Well, we all saw the news this past weekend of violent protests in the streets of major cities throughout the nation.
Once again, the national media in its coverage, left us all scratching our heads.
Who are these antifa folks they keep talking about? What in the world are they protesting? Is it the tragic death of George Floyd, or do they have some other agenda?
Let’s start with who they are.
Antifa: The antifa movement is composed of far left-wing, autonomous, militant anti-fascist groups and individuals in the United States. The principal feature of antifa groups is their use of direct action, with conflicts occurring both online and in real life.
They engage in various protest tactics, which include on-line activism, property damage, physical violence, and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist, or on the far-right.
Now we all know what is meant by being far right. But what again is this term Fascist?
Fascism: Fascism is a form of radical right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy.
The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Francisco Franco were all Fascist Dictators Opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is on the far-right when speaking of left–right political positions. So, Antifa is far left wing and anti far right wing.
Let’s add one more definition before we start.
Collectivism: Collectivism is a political theory associated with communism. More broadly, it is the idea that people should prioritize the good of society over the welfare of the individual. So, tax me to death so everyone benefits.
Now there was a great article about all this in the recent issue of “The American Thinker” by writer Paul Krause.
He made an interesting point when he stated “Antifa storms in and out of the news, despite that fact, the Left is unable to denounce this militant band of thugs. The Left cannot denounce Antifa because Antifa embodies the very concept of war and violence that collectivism needs to thrive on. To attack Antifa would be to attack the heart of the cancerous poison that is destroying liberty oriented societies”.
This concept was first presented by a fellow named Michael Oakeshott.
Michael Oakeshott is largely forgotten.
Even at the peak of his powers, as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1969, he was overshadowed by other political scientists of his time.
Yet Oakeshott has more to teach us about our current times than any of the others.
Oakeshott’s focus was on the conduct of politics itself, with governance.
Unconcerned with the minutiae of policy proposals or manifesto pledges, his work was to explain the workings of politics to serve a nation.
He was writing at a time when –isms dominated politics. Keynesianism (the promotion of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending) , socialism and central planning had captured the politics of the West, while varying degrees of collectivism and Communism prevailed behind the Iron Curtain.
In his most famous essay, “Rationalism in Politics”, published in 1962, he attacked the intellectual conceit that underpins all these –isms, namely the misplaced faith in “rationalism” that stemmed from the 18th-century enlightenment. “
To the Rationalist”, Oakeshott wrote, “nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny.” In other words, just because it has proven to work in the past, it should still be challenged.
By ignoring what he called “practical knowledge”—custom or tradition, as he meant it—the rationalist, armed merely with “technical knowledge”, created the illusion that bureaucrats and governments could solve all of our problems. Racism, poverty, gun violence, health care, you name it, government can fix it.
By contrast, Oakeshott identified what he called a “conservative disposition”, and this is what makes him especially relevant today.
What is the conservative disposition?
For a start, Oakehsott was against chasing unicorns, or just throwing out the political playbook. (Change for the sake of change).
For a politician of this disposition “will find small and slow changes more tolerable than large and sudden: and he will value highly every appearance of continuity.”
Hence his famous dictum that the conservative will “prefer the familiar to the unknown…the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible.”
Oakeshott, like the Anglo-Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke before him, was not against change, but he was very aware that “innovation entails certain loss” and only “ possible gain”.
The person of this disposition, he argues, “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile…And all this not because passion is vice and moderation is virtue, but because moderation is indispensable if passionate men are to escape being locked in an encounter of mutual frustration.” (Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater).
Sadly, there could be no better description of our current government crisis, and the divisions that it has created – an “encounter of mutual frustration.”
Governing is described by Oakeshott as a “specific and limited activity”, but one of those very specific activities is to mediate differences, not to widen them.
These virtues of government, as Oakeshott would have termed them, can also be described as the virtues of pragmatism, or indeed statecraft.
When people say the federal government has lost its mind, this is exactly what they mean, the government can no longer mediate differences and is in a state of mutual frustration.
It is time they went back and reviewed the teachings of Michael Oakeshott. And if Conservatives do not, others certainly will.
It bears repeating that the conservative disposition is not confined to a Conservative Party, or to any centre- right party. It can be used by others, and has been in the past.
Clement Attlee, Britain’s post-war Labour Prime Minister is a perfect example. He is still scorned by the radical left for not “reforming” any of Britain’s ancient institutions.
But this is exactly why he remains the left’s most successful “statesman”, because he understood the temper, of the electorate.
Oakeshott’s essay “The Political Economy of Freedom” is as relevant today as when it was published in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of the bureaucratic welfare state, and the dawn of the Cold War.
