Sidney Hook's theory of education in a democracy

Philosopher Sidney Hook is best remembered for his debates with other philosophers and engaged political figures about Marxism and Communism (link). My interest here is in a different part of his work after World War II, his philosophy of education. Hook was a student of John Dewey, the author of Democracy and Education, but ultimately Hook had more to say about what educational values ought to guide a modern university than did Dewey. Much of Hook's theory was expressed in Education for Modern Man, published in 1946 and republished and extended in 1963. The book has a striking degree of relevance today in the context of debates over curriculum both inside universities and outside. What is the value of a liberal education? Is a "Great Books" curriculum a good basis for a liberal education in a democracy? How should the content of a liberal education be made compatible with "education for a career"? And what ideas are out of bounds within a university classroom? Hook had trenchant answers to all of these questions. (Here is an earlier post on the question of how to define the goals of a liberal education; link.)

Let's begin with Hook's assessment of the state of liberal education in post-World War II America.

Whatever a liberal education is, few American colleges offer it. Despite the well advertised curricular reforms in a few of our leading colleges, by and large the colleges of the country present a confused picture of decayed classical curriculums, miscellaneous social science offerings, and narrowing vocational programs -- the whole unplanned and unchecked by leading ideas. What one finds in most colleges cannot be explained in terms of a consciously held philosophy of education, but rather through the process of historical accretion. The curriculum of a typical college is like a series of wandering and intersecting corridors opening on rooms of the most divergent character. Even the cellar and attic are not where one expects to find them. (4)

Hook proposes that educators need to think more carefully about the purpose and goals of a college education.

The discussion will revolve around four generic questions:

1. What should the aims or ends of education be, and how should we determine them?
2. What should its skills and content be, and how can they be justified?
3. By what methods and materials can the proper educational skills and content be most effectively communicated in order to achieve the desirable ends?
4. How are the ends and means of education related to a democratic social order?

A satisfactory answer to these questions should provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of what constitutes a liberal education in modern times. (6)

He unpacks these questions around a statement of seven fundamental "learning goals" for a university education:

1. Education should aim to develop the powers of critical, independent thought.
2. It should attempt to induce sensitiveness of perception, significantly associated with the different receptiveness to new ideas, imaginative sympathy with the experiences of others.
3. It should produce an awareness of the main streams of our cultural, literary, and scientific traditions.
4. It should make available important bodies of knowledge concerning nature, society, ourselves, our country, and its history.
5. It should strive to cultivate an intelligent loyalty to the ideals of the democratic community and to deepen understanding of the heritage of freedom and the prospects of its survival.
6. At some level, it should equip young men and women with the general skills and techniques and the specialized knowledge which, together with the virtues and aptitudes already mentioned, will make it possible for them to do some productive work related to their capacities and interests.
7. It should strengthen those inner resources and traits of character which enable the individual, when necessary, to stand alone. (55)
   

Each of these goals is noteworthy. Goals 3 and 4 are "content" goals concerning the kinds of knowledge that graduates need to have gained in order to be able to confront the personal and social challenges that lie in their future. Goal 6 recognizes and endorses the idea that the graduate needs to be prepared for productive work and career. Goals 1 and 7 concern the qualities of character we can hope for in our graduates: independence of mind and courage of their convictions. Goals 2 and 5 are specifically important for "education for democracy": cultivation of the skills of understanding and accepting difference (racial, religious, economic), and cultivation of loyalty to the institutions of democracy and freedom. (Hook specifically calls out the fact that Weimar-educated engineering and technical students were among Hitler's strongest supporters; 24-25.)

An important goal in Hook's account (goal 2) is preparation of the student for a diverse world of different people, different religions, and different races. Hook describes the goal:

The existence of democratic communities in which individuals of conflicting religious faiths and metaphysical beliefs sincerely co-operate in democracy's support indicates that it is possible to find criteria for accepting democracy that do not depend on revelation or intuition. (62)

In our language today, we might say that Hook in interested in education for inclusiveness in a pluralistic society. How can we go about that task, in Hook's view? Part of his answer is the experience of thinking imaginatively about the human experience of others, and this means cultivating the skills of empathy and compassion.

What does it mean to think about a play, or about a poem, or about people? It means also to feel, to imagine, to conjure up a vision. Not only that but also that. Why is it that we often say to some thoughtless person, "Put yourself in his place"? To another, "You haven't got the feel or the hang of it"? To a third, "You understand everything about the situation except what really matters"? We do not convey truths by this way of speaking, but we help others to find the truth. (27)

Here the idea is the importance of helping the student to gain the cognitive-emotional capacities of "understanding the other person's experience", or empathy. And this can be part of many aspects of a university experience, from reading history to studying and experiencing art, poetry, and drama. (In this way Hook seems to anticipate Martha Nussbaum's arguments in Cultivating Humanity.)

And then there is the question of "relevance" versus "traditional civilizational texts and values". Hook thinks this is a false dichotomy. He entirely endorses the idea that a college education should prepare the student to think critically and courageously about the most important problems that confront him or her at the present; so involvement in contemporary issues and problems is important (relevance). But he also believes that the history of human texts -- Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe -- can provide the student with some of the resources of imagination and understanding that are necessary for this task (119 ff.). Consider his view of what a student needs in order to come to grips with fascism or totalitarianism:

Let us examine some concrete illustrations of contemporary problems and issues, so despised by traditionalists, in order to see what would be involved in their adequate understanding. Nothing is more contemporary than present-day totalitarianism in its various forms. Can its nature be understood without a social and economic analysis of capitalism and its periodic cycles? Can we come to grips with its rationalizations, and understand our own minds in relation to it, without some study of the ideas of men like Chamberlain, Nietzsche, Hegel, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato? Can theories of race and racial supremacy be exposed without a sound knowledge of biology and some familiarity with the elements of scientific method? Can an intelligent analysis be made of proposals that the West disarm unilaterally in the belief that the Soviet Union will follow suit, without a study of the pacts and treaties previously entered into by the Kremlin and the score of their fulfillment? (124)

In other words, a broad and deep exposure to history, literature, social science, natural science, and philosophy is highly "relevant" to the problems associated with confronting totalitarianism.

Hook is most assuredly a harsh critic of the "Great Books" theory of college curriculum (St. Johns College, Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler). His objection is not to "dry-as-dust" old books; rather, it is an objection to the dogma that the books speak for themselves, and that there is no need to try to connect the insights of these authors to the problems of the present and the recent past. This is to make a fetish of the "monuments" of Western civilization.

Hook also argues for the importance of knowledge of "social studies" -- the basics of economics, sociology, political science -- for every student, because these areas of knowledge provide the context for events, crises, and problems that arise in every profession and every period of history.

The knowledge and insight that the social studies can give are necessary for every student because no matter what his specialized pursuits may later be, the extent to which he can follow them, and the "contextual" developments within these fields, depend upon the total social situation of which they are in some sense a part. An engineer today whose knowledge is restricted only to technical matters of engineering, or a physician whose competence extends only to the subject matter of traditional medical training, is ill-prepared to plan intelligently for a life-career or to understand the basic problems that face his profession. (140)

This is a prescient point, and the examples of engineering and medicine are especially important. (Think of the moral and social complexities of facial recognition technologies.) The liberally educated engineer or physician is much better prepared to confront the social and moral complexities of their work than the physician who pursued the bare minimum of "distribution courses" in a race to get to an engineering graduate program or medical school.

