Might Objectivism become the Communism of the 21st Century?

Political movements tend to come in cycles, especially when switching between extremes. The further to the left or right a country or other group heads in one generation, then often the further they'll swing to the opposite in the next few. Germany for instance, was utterly taken over by Nazism, one of the most right-wing ideological movements in all history, in the 1930s but following WW2 the Germans have basically turned into near-Pacifists now, as if they're trying to make up for their history by being as progressive as possible today. In any democracy this pattern should be evident as well. No matter how successful a government, people's attitudes eventually change and the political tides sweep the other way.

Technological change comes hand in hand with this process. Modern systems such as capitalism and representative democracy were hardly possible before the invention of the printing press. How can you have elections, or stock markets or a currency when 99% of the population can't read or write? Many people these days wonder why authoritarian systems like monarchies and theocracies dominated human society for so long. Why were people so complacent about such an undemocratic system? Didn't they want to rise up and let their voices be heard? Well the answer is that it's simply very difficult to harness people power with medieval technology. Most people rarely travelled more than a few kilometres beyond the village where they were born. Famines and plagues would sweep through a population and kill off a significant portion of it every few years or decades at best. Giving everyone the vote in 1500 AD would be, to put it harshly, akin to giving six year olds the vote today. The results could have been disastrous and led to a much less efficient and versatile system of government then simply having a small, connected royal court make decisions, despite the flaws and corruption inherent to that order. Once large portions of the population began to be educated, it was the perfect breeding ground for a new wave of ideas.

The hyper religious institutions that dominated Europe up until the 17th century saw the rising tide of modernism sweep aside their dominance with the coming of the enlightenment and later movements from about the 1770s onwards. Imperialism and nationalism, tied in with religion more often than not, were particularly strong movements in the 18th and 19th centuries. Atrocities from the conquest of Tenochtitlan to the Boer War were often fundamentally justified on the basis that the Europeans, being a 'superior' civilization to all others in the world, could basically do whatever they pleased regardless of how many millions died as a result. Of course while the wiping out of the American Indians and Australian aborigines was somewhat inevitable, many later imperialist atrocities certainly were not. The millions slaughtered in the Belgian Congo or who died of manmade famines in British India were innocent victims of an unnecessarily harsh system based heavily on racism. It's no wonder that anti-colonialism became so widespread as the 20th century progressed.

No description of the 20th century would be complete without looking in detail at Communism. Modern conservatives often use the atrocities committed under communist regimes as a political football to attack their progressive opponents, branding any mildly left-wing policies as anti-business and inflating their significance greatly until much of the public is convinced that another 'Cultural Revolution' is imminent. An excellent example is the way Republicans in the US have branded Democrat's recent attempts to reform healthcare as trying to import 'radical socialist' ideas to America. This is so far removed from the reality that such attacks should be treated with scorn, yet a great number of Americans have fallen for such propaganda. One wonders why the Democrats don't retaliate with mirroring accusations. If fining people for not buying health insurance is just a stone's throw from the Holodomor, then isn't helping large corporations crush the union movement a modern Night of the Long Knives?

Generations of peasants and young revolutionaries in Russia grew increasingly discontented with the rule of the Russian royal family as the 19th century went on. Unlike in western Europe where fledging democratic systems allowed the people's voices to be heard as the power of royalty faded, Russia remained an absolute monarchy right up until the 1917 revolution. The First World War of course, split wide open the cracks in an already ailing system. The Tsar sent millions of young men to pointlessly fight and die, ill-equipped and ill-led, on the eastern front. Such conditions were the perfect breeding ground for left-wing ideals to spread. Men in the trenches on all fronts began to feel greater solidarity with the poor, wretched souls just across No Man's Land than with their own upper-class officers sitting comfortably in their headquarters tens of miles behind the front.

In understanding the difference between left and right-wing ideologies, the simplest description is to simply ask whether a policy encourages maximising either cooperation or competition. The left believes in the former. It seeks an end to prejudices such as racism and sexism, champions democracy, equal opportunity, the welfare state and as far as possible pacifism. The right believes in the latter, championing free markets, ethical egoism, self-reliance and a sympathy for hierarchical government systems.

Just as tens of millions of people were killed by right-wing ideological ideas in the 18th and 19th centuries, the opposite occurred in the 20th as well. Stalin, through manmade famines or purges, killed some 20 million people between the 1920s and the 1950s. Mao in China arguably killed a lot more. Regimes such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the still existing North Korean regime caused millions more deaths, deliberately or at least unnecessarily. The total death toll due to Communism in the 20th century is probably upwards of 50 million. However it is worth noting that even this enormous figure is well under half of the 200 odd million deaths due to wars and genocides between 1900 and 2000. The World Wars, caused of course by right-wing nationalism or fascism coming to power in Europe and Japan, killed around a hundred million people between them. Colonial conquests were still ongoing early in the century, by the British in South Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the Germans in Tanzania and Namibia and the Americans in the Philippines. Anti-colonial wars later swept through many of the same countries and caused millions more deaths. No matter how you balance the numbers, the Communists killed far fewer people than the right-wing regimes they competed with during the 20th century.

