A book that rivals ‘Foot Ball’

Today, looking to correct a YouTube comment, I stumbled upon a book that at first was curious to me but when I open a small sample I realised immediately that I had stumbled upon a book as bad as R. Picken’s awful Foot Ball of many years ago.

Written by one Larry Robinson and originally published in 2020, the book is titled “The Myth of the Moderate Democrat: How the Party of Jacksonian Democracy transitioned to Marxist Statist Collectivism”. Its author claims to have been a political junkie for six decades before the publication of The Myth of the Moderate Democrat, and to be a pastor, evangelist and theologian possessing a Doctor of Divinity.

What Robinson said in the section of the book that was accessible is at first familiar Republican propaganda — that FDR governed with a Marxist ideology. Whilst there may have been Communist sympathisers in American government during the New Deal era, the reality is that the New Deal was a series of largely ineffective compromises involving many players not only within the United States. As Ron Rogowski in his Commerce and Coalitions and Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert in American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History demonstrate, the New Deal was a by-product of a series of revolutions and hyperinflations that affected Europe after post-World War I chaos whereby Europe’s working classes supported the Bolshevik Revolution but failed to spread it beyond the Russian Empire. The result of all these processes was a prolonged “deglobalisation” that lasted until the rise of the oil monarchies in the middle 1970s, while the result of deglobalisation in capital- and land-rich nations [North America, continental Oceania] was a pronounced, but historically unique reduction in income inequality. 

FDR was never a Marxist. In fact, as Thomas Paul Bonflglio noted in his 2012 The Psychopathology of American Capitalism, the New Deal was accompanied by a dismantling of the left-leaning parties of the first third of the century. Especially in the nonplantation South and some Western states settled therefrom [e.g. Nebraska], ballot laws became so rigid that formerly not insignificant “socialist” parties could never even access the ballot. As Bonfiglio noted, this placed American politics, especially after the war, in a unique position whereby “left” meant what most would consider right-wing, and anything remotely centrist was called “far left”, which has always made me laugh. Also, unlike the social liberalism of the European working classes, who supported legalisation of homosexuality in the 1920s or earlier, the New Deal was socially highly conservative, involving a uniquely strict “Motion Picture Production Code”. Following the collapse of the union base beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats did reverse themselves vis-à-vis the New Deal in order to stay viable. However, this made the 1990 to 2020 Democratic Party one of strong social liberalism combined with — by the standards of the rest of the world — strong economic conservatism. Today, demography and the desire of the global ruling classes to overcome the (high but insufficient) ceiling social liberalism places on corporate profits is, if the World Socialist Web Site’s [originally New York Times’] assessment of declining Democratic membership and registration be accurate, likely to make the Democratic Party less and less viable with time.

Robinson does not understand that Democrats completely abandoned collectivism after the 1980s, and their embrace of social liberalism in the 1960s is evidence they were abandoning it then. By the 1990s the difference between the parties became exclusively social rather than economic, because the hegemony of big business as donors absolutely excludes any party representing the bottom nine-tenth or more of America’s economic distribution. Demography, in this situation, defeats liberalism because the socially liberal tend to have extremely few if any children, which explains the present takeover of the radical right at a global level.

Did Barrington Moore write too early?

Re-downloading and re-reading Ron Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I was struck by a quite interesting and revealing quotation:

“In one of the classic works of modern comparative sociology, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967) [Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy] focused attention on a particularly malignant — indeed, protofascist — developmental coalition, namely the protectionist one of capitalists and landowners against labor. If the present [Commerce and Coalitions, 1989] approach is correct, such an alliance was likeliest to arise in the formative nineteenth century in countries where land and capital were both scarce and only labor was abundant — that is, virtually all of Europe save its economically advanced northwestern corner, and all of eastern and southern Asia. There capital and land could be expected to unite in support of protection and imperialism; only labor, and the most labor-intensive agricultural and manufacturing enterprises, will normally have supported free trade and a less expansive foreign policy.