This point has to do with a graduate's readiness for his or her professional responsibilities. But Hook observes that one's responsibilities as a citizen within a democracy have even greater need for a basic understanding of the social processes that surround government, the economy, social inequalities, racism, or health disparities. It is impossible to engage fully and productively in the affairs of a democracy if one has no understanding of how social and economic processes work.

And now we come to the role of values within a college curriculum. Hook believes that there are a range of "civic" values that universities must help students attain -- respect for others, devotion to the rule of law, commitment to democracy -- which means that a college education is not fundamentally value-free. Universities do indeed need to convey values to their students. But these are civic values -- the values that are necessary for a democracy to thrive.

Finally, to teach values means to develop within students a willingness to commit themselves to new values, and to reaffirm or to reject the values to which they find themselves previously committed. When this is done after the value alternatives which are being excluded have been presented, then it can be said we are teaching that some values are better than others. (178)

This is not dogmatism or a doctrinaire approach to values education; it is couched in terms of critical thinking and reflection. But its goal is to reinforce the stability of a democracy -- a condition that Hook knew only too well could not be taken for granted.

Hook's philosophy of education, formulated as it was in the late 1940s, is remarkably relevant to the current challenges that universities face in providing their students with the tools they will need to be independent thinkers, effective professionals, and committed citizens. Much better it would be to have this conversation with Sidney Hook and John Dewey than with Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.

A 1934 debate about communism among American philosophers

The appeal of Marxist socialism -- communism -- as an alternative to the consumerism, inequality, and exploitation of European and American capitalism was a powerful draw for many intellectuals in the 1930s, especially in the context of the great Depression and widespread crisis and deprivation of the 1930s. This interest extended to many prominent American philosophers. It is a credit to philosophy that these philosophers took on the great issues of the day and engaged seriously with them.

1934 was an especially intense time for intellectual and political debate between defenders of liberal democracy and advocates for some version of communism. The Depression was in full swing, and there was a widespread view in Britain, France, and the United States among intellectuals that capitalism was bankrupt -- incapable of solving the social problems it created and confronted. On the other side, the enormous failures of Stalinist Communism were not yet as visible in the west in1934 as they would be in 1954. The Moscow Show Trials were still five years in the future, the Holodomor was not yet widely known in the west, and -- at least in its propaganda image -- Soviet economic planning had succeeded in transforming a backward society into a rapidly developing modern industrial economy.

A particularly interesting document from 1934 is a symposium called The Meaning of Marx (link) including contributions by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Morris Cohen, Sidney Hook, and Sherwood Eddy. All of the contributors except Eddy are leading philosophers in the analytic and pragmatist traditions of philosophy, and their comments and reflections on communism as a social-political system are highly interesting.

Sherwood Eddy and Sidney Hook frame the symposium with articles entitled "An Introduction to the Study of Marx" (Eddy) and "The Meaning of Marx" (Hook). Dewey, Russell, and Cohen offer brief essays on the topic, "Why I am not a Communist", and Sidney Hook has the final word with an essay called "Communism without Dogmas". This period of debate is much more interesting and substantive than the vitriolic animosities expressed in the 1950s under the conditions of McCarthyism, because each of these authors makes a serious and sustained effort to make sense of the historical events through which they are living. (In 1937 Dewey and Hook were also actively involved in supporting Leon Trotsky against Stalin's accusations following the Moscow show trials of 1936.)

Sherwood Eddy

Sherwood Eddy is not a familiar name, but he was a prominent Protestant educator and missionary, educated at Yale and Princeton Theological Seminary. What is striking about Eddy's essay is the unstinting admiration he expresses for the ideology and values of Soviet Communism. Eddy's interpretation of social change remains "religious" in a sense; he understands Communism as a unifying belief system capable of motivating the masses of the population.

Russia has achieved what has hitherto been known only at rare periods in history, the experience of almost a whole people living under a unified philosophy of life. All life is focused in a central purpose. It is directed to a single high end and energized by such powerful and glowing motivation that life seems to have supreme significance. It releases a flood of joyous and strenuous activity. The new philosophy has the advantage of seeming to be simple, clear, understandable, all-embracing and practical. (2)

Further, he contrasts the ideological unity and purity of Soviet society with the degeneration of values in western capitalist society:

As surely as Soviet Russia has become united, we of the West have witnessed a philosophic decadence and disintegration. Where feudalism once united the world, capitalism has divided it by the competitive anarchy of a loose individualism. Not organized society but the insecure individual is now the unit where every man is for himself. The economics of profit conflict with the aims of culture. The gain of the few is pitted against the welfare of the many. This whole laissez-faire philosophy of life breeds competitive strife between individuals, classes, races and nations. (4)

At the end of the essay Eddy summarizes points of agreement and disagreement with Marx; most important is this point:

I. I do not believe that violent revolution is inevitable, nor do I believe that it is desirable in itself as Marx almost makes it. When once violence is adopted as a method in an inevitable and "continuing revolution," when to Marx's philosophy is added Lenin's false dictum that "great problems in the lives of nations are solved only by force," most serious consequences follow wherever communism is installed under a dictatorship or prepared for by violent methods. This shuts the gates of mercy on mankind. In Soviet Russia all prosperous farmers are counted kulaks, and the kulak becomes the personal devil or scapegoat of the system, as does the Jew in Nazi Germany. Intellectuals and engineers are all too easily accused of deliberate sabotage, of being "wreckers," class enemies, etc. When this philosophy--that great problems are solved "only by violence"--is applied, then trials, shootings and imprisonment follow in rapid succession. Hatred and violence mean wide destructive and incalculable human suffering. (27)

Thus, though I acknowledge my real debt to Marx, I do not count myself a Marxist. I have stated elsewhere: the reasons which would make impossible my acceptance of the system as practised in Soviet Russia under the dictatorship: Its denial of political liberty, the violence and compulsion of a continuing revolution, and the dogmatic atheism and anti-religious zeal required of every member of the Communist Party. (29)

Here he draws out precisely the implication of totalitarianism contained in Stalin's version of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The war on the kulaks -- the Holodomor -- was going on as this symposium took place (1933-34) (link).

Sidney Hook

Sidney Hook was a well-known philosopher, with a political commitment to radical change and a willingness to defend Communist ideas in the 1920s and early 1930s. He became anti-Communist and anti-Stalinist beginning in 1933 and broke fully from the Communist International by 1939, but remained on the left as a democratic socialist. Hook came to be regarded by some on the left as a renegade and new conservative, but Tony Judt disagrees strongly with that view:

He became an aggressively socialist critic of communism. The “aggressively socialist” is crucial. There’s nothing reactionary about Sidney Hook. There’s nothing politically right-wing about him, though he was conservative in some of his cultural tastes—like many socialists. Like Raymond Aron, he was on the opposite side of the barrier from the sixties students. He left New York University disgusted with the university’s failure to stand up to the sit-ins and occupations—that was a very Cold War liberal kind of stance. But his politics were always left of center domestically and a direct inheritance from the nineteenth-century socialist tradition. (Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 226)

So what was Hook's position in 1934? He believed that it was valuable to distinguish between Communism (the specific version implemented after the Russian Revolution) and communism (the ideal theory implied by Marx's writings on post-capitalist society). Hook's goal in "The Meaning of Marx" is to express what he thinks Marx's writings actually imply about "communism". And he believes, even in 1934, that Stalinism was a cruel perversion of that vision of the future, but that Marx's own conception was the correct pathway for modern people to follow.

Here is the first premise of Hook's view:

Marxism [urges] social action which aims by the revolutionary transformation of society to introduce a classless socialist society. (33)

What is a "classless society"?