Oakeshott provides cold insights into the reality of our now venerated New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and the welfare architects who shackled free society.
The aim of collectivists in free societies is not to wage a bloody revolution like the Jacobins (France) or the Bolsheviks (Russia).
As Oakeshott said, “modern advocates of collectivism disintegrate the integral and wholesome reality of liberty. We are instructed by the enemies of freedom masquerading as advocates of freedom, to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom, between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ freedom, between ‘social,’ ‘political,’ ‘civil,’ ‘economic,’ and ‘personal’ freedom.”
By focusing on only one or two freedoms, we are distracted as we lose our other freedoms.
How many times have we talked about America’s current lack of attention span? How the media now leads us by the nose from one story to the next?
Isn’t it amazing how the Covid virus has now slipped from headline news?
According to Oakeshott, liberals pose as champions of one type of distinguished freedom, while eroding and destroying all the other types of freedom. Rather than see freedom as interconnected and wholesome, the new collectivists see institutions, like our police departments, as oppressive and our present society as backward and tyrannical.
Think gun violence and gun control debate.
The new, far left liberal, therefore presents himself/herself as a champion of engineered liberty; which is to say that he/she controls what freedoms the population will be allowed to have.
Collectivism thrives on revolution and rioting. In fact, it needs revolution. Liberalism demands the mobilization of people to advance its aims.
As such, it is necessary for liberals to always have an existential threat which allows for the perpetuation of mobilized society. As Oakeshott says, “The real spring of collectivism is not a love of liberty, but war. The anticipation of war is the great incentive, and the conduct of war is the great collectivizing process.”
Abraham Lincoln began to collectivize the Union during the Civil War. Roosevelt further collectivized the “new nation” through the “war” on the Great Depression which was superseded by the Second World War.
Roosevelt subjugated civil society to the bureaucratic state and thrust the American economy into its perpetual war economy existence — if there is no war for the post-Roosevelt economy, the economy will decentralize back into the hands of those it was taken from under the guise of national emergency.
Antifa claims to be for peace. Its purpose is war. Beyond the insurmountable evidence that this is the case, the mere fact that Antifa exists to counter the existential threat of government control should also give away its true, bloodthirsty, and violent purpose of being.
There is nothing libertarian about Antifa. It is a socially engineered monster meant to act as the shock troops of the final collectivist campaign for the domination of what used to be free American society.
Antifa exists, as it does in all of these rioting cities, above the law. Without the law to keep the peace, we are in a state of war which allows for collectivism to present itself as the new agent of order.
Because collectivists have infiltrated our governments at the local, state, and federal levels, ever since FDR, and because the collectivist ideology needs war to sustain itself, the left leaning politicians will never be able to condemn Antifa.
Why? Because that would entail condemning their own philosophy of revolution to “fundamentally transform” the United States. This is not a recent phenomenon, it is a deeply rooted one, though Antifa is the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon of collectivism.
We are told that there is a war against minorities led by local police. We are told that there is a war on gays, lesbians, and the rest of the imaginary rainbow. We are told that there is a war on poor people. We are told that there is a war on decency and civility. We are told that there is a war on women.
There is a war on everything, according to the Left. And they use this prop of war to front themselves as champions of the “new freedom” which is, in reality, a front for further collectivist control.
Liberals in America do not openly seek the revolutions that tear down in an uncontrollable rage like the Jacobins or Bolsheviks of old but corrode and rearrange from the inside. They wage a revolution behind the scenes, only for us to wake up and ask what happened.
Antifa may come and go. But what it represents and embodies is nothing short of the bloodthirsty and domineering mindset that possessed the Jacobins to kill hundreds of thousands to try to reorganize French society in 1789 and the Bolsheviks to slay millions of their own people in their bloodthirsty effort to reorganize Russian society.
As Oakeshott says, in free societies collectivists cannot openly embrace such revolutionary tactics as they do in societies without the same longstanding traditions of liberty. Instead, they slip into the system and reorganize from the inside — slowly taking away our freedoms under the illusion of new freedoms and new progress.
Antifa’s manifesto calls for the reorganization of American society and the creation of a new man.
That’s precisely what collectivists past and present have always dreamed of achieving. And collectivists need war, or, in more palatable contemporary terms, an “emergency,” to usurp power for themselves for their domineering and hateful ends.
Collectivists need an imaginary enemy, to continue fighting their war for totalizing control over all people and society.
So there you have it folks. Was Michael Oakeshott correct? Have we lost our ability to govern?
If so, is it by accident or design?
Is Antifa simply a tool being wielded by the far left to gain political control?