Totalitarian Leadership
In America radicalism sought to
empower the ordinary people; conservatism sought to
restrict power to the higher classes. In France, however,
these differences were more irregular. Despite the
difficult relations between the aristocratic tendencies of
conservatism and the democratic aspirations of radicalism
in the American revolution, Jefferson had succeeded in
establishing Rights which ensure in a very practical way
that government remains accountable to common sense
understanding because they serve to prevent any prolonged
limitation of free speech either directly, by the creation
of unjust laws, or indirectly, by the unlawful use of
force. The French Declaration of Rights however
accomplishes neither of these landmark achievements,
despite Jefferson's attempt to persuade French radicals to
at least uphold the right to trial by jury. Consequently
rights to trial by jury and self defence have never been
consistently upheld either in France or Europe generally.
Both historical and philosophical differences help to
explain this. French aristocrats lost the battle of
Agincourt because they refused to arm commoners.
Rights to jury trial and to bear arms helped to empower
commoners for many centuries in England even before the
American revolution, which consequently can be viewed not
just as the first, but the third or even fifth British
revolution. Reaffirmed for protestants through the 1688
Bill of Rights, these freedoms were further developed in
British colonial self government. While craft skills were
widely developed among the British population, certainly in
regard to arms manufacture, the French population had less
experience of both politics and technology, which tended to
be confined to the manufacture of toys for the aristocracy.
Consequently while common sense lay at the heart of British
philosophy, in Europe it was held in lower esteem. These
differences were accentuated with advances in industry.
After the reformation the separation of faith and reason
upheld in the British scientific revolution engendered
further support for religious freedom among the people. In
Europe this separation was not so clear, certainly in
philosophy, which had failed to break with the purely
abstract, 'dialectical' methods of scholasticism.
European radicalism attempted to emulate the empiricist
approach of British philosophy but in an abstract,
professorial manner, and largely divorced from the
experience and judgement of the people in politics and
technology. French philosophy followed Descartes, whose
concept of self evident truth had a quasi-religious, merely
contemplative, scholastic connotation. Self evident truth
in British philosophy related to the experience of craft
industry and the judgement of the common people, and could
be posed independently of theological doctrine. John Adams
confided in a letter to Jefferson he believed the French
had never understood common sense. For Americans
sovereignty must ultimately lie in the common sense
judgement of the people. French radical leaders were
reluctant to fully recognise this fundamental component of
democratic government, and tended to rely instead on the
judgement of specialists and experts.
Common sense in European intellectual circles tended merely
to denote the viewpoint of the lower classes, largely
devoid of organised, independent thought and prey to the
prejudices and cultural imperatives decreed by their
superiors, including the clergy. The relatively low esteem
in which common sense was held in France lies at the root
of totalitarian ideology, because it tends to engender the
development of extremist, elitist tendencies among the
radical intelligentsia in the difficult process of
transition from monarchy to democracy as a means of
exerting control over the masses. These difficulties find
expression in distinct and opposing doctrines of
constitutional law. Whereas in the American Bill of Rights
the ultimate sovereignty of common sense is guaranteed by
the right to trial by jury, in the French Declaration of
Rights this democratic principle is supplanted by an
abstraction: the 'general will,' a vague, indeterminate
conception reflecting the confused, unresolved state of
European philosophy. The formulation that freedom of speech
must conform to the 'general will' in a constitution that
does not guarantee trial by jury implies the parameters of
free speech will be determined by those who have the
decisive say in what the 'general will' should be. Although
both doctrines incorporate deference to the separation of
powers therefore, the French doctrine is more vulnerable to
control from the top, and with this, unaccountable forms of
power. These tendencies are also apparent in the autocratic
approach taken by French radical leaders to freedom of
worship. Jefferson regarded the establishment of this right
as his greatest achievement. French radicalism however
sought to 'dechristianise' the people by imposing atheist
worship of reason, and later by Robespierre's Machiavellian
attempt to invent a state religion to ensure popular
obedience. The general will for Robespierre would have a
divine component. These puritanical inclinations found
expression in imprisonment of the chief exponent of common
sense - Thomas Paine. After such extremism had worn out
public patience more pragmatic arrangements were adopted,
leading eventually to a corrupt dependence on militarism
and Napoleon's dictatorship. There were other factors at
work in the defeat of French radicalism, but our main
purpose here is to affirm the truth of John Adam's
observation that common sense had not been understood in
France, because it is from this root that totalitarian
ideology later developed. Babeuf's 'conspiracy of equals'
followed the defeat of the Jacobin dictatorship. He
maintained that 'democracy according to the French
revolution' demanded the imposition of a dictatorship in
order to destroy conservative resistance. At bottom this
resort to force as panacea has been the essential formula
of all leftist revolutionary theory since, including
Marxism.