The abolition of private ownership of the social means of production spells the abolition of all economic classes. (38)

This point reflects a double-pronged theory on Marx's part: ownership confers massive economic advantage to one group over another, and that advantage is transformed into the political power needed to sustain the class system itself against the protests of the under-class.

Hook then turns to the political implications of this socio-economic analysis of capitalism. How can the working class gain political power over the propertied class? His account has three features -- militant action by the masses of workers for improved conditions, coordination with "intermediate and subordinate groups" to change the existing order, and to "destroy the myth of the impartiality of the state" in order to effectively demand social and political revolution (47).

So what about dictatorship and democracy in Marxist socialism? Hook argues that Marx's conception involves a genuine version of democracy that is different from liberal democracy: "proletarian democracy".

Against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, Marx opposed the ideal of a workers' or proletarian democracy. His criticism of political democracy in bourgeois society is that it is a sham democracy for workers--a sham democracy because, no matter what their paper privileges may be, the workers cannot control the social conditions of their life.

In the nature of the case, a workers' democracy--based upon collective ownership of the means of production--does not involve democracy for bankers, capitalists and their supporters who would bring back a state of affairs which would make genuine social democracy impossible. (49)

How is proletarian democracy different from dictatorship?

According to Marx, in at least two important respects. First, it expresses the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population, and by providing a social environment in which human values rather than property values are the guiding principles of social control permits the widest development of free and equal personality. Second, as the democratic processes of socialist economy expand and embrace in its productive activities the elements of the population which were formerly hostile, the repressive functions of the estate gradually disappear. (49).

This paragraph has the tragic ring of utopian optimism about the "withering away of the state", and observers of the logic of Stalinist repression would note -- this expectation of gradual democratization is absurdly unlikely. It sounds like an op-ed piece in the Daily Worker. Hook is strongly opposed to the dictatorship of the party (50); but the logic of power demonstrates that what he describes is a fairy tale. And later in his career, it is doubtful that Hook would have claimed or expected such a benign development. I will return to Hook's views later.

Bertrand Russell

Russell responds directly to the question, "Why I am not a Communist'. He makes it clear that by "Communist" he means "a person who accepts the doctrines of the Third International" (52) -- that is, a Stalinist. His reasons are stated succinctly. He denies "historical necessity" to any particular process of historical change -- including the necessary triumph of socialism over capitalism. He finds the theories of value and surplus value in Marx to be indefensible. He rejects the concept of "heroic infallibility" of any individual -- whether of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin. Unlike Hook, he takes the "dictatorship of the proletariat" at its plain meaning and rejects it because it is fundamentally anti-democratic. As a sociological fact he observes that Soviet Communism is highly repressive of liberty -- freedom of thought and expression -- and he rejects it on that basis as well.

He also has several more minor objections. Marx glorifies manual work over intellectual work. "Class war" is unlikely to succeed, and politics should proceed through persuasion rather than violence. Communism is grounded in hate, and hate is not a basis for social reconciliation. The claim that we must choose between communism and fascism is a wholly false choice; there is a third alternative -- liberal progressive democracy.

John Dewey

John Dewey's response to the question is similar to Russell's. Soviet Communism is authoritarian, repressive, and dogmatic. The Communist view of history is deterministic and monistic. The primacy Marxism gives to class conflict over-estimates this particular economic source of conflict within society Worse, the threat of proletarian uprising is likely to bring about fascism. Communist politics -- the behavior of the Communist state and its functionaries -- rely on lies, deception, and betrayal. And social change created only through violence by one group against another cannot succeed.

Were a large scale revolution to break out in highly industrialized America, where the middle class is stronger, more militant and better prepared than anywhere else in the world, it would either be abortive, drowned in a blood bath, or if it were victorious, would win only a Pyrrhic victory. The two sides would destroy the country and each other. (56)

Dewey's response gives the impression of a person who has reflected seriously both on history and on the pro's and con's of communism. His rejection of communism is fully considered and reflective.

Morris Raphael Cohen

Morris Cohen too gives powerful intellectual and personal reasons why he is not a communist. He finds Marx's political economy highly illuminating; but the associated theory of revolution and socialism is unacceptable to him. Most importantly, the experience of Soviet Communism is a humanly appalling example of repression and dictatorship. Cohen makes a very interesting historical point: uprisings by single groups almost always lead to disaster, massacre, and oppressive reaction (58). Profound social change requires a high level of social concurrence. He draws attention to the social violence that the USSR is brought to impose:

To this day the Communist regime dare not declare openly in favor of nationalizing the land. Their system of cooperatives is frankly an attempt--and I do not believe it will be a successful attempt--to evade the peasants' unalterable opposition to communism so far as their own property is concerned. (59)

(Here again -- the collectivization of farmland in Ukraine and the horrendous war of starvation against the kulaks was just beginning in 1933-34 in the USSR.)

Rather than harsh dictatorial imposition of the will of one class over another, Cohen offers the view that real social change requires cooperation among social groups:

If the history of the past is any guide at all, it is that real improvements in the future will come like the improvements of the past, namely, through cooperation between different groups, each of which is wise enough to see the necessity of compromising with those with whom we have to live together and whom we cannot or do not wish to exterminate. (60)

And, like Russell, he believes that the argument that one must choose between communism and fascism is entirely specious:

When the communists tell me that I must choose between their dictatorship and fascism I feel that I am offered the choice between being shot or being hanged. It would be suicide for liberal civilization to accept this as exhausting the field of human possibility. I prefer to hope that the present wave of irrationalism and of fanatical intolerance will recede and that the great human energy which manifests itself in free thought will not perish. Often before it has emerged after being swamped by passionate superstitions. There is no reason to feel that it may not do so again. (62)

Sidney Hook (rebuttal)

The primary line of criticism of Communism offered by Eddy, Russell, Dewey, and Cohen is their forthright rejection of the dictatorial and repressive nature of the Communist regime in the USSR, along with their view that these features derive in some way from some of the features of Marx's own theory of socialism and class conflict. Hook too rejects dictatorship and repression. But he argues that these features are not inherent in a Marxist-socialist revolutionary regime; they are accidents of history. In this it seems that history has plainly refuted him.

But let's ask the more fundamental question: why did Hook remain a committed Marxist? Why did Hook persist (in 1934) in affirming the importance of socialist revolution? It was because he continued to pay a great deal of attention to the other aspect of Marx's analysis: the systemic exploitation, domination, and indignity to which the working class is subject within capitalism, without any realistic hope of change absent comprehensive economic revolution. He was Marxist in his socialism because he was Marxist in his diagnosis of how capitalism unavoidably works, and he thought there was no other way to end exploitation and domination of the working class.

It is the absence of a realistic alternative program and path of action which makes the criticism of the communist position -- justified as it may appear to be from an abstract ideal position -- irrelevant to the pressing tasks of combating capitalism, fascism and war. (65)

However, this is intellectual stubbornness, because there were in fact realistic alternative programs. Laissez-faire capitalism was not the only non-communist political-economic regime to serve as an alternative to communism. The germs of social democracy were already visible in western Europe in the 1930s, including in the socialist and workers' movements in Britain.

It is hard not to see Hook as an apologist for communist dictatorship in this period of his thinking -- even though he explicitly rejects Soviet repression and dictatorship. "My own position is briefly that the fundamental doctrine of communism is sound but it has been so wrapped up in certain dogmas that its logic and force has been obscured" (74). This is either simple naïveté, or simple apologetics. Further, his unwarranted confidence in the Communist movement shows up here:

Communists would not martyrize an entire people as the fascists have done, they would not countenance wholesale massacres of innocent victims, they would not pound and torture women and children in order to achieve power. (71)

The year of this symposium was 1934. And the Soviet Union was engaged in precisely those practices at that time, including especially the horrendous war of starvation against the Ukraine, with four million deaths by hunger. It is interesting that Hook quotes New York Times reporter Walter Duranty. Duranty was the journalist in 1932 who popularized the aphorism, "If you want to make an omelette, you've got to scramble eggs" (link).