What Moore saw — rightly, in my [Rogowski’s] estimation — as the far more hopeful coalition of capital and labor should have arisen, according to the present theory, principally in two quite different circumstances: where both of those factors were abundant, and only land was scarce (essentially northwestern Europe, our first case[)]; and where both labor and capital were scarce, and only land was abundant (the “frontier” societies of the third case). In the former case, workers and capitalists alike will have favored free trade and a foreign policy of restraint; in the latter, both will have embraced protection and imperialism. In either of the two cases, however, the fatal alliance of land and capital is circumvented and, in Moore's perceptive telling, the path to a tolerably free society remains open.”

In light of last year’s US presidential election, the rise of Peter Dutton, and the much longer-term rise of geopolitically powerful petro-dictatorships, I get the feeling that Moore wrote his book too early, indeed much too early.

As I have repeatedly emphasised over the past two years, during the era discussed by Moore there existed no example of Rogowski’s “fourth case” — where both capital and land were abundant and only labour was scarce. Under such a situation, which today prevails in:

1. North America
2. continental Oceania [Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia]
3. the Persian Gulf oil states
4. the more advanced countries within North and Central Asia

capital and land are expected to unite in favour of free trade and a (theoretically) less expansive foreign policy, while labour and more labour-intensive enterprises will favour protectionism and (theoretically) imperialism. The problem, which Rogowski does hint at, is that the recent history of the United States and the East Slavic and Turkic “core USSR”, alongside the entire history of the Gulf States since oil was discovered, demonstrate the capital and land are never satisfied with whatever suppression of labour they achieve, because their goal, as emphasised here and here by Red Flag Magazine, is always to increase profit. Moreover, the scarcity of labour encourages ruling classes to import labour in order to lower wages in the labour-intensive nontradable sector. This has several critical effects:

1. it virtually eliminates the ability of labour in those labour-abundant countries [South Asia, Tajikistan, the Levant, Central America and the Caribbean, non-continental Oceania] from which labour is imported to gain from exporting
2. it reduces the ability of the countries noted in 1) to offer competition for the capital- and land-intensive production via labour-intensive production
3. it thus eliminates the political power of labour in the countries noted in 1) and further increases the control of capital and land in countries rich in both
4. as Christopher Allen Culver of Pennsylvania State University and the US Air Force Academy has noted in his ‘Remittances and Autocratic Regime Stability’ and ‘Manipulating Remittances’, remittances sent back to the countries noted in 1) allow these labour-abundant countries stronger currencies, which further:
1. weakens export competitiveness
2. strengthens local capital and land against labour
3. strengthens the global hand of the ruling elites in capital- and land-rich nations

As discussed most explicitly by the late Sophie Body-Gendtrot in her 2002 The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective, the ruling elites of this free-trading coalition favour the most extreme possible social control of the domestic underclass. Although it is not explicitly discussed, the fact that the wealthy favour the most intense policing is, plainly, because political activity — requiring international class solidarity — is the only exit route for the ghetto underclass. Mass incarceration is a direct reflection of the political hegemony of America’s very rich, whose primary goal is closing any route to a challenge from the bottom ninety percent. Placing the poorest and potentially most dangerous under direct control is a huge step towards this goal, and the Gulf States do the same thing via their contract system with expatriate workers. Labour, contrariwise, will favour a much more open and free domestic policy, illustrating Sigmund Freud’s principle that economic freedom is opposed to political and sexual freedom.

Free-trading capital and land under expanding trade must ensure trade continues to expand. Externally driven declining trade [via export controls by labour-rich nations, as with Cold War-era Southern Africa] will in these labour-scarce trade-open economies empower previously powerless labour, as discussed by Ron Rogowski, and Texas Tech’s David Letzkian and Dennis Patterson. A free-trading coalition of capital and land must thus ensure labour-rich nations cannot restrict exports to them. Consequently, the theoretically less expansive foreign policy of the free-trading coalition of capital and land becomes much less restrained than Stolper–Samuelson theory predicts. This factor explains the existence of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, whose strict and enforceable trade rules are exceedingly critical to the global power of the United States and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies. Alexander Etkind in his Russia Against Modernity (reviewed here) similarly suggests that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed to prevent foreign states decarbonising and Russia losing its fossil fuel profits. Whilst Etkind’s assessment is debatable, massive and influential lobbying by the Gulf States in the West is much more definitively aimed at preventing the loss of profits through reduced global oil and gas use. US wars against Central America (between 1944 and 1996) undoubtedly had the same aim of preventing those nations controlling trade.

