The Long View

Solstice Eve Dreams

Let me apologize to users of the bulletin board for the loss of any posts made in the past few days. I have had good luck with debugging board issues lately, but unfortunately this time I had to do a restore from last weekend. I was away and could not attend to these things.

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But where was I, you ask? I was in Las Vegas, a destination I had never before visited, perhaps because any business or academic enterprise with which I have ever been associated has been too sedate or too stingy to hold its annual meeting in a place like that. This time I was actually on family business. I did visit a few casinos and lost a small amount of money, for form's sake, but gambling is one of those activities whose point I will never see. Still, perfectly sane people like Las Vegas, among them Paul Johnson. Architecturally, the Strip reminded me of nowhere so much as the redeveloped parts of downtown Newark: lots of almost-Art Deco and not-quite Belle Epoque interspersed with whimsical Modern. Newark unhappily lacks the carnival facades, however. The only problem is that the Strip is an inevitably pedestrian-heavy district that treats pedestrians as an afterthought. The Strip would be one of the great public spaces of the world if it were a pedestrian mall.

On the other hand, I am unreservedly enthusiastic about the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. There are lots of hiking trails and easy climbs that look like fun to take when high temperatures do not make the exercise a death wish.

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Mark Steyn has some remarks about the significance of the recent European elections that engage many of the points I made in this space last week. Steyn tells us:

Woody Guthrie used to have a label on his guitar: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Not true, of course. Just the usual self-flattery to which singing Commies are prone. But, in the room where they cook up European conventional wisdom, they could easily pin a sign on the door saying: “This Political Machine Creates Fascists.” One can forgive Bulgaria its wackier demagogues: they are, after all, only two decades removed from one-party totalitarianism. But, in the western half of Continental Europe, politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. In good times, it doesn't matter so much. But in bad times, if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones. Europe has taken a worse hit than North America in the first crisis of economic globalization: unemployment in Spain, for example, is over 17 per cent. To the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, this “crisis of capitalism” is the biggest event since the fall of the Soviet Union. But, if it’s a "crisis of capitalism," why did the mainstream Euro-left take the electoral hit rather than the mainstream Euro-right? Instead of turning to socialist parties promising more state booty, voters boosted the fortunes of the neo-nationalists. Many of these groups are economically protectionist (and in some cases more "left wing" than, say, the British Labour Party) but they’re also culturally protectionist in a way the polytechnic left most certainly isn’t.

I agree with Steyn's critics that the importance of the election of fringe-Right candidates has been exaggerated: we are dealing here with protest votes, not a fascist revival. Nonetheless, we might usefully recall Roger Eatwell's views on the political constellation that created fascism. I quote from my review of his Fascism: A History:

The first major difference [between the European countries that went fascist and those that did not] was that Britain and France had respectable national right-wing parties during the 1920s and ‘30s, while Germany and Italy did not. In Italy, a proper conservative establishment never got a chance to form. To a large extent, the Kingdom of Italy had always been something that northern Italians did to southern Italians (and this without the blessing of the Church, which was still annoyed at the way the Papal States had been annexed in 1870). Therefore, the local notables who might have formed the backbone of a conservative party were alienated from the national government. In Germany, of course, the old establishment had been discredited by the war. The lack of responsible right wings meant that irresponsible persons in these countries had a chance to fill the political space such parties normally occupy. The opportunity came when the narrowly-based political establishments appeared to be incapable of dealing with a national crisis.

Fascism was an exotic creature of its time and is unlikely to recur. That does not mean that novel political forms could not appear that would be comparably discontinuous with the past.

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Some elections are still worth stealing, or so we may judge from recent events in Iran. Nonetheless, I must confess that I am suspicious of Western reporting on the post-election controversy. I am reminded of the New York-based columnist who said after the election of Richard Nixon that the columnist did not believe the results were accurate because the columnist did not know a single person who had voted for Nixon. Western reporters seem to have spoken to everyone in Iran who has ever visited a Starbucks; interesting folks, no doubt, but probably not the best gauge of national opinion. However, though I am entirely willing believe that the incumbent actually did win, that does not mean that the reported vote results were not fishy, or even that the regime is not in some peril.

Here, I dug out my copy of Robert Heinlein's Take Back Your Government (written in 1946 but published in 1992), where Heinlein had this to say about the fall of the Prendergast Machine in Missouri:

The Prendergast Machine, now moribund, of Kansas City, Missouri, was a perfect example of a machine which gave the people what they cared most about and stayed in power for more than a quarter century thereby...Later on, when the Boss grew older and the Machine lost its careful attention to detail, it was certainly true that the sound of gunfire was not too uncommon in the "respectable" neighborhoods...This was the beginning of the end; the Machine had overreached itself and permitted things which the citizens really disliked. Shortly thereafter the Old Man was so old and sick that he was unable to attend personally to one campaign. The "Boys" decided to make him a present, a really fine majority. Ghost votes were common in Kansas City, but this one reached a new high -- or low. The Machine majorities were so enormous; the tallied opposition so microscopic, that it was easy for a federal grand jury to dig up proof of fraud from the persons who were willing to swear that they had voted against the Machine.

The Islamic Republic has its faults, but at least it was universally regarded as legitimate. That will no longer be the case. The Kantian Peace, to the extent it protected Iran, will no longer apply.