory in Europe, his Third Army — which never numbered more than 300,000 troops — inflicted on the Germans more than 1.4 million casualties, which included more than a million captured. Patton was without question one of the greatest generals in the biggest war in human history. Yet he was also a man with opinions who was unafraid to speak his mind, no matter how “controversial” others might consider his views.

Like most Americans of his era — he was born in 1885 — Patton hated Communism, and viewed the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II as a necessary evil, at best. After the German surrender, as the occupation commander in Bavaria, Patton was particularly enthusiastic about the “de-Nazification” agenda. He publicly said that he did not believe that Germans should be removed from civic offices merely because they had been Nazi party members, arguing that a German might have joined the party in the same way an American might have joined the Democrats or Republicans. This provoked a firestorm of outrage in the press and among politicians, and meanwhile Patton was also outspoken in his views about our Soviet “allies.”

In the movie version, Patton gets a phone call from Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. An officer 10 years Patton’s junior, Smith had been a mere lieutenant in World War I when Patton was a highly-decorate colonel. The conversation between Smith and Patton certainly must have been awkward in real life, and in the movie version, when Smith mentions that the Russians are upset, Patton answers: “Well, the hell with the Mongoloid Russians. We’ve given them Berlin, Prague, God knows what else. They gonna dictate policy too?” Smith then begins to say that the war in Europe is over, and Patton interrupts to reply: “The war shouldn’t be over. We should stop pussyfooting about the Russians! We’ll have to fight them anyway. Why not do it now, when the army’s here? lnstead of disarming Germans let’s get them to help fight the Bolsheviks.” That is an accurate summary of his opinion.

Was Patton right? To entertain historic alternatives — the hypothetical “what if” scenario — is helpful as a way of evaluating events, and necessary to make the study of history useful as a guide to present and future action. As it actually turned out, the United States had no real choice in the matter. The so-called “Duclos letter” revealed that Stalin had already decided America was henceforth to be viewed as an enemy. The “Popular Front” alliance against Hitler had served its purpose, and those holding pro-American views (“Browderism”) were purged from Communist ranks. In expressing his hostility to “the Mongoloid Russians” and suggesting a new war to “fight the Bolsheviks,” Patton was actually prophetic, foreseeing the Cold War that dominated U.S. foreign policy for the next 40-plus years.

Totalitarianism is always evil, whatever name it might call itself, even when its methods are employed by people who claim to be friends of democracy. Whatever his other flaws, Patton clearly saw that the Soviets were as totalitarian as the Nazis.

Matthew Yglesias has little in common with Patton, but the fact that he’s now speaking out against the “illiberal” turn of some soi-disant progressives suggests that Yglesias is at least no longer blind to the danger. Let’s hope he remains alert.