Returning to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore did note the importance of the alliance between Southern planters and northern industrialists to US politics — transformed today into an alliance of fossil fuel producers and giant agribusinesses — since the great globalisation following Reconstruction. He noted the possibility of this coalition evolving earlier, which presumably would have shaped the US into the de facto oligarchy it became during the Jim Crow era and more decisively after the expansion of trade that began according to Rogowski in 1963 — but minus the democratising reforms of Reconstruction. In Saudi Arabia, power-sharing between the Al Saud and Al Ash-Sheikh meant an alliance between the rentier capital of the state and the Wahhabi clergy (land) had forged a free-trading coalition even before capital became abundant after oil was discovered. Similar links between imams and sheikhs developed in other Gulf states. This has prevented any possibility of a tolerably free society for anyone except capitalists and the traditional nomadic pastoralists, and, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is potentially much more dangerous in the long term than the better-known protectionist alliance of land and capital.

Another idea from ‘Commerce and Coalitions’: Why no tradition of private charity in most of the world?

Looking again at Ron Rogowski’s book Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affected Domestic Political Alignment, it has occurred to me that his theory might explain something I have long known about but have never even attempted to explain.

This question is about why traditions of private charity are so geographically restricted. Despite the commendation of private charity in all or almost all traditional religious systems, large-scale traditions thereof are exceedingly restricted. They are extremely well developed in the United States, marginally developed in the United Kingdom, well developed in the wealthier Muslim nations (zakat is a Muslim pillar), but almost absent everywhere else in the world.

Throughout my life, I have romanticised private charity, despite the fact that, as groups like Resistance [now part of Socialist Alliance] demonstrated to me a quarter of a century ago, its primary purpose has always been to prevent either:

1. rebellion by the oppressed and/or 
2. money getting into the control of the immense majority, as this quote from Socialist Worker demonstrates:

“Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg's private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers and from democratic control, writes Jason Farbman, in an article published [originally ]at Jacobin.”

I have always felt, without any sense of logic, that a society based on private charity would be softer, friendlier, more hospitable, and less selfish than one based upon taxation, despite the refutation of this argument by countless socialist groups over almost two centuries. Even among non-Marxists, Emory Paul alongside Jordan Weissman and Mike Konczal demonstrate private charity has never been able to eliminate poverty, whilst Kathleen Wellman in her recent Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters notes on page 286 that:

“private charity never provided an adequate social safety net before the Social Security Act of 1935 [Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), page 460]”

In fact, I will plainly confess that my romanticism noted above comes from the idea that private charity might provide a completely adequate social safety net — implicitly viewed possible by such books as the Politically Incorrect Guides.

If we follow from what socialist groups say, and from Rogowski, the geographically restricted nature of private charity becomes no surprise. Although the very rich will always prefer private charity to taxation, and most likely prefer private charity to paying rents to government, private charity still costs them a lot of money. Thus, something must be gained by the extremely rich from large-scale private charity before they will offer it. Under most economic conditions, very low wages for labour will cost the wealthy less than large-scale private charities — after all, the rich must exploit workers to become rich. The exception will occur when the profits from using labour are limited by scarcity and the rich can gain much more from owning and profiting from capital and/or land. This will occur when goods that use labour significantly can be more economically imported than produced locally, and low-skill labour becomes restricted to a limited range of nontradable industries. Under these conditions — export of capital- and land-intensive goods and import of all even modestly labour-intensive ones — the ruling class can gain politically by demoting to private charity. Charity here:

1. prevents local labour from politically organising in the absence of employment opportunities
2. prevents the governments of labour-abundant societies from becoming independent of capital- and land-abundant ones
3. serves to allow the local ruling class(es) to justify its views via philosophy
• e.g. right-wing think tanks in the US and jihadist groups funded by Saudi, Qatari and Emirati charity
4. allows the ruling class to discriminate in whom it gives its donations to, so as to divide the lower classes by race and ethnicity and eliminate the possibility of a unified nonelite