Nearly all modern western countries do not, despite what some may think, lean heavily towards the left or the right politically. They are a mix of both. They have a democratic voting system overseeing a regulated free market alongside a generous welfare state. Political power is not greatly concentrated in any institution, be it left or right wing, and this makes large scale genocides and fundamental structural problems in society rare. The greatest threat to the prosperity of such nations is not terrorism or climate change, it is their own ideological extremes becoming mainstream and suddenly finding themselves in a position to greatly reform society at their whim. Such processes, once they have begun, tend to gain momentum as they progress and as such can be very hard to stop, let alone reverse. This can be seen historically with such events as the French Revolution in the 1780s, the October Revolution in 1917 and Hitler's coming to power in 1933. Bloody turmoil of one form or another commonly follows.

This little history lesson brings us to today's topic. It concerns a growing movement which most people are only just starting to wake up to the existence of, namely the far right-wing philosophy that has so firmly taken power over many conservatives in the US and increasingly elsewhere lately, that of 'Objectivism'. Just as Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in the 1840s as a critique of 19th century capitalism, Ayn Rand, a women born in Russia who in her youth lived through the chaos of the Russian revolution, wrote a series of novels in the 1940s and '50s criticising 20th century Communism. Chief among them are the fiction books 'The Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged'. Her philosophy champions individualism, ethical egoism and flatly rejects any notion that collectivised action is ever worthwhile.

Just as Marx's ideas took decades to permeate through the social consciousness and several generations before serious political movements and governments began to rely on them, Objectivism has been festering for quite a while on the American political scene. Republicans have for the better part of a century been more wary of increasing government power than Democrats, but over the last thirty years or so, notably since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 on a platform proclaiming that 'government is the problem, not the solution', this wariness has turned into outright hostility. In just a few short years the implementation of many facets of this newfound ideological movement has severely impaired the American economy. Clinton's surplus when he left office in 2000 quickly disappeared in the face of the Bush tax cuts and the War on Terror. Financial deregulation contributed to the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, and the election of Barack Obama did little to stem the flow of events due to Republican obstructionism in congress. Only for 14 weeks did the Democrats have a filibuster proof majority in the senate, during which they managed to slip through a greatly watered down healthcare reform bill and, well, not much else.

Regardless of who wins the 2012 presidential election (and it's still looking likely to be Obama) it's inevitable that a Republican will once again win the Whitehouse before long. Whether it happens this year or in 2016 or even 2020, the political winds will eventually shift back, and it seems likely that Obama's presidency will have only halted the march of Objectivism temporarily, not reversed it's course, and of course this phenomenon is not unique to America. Conservatives in many countries, from Margaret Thatcher in Britain to Tony Abbott (currently leader of the opposition here in Australia) are increasingly taking their cues from their big brothers across the pond. Conservative parties in many western governments face much the same electoral challenges. Chief among these, and this may be the main driver of their dramatic ongoing shift to the right, is a demographic one. Conservative voters tend to be older, whiter, and less educated than the general population. These are the exact groups which are being increasingly marginalised as university education becomes more common, and the population grows younger and more multicultural due to immigration from overseas. The specifics of this shift may differ, Latinos for instance are now the largest minority group in America, while in Australia it's Asians and in many Europeans countries Muslims and Africans, but the underlying reality is the same. A similarly unwelcome shift has occurred in an economic sense. Most western countries have a rapidly ballooning welfare state, looking after their growing populations of elderly as medical technology has improved, and the chronically unemployed as their jobs have headed overseas because of cheap third world labour.

This chain of events bears some remarkable similarities to the earliest incarnations of socialism and communism a century or so ago. Increasingly sick of right-wing disasters such as the First World War, Imperialist conquests and growing inequality, the downtrodden 'working class' overthrew the 'bourgeois' and sought to impose their strict worldview on society and then spread it globally. The opposite now appears to be happening. Fed up with the perceived dangers of a growing welfare state, a progressive taxation system, not to mention secularism and multiculturalism, the Objectivists along the far right seek to dismantle all forms of 'big government' and replace it with, well what exactly? Just how bad could things get?

Some 30,000 people already die every year in the US because they lack health insurance, and a similar number die of firearm related deaths. Both phenomenon are almost entirely preventable, as evidenced by the fact that every single other developed country in the world has long since introduced universal healthcare and such a system has, put simply, worked wonders, being vastly more efficient then one where private options do not have to compete with a public one. The US, once one of the world's most liveable countries, has plunged to 49th in life expectancy. Firearm related deaths are 5-10 times the average among western countries, as is the incarceration rate. 2.5 million people are now in jail in the United States. Almost one in a hundred. More than half of them are there having committed no violent crimes. About a quarter of the total because of mere drug offenses. It's right-wing social engineering to an extent not historically seen in decades.