Common sense realism is widely acknowledged as the most
viable basis for scientific method. No social theory since
the American revolution however has upheld a clear grasp of
its principles. French revolutionary defeat led to relative
isolation of American radicalism, and its loss of influence
in Europe. America in consequence developed on a more
conservative foundation than envisaged by Jefferson and
Paine, while European radicalism evolved on philosophically
confused premises. The belief that socialism is superior to
capitalism before the conditions for testing this
contention have even been stated reflects this confusion,
in that it does not distinguish the self evident from that
which can be derived from it.
Consideration of these
historical antecedents concerning radicalism and
conservatism can help explain the present dilemmas of
electoral reform and also indicate ways to resolve them.
One reason to suspect the sincerity of Labour electoral
reforms is that a resort to fraud corresponds to what these
antecedents might lead us to expect. The problems
confronting the Left are not merely tactical in nature, and
cannot be solved by merely tactical methods. The hopes of
socialism centred on the conviction that it would prove
economically superior to capitalism. But such hopes were
founded on unproven, merely speculative claims about the
expected economic performance of socialism, not the self
evident truths of common sense. The Left since Jefferson
has failed to distinguish between on the one hand the tasks
of constructing a political order in which different
macroeconomic systems could be tested upon a non partisan
foundation, and on the other the assumption that one such
variant - socialism - would prove superior. Once Left
leaders recognised these hopes would not be realised, they
could either conduct thoroughgoing, open debate at advanced
levels of theory to develop the best alternative strategy,
or lie. The sudden nature of the collapse of communism -
taking even the CIA by surprise - indicates they chose the
latter option. There is, for example, no evidence of
serious, open discussion of the fundamental changes
undertaken by Gorbachev before their implementation, mainly
because most Left leaders since Lenin have been self
selecting members of a conspiratorial elite. The practice
of open discussion in Soviet publications aimed at the
level of the politically advanced was supplanted long ago
by what Lenin termed 'economistic' methods - the production
of simplistic propaganda without polemical content aimed
from a rather condescending height at the level of the
'masses.' Presupposed, as shown, by longstanding
aristocratic tendencies among the European radical
intelligentsia, this approach is based on the view that
workers are driven by blind economic forces and are not
organically suited to understanding political strategy. New
Labour's obsession with 'spin' conforms to the economist
tradition, as also the 'third way' itself, since it is
founded on the claim by its author, Anthony Giddens, that
progress is determined by who controls the 'authoritative
resources of power' - basically, the mass media. New Labour
assumes, unlike Lenin or Jefferson but very much like
Machiavelli and Goebbels, greater faith in the control of
information than the pursuit of truth through conscious
understanding.
Eurosceptics accordingly maintain Left strategists prefer
to keep the public in the dark as to their real purpose,
since this involves subverting Parliament by a
transnational bureaucracy. As Iain Duncan Smith has
alleged, 'the unstated but certain policy of the Labour
Party is to break up the UK into bite size morsels that can
more easily be digested by the European super state.'
Devolution and unelected but still funded regional
assemblies fulfil this purpose. The European constitution
can trace its ideological genesis to the French revolution:
it accordingly does not contain either rights to jury trial
or to bear arms. The Europhile intelligentsia tend to
assume they know what is best for the public in divining
what the general will should be in regard to what
macroeconomic system should be adopted. Government by
bureaucracy, not parliament, serves this purpose. In that
sense the Left does not seek to construct a non-partisan
participatory democracy but instead to rig electoral
reforms to suit their factional interests. Just as Left
policy on a global scale was not to openly debate its
strategy when socialism proved wanting but instead to
pursue the tactics of stealth, then so also its affinity
for participatory democracy is necessarily limited even
though, ironically, thereby also in the long run self
defeating. That dilemma is what now confronts the Left:
having failed to be honest with the public, its activist
base has declined, making the tactics of deception
increasingly futile, leading to even further decline in
voter turnout.
Having necessarily abandoned Marxist faith in the
inevitable superiority of socialist economics, it is
Machiavellian tenets which at bottom remain predominant
even today in Left strategy, from the use of 'spin' to near
blatant electoral fraud. The failure of Left leaders to
address problems of falling voter turnout in a non-partisan
way is best understood in this context. Socialism has never
properly incorporated common sense realist methods of
political strategy and analysis, but as Jefferson stated,
the whole art of politics consists in being honest with the
people: for common sense the best policies are based on
honest premises. Despite his sympathies for French
radicalism he rejected its extremist, Machiavellian
methods. Robespierre by contrast explicitly upheld
them.