Alan Bernstein

Race: How We Got Here

August 8, 2019 by Alan Bernstein 7 Comments

Our country’s founders foresaw a continuous contest between the federal government and the states. The government was to have only those powers ceded to it by the states, but it would claim more. Trust in, and the amount of, power accorded to the government is what divides conservatives from liberals (and their many derivative systems) in our country now. Conflict over racial difference and human rights has driven that division more than anything else.

Although the problem is much older, the most recent major turn occurred when the Supreme Court declared in Brown vs Board of Education (May 17, 1954) that education could only be equal if blacks and whites were schooled together. In the South, resistance was intense. Many whites retreated into what they called Christian academies to preserve segregation. Mississippi closed all public schools (Sept. 16, 1954). Virginia allotted public money to support segregation academies (January 9, 1956). Southern resistance to court-ordered enforcement of Brown also took the form of murdering civil rights activists, black and white. Gradually, the federal government actively enforced Brown and extended equal rights via the courts, the congress, presidential executive orders, and by dispatching soldiers.

At first, the Republican Party, founded by Abraham Lincoln, was the strongest proponent of civil rights. The staunchest defenders of segregation in the opposing party were Southerners called Dixiecrats. After a court ordered still-recalcitrant Alabama school districts to obey the Brown decision, there followed an eleven-day wave of bombings. On September 15, 1963, a Sunday, members of the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham AL exploded a bomb that killed four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The nation was outraged. Encouraged by the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of July 2, 1964, which banned segregation in public places and discrimination in employment. Even then, only 61% of Democrats in the House supported this action but 80% of Republicans. Again in 1965, still under Johnson, only 73% of Democrats as against 94% of Republicans passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to remove legalistic obstacles to black voter registration.

The Civil Rights act passed with the 1964 presidential primary campaigns in full swing. Eleven days later, the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who filibustered against the Act, over runner-up Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate. Dwight Eisenhower’s former vice-president, Richard Nixon, backed Goldwater. Five states in the Deep South that had voted for the Democrat Kennedy in 1960 (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina) voted for the Republican Goldwater in 1964, along with his home state of Arizona. Rejecting their segregationist tradition, the Democrats nominated Johnson, who won.[i] During the 60s, the parties, therefore, reversed their positions on civil rights. Among blue-collar workers about 60% voted Democratic in 1960; in 1968 it was 30%. African Americans went the other way. In 1960, one-third voted Republican; by 1972, only one-in-ten did.[ii] Segregationists fled the Democrats; African Americans fled the Republicans. Race was the pivot.

The cohesion of segregationist voters as they switched parties reflected an underlying belief in a standard American identity. Consciously or not, over time, a mythical type pervaded the country: white, male, Christians of northern European stock were held to form the American ideal.[i] “Their” women accepted and promoted this notion. History textbooks and scholarship exaggerated the influence of this group. New England’s sole experience was said to have shaped the new country. After they were physically almost eliminated, Native Americans were not mentioned except as “heathen savages.” Those enslaved and brought here forcibly from West Africa were viewed by Christian writers like Josiah Priest, as children of Ham, doomed in Genesis 9:25 to be forever “the lowest of slaves.” Mexican American ties to an Aztlan culture that linked the American Southwest to Mexico and the Spanish language was ignored. The ordinary European American identity that many assumed and propagated encouraged them to assert their own group’s interests and limit the potential of others.[ii] From their aggrieved viewpoint, Brown versus Board of Education forces them to educate their children together with those they scorn—violating, as they said, freedom of association. When the Nineteenth Amendment expanded the suffrage in 1920, women gained political equality with men — a monopoly lost. From this perspective, affirmative action (the phrase was coined by John Kennedy in Executive Order 10925 of 1961) constitutes government betrayal. Defenders of the ideal identity see it as reverse discrimination. For white opponents of civil rights, these actions amount to saying not that blacks are equal to whites, but that whites are no better than blacks. Worse, in affirmative action, they believe the government saw minorities, specifically blacks, as being preferable.[iii]

Sensing this resentment, Richard Nixon devised his “Southern Strategy:” Lose the blacks, win the white working class. He targeted, and often won, in his words, “Democrats, blue-collar workers, and working-class white ethnics.” Nixon implied that racial minorities sought not equal rights or opportunity, but superiority. “They refuse to start at the bottom of the ladder the way you did,” he lied. “They want to surpass you. . . . They want it [your success] handed to them.”[i] The need to interact with these “others” as equals inspired fear in those who saw them as threats. When stoked by demagogues, that fear becomes hatred. The toll on all concerned has been horrific.