Hook closes his rebuttal with an indefensible call to repeat a failed experiment: "The time has now come to build a new revolutionary party in America and a new revolutionary international" (89). In this debate, Dewey and Cohen show the greatest wisdom: work towards greater fairness, equality, and liberty through cooperation among social groups in a democratic society.

What I find interesting about this debate is the fact that it is much deeper, about issues that really matter, than any discussions of alternative futures for humanity that might be feasible for future generations that are in the air today. What was at issue in 1934 was whether it was possible to have a decent society for all citizens within the framework of a democratic market-based economy; or, instead, only collective ownership and party rule could ensure equality. There are alternatives -- for example, social democracy and the Nordic model -- but we no longer seem to want to have those fundamental conversations (link).

The GOP descent into right-wing authoritarianism

In December 2020 I reviewed Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (link) to try to assess the damage and threats created for our democracy by Donald Trump’s conduct as president. There were very worrisome indications at that time of the slide towards an authoritarian political regime caused by Trump's behavior and language.

Unhappily, the situation in the United States has worsened significantly since then. Less than a month after the post appeared the attempt to violently overturn the lawful election of President Joe Biden took place. Former president Trump continued to press his groundless lies about a stolen election. Republican members of Congress excused and justified the attempted insurrection of January 6. Violent militias and armed white supremacy groups have been encouraged by Trump and Republican politicians to make their presence known. Active calls to violence against “liberal Democrats” and RINOs have been featured by candidates in their advertising and social media campaigns. All of this sounds like a highly dangerous acceleration of the authoritarian, anti-democratic values of the GOP at almost all levels of leadership.

It is worthwhile to review the main tendencies that Arendt associated with the totalitarian impulse. These features are her observations of totalitarian regimes, based on her study of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. And they seem highly relevant to the political environment in the United States today, based on a sober assessment of GOP behavior throughout the country.

1. Orientation of politics towards an all-encompassing ideology or worldview, often involving racism and social division.

The racism, xenophobia, and gender-hostile content of Trumpism and GOP political ideology is apparent -- most recently in the Texas GOP platform enacted in June 2022. This unifying right-wing extremist ideology, now becoming mainstream in the GOP, encompasses anti-LGBTQ values and policies, anti-immigrant language, and a deference to white supremacy and serves as a rallying call for the GOP.

2. Consistent and sustained efforts at destroying liberal political institutions.

The GOP from top to bottom, with a very small number of exceptions (e.g. Cheney, Kinzinger, Romney), demonstrates virulent antagonism to the values of a democracy (respect for electoral institutions, respect for one's political adversaries, recognition that government represents all the people, not only one's own supporters) and determined hostility to the institutions of democracy (racially designed rules for voter registration, locations of voting stations, rules governing absentee ballots, ...). This list could be continued as a 20-page indictment. The anti-democratic idea of implementing "electoral college" systems in state elections (Colorado, Texas) is another instance of a profoundly racist attempt to minimize the votes of urban voters.

3. Use of violence-prone paramilitaries to further political objectives.

The alignment of Donald Trump and many GOP elected officials and leaders with violent organizations such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and many other violent militias and organizations has been documented by the House select committee investigation (link). The use of violent video and threats by GOP candidates in election ads is a frightening and rising phenomenon -- for example, Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greiten's campaign ad boasting open season on RINOs and featuring a special forces team invading a home (link). Many GOP candidates have used campaign images and videos featuring themselves with semi-automatic weapons -- a deliberate linkage between politics and deadly violence. And the threats and acts of violent harassment reported by election officials in multiple states at the June 21 House January 6 committee meeting are thoroughly chilling. These actions by Trump supporters are reminiscent of violence in Berlin and Rome at the time of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

4. Fundamental deference to the Leader.

The cult of Donald Trump is legendary. What is astonishing and frightening is the almost absolute hold this cult leader has on his mass following and the elected Republican officials who crave his support and endorsement. "Deference to the Leader" has new meaning in American politics following the Trump phenomenon. ""I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible"" (link). Yes, it is incredible.

5. Persistent use of lies and fabrications.

Trump's willingness to lie is legendary. The "Big Lie" about election fraud is the most egregious example, since it has created a dangerous and volatile social movement based on loyalty to Trump and willingness to adopt his lies. But lying is the fundamental mechanism of Trump's political strategy. The Washington Post estimated that Trump had told 30,573 lies during his presidency (link). The movement mobilized by Trump has continued to use lies to further its activism -- for example, about COVID, about vaccination safety, and about the many conspiracy theories promulgated by outlets like QAnon.

6. Intimidation and cooptation of legislators and political leaders.

Intimidation of non-compliant Republican office-holders has been apparent since Trump's defeat in 2020. Physical threats of violence have occurred (most recently against Adam Kinzinger), but also against other Republican House members who voted for impeachment, such as Fred Upton and Peter Meijer. In addition to threats of physical violence, non-compliant Republican candidates have been bullied in public meetings and vilified as RINOs. Public independence from Trump by GOP candidates is generally seen as political suicide.

7. Fellow-traveler organizations.

White supremacist organizations have been very public in their support for Trumpism. Many evangelical churches and organizations are unquestioning in their support for Trump and Trumpism. Fox News commentators have provided powerful propaganda support for Trumpism.

If these are reasonable markers of the makings of a totalitarian regime, as Arendt argued they are, then the US democracy is in serious, grave jeopardy. Our political sphere -- driven by the political worldview, motivations, and determination of the GOP throughout the country -- has declined rapidly by these criteria since 2016, and the decline accelerated in 2020.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the form of government the GOP would like to see is an authoritarian sham democracy in which only their supporters have the ability to vote, and in which GOP majorities are free to carry out their ideological agenda: reduce reproductive rights, subordinate the courts to the status of ideological henchmen, empower ever-wider ownership and brandishing of semi-automatic weapons, place ideologically inspired restrictions on curriculum from kindergarten to graduate school in public institutions, and restrict freedom of thought and expression when it comes to GOP hot topics (gender, race, BLM, CRT, ...).

What would it take for moderate conservatives with integrity and democratic values to regain their positions of influence and voice within the GOP? As for the leaders and elected officials who are taking their party down the road of unhinged extremism -- history will regard you with shame and infamy.

Philosophies of the far right

image: Joseph de Maistre

The ideologies of the far right have a particularly strong grip on a segment of democratic society in the current epoch. This is evident in the extremism of the current leadership of the GOP, and it is evident as well in the growth of hate-based groups in the United States (link). What are the ideas, values, and emotions that possess these anti-liberal, anti-democratic persons and parties?

There is a fairly simple set of answers that resonate with journalistic coverage of the far right in the US and other countries: nativism, anti-immigrant activism, white supremacy, anti-government activism, class resentment, and willingness to appeal to violence against one’s political or cultural “enemies”. These are the items mentioned in the hypothetical “far-right index” proposed in a recent post (link). Many of these attitudes and values can be bundled together into “right-wing populism” (link).

Do these attitudes amount to a political philosophy? Or are they more akin to a smorgasbord of separate attitudes of intolerance, mostly unified by hatred and mistrust of other groups, resentment of one’s own governing classes, and a crass willfulness that refuses any sense of collective democratic obligation? 