Where labour is abundant, contrariwise, the ruling class will always profit most from employing it, while much less potential profits exist from labour-efficient production. Such a ruling class has neither the ability nor the incentive to encourage charity: it requires abundant labour to engage in the colonialism found when both capital and land lose from free trade and restrained foreign policies. Thus, enduring abundance of labour in Europe and monsoonal Asia is enough of itself to explain the absence of large-scale private charity in these societies — exactly as with anarcho-capitalism. In fact, large-scale private charity appears to require extreme scarcity of labour. Commerce and Coalitions notes in its discussion of the long sixteenth century that in 1750 Latin America was ten times less sparsely populated than North America. This suggests that, although Latin America imported labour-intensive goods, there was not the same incentive to economise on labour and for owners of land — whose ownership was much more concentrated than among whites in North America — to engage in private philanthropy amongst the lower classes.

Another factor unrelated to Rogowski’s book that may explain the absence of traditions of private charity in Oceania and Latin America is that immigration was much more tightly controlled by colonial governments than in the United States. Thus, persecuted religious groups, who are important in the evolution of private charity, had less opportunity — and in the case of ancient Australia, ability — to escape persecution in these regions. This cannot be a full answer given that Canada, which had the same sort of settlement by such groups as the United States, did not develop the same traditions of private charity. Even so, it is a very reasonable hypothesis that significant private charity will invariably be confined to societies that are, or historically were, exceeding land-abundant and labour-scarce.

Least “average” yet most “American” — not the contradiction it seems

Several years ago, I read on Wikipedia about how Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States. I accepted that ideal easily, given that the state — excluding the Memphis, Tennessee-aligned southernmost three counties of Alexander, Pulaski and Massac — is a mixture of the Midwest and the nonplantation South, which I have come to view as the most generically “American” regions of the country.

Upon actually reading the article, originally published in The Southern Illinoisian in 2007, I found something somewhat surprising:

“West Virginia was the least typical state — poorer, whiter, more rural — followed by Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont and Kentucky.”

That New Hampshire and Vermont are among the least typical states is impossible to question. Although certain features of their cultures — among the most distinctive in the US — may be retained from or linked to Puritan history, their dependence on highly global industries like tourism and finance exposes them to highly modern influences.

Mississippi is a slightly complicated case. Although ever since the Civil rights era it has been thought exceptional, in reality its highly trouble civil rights history is not “Mississippi exceptionalism” but “Mississippi genericism” at least vis-à-vis the other wholly “Deep South” states of South Carolina and Louisiana. Both South Carolina and Louisiana are among the most distinctive states of the US culturally and in political structures. Mississippi, contrariwise, had and has political structures analogous to the nonplantation South (and most of the US).

It nonetheless surprised me that Kentucky and West Virginia would be called the least typical states. In many ways, especially regarding culture — not a criterion used by The Southern Illinoisan — Appalachia and other nonplantation areas of the South comprise the most distinctly “American” region of the United States. In that sense, West Virginia and Kentucky are (two of) the most “American” states in the country.

The interesting thing is that, when I think about it, there is no contradiction between being the least “typical” state and the most “American” one. The reason Appalachia and other nonplantation regions of the South are such is that they are almost completely unexposed to outside cultural influences. Instead, they have become what James Löwen called “white ghettoes”, but which he and I agreed are more accurately named “white cloisters”. For historical reasons, many rural areas in the nonplantation South, the Midwest and the interior west have chosen to isolate themselves from outside culture for either religious or racial reasons — which of course may be linked.

Why no anarcho-capitalism before the 1970s?

In Commerce and Coalitions, Ron Rogowski argued on pages 165 to 168 that socialism never evolved in the United States because of the enduring abundance of land and scarcity of labour. Whilst Rogowski is too timid about discussing race — for a start, the theories of Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, and later Wolfgang Stolper and Paul Samuelson, are in no way inconsistent with division on the basis of race if ownership of production factors be divided thereby — he does offer quite reasonable explanations in terms of how labour loses from trade and becomes either timid or powerless except during falling trade.