Condemning Nixon’s exploitation of white backlash is not a criticism of whiteness but of a false superiority—white supremacy. Some members of any group will exaggerate a natural pride in what they consider their outstanding qualities. In the U. S., historically, though, the white, male, middle-class, nuclear family was assumed to be the “American norm” used, sometimes unconsciously, to disparage others of different genders, ethnic backgrounds or skin colors and therefore to exclude them from the norm. Discrimination against others for the color of their skin is racism. This advertisement for U. S. war bonds shows how a white farmer and his children are considered typical and assumed to represent all Americans.

John Steuart Curry, Our Good Earth. . .Keep It Ours.
© John Steuart Curry. Chazen Museum of Art, Madison WI. https://embarkkiosk.chazen.wisc.edu/Obj1873?sid=11350&x=477858&port=1599
SAAM-2001.83_1 American Art Museum, Gift of Roger Genser–The Prints and the Pauper, 2001.83

The farmer stands with two children in the middle of a seemingly boundless field of wheat. His grasp of sheaves in either hand indicates ownership and power. The mother is lacking. The children imply a connection between the father’s genes and the land. The appeal for war bonds suggests that battle will keep the land “ours” for families like this one and their descendants. The non-white and other minority ethnic American combatants are omitted, here, from those whose land it is. Those who identify with this standard feel a loss to their identity as the government protects others and causes, they fear, this image to fade.

This ideal, and the anxiety occasioned by deviation from it, pervaded the entire U. S. What the South resisted openly, those outside the old Confederacy opposed covertly but with similar oppressive effect. Using silent shunning rather than actual legislation, whites confined blacks into segregated neighborhoods, ghettoes. The neighborhood schools they extolled were a cover for segregation. For that purpose, busing was no problem. Indeed, in the case for which the landmark Supreme Court decision was named, the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had bused Linda Brown away from her neighborhood school to keep it white. Although the history goes back years, it was Boston’s 1974 confrontation over busing to bring blacks to white schools that focused national attention on this northern pattern. Busing was another way to achieve integration, and northern, white, ethnic neighborhoods resisted it fiercely.

Opposition to federal integration orders —anti-black animus— helped reverse the prestige enjoyed by the government since World War II. Whereas victory in war followed by the presidency of its allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower, and the economic growth that came from having the world’s strongest economy (and its only atomic weapons) had boosted the reputation of our government, things began to change in the 1960s. The war in Vietnam tarnished our military and cost our foreign policy much prestige. At home, three liberal leaders, including a president, were assassinated. Ronald Reagan blamed the government itself when he lamented its tendency towards “over-regulation.” In his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, he declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.” Reagan thus applied white, working class and segregationist arguments against civil rights to many other areas where corporations and some churches opposed the state’s liberal efforts at regulation or reform.

To undermine the legitimacy of government, some have attributed to Ronald Reagan this remarkable statement. “Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.” It is curious how this statement turns back on itself. The government’s duty to protect the rights of every (even the “least”) individual among us is precisely the rationale for civil rights. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King (had he not also been assassinated), and many other Christians would have caught this biblical allusion to the command that all should care for all.[i] Strange, then, that opponents of government neglect this moral responsibility.

Objection to Big Government became the springboard for many other conservative attacks on liberal programs. The conflict thus expanded from race relations and minority rights to the federal government’s relationship to local jurisdictions, corporations, and religious denominations. Businesses opposed government regulations requiring them to have clean, safe factories, to limit workers’ hours, to label products, to bargain collectively, to avoid polluting the environment. Other conservatives opposed government-enforced women’s rights (e.g. to abortion, paid maternity leave), gender equality, and gun regulation. This opposition can become violent. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, did it, he said, “to put a check on government abuse of power.”