One way of thinking about this question is provided by Mark Sedgwick’s very interesting 2019 volume, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The contributors are drawn from a range of European and North American research institutes, and their essays reflect some of the diversity that exists across right-wing extremist thought in western democracies today.

In his informative introduction Sedgwick highlights a number of political ideas in these waves of far-right thinkers: from Spengler, a theme of “apocalypticism”; from Schmitt, a “suspicion of the global universal elite”, emphasis on “friend and enemy” in politics, and legitimation of authoritarian rule; from Evola, the elevation of tradition, hierarchy, and the transcendent; from de Benoist, a rejection of egalitarianism in favor of “ethnopluralism”; from Buchanan the “white European” roots of US history and heritage, as well as a deep suspicion of “global liberal elites” and antagonism towards Mexican immigration into the United States; from Taylor and Dugin a race-specific ideal of US culture; and from Bat Ye’or a fundamental antagonism towards Muslim states and immigration. There is a broad family resemblance across these conservative visions of civilization, but they by no means add up to a coherent philosophical system.

The volume also treats “emerging” thinkers on the far right: Mencius Moldbug, Greg Johnson, Richard Spencer, Jack Donovan, and Daniel Friberg. The political and cultural radicalism of this most recent group are the most extreme and alarming -- and the most influential on current hate-based organizations:

Moldbug and Johnson are both former libertarians. Moldbug draws on Gramsci’s analysis of hegemonic intellectual elites, and Johnson draws directly on the French New Right and on the idea of metapolitics (as well as on Heidegger and Traditionalism). Moldbug, like many other key thinkers, warns against progressive elites and their universalism, the egalitarian rhetoric that conceals their rule, and the “feedback loop” of which they are part, which he labels “the Cathedral.” He goes farther than most on the radical Right in directly and explicitly condemning democracy as a mask for the Cathedral, preferring hierarchy (like Evola) to democracy. Johnson, who runs the important website Counter-Currents, is perhaps the most radical of the contemporary thinkers of the radical Right, certainly in ethnic and racial terms. He is unusual in being distinctly anti-Semitic, a position held otherwise only by Schmitt, and then really only during the Third Reich. As well as subscribing to the Traditionalist narrative of inevitable decline, Johnson sees an apocalyptic risk of “demographic Armageddon,” and calls explicitly for forced population transfer and the nonlethal ethnic cleansing of both Jewish and black Americans to allow a white “ethnostate,” with blacks getting their own ethnostate in the American South, and Jews moving to Israel. It is Johnson who, alone among modern and contemporary key thinkers of the radical right, expresses sympathy for Nazism. In a typical month in 2017, his Counter-Currents website attracted two hundred thousand visitors who viewed 1.5 million pages of content. (kl 337)

Significantly, Sedgwick observes that the most politically potent of these far-right themes in the US are the themes of racial and cultural antagonism. “Race, Islam, and elites are especially important issues today because, more than the other themes common to the key thinkers of the radical Right, they have easy resonance at the street level, and in electoral politics” (introduction, kl 405).

The non-profit organization Counter Extremism Project monitors the activities of extremist and white-supremacist groups in numerous countries. Here is an extensive report on the current activities of white supremacist groups in the US; link. The report provides extensive evidence of the themes of racism, anti-semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and nativist political identities that are highlighted in the current wave of "Alt-Right" writers. Many of the groups documented in this report are neo-Nazi groups with explicit messages of anti-Semitism, racism, and violence.

So here is the hard question. Does the tradition of radical-right philosophy drive modern far-right extremism? Or are the philosophies expressed by this tradition just an epiphenomenon, with the real drivers of extremism coming from currents of racism, hatred, and antagonism that are present in segments of the populations of various countries of Europe and North America? Does a Patrick Buchanan or a Richard Spencer wield political influence because of his apocalyptic ideas, or rather simply because his ideas serve as a basis for potent mobilization speeches on Youtube and TikTok for individuals and groups already inclined towards hate and violence?

The answer seems evident. The extremist right as an activist movement is not driven by a coherent political philosophy. Rather, it is propelled by demagoguery, another ancient Greek invention; the use of simple tropes to win the emotions of masses of followers and energize them to action. And the tropes that have driven extremism in the US are painfully evident: white supremacy, nativism, resentment, and fear of the black helicopters.

Carlyle's critique of modernity

What is wrong with life in the modern world? The complaint that modern society represents a toxic reduction of the importance of community in the lives of individuals is a familiar one. One version of this critique is the idea is that modern society has replaced all personal bonds and relationships with a single "cash nexus". And the observation that modern market economies function to create cruel and increasing misery and inequality is entirely well founded. It may surprise some readers to learn that this complaint is nearly two centuries old. At the time that Karl Marx was denouncing capitalism for its immiseration of the industrial working class, Thomas Carlyle was bitterly castigating British government for its policies of laissez-faire and its refusal to address the problems of destitution seriously. And Carlyle introduced the idea of the cash nexus in his essay on Chartism in 1840:

O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men! On the whole, we will advise Society not to talk at all about what she exists for; but rather with her whole industry to exist, to try how she can keep existing! (Chartism, 61)

Consider the opening paragraphs of Past and Present, which draw attention to the two Englands that existed in the 1830s:

THE condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind, yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with work- shops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, “Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers, none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!” On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; but on the rich master-workers too it falls; neither can the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, but all are like to be brought low with it, and made ‘poor’ enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one.

Of these successful skilful workers some two millions, it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have ‘out- door relief’ flung over the wall to them,—the workhouse Bastille being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger.* They sit there, these many months now; their hope of deliverance as yet small. (Past and Present, 1)

Carlyle was aware of two highly visible "diseases" of English society in the first half of the nineteenth century: the poverty and degradation of working people, and the unfairness of the prevailing social and economic relations between privileged and poor. In passage after passage in Past and Present he denounces the extreme misery of working people:

Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Laborer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel. (Past and Present, 3)

And these inequalities of economic wellbeing are grossly unfair:

We have more riches than any Nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any Nation ever had before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success, if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. (Past and Present, 5)

It is 'for justice' that he struggles; for just wages, — not in money alone! An ever-toiling inferior, he would fain (though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a superior that should lovingly and wisely govern: is not that too the 'just wages' of his service done? (Chartism, 22)

This is Carlyle, an intelligent observer of modern economic society in the 1840s. Carlyle's prescriptions for a better future for England were reactionary: rule by well-intentioned kings, a well-established social hierarchy in which each person knew his or her place, and revitalized religious institutions. His political vision of the future was romantic and backward looking. But his analysis of the current pathologies of England's social and economic life was profound. And so thought Frederick Engels, who wrote an extensive review of Past and Present almost immediately upon its publication:

This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle landowning aristocracy which “have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief", a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, “captains of industry", are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn-out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interests, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own “brute individuality", a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of “soul", that is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness, in furious discontent and rebellion against the old social order, and hence a threatening, irresistibly advancing democracy – everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility. – That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle’s particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says. He, alone of the “respectable” class, has kept his eyes open at least towards the facts, he has at least correctly apprehended the immediate present, and that is indeed a very great deal for an “educated” Englishman. (Engels, Review of Past and Present)

Now consider the concerns and criticisms offered of our own era by an equally astute observer, Tony Judt. His 2010 book of reflections, Ill Fares the Land, offers a remarkably similar set of criticisms that are both systemic and moral. Consider first the title. This phrase calls us back to Oliver Goldsmith, who used the line in his 1770 poem "The Deserted Village":

Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay ..." -- Goldsmith, Carlyle, and Judt all denounce the same characteristic of a modern wealth-based economy. The single-minded quest for wealth and material advantage leads to social disaster.

