While I'm waiting for AD to reveal the
facts which are supporting his distrust of Stewart Rhode's public attestation of Oath Keepers' disassociation from militias and white supremacists....
I thought that it would be thought provoking to reread an essay that I like to reread, from time to time.
I enjoy its provocative nature.
http://www.insteadofablog.com/2006.10.28.shtml
Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism:
A Distinction Refined
by Wirkman Virkkala
Back in the ’80s, neoconservatives spent much of their public time ruminating on the great weight of difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. It was morally allowable to co-operate with the former against the latter, they argued.
The distinction between the two was fluid, though. But I had to admit, there did seem to be a difference.
What is it?
The basic distinction most of us made, in they heyday of the argument, was that the distinction was a matter of degree. Authoritarians meddle more in society, and demand higher allegiance and more obedience than democratic societies do. Totalitarians go further. They meddle in every aspect of life. There is nothing off-limits to them. The totality of your life belongs to the state . . . hence the name, totalitarianism.
This conception of totalitarianism was pithily defined by the satirical slogan for anthill society in T.H. White’s Once and Future King:
Everything not forbidden is compulsory.
The authoritarian idea is weaker. Authoritarians wish to forbid only a subset of things, and seek to compel mainly allegiance and servitude to the state. Authoritarians do offer leeway. Some people can remain relatively free in an authoritarian society, even without becoming part of the ruling elite. As long as they keep their noses clean. And do not appear to oppose the regime.
But I suspect this matter of degree does not quite get to the heart of the distinction. Also important is the direction of intent. There is an element of moral style that can be easily seen when one compares Hobbes (an authoritarian philosopher) and Marx (a totalitarian ideologue). The first stresses the negatives to be avoided; the latter, the positives to be achieved. Hobbes worried over the struggle of all against all, and of civilization collapsing, leaving us with a life "nasty, brutish, and short." Marx heralded the coming of a worker’s paradise, where no one lacked for sustenance and fulfillment. Both prescribed autocratic regimes. The difference may have been one of scope, but the basic orientation is quite clear: Hobbes was fearful of degradation; Marx was hopeful of salvation. Oddly, both eagerly risked despotism to achieve their ends.
Authoritarians get most exercised about those who oppose them, and secondarily some social vices that they see (for whatever reason) as obviously bad or evil. Indeed, authoritarian advocacy by members of freer societies tend to go much further than authoritarian regimes do; they seek to forbid everything that they see as bad or dangerous.
Various concepts of the good? These aren’t the main focus of their coercive agenda. An authoritarian may allow you leeway to pursue a wide variety of "acceptable" routes to goodness, however defined. But paths that they consider evil? No way. These they proscribe. And they are quite willing to terrorize you to get you to avoid those pathways and temptations.
The totalitarian focus is different. In actually existing totalitarian societies, not much is left as an option. But totalitarian advocacy in freer societies most concentrate on the core notion . . . of goodness, of good things (social goods) to be achieved. Totalitarians feel compelled to compel you to "do what’s good."
Totalitarians often profess to be "at a loss" in argument. They confess to incomprehension to objections made to their demands. "How can you oppose the achievements of goodness? How can you not help us save the poor? How can you . . .?" Indeed, their main rhetorical tool is the expression of incomprehension. It defines those who agree with the ends and means as "with it" and those who do not (for whatever reason) as stupid and greedy.
Authoritarians say something similar when you object to making every conceivable "bad thing" or dangerous act illegal. "How can you defend the bad?" People with knee-jerk authoritarian tendencies, like Bill O’Reilly, regularly dismiss opponents of the drug war as "druggies" themselves. If you are not with an authoritarian on his or her quest to rid the world of this evil or that, you are against them. You become their enemy.
Against both ideas stand individualist liberalism, that is, modern libertarianism. The idea of individual liberty incorporates the allowing of people to do a whole subset of dangerous and bad things . . . and allowing them to pursue various and competing visions of "the good" in their own way.
Attempting to corral everybody away from some conception of the bad, that’s a conservative notion, in the end an authoritarian idea. Individual liberty allows for a lot of private vice. And social ills, too. When we don’t allow for these, we end up with sweeping state power, with everyone and everything brought under the minute inspection of moralists who seek to stamp out particularist and even private versions of the bad.