To conservatives, limitation of government is a primary civic responsibility. It follows the Ninth and Tenth Amendments that restrict government to those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. To liberals, such opposition attacks the statement in the Declaration of Independence that people create governments to secure the inalienable rights bestowed on all and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” There could hardly be a more American debate than one opposing the premises of the Declaration of Independence to those of the Constitution.

Here is the dilemma that divides us today. Instead of seeing the protection of another person’s rights as a guarantee of our own, some feel a loss. It is a false supremacy, an assumed privilege, that allows some to neglect or even trample others’ rights because they are certain the system will defend their own. Our liberties are best protected when we understand our citizenship, indeed our humanity, as part of a net whose flexibility is its strength. Like every net, our social fabric has many intersecting knots. Each is composed of overlapping aspects of identity: gender, religion, homeland, family, neighborhood, school, and other ties. With enough empathy, we can see the whole differently from each knot. Our ability to grasp reality from all these angles can bind us as a nation.

[i] Matthew 25:40 “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Cf. verses 41-46.

[i] Lepore, 637-8.

[i] See the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which initiated country-of-origin quotas, favored northern Europe, and excluded Asians altogether. For the characteristics of an American identity, see Que-Lam Huynh, Thierry Devos, and Hannah R. Altman, “Boundaries of American Identity: Relations Between Ethnic Group Prototypicality and Policy Attitudes,” Political Psychology, 36, 4 (2015), 449-468; doi:10.1111/pops.12189.

[ii] Huynh, et al., 449, 466.

[iii] For a more nuanced analysis of this Middle American perspective than this summary permits, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), esp. 221. Hochschild notes in Mississippi the “perceived betrayal by the federal government,” and the sense that their type is disappearing, “There are fewer and fewer white Christians like us” (221).

[i] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), 613-14.

[ii] Lepore, 633. These percentages are approximate.

Sanctuary for Immigrants

June 22, 2019 by Alan Bernstein 1 Comment

Yes, even illegals. I don’t want known criminals to enter the country, but I do favor sanctuary for desperate refugees. It’s surprising that Trump supporters don’t value those winners who flee tyranny and arrive here from Central America. These people “made it”! Think of the courage, the perseverance, the drive those people have shown! You think they won’t be able to contribute to this country? They’re success stories!

OK, they should enter legally. Right. If possible. Confronted with this dilemma, I think of the word “equity.” It doesn’t only mean “equality.” It also means “fairness” —in the deepest sense. It applies particularly to situations like this, when applying the law strictly would result in a greater injustice than letting an apparent violation pass.

A good example comes from Berlin after the Wall went up. How we cheered for the captives of the East who made it, underground, illegally, to West Berlin! The Newseum celebrates the contrast today in Washington D. C., where the two sides of the Wall are on display.


East Side	West Side

Perhaps recognizing that legacy, or conscious of those forced to flee the Nazis, Angela Merkel led Europe in accepting refugees from the Middle East and North Africa in Germany. She has paid a political price, but it was the right thing to do.

There are other historical parallels that wrench the heart. I’m reminded of the Jews from Germany who sailed to our shores in the 1940s and were sent back to die in the concentration camps. I’m reminded of the hope that Israel represented for many compelled to flee the Nazis and who needed a refuge, a sanctuary. America has offered similar hope to many over the centuries. How legally they all entered: all the Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and others from around the world (despite our legal but immoral bias towards certain countries —races) is an open question. In today’s debates, it’s assumed they all entered legally. Frankly, I doubt it. But how do you prove it either way after all this time?

The Underground Railroad also comes to mind. This illegal network helped the enslaved escape after the Northern states abolished slavery before and during the Civil War. They were all “illegals,” the property of their owners (whatever that means). Anyone who located one was bound to return him or her. Fortunately, many people understood the principle of equity and offered them sanctuary. You bet! I’m on the side of the enslaved who escaped and I favor those who sheltered them.

As for the illegals at our borders today I say we should process them kindly. Many of them openly seek legal status under the laws of sanctuary, specifically the right of non-return or non-refoulement. Prohibitions against forcing refugees back into danger in their home countries exist in international and United States law. Sure, some cross outside established entry points, but many, many more are waiting their turn for legal hearings. They are being stalled by a contrived shortage of personnel and the Trump administration’s vindictiveness. We, as citizens, could meet this challenge if we wished, if we would pressure our representatives to act humanely instead of from xenophobic fear of strangers. Anything less is a prodigious sin of omission.