One related point I thought of on reading Rogowski but which has not been discussed is why anarcho-capitalism evolved where and when it did. Since the Republican Revolution, anarcho-capitalism has been a highly influential ideology amongst the US ruling class, with Randolph Hohle arguing that anarcho-capitalist and allied writers use a code of:

“private” = “White”

“public” = “Black”

to justify their vision of a society without public services. (Although Hohle says this code developed only after the civil rights revolution of the middle 1960s, I feel that it probably dates back to at least the early Republic when free blacks, as I noted previously, became viewed as wholly deviant.)

Despite its influence, anarcho-capitalism has never been subject to detailed scholarly study. The critical question is why, given the benefits not having to pay taxes would have to the extremely rich, anarcho-capitalism only became an established ideology in the 1970s, and never evolved in Europe or Japan at all. Here, Rogowski can provide a very clear answer. Anarcho-capitalism is, by definition, a militant movement of the upper classes to remove the power of labour, and in its goal to eliminate the public sector is the direct opposite of socialist movements aiming to eliminate the private sector. By inverting what Commerce and Coalitions says about socialism, we can predict logically that anarcho-capitalism (or similar militant movements against democracy) will arise where(ever) capital benefits from expanding trade and labour does not, that is, where capital is abundant and labour scarce. In Rogowski’s terminology, anarcho-capitalism will arise in advanced economies with a high land:labour ratio. Under these conditions, capital and land gain from free trade, whilst labour sees its opportunities restricted and its incomes reduced. Thus class struggle is intense as capital and land seek to eliminate the power of groups opposed to their unlimited power by funding politicians so dedicated, and ultimately to destroy all possible sources of power of such groups. Under this condition, those who do not lie at the very bottom of society — lacking the resources to unite with those who do as their skills are devalued — will stigmatise those at the very bottom. Rogowski himself showed that this stigmatisation can be extremely powerful on page 85 of his 1974 Rational Legitimacy: A Theory of Political Support, and on page 157 he suggests that the probability of a coalition between lower classes with different stigmatisation states is likely to be very low if the groups lack combined economic power.

As I have discussed here, there were never any advanced economies with even a relatively high land:labour ratio at any point between the birth of Christ and about 1900. An undated file from the University of Michigan noted this at PS 489.1 (page 5):

“Abundance of Land and Capital, Scarcity of Labor (p. 32):

Who?

1. 1840: no one
2. 1914: US and Canada
3. [1991-: US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Arab Gulf States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey (marginal)]”

Thus, before 1900 no state favourable to the development of strong and/or influential anarcho-capitalist type movements existed. Although Proudhon’s ideas as depicted by Marxist Left Review strikingly resemble anarcho-capitalism in many respects, if Rogowski be correct then Proudhon was planting an ideological seed onto the unfavourable soil of mid-nineteenth-century France.

In the developed countries of northwestern Europe, enduring abundance of labour meant that when trade expanded, enriched workers pressed for and gained more rights and a larger public sector. Additionally, labour did not oppose capital because both benefitted from trade, and this made capital compromise severely with labour’s opposing demands for the highest possible taxes and greatest regulation. This is even more emphatically true of later-developing East Asia.

In a labour-rich society, labour opposes capital only when capital is scarce. There capital becomes militant only during falling trade and is intensely protectionist. This militant capital will then support autarky with only the most restricted possible trade, a position entirely opposed to free-trading anarcho-capitalism. Unlike anarcho-capitalism, Marxian socialism was and is not explicitly pro-free trade. Thus one could theoretically imagine militant socialism arising in advanced, land-rich economies under falling trade, though history does not provide an example and there exist many reasons why this would not happen even if the falling trade were extremely prolonged. Thus, “no anarcho-capitalism in labour-rich societies” is almost certainly a more rigid rule than “no militant socialism in labour-scarce societies”.