Here is how Judt begins his critique, writing in 2010:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. (Introduction)

Judt highlights three aspects of our current economic realities: the ludicrous levels of concentration of wealth that we have reached in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the conspicuous consumption that accompanies it; the widening inequalities that western economies have witnessed since the 1970s, leading to every-more severe disparities of outcomes between affluent and poor (health, education, employment, mobility); and the absolute immiseration of the poor in many advanced capitalist economies, including the US. These facts lead to appalling outcomes: misery, to be sure; but also, erosion and extinction of social trust, commitment to the public good, and a sense of community that is broader than "involvement in a market economy". A society based entirely on the "cash nexus" is a bankrupt society -- this was Carlyle's view, and it is Judt's view as well. And, paradoxically enough, the erosion of trust and community is ultimately toxic for the stability and health of the market-based capitalist society itself.

The collapse of the value of community is marked by the conservative movement towards small government, privatization, elimination of public support, and minimal (negligible) regulation of industry and economy. This collapse signals an important moral fact: the idea that the citizens of a minimal state have no obligations to their fellow citizens through public programs. The affluent are "self-made" and the poor are incompetent and unmotivated -- undeserving of compassion and public support. But for Judt this is insane: it reflects a solipsism worthy of Ayn Rand, imagining self-sufficiency of the individual with no dependency on social arrangements. This view of modern society is truly deranged; without public roads, honest co-workers, and peaceful citizens, we are back in the world that Hobbes imagined. Or, as Judt quotes JS Mill: “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought ” (151).

What is genuinely noteworthy is how similar the outlines and concerns are of Judt's critique in 2010 to Carlyle's critique in 1841. Judt's solution for the coming generation is simple: to bring new energy into the moral and social ideal of "social democracy" -- a liberal society based on freedom and wellbeing for all its citizens, a system of mutual cooperation and respect. And the mechanics of a just society are reasonably well understood, both in practice and in theory. Most generally, they are the institutions of what John Rawls calls a "property-owning democracy":

Both a property-owning democracy and a liberal socialist regime set up a constitutional framework for democratic politics, guarantee the basic liberties with the fair value of the political liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and regulate economic and social inequalities by a principle of mutuality, if not by the difference principle. (Justice as Fairness 138)

Or in other words, a just polity based on the equal dignity and worth of all citizens will involve protections of fundamental liberties; secure and equal democratic institutions; and extensive provision of public benefits such as education, healthcare, adequate nutrition, and a dignified life (link). And these are precisely the premises of social democracy in Europe for over a century.

An extremism index for elected officials

Senator Mike Braun (R-Indiana) made news in the past few days by questioning whether the Supreme Court was right to rule in 1967 that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Here is the exchange (link):

"So you would be OK with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states?" a reporter asked.

"Yes," Braun answered. "I think that that’s something that if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I think that’s hypocritical."

Braun now says that he misunderstood the question; but the video makes that hard to believe.

Braun's statement is just the most recent in a long series of appalling statements, screeds, and complaints by elected officials that place them in the range of what would have been called unacceptable right-wing extremism only a few decades ago. US senators and representatives have made statements with extremely ominous implications on a range of topics:

• justifying or encouraging political violence
• condoning racism and white supremacy
• vilifying their political opponents
• aligning themselves with openly insurrectionary organizations
• expressing admiration for authoritarian leaders in other countries
• calling for extreme voter suppression legislation in their home states
• defending the January 6 rioters as "peaceful protesters"

Reading the newspapers everyday provides the interested reader with an impression that these kinds of statements are increasing in frequency and boldness, but that is just an impression. Would it be possible to attempt a more systematic study of the extent and depth of anti-democratic rhetoric among our elected officials based on their public speeches and comments?

This sounds like a big-data kind of project, in which the research team would collect speeches, interviews, and quotes through newspaper reports, press releases, social media items, and other sources. Then a systematic content analysis could be performed, identifying recurring themes and phrases for each politician. The work would need to be done according to clear criteria so that it would be possible to provide a profile of the themes advocated by each politician, and a measure of each politician's score with respect to a few large themes: white supremacy/racism; condoning of political violence; support for voter suppression; support for the rule of law; support for neutral and equal political institutions; affiliation with extremist groups; ....

An ongoing project like this could be conducted by a news organization like Talking Points Memo (link), the Atlantic Monthly, or the Guardian, or it could be conducted by a non-profit organization. Much as the Americans for Democratic Action (link) constructs a "liberalism index" for elected officials based on their voting records on a selected group of pieces of legislation, we might imagine a multi-dimensional index of elected officials measuring their affiliation with right-wing extremism through statements contained in their public utterances. 

It would be very interesting to see a list of current elected officials who have explicitly supported racist or white supremacist ideas; a list of officials who have endorsed or encouraged political violence; a list of officials who cast doubt on the validity of voting and electoral processes; and officials who have publicly associated themselves with hate-based groups. Presumably there would be a good degree of association among the lists, and as citizens we would be in a much better position to understand the depth and breadth of the threat to democracy that we currently face. And it is likely that many of us would be jolted and alarmed at how long those lists are.

The graphic for this kind of research project might look like a weird spike protein for each individual, with spikes for the handful of themes and values used to aggregate the content analysis of their speeches. A politician given to racist utterances, support for political violence, and support for voter suppression would show a preponderance of elongated spikes on these themes, and negligible spikes on the pro-democracy, pro-voting rights, anti-racism themes.

The research team might go further and consider constructing a "rightwing extremism" index, as a weighted combination of several of these factors.

It would be very interesting to see how many members of the Senate and the House would emerge with high scores on the "rightwing extremism" index. In the current environment it seems as though the number would be a large one. And it would also be very interesting to see how the distribution of ratings on this index changes over time. Will these politicians become even more extreme in the near future? Will they begin to moderate their words and actions? Will the impulse towards anti-democratic extremism abate in the United States, or will it continue to intensify? And most importantly, what do these trends suggest for the health and prospects for our democracy?

It is possible that there is research along these lines currently underway. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

Russia's aggression against Ukraine as a war crime

When Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939 it committed a war crime, codified by the standards established in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Here is a very useful summary of the Nuremberg process ("The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law", edited by Tove Rosen) at the Robert H. Jackson Center (link), and here is a summary of the Nuremberg Trial process provided by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (link). Useful discussion and definitions are provided by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (link). The principles established for the Nuremberg Trials have served as the basis for subsequent war crimes prosecutions since World War II, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in response to crimes against humanity in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda following the genocide in Rwanda.

The key charges to be considered in the Nuremberg Trials included these:

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

1. Crimes Against Peace:

a. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

2. War Crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave- labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

3. Crimes Against Humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

The first charge is "initiating or waging of a war of aggression". It is perfectly evident that this phrase describes Russia's fullscale invasion and assault on Ukraine perfectly. War crime #1, planning and waging a war of aggression, should be immediately pursued against the Russian state, its leaders, and its military commanders, by the appropriate international tribunal.

The category of misconduct referred to in clause 2 is more complex. But evidence from numerous cities in Ukraine supports application of this article to Russia's military conduct as well. The fact of "murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labor ... of civilian population" appears to be occurring through the use of bombs, rockets, and artillery against city centers, targeting civilians, and the apparent deliberate killings of refugees and news reporters by Russian soldiers and aircraft appear to be documented as well. "Wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity" is clearly taking place as well. The videos currently available of apartment buildings ablaze after rocket, shell, and bomb attacks seem to provide prima facie evidence of "wanton destruction of cities" as mentioned in article 2. The kidnapping of mayors of several Ukraine cities possibly fall under this article as crimes as well.