Individual liberty, when seen in the light of the fight against authoritarianism, is indeed liberal in the old sense, for it generously and tolerantly allows people a lot of room for experimentation and even folly. It expects people to learn from their mistakes, and the mistakes of their neighbors. Such liberals may weep when people don’t learn (for humans often don’t; it’s merely the case that they can), but they don’t let empathy for human suffering turn into a scourge against all conceptions of the bad.
Of course, this kind of liberality is in short supply these days. Actually allowing for a variety of values . . . this is not comfortable to many people who hold values strongly. For many, the recognition that values are diverse, subjective, and sometimes in conflict, doesn’t come easily.
That’s why philosophical arguments about value often sweep diversity of values under the rug. That’s why (I gather) conservatives yammer on about "absolute value," even if they cannot logically demonstrate what that might be. At least, they have great trouble convincing more than a plurality of the population.
Our governments in America tend to lean authoritarian. But that doesn’t mean they do not occasionally exhibit a totalitarian streak.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that politicians, in their traditional appeals of "coming together" to work "for the common good" do not frequently exhibit strong totalitarian tendencies.
My credo in politics can be put to this: we are not free so long as we are compelled to refrain from doing everything seen as bad. We are utterly servile when we are compelled to do everything seen as good.
Wrinkle in this idea: people with truly minimal ideas of badness and goodness can still be of authoritarian or totalitarian temper in psychology even if their actual, demonstrated political positions are eminently libertarian. The liberals among the libertarians are only those who hold "thicker" moral philosophies. You can’t be a liberal if your only idea of goodness is limned by liberty alone.
But caution: when I just used the word "liberal," I was not using it in its modern, degraded American sense, which has been pithily defined as "a liberal is a person who is liberal with spending other people’s money." Modern liberals, as the inheritors of Progressivism, are people who tend to react very negatively to authoritarian styles of argument but are very, very enamored of totalitarian ones. This is an uneasy compromise, and yields a weird political philosophy, to say the least.
When liberals were libertarians, basically — that is, back in the days of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics — liberals truly fought authoritarianism in temper and principle. Now, however, liberals have foresworn the idea of limiting government, of liberty itself as a limiting principle, and see "freedom" as only a positive thing, and something to be secured by government action above all else. They thus strive for wealth for all, health care for all, not expecting this "all" to work for it in their several capacities, but "everyone" (that is, a few activists) working together in collective action to legislate these conditions into reality.
On the face of it, modern liberalism strikes me as one of the least realistic philosophies imaginable. So much hope is put to complicated methods of co-operation, and so many garlands are thrown onto the chains of coercion that make such systems work in practice. The philosophy is doubly illusionary. A delusion of the elites, who, with extraordinary degrees of hubris, can think they can remake society from the ground up, easily and with just a few good intentions.
But look at those intentions. About goodness. This is where modern liberalism’s totalitarian tendency lies. In conceptions of the good. Do many need help? Of course. So let’s make everybody better off pay to help the least well off! There’s the argument. Compulsory goodness. Charity is good, therefore we will all be compelled to help.
Charmingly, modern liberals still oppose the authoritarian mindset, the idea that every bad thing must be stamped out. Whereas a conservative churchgoer might not blanch at extraordinarily intrusive and illiberal laws against recreational drug use (they are, after all, the people who brought us Prohibition, and most strongly support today’s War on Drugs), or for the suppression of nudity on television or swear words on radio, liberals let such things slide. This is there one conception of liberty that remains "Old School."
Conservatives, for their part, tend to be less enamored of forcing everybody to do what is right in their eyes. Perhaps this is, in part, because their traditional religion depends upon personal responsibility, and state action is largely a war against personal responsibility. State action for good things tends to socialize responsibility, as burdens are shared by all alike, through taxes.
This is the charming side of conservatism: the ability to see through the state as an instrument for goodness. Goodness in its most positive aspects does not come by committee. And any religious person knows this. Or any practical person with roots in a working community. Human beings just aren’t that impressive to them, and conservatives tend not to be utopians about human character.
But that doesn’t absolve them from their periodic hysterias about stamping out the bad. Both philosophies, that of Fearful conservatism and Prodigal liberalism, fall prey to the temptations of power. They just choose different styles: authoritarianism for those on the right, and totalitarianism for those on the left. Each waters down the heady tonic of suppression and coercion with a compromising opposition to the other’s vice.
There are better compromises available. Indeed, one is ideal.
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