Some people object that creating sanctuaries opens our borders and threatens national security. The smear of “open borders” is a vicious exaggeration. No one goes that far. The charge implies we wish no planning whatsoever. But that is not the case. When we accept this challenge, as we must, we could organize humane transition centers, guarantee an education, teach English and Spanish, inculcate the basics of democracy through civics, American history, and entrepreneurship — as we do our own. Once trained here, some would return and implant our values in their home countries. Indeed, it is the lack of such institutions and opportunities —not to mention crime, corruption, gang violence, economic devastation, and drought caused by global warming— in their homeland that has driven them here. Such a plan would implement the vision articulated but not effectuated by presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush of spreading democracy. When we wake up and do that, we would teach not only by precept but also by example. Yes, these ideas would be expensive, but this investment would yield ample returns in economic benefit and international good will. We Americans like to think of ourselves as world leaders. How can we ignore an opportunity like this?

Conscience and Citizenship

May 24, 2019 by Alan Bernstein 1 Comment

Some Supreme Court cases in recent years have asserted a constitutional right to religious freedom using the First Amendment’s protection of “the free exercise of religion.” In the case involving the Masterpiece Cakeshop, the owner claimed a religious right to deny service to certain customers. That argument has entered the realm of medicine. In 2019, Donald Trump’s White House asserts that “conscience protections” give medical professionals the right, on religious grounds, to refuse to perform, or inform about, or refer patients to practitioners willing to carry out procedures such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide.

The free exercise of religion is the right to hold whatever religious beliefs one accepts, to worship with co-religionists, to adhere to the same moral precepts as they do . . . or not (because religious freedom also includes freedom from religion). Except in the mentally ill, all adults have an innate ability to distinguish right from wrong, that is, a conscience. Conscience is not the monopoly of religious persons; it is characteristic of humanity.

What, then, is special about religion? In addition to creedal statements about the nature of ultimate reality and narratives about inspired leaders, religions enjoin some behaviors (prayer, charity, pilgrimage) and forbid others (idolatry, blasphemy, murder, stealing, lying, adultery, banned food or drink). Some religions actively seek to expand through missionary work, conquest, or by physically eliminating adherents to other faiths. Religions often exclude from their own community people who modify or challenge their teachings, ignore their practices, or perform prohibited acts. Non-conformists are to be shunned. They are denounced as apostates, backsliders, or heretics, and stigmatized as damnable. Often, they are persecuted and sometimes executed.

In the U. S., legal enforcement of these disciplinary provisions would deprive individuals of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The free exercise of religion promised in the First Amendment does not confer the right to deprive citizens of the equal protection under the law promised in the Fourteenth. These denials would impede equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, other promised freedoms (voting, education, welfare), and equal economic opportunity. Could the followers of only one religion, claiming the absolute truth of their faith, discriminate on this basis? The danger here is immense! Some religious people fear a turning of the tables by which secular people or “Nones,” those who adhere to none of the religions, could persecute the faithful. But the First and Fourteenth Amendments also protect religious practitioners. The guarantees work both ways. And so they must!

If Congress can do nothing to establish religion or prohibit its free exercise, it would appear that no government, whether federal or local, can forbid what one’s religion enjoins. Yet the law does interdict practices considered religious by some: polygamy, genital mutilation, ritual drug use. If Congress cannot (generally) prohibit religious practices, is the converse true? Just because religions can ban lawful practices their faith forbids, can they also require adherents to prevent lawful practices of non-adherents?

Here is the conflict between conscience and citizenship. If conscience demands departure from law, then suffer the consequences specified in law and protect your conscience. This happens when you rank conscience over citizenship. But if opposing parties each assert a basis in conscience for their conflicting positions, then conscience cannot rule, only law. If citizenship makes us equal, as it must, then citizenship is prior to conscience because only citizenship will protect our various appeals to conscience on an equal basis. Therefore, to prioritize one citizen’s conscience over another’s is to deny the latter person’s right to equal treatment as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Since it is wrong to assume that only religious people have a conscience and since the First Amendment states “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” then no one person’s conscience can override another’s. Law must outweigh conscience in the guarantee of equal rights.