The rule that there is no anarcho-capitalism in labour-abundant societies can also be extended to other forms of ruling class militancy like religious fundamentalism. This also first emerged in the United States after it became abundant in capital, notably with the second Ku Klux Klan, and re-emerged there after the postwar globalisation. It has been the dominant force in the Gulf monarchies since the pivotal oil crises of the 1970s. These movements argue, at least implicitly, that God’s law decrees a natural hierarchy based on non-class distinctions like race, gender or religion, and that this is a natural order for all human societies.

The harsh reality of Nazi and Communist sympathy — trivialised too often

In recent years, in an attempt to dissect the old Politically Incorrect Guide series, my brother and mother have frequently noted that the founder of Regnery Publishing, Henry Regnery, was a Nazi sympathiser. This despite the fact that Regnery’s books are never supportive of the Nazis and frequently critical.

However, the reality about Nazi sympathisers, as shown by Clement Leibovitz during the 1990s in his book In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, which I have been reading recently, is much darker than merely heroes of the extreme right being Nazi sympathisers. Leibovitz demonstrated, in fact, that a clear majority of the ruling classes even in those nations that remained democratic were Nazi sympathisers. Moreover, even those portions of the ruling classes of the democratic survivors who were not Nazi sympathisers had negligible sympathy for liberal democracy. They saw democracy as only a temporary compromise with workers’ demand for a revolution to eliminate ruling classes entirely before — as had been done throughout Central and Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia — defeating the workers completely and restoring a status quo ante where workers lacked the political and legal rights (like the right to vote, the right to unionise, the right to strike, and freedom of speech) gained since the 1860s.

Leibovitz shows that the overwhelming goal of the British and French ruling classes — and presumably the ruling classes of other remaining democracies in Europe, not to mention the US, Canada and Australia — was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime by whatever means necessary. He demonstrates that they never accepted the existence of the Soviet Union, even after Stalin relinquished the goal of international revolution. It was this desire to overthrow the Soviet government, which had been consistently dominant within the Western ruling classes, that drove their strong sympathy for Nazism and their appeasement policy.

At the same time, Leibovitz — much more than even Trotskyist groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party — conclusively demonstrates that the working classes of Western Europe overwhelmingly sympathised with the Soviet government. Of course, the majority of Europe’s working classes had supported the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution back at the tail end of the 1910s. Once revelations of real wages cut by a third or more, and loss of hard-won rights to form unions and to strike in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy appeared, the working classes of surviving European democracies became desperate to have Hitler and Mussolini overthrown, or minimally prevented from expanding by force. That idea drew overwhelming opposition amongst their ruling classes, who knew it would result in the spread of Bolshevism — something they could not tolerate.

Leibovitz also conclusively shows just how much Thomas Woods (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) and Paul Kengor (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism) trivialise sympathy for Lenin and Communism in general. Kengor’s claim of 25 percent of Millennials having a favourable view of Lenin is insignificant when it is observed that probably over 90 percent of industrial workers in Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s had a favourable view of the Russian Revolution’s leader. Woods’ focus on Communist sympathisers in American government and Hollywood is similarly ridiculous. Even in the 1930s most workers in Britain and France sympathised with Russia as much or more than with their own government, while when Lenin was alive Western Europe’s industrial working class observed how a workers’ revolution could transform society. They not merely wanted to emulate what Russia’s workers had done, but believed they were capable of emulating them locally.

Leibovitz also shows that the only thing that limited the ruling classes’ ability to let Hitler and Mussolini expand east and destroy the USSR was popular — which can only mean lower class — opposition to those dictators, and/or support for the Soviet Union. Even if working class excitement had died down by the 1930s, the USSR remained the enemy of every paramount enemy of the workers — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thus, even if they disagreed with Stalin’s policies and/or practices, the working classes in the surviving democracies still wanted the USSR to survive.

All this points to a harsh reality: extremely few people in interwar Europe sympathised with liberal democracy. Generally, the ruling and middle classes desired right-wing authoritarian regimes, whilst the working classes desired revolutionary socialism: a society without bosses or profits where all decisions were made directly under workers’ control, far more democratic than familiar systems of liberal democracy. Even when the ruling classes did very reluctantly accept fighting the Nazis — and as Leibovitz shows most therein privately thought they were fighting the “wrong” enemy — they did not come to accept liberal democracy as a “good”. The workers, for their part, overlooked the brutality of Stalin’s regime and the reality of his counterrevolution because Stalin’s Russia at least publicly opposed what they hated the most: right-wing authoritarianism and the Catholic Church.