Clause 3 involves "genocide" and mass crimes against human beings, when based on "political, racial or religious grounds". The fact that Russian attacks on almost all of Ukraine's largest cities have led to massive refugee movements (currently more than four million displaced persons and refugees) suggests "ethnic cleansing" -- an effort to push out of Ukraine's territory the segment of Ukraine's population that is most unwilling to accept Russia's hegemony and domination.

Two important principles were codified in 1950 to reflect the legal practice of the Nuremberg Trials: the principle of the legal responsibility of heads of state and the invalidity of the defense of "following orders".

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

These principles imply that the individual leaders of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine are personally vulnerable to charges of war crimes. Principle III explicitly declares that the head of state (Vladimir Putin) is appropriately subject to charges of war crimes under international law. Perhaps more importantly, Principle IV implies that military commanders themselves are liable to charges based on the crime of waging aggressive war. This strongly suggests that military commanders need to be considering their own liability for their actions in Ukraine.

How to think about deliberate social change

What is involved in trying to create a better world? That is: what is involved in being an activist, a reformer, a radical, a revolutionary, or – for that matter – a reactionary? And how do the various forms of knowledge provided by areas of research in the social sciences play into this question? Is reforming the social world more like dreaming or more like building a cabinet?

This is an interesting set of questions for several reasons. One has to do with a very basic and crucial human feature – our capacity for rational-intentional manipulation of our various environments. Marx (and Hegel) put this feature of human capacity at the center of a rich conception of human “species being” – homo faber, the human tool-user, the creator through intelligent labor. The essence of “labor” is the use of one’s skills and knowledge to transform materials into objects that satisfy our needs, wants, and aesthetic values. And we would like to suppose that we can use our intelligence, our abilities to cooperate, and our practical skills at building social institutions, to construct a better world.

When we put this question in terms of transformation of the material world, we are talking about technology. We are led into a reflection on the knowledge provided by the natural sciences and the ways in which these forms of knowledge permit human beings to transform and build the natural environment; we are led to the disciplines of craftsmanship and technology. We are led to a consideration of practical intelligence and the artful transformation of nature. But what about purposive social change? How should we use knowledge and intelligence to bring about a better social world?

An important preliminary question is the scope of the possible: to what extent can we remake either the natural world or the social world? On the side of the natural world, the answer is fairly clear; humanity has thoroughly transformed the surface of the earth through its use of technology and scientific knowledge. (What is less clear is whether we have done so in ways that serve our collective interests, and whether unanticipated consequences have often derailed the benefits we sought.) An aircraft is the result of an integrated design process; a city is the result of a combination of plans, designs, accidents, and uncoordinated choices. So an aircraft is a much more intentional artifact than a city.

In the realm of the social world, the evidence is less clear when it comes to intentional transformation. There is ample evidence of social change, of course; but to what extent is that purposive or intentional social change? To what extent, perhaps, is largescale social change more like an ecological system than a building designed by an architect; more the result of many small and often unintended interventions rather than the result of a blueprint?

We can also ask the question: what sorts of things are we thinking to change, when we yearn for change? Here are several important possibilities: basic social structures; intermediate institutions; patterns of human behavior; mentalities and forms of social consciousness; social practices; and patterns of exploitation and domination.

So where do the social sciences come in when we consider the project of social reform? There are at least three locations within this story:

• in the theory of the present (why does contemporary America embody racial inequalities? What are the current social mechanisms?);
• in the theory of an ideal future (description of feasible institutions that produce equality); and
• in the theory of a strategy of change (description of feasible actions that can be taken over time leading to the establishment of new social arrangements).

What this comes down to is three rather different applications of the empirical and theoretical findings of the social sciences. First, the social sciences can provide the basis for a causal-institutional analysis of the way that the current system works. Second, the social sciences can allow us to “test” the viability of an institutional change and a new set of institutions, to try to estimate the way that these new institutions will function. This is a bit like simulating the behavior of a new device under a set of test conditions. Third, the social sciences can provide an inventory of a large number of mechanisms and processes of change – protest, demonstrations, armed struggle, lobbying, public relations campaigns, … This application permits us to attempt to evaluate the credibility of a proposed strategy of change.

So how should we think about purposive social change – especially change in the direction of novelty, systemic change, and large change of behavior and mentality? Careful reflection on the nature of the social suggests that social arrangements and processes are always conditioned by contingency, heterogeneity, and plasticity; so there are no “iron laws of history,” no general theories that tell us how social processes work. Instead, good social science theories shed light on specific, mid-level social mechanisms and processes – very ably described by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. So we can forget about the social sciences providing a general “physics” or “mechanics” that might provide a blueprint for social design – as our understanding of the natural sciences does in fact permit in the design of material technologies. Instead, we can derive from the various areas of the social sciences some pragmatic rules of thumb about how mid-level social processes work.

How does this help to answer our question? Because we can use the open-ended totality of the learning that research in the social sciences has made possible about how the social world actually works, to help guide our thinking as we think about social reform and social change. We can attempt to mentally model the way that new institutions would work. We can attempt to foresee some of the glitches that will arise as we undertake a process of extended social reform. We are forced to be humble: prediction is very limited, there are always confounding factors that we haven’t incorporated into our mental models, and contingency runs deep. But we can make a start at evaluating a change strategy – the likely features of functioning that a given institutional design will display; the failures that may arise as a process of communication or coordination is undertaken; and the forms of corruption, weakness of the will, freeriding, and gaming that we can expect in any large process of social change.

A good example worth considering is the inadequate efforts that were undertaken towards reform of the financial industry following the 2008 financial crisis. These efforts were not highly successful, for several identifiable reasons: industry capture of the process, inadequate understanding of complex interactions among rules and regulatory institutions, and failure to anticipate innovative strategies to circumvent the rules. But equally difficult questions arise every kind of social reform – the design of a new set of tenure procedures in a university, the design of a system of regulation to end disparate use of force by US police departments against racial minorities, or the design of single-payer health insurance system.

Several ideas seem to come to the top out of these reflections.

(1) Designing social change is difficult, in part, because it requires us to imagine and create social arrangements that don’t yet exist. So we have to exert our analytical and empirical intelligence to try to estimate the way these arrangements might work – and how ordinary people might live within them. Are they feasible? And do they produce the intended social effects?

(2) The social sciences set some loose limits on our reasoning as we think about both systems and pathways; but social science will never permit precise calculations about the future. There is a very broad range of possible outcomes for almost any social intervention.

(3) The kinds of atrociously bad outcomes that twentieth-century “modernizing projects” have led to have occurred as a result of aggressive and misplaced confidence in social theories and models. This is a deeply important lesson. There is a very wide gap between theory and reality. Marxism and neoliberal purism alike have created enormous human suffering in the past century.

(4) This being recognized, social innovators ought to be risk-aware: take small steps, evaluate, examine; and proceed further. Just as designers of nuclear power plants need to design for worst-case scenarios and soft landings, so social innovators should be cautious as they push forward their reforms.

(5) All these cautions properly acknowledged, we have no choice but to attempt to create a better social future for humanity. And this means respecting the constraints of democracy even as we struggle for substantively better social arrangements.

(Here are several earlier discussions relevant to this topic; link, link, link, link.)

A topology of political theories?