Tackling Socialism

April 25, 2019 by Alan Bernstein 2 Comments

As the campaign for the 2020 U. S. presidential election begins, we see many Democratic candidates calling themselves socialists of one sort or another. At the same time, President Trump and other Republicans denounce their potential opponents precisely for wanting to make America socialist. To assess this conflict correctly, it’s necessary to understand what socialism is and what it isn’t.

Because Karl Marx believed socialism is a step on the way to Communism, some people are simply afraid of the idea. Even the word “social” can seem suspect. Cherishing individual rights, many fear that attention to society or social concerns may erode their property or their freedom. But this fear is misplaced. Beyond the focus we rightly put on ourselves as individuals, the interactions we pursue with others are social. Members of families, schools, clubs, teams (even fans of the same team), neighborhoods, businesses, military units, towns, and, on a larger scale, races, religions, countries, genders — enjoy social bonds. The term should not be toxic.

A. Socialism is not Communism. What’s more, socialism is no one thing. To be sure, there is a very threatening definition of socialism used by those who are most opposed to it. They call it a system of government or society “in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.” Historically, societies with state-controlled economies are already Communist. In these, the people have no input; the state is in total control even if the government stages phony elections. Socialism is the desire to construct, by democratic means, an economy that diminishes inequality and augments equality of rights, security, and opportunity. Some prefer to call this system “social democracy.” That’s because some dictators have abused the term “socialism” or “socialist” to hide their accumulation of power, but others have done the same thing with religion and other disguises, like military exploits or nationalism. It is not socialism that leads to dictatorship, but dictators who mislead a negligent and credulous population. Dictators have many ways to achieve their goals and hiding behind a vague abstraction is a common tactic.

Unlike socialism, Communism is despotism — unquestionable command. Marx saw Communism as an inevitable result of two converging developments. Discipline learned in the factories, he theorized, would empower propertyless workers (the proletariat) to overthrow the shrinking class of capitalists who would eliminate one another through their monopolistic, self-destructive competition until the remaining few could no longer resist overthrow by their own workers. The result would be what he gleefully called the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, this involved KGB purges, closure of churches, anti-Semitism, forced industrialization, planned famines (genocide), censorship, the gulags with their enforced psychological treatments, and more. It was an economy run by dictatorial command. In contrast to this mechanistic model of Communism, socialism is instituted democratically and run by elected representatives. Measures that socialist governments propose can therefore be challenged and corrected. Republican leaders in the U. S. refer to socialism as if it were Communist totalitarianism — a smear tactic. To suggest that Democrats desire socialism like the (not socialist) dictatorship now afflicting Venezuela or Cuba smacks of slander.

American progressives today advocate various blends of socialism and capitalism. Only the hardest of hard-liners call for the abolition of capitalism and for government ownership of all enterprise — which would no longer be enterprise. And, it’s worth noting, in American capitalism today, the government is one of the biggest clients of private companies such as defense and intelligence contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Leidos. In 2018, 45 companies did over half a billion dollars with the government for a total of some $89 billion. There is a symbiosis between private industry and socially (taxpayer-) funded projects. Government and business are not always opposed parties.

Economic conservatives rightly observe that in countries generally considered socialist, such as those in Scandinavia, private enterprise thrives. “There is a positive link from welfare state provisions to the productivity of private enterprises,” say Erling Barth, a Norwegian economist, and his co-authors. In the Nordic countries, wage differentials are generally small, which makes it expensive to hire unskilled workers but less expensive for highly skilled ones. So efficient enterprises can open and flourish while less efficient ones close more easily. Simultaneously, taxation benefits those who must gain new skills to improve their employment. To balance this healthy ferment, the system also supports education, health care, and retirement benefits generally. By diminishing the difference between “winners” and “losers,” workers and entrepreneurs can take risks, and innovation thrives. Barth says generous social support increases reciprocity, trust, and security. “[T]his is an example of the complementarity between worker security and capitalist dynamics.” Even though “the evaluation of the public good may also reflect the concern for others,” altruism alone is not the goal. The system pays. Nor should this blueprint be applied rigidly anywhere. The Nordic countries have made their individual adjustments. In the U. S., we have traditions that would not easily tolerate so radical a restructuring. Still, it is encouraging that potentially attractive alternatives are out there to consider.