The next Republican president, unless the situation changes quite dramatically, would be constrained into a very narrow ideological straitjacket to satisfy his Randian base. Further tax cuts would cause the deficit to balloon further without noticeably stimulating the economy, as has been the case under Regan and Bush. The influence of big corporations would continue to increase, the wealth gap would continue to skyrocket, military spending could not be allowed to decrease from the dazzling highs it reached following the massive overseas deployments involved in the war on terror, vote-rigging in elections, already common, could become the norm, and any foreign governments thinking of defying US business interests overseas would be playing a very dangerous game. Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected left-wing president of Venezuela (yet labelled a tyrant by conservatives) might be targeted by the Republicans as the next target for an American-led invasion. Sounds implausible? Americans have been persuaded to enter into far more pointless and disastrous wars, such as Vietnam and Iraq. And what would give the Americans the right to carry out such brutal actions? It's the old European excuse. We consider ourselves superior to the rest of the world, so that gives us the right to do as we please. Sound familiar?

America under Objectivism could follow a roughly similar path to Russia once Communism had taken hold. Shunned yet feared by the international community, opposed by western democratic governments and third world countries alike. Given their history of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, it's hardly likely that the Americans would hesitate to try and export their ideology overseas. Already right-leaning countries like Japan and Britain might be quick to adopt it, through coercion or not. America's vast military might, including a navy more powerful than the rest of the world's combined, would give real backbone to such movements, just as Communism spread to a multitude of countries after the Soviet Union's colossal victory in the Second World War. Judging by American actions during the cold war, left-leaning populist governments worldwide should be ever more wary in future of US-backed coups.

Whereas ordinary right-wing governments are usually content to simply ignore the plight of the poor and weak in society, a common feature of Objectivist ranting is to take the fight to the 'takers' in society and end their exploitation of the 'makers'. And no, that is not the old communist rhetoric of the bourgeois living off the blood and sweat of the working class, but completely the other way round. In the objectivist worldview, prosperity comes not from the spending of consumers or the hard work of labourers, but from the leadership of the wealthy elite. I hate to break Godwin's rule so easily, but doesn't such dire anti-collectivist rhetoric mirror the message of the Nazi party in Germany above all others? The idea that a new holocaust could take place in a modern western country may sound absurd, but indeed stranger things have happened. Europe at the start of 1914 had no idea that within a year millions of it's finest young men would have died in a terrible slaughter the likes of which civilization had never seen. Similarly, many impartial observers in 1900 thought of Germany as among the most prosperous and enlightened societies in the world, yet within 40 years it was committing genocide on an unprecedented scale. One mustn't forget that even as late as 1939 Hitler did not intend to physically wipe out the Jews and other 'untermenschen', but merely to deport them and destroy their influence over the rest of society. Things escalated from there.

Should the modern 'untermenschen' in America, and perhaps other societies, be worried? Who does the Tea Bagger crowd hate the most? Homosexuals are surely on the list, just as they were in Europe for many centuries and in Nazi Germany in particular. Immigrants, from Latinos to Muslims, are most definitely up there as well. Scientists, environmentalists, unions, atheists and the poor have to round out the most despised groups in Bible Belt America. The hatred felt by many conservative Americans for such groups is readily visible. Polls show for instance that racism in America, despite protests to the contrary, is still alive and well. More than 40% of Mississippi Republicans still do not believe that interracial marriage should even be legal. This is a society where as recently as a generation ago, black people had to sit at the back of the bus. Such prejudice dies hard.

Of course none of this scenario would be plausible if it weren't for the western world's current economic woes. Even when running a budget deficit of over $1 trillion a year, unemployment in America has been stuck over 8% for over three years, and underemployment, perhaps a more useful figure, is closer to 15%. More than half of all Americans now live off some form of welfare. Societies stuck in such doldrums for long can turn into absolute powder kegs, as the aftermath of the Great Depression showed. Many Americans seem to sense that widespread social unrest across the country may be imminent. There are now 90 guns per 100 people across America. By comparison the average among western countries is only 10-20 and the second highest rate in the world is found in war-torn Yemen, and is still only 50 guns per 100 people. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests across the country since 2009 may be only just the beginning.

How was Communism defeated? By better example. It is somewhat ironic that Communist revolts began to occur just as worker's rights were starting to be taken more seriously in many countries. Though of course a lot of the progress made by labour movements in the western world no doubt owed it's success to fears that a full-blown Communist revolt could take place if their demands were not met. By the 1980s it was realised, even in die-hard Communist circles, that a mix of socialism and capitalism produced better results than just one or the other. It could take generations before far-right Objectivists learn the same lesson. This is true regardless of whether they remain on the fringes of society or fully progress to the mainstream, though the latter is unfortunately looking more likely with every passing year.

History shows that the status quo in any society can often unravel with frightening speed. America's future may proceed without great disruption. But if we're unlucky, can it really be denied that such an Objectivist revolution could occur within the next few years or decades, and plunge much of the world into chaos for generations as happened after Russia fell to the Communists in 1917? Only time will tell. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were all far bloodier than the preceding time periods. Why should the 21st century be the one to break the trend?