We sometimes think of political philosophies as falling on a spectrum from left to right. Bernie Sanders is on the left and Greg Abbott is on the right. Our mental map might perhaps look something like this:

(Please note that the graphs are easier to see if the reader clicks the image and views the full-resolution image.)

However, a moment's reflection shows that this scheme doesn't really work. There isn't a single dimension along which these various political philosophies can be arranged. Anarchism isn't just further out on the same dimension as liberal constitutionalism; rather, it highlights a different set of moral concerns altogether. Communitarianism is a complex of values that appeals, in different ways, to both progressives and conservatives. Is communitarianism a left-leaning or a right-leaning philosophical position?

We might say as a form of shorthand that classical liberalism gives highest priority to the rights and freedoms of individual citizens; classical conservatism gives highest priority to the continuity of traditional social and political values and relationships; socialism gives priority to bringing about the end of economic domination of one group by another (equality); and fascism gives priority to ideological purity and state control of society. This shorthand gives a sense of the multi-polar nature of political philosophy. 

Consider a handful of fundamental values or themes that have motivated important schools of political philosophy -- for example, the values of liberty, equality, community, state supremacy, and ideological unity. How do the eleven political philosophies mentioned on the left-right spectrum above relate to those values? Here is an impressionistic graphic that perhaps sheds some light on the "space" of political philosophy. The core values of liberty and equality do a reasonably good job of differentiating between the "left" end of the spectrum from the right end. The values of ideological supremacy and state supremacy capture theories at both extremes: communism in the Stalinist mode and fascism. The value of community seems to be invoked in theories on both the left and right halves of the spectrum.

Can we do even better? We might consider placing political philosophies on a more notional graph that flags each political theory with a tag for the values it incorporates. This might look something like this:

This graph gives a greater sense of the nuances and divisions that distinguish the various political philosophies mentioned here; some are more similar to others because they share more of the "tags" that characterize them, and yet they differ in incommensurable ways. Here again, the left-right spectrum doesn't work well; rather, there is a multi-dimensional scattering of political philosophies across the values of equality, liberty, tradition, state domination, etc. Communism and fascism wind up looking like cousins, not extremes at opposite ends of the spectrum.

It should be possible to incorporate the relationships indicated in the preceding graph into a network graph among the eleven political theories mentioned here. The graph might look something like this:

This graph is still impressionistic, but it has a credible logic to it. It seems to capture real affinities among a range of political philosophies. And, most interestingly, it seems to give rise to a very different arrangement of views across conceptual space. The centrist views on this scheme are social democracy and civic humanism, whereas the extreme views are totalitarianism and populism, as well as libertarianism and anarchism.

Having spent several hours exploring different ways of "graphing" the space of political philosophies, I'm inclined to think that this is a useful tool for exploring the underlying commitments of various political theories. The multiple values and fundamental questions posed by Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Hayek, or Nietzsche do not reduce to a simple set of propositions. But by examining the cross-connections that exist among these various theories we can see both areas of consensus and difference among the theories. And we can see why the theories associated with totalitarianism, fascism, and communism, are so fundamentally unacceptable to a broad range of political thinkers. They are incompatible with the values of individual rights and liberties, the value of human equality, and the aspiration to human progress.

Factions, insurrections, and the Federalist Papers

Sometimes political philosophers think of the The Federalist Papers as fairly minor contributions to the history of political theory -- time-bound, parochial, and written by colonial bumpkins who couldn't really hold a candle to Locke or Hobbes. When addressed at all, they are often used simply as evidence about the "original intent" of various constitutional provisions in the US Constitution (link). Now that I've included several of the papers in a course I'm currently teaching on modern political thought, however, I've come to a new appreciation of what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were attempting to accomplish -- in contrast to Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. And I have gained a new appreciation of their sophistication as political philosophers and theorists. Most strikingly, I've seen today something that was invisible in the 1960s: how some of the work is enormously relevant on the assault to democracy we are currently experiencing from the far right in the United States.

The approach taken by the writers of the Federalist Papers is one of psychological realism. They want to design political institutions that work for citizens as they actually behave, not as we would wish them to behave. Here is a fine statement of their approach in FP 51, offered in their analysis of the institutional idea of "separation of powers" in government:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. (FP 51: 268-269)

One of the key problems that Madison and Hamilton confront, in a very serious way, is that of "faction". We might think of this problem in a fairly trivial way: "I say potato, you say potahto". We're different. But what they have in mind is much more critical to the health and stability of a democracy than that. It has to do with groups that potentially endanger the survival of the republic itself, and the liberties of the citizens who make it up. Madison opens No. 10 with these words:

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed, than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. (FP 10: 42)

Madison and Hamilton hope that they and their colleagues in institution-building in 1787 will be able to design governance arrangements that reduce the dangers of "faction" to the viability of the emerging American democracy.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. (FP 10: 43)

It is worth observing that a faction is not simply a group united by a shared set of preferences -- citizens who advocate for a new public park in a city, say -- but rather a group that advocates for actions that are "adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". Ku Klux Klan activists in Alabama in the 1950s who sought to intimidate African-American men and women from exercising their rights to vote would be a faction; so would a group that seeks to undermine a community's ability to prevent the spread of polio among its children.

Why do factions and inter-group conflict arise? Madison (and Hamilton) approach the problem of politics realistically; and that means that they take human beings as they find them, not as we would wish them to be. Moreover, this is true both for citizens and leaders. Here is an extended passage:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders, ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions, whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind, to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts. (FP 10: 43)

Madison notes that it is impossible to prevent the occurrence of factions and the conflicts they create; individuals are not fully rational, just, or self-controlled.

If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know, that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together; that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.(FP 10: 46)

And likewise, rulers are not angels either:

It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm: nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all, without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another, or the good of the whole. (FP 10: 45)

But Madison believes that appropriate institutional arrangements can minimize the bad effects of ordinary citizens exercising their passions and their interests. One such arrangement that serves as a buffer to the hazards of factions is representative government, or what he refers to as a republic. Political decisions no longer depend on the direct votes of citizens, but instead emerge from a decision-making process involving their elected representatives. He believes that the elected representatives will be more moderate than the factions of the public and "more consonant to the public good" (46). But, realist that he is, he also realizes that there may be a process of faction formation within the government itself:

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people. (FP 10: 47)

We seem to have examples of both hazards to democracy in contemporary US politics: a substantial minority of citizens who come together with the goal of attacking legitimate public institutions (public health departments and school boards, for example) and legislators "of sinister design" who gain the votes of their districts and then act out of ideological and personal self-interest. Madison confirmed that this was a possibility in 1787, but he thought it unlikely as the electorate grew larger.

In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters. (FP 10: 47)

Finally, Madison believed that the plurality of states within the Federal republic would be a buffer against extremism in the legislature:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states: a religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it, must secure the national councils against any danger from that source: a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire state. (FP 10: 48)

Both of these replies suggests a confidence in something like the "wisdom of the crowd"; but both are refuted by the politics of the recent past. "Factious leaders" have gained national followings, with adherents in multiple states. And multitudes of voters and citizens have been swept up into populist fantasies leading them to support policies and candidates who advocate those fantasies. Right-wing populism, fueled by conspiracy theories and social media, seems to have swamped democratic republicanism.

Madison and Hamilton were asking the right questions: How can we design democratic political institutions that are resilient in the face of ordinary men and women, extremist factions, and unscrupulous leaders? Perhaps there are good answers to these questions that haven't yet been explored. But unhappily, Madison and Hamilton did not themselves arrive at a convincing solution.