Even those who enthusiastically proclaim themselves socialist do not agree on precisely the form of socialism they advocate. But even if they did, in the U.S., the constitution, elections, representation, and the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and right to oppose government make any form of socialism introduced here the antithesis of Communism. Besides, from about 1900 our country has a long tradition of outlawing or correcting the worse abuses of capitalism. These include child labor laws, government-imposed standards for safe workplaces, accuracy in labeling, truth in advertising, anti-monopoly laws, and legalized collective bargaining. Our citizenry welcomes the protection afforded by social security, welfare, food stamps, and disability and unemployment insurance that reduce the worst inequities in the distribution of wealth. The Republican George W. Bush improved these protections with prescription insurance (Medicare, Part D) as did the Democrat Barack Obama with the Affordable Care Act. Plans to reduce the roughest edges of capitalism are not inimical to it; they protect it.

B. Capitalism has evolved. If it’s a distortion to say that socialism leads to Communism, it’s also wrong to pretend that capitalism in the U.S. today conforms to its own ideals. Favoritism, the purchase of influence, plutocracy, the international loyalties of multi-national firms, lobbying for special consideration for individual industries from farms to fossil fuels to IT are inconsistent with what its theorists claim for capitalism. How can you have Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” when lobbyists procure privileges for their particular interests or when the government bails out companies deemed “too big to fail”? How can you renew the leadership cadres of the top enterprises if employers reserve positions for their social class or gender or race while ignoring other talent? What competition remains when colleges reserve legacy positions for the children of alums?

In its best conception of itself, capitalism assumes that an exchange of goods and services (by definition — “goods,” “services,” right?) is a reciprocally beneficial relationship between buyer and seller. Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations in 1776 provided its classic definition, held this belief. Long before that, in another work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he explained how the economy is intimately connected to morality, compassion, and service to one another. One chapter has the title “Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition.” (In the 18th century, authors used long titles.) The world’s first great advocate of capitalism deplored the tendency of an economy to scorn the less fortunate. He understood that an economy must fit society’s moral values.

C. Individualism. One of the chief objections to socialism is the charge that it leads to conformity. Extrapolating from excesses in the Soviet Union, critics like George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm) depict socialism as a system enforcing uniformity in thought and action. But the antidote can exaggerate in the opposite direction. For example, the heroes in Ayn Rand’s best-known novels (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) are materialist, self-seeking, and soulless. Rand portrays only the rich as good, the poor as losers, the charitable as suckers, and recipients of charity as parasites. This praise of self-aggrandizement, acquisitiveness for its own sake, is ultimately a godless, secular ideology, like Communism.

We must, indeed, fight conformism. But to do so, we must identify all its sources. Communist propaganda and censorship are certainly one. Superstition and religious orthodoxy can be others. So can fads inspired by public relations, social media, and advertising. Indeed, attacks on capitalist-inspired conformity come from left and right. There’s the famous scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times of a worker being devoured by the gears of a giant machine. Surely a critique from the left.

But then there’s Apple Computer’s famed commercial depicting attaché case-carrying and blindfolded employees in suits marching like lemmings over a cliff.

It attributes the same faults to its rivals’ practice of capitalism as conservatives attach to socialism: uniformity and blind obedience.

A similar symbol is the office cubicle.

D. Conclusion. Mass production, economies of scale, pervasive advertising, market saturation, and now, potentially, artificial intelligence: all are summed up in our scornful phrase “one size fits all.” In short, capitalism can reduce humans to machine status just as capitalists say socialism does. There must be a mid-point — a happy medium — where socialism and capitalism check each other. More positively, taking a cue from Erling Barth, there may be a way for socialism and capitalism to energize one another.

Conservatives and liberals in America should not see each other as enemies or threats to one another’s way of life, but as fellow citizens — partners in debate. So let’s find the best solutions by trimming away the fallacies in each other’s positions and come to the most workable solutions to which we can contribute willingly because they were arrived at by these superior means.

« Previous Page