The localisation of “dangerous” academics

During the middle 2000s the seemingly — and in some ways actually — inadequate and unconvincing responses of groups like Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Resistance to the September 11 terrorist attacks turned me somewhat away from these groups. Unfortunately, what I turned to as an alternative was much, much worse than any flaws in the radical left — into reading, on the assumption of “true unless refutable”, the propaganda of the anti-democratic Republican Party.

Republican propaganda is not ipso facto internally consistent. I early on noted contradictions between The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the later Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, accepting the former’s much more convincing view that Saudi Arabia was an extremely dangerous ally of the US. However, one of the worst examples of Republican propaganda that I partially took on board during this period was David Horowitz’ 2006 The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. It was a standard mantra of the Republican Party that American universities are hotbeds of left-wing radicalism, and as a lover of lists I used my brother’s card to borrow The Professors from Monash.

Even reading when less critical of the extreme right, I saw many flaws in The Professors despite possessing little knowledge of the vast majority. What Horowitz’ said that I did know something about seemed extremely flawed, sometimes to the point of being absolute errors. Re-reading when one learns more has made me far more disbelieving of Horowitz’ claims, which sources like the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated as contrary to fact.

What is really revealing is that Horowitz’ “dangerous professors” are geographically remarkably concentrated, as can be seen from the table below where the 101 “most dangerous” academics are listed by the state they worked in. In order to account for bias from institutions with many “dangerous” academics, I have included an additional column listing how many different institutions in each state had professors profiled in Horowitz’ book. Different campuses of the same university are counted as one because they are likely to be politically similar and might work together.

	Professors	Institutions
Alabama	0	0
Alaska	0	0
Arizona	0	0
Arkansas	0	0
California	16	6
Colorado	6	4
Connecticut	0	0
Delaware	0	0
District of Columbia	4	1
Florida	1	1
Georgia	1	1
Hawaii	1	1
Idaho	0	0
Illinois	7	4
Indiana	3	3
Iowa	0	0
Kansas	0	0
Kentucky	1	1
Louisiana	0	0
Maine	0	0
Maryland	0	0
Massachusetts	6	5
Michigan	2	1
Minnesota	0	0
Mississippi	0	0
Missouri	1	1
Montana	0	0
Nebraska	0	0
Nevada	0	0
New Hampshire	0	0
New Jersey	2	2
New Mexico	0	0
New York	25	9
North Carolina	3	2
North Dakota	0	0
Ohio	3	3
Oklahoma	0	0
Oregon	1	1
Pennsylvania	10	5
Rhode Island	1	1
South Carolina	0	0
South Dakota	0	0
Tennessee	0	0
Texas	5	3
Utah	0	0
Vermont	0	0
Virginia	0	0
Washington	2	2
West Virginia	0	0
Wisconsin	0	0
Wyoming	0	0
TOTAL	101	57

Although I was unable to draw a precise map as I intended when planning this post, it is striking that thirty of fifty states are not home to a single one of these academics listed as “dangerous” by Horowitz. Apart from four universities in Colorado and three in Texas, the entire area between the Mississippi and the Cascades is entirely unrepresented, as is Upper New England and even Connecticut. The Deep South has only two academics, and including Texas the remainder of the South has just eleven.

The Northeast, contrariwise, is academically home to forty-eight of the 101 most dangerous academics. More than that, a quarter worked in New York alone, and sixteen (one-sixth) in New York City alone. What this confirms is that opposition to the policies of the Republican Party is massively concentrated in a few areas, and is exceedingly weak elsewhere. For Americans who have no exposure to the ideas offered by so-called “dangerous” academics, Republican propaganda constitutes an unchallenged message, regardless of what Republican spokespeople and think tanks say.

Why countercultures merge into GOP orthodoxy

The 1990s Republican Revolution, whose ultra-free-market ideology has largely dictated American politics over the past three decades, was frequently justified by its supporters as a response to the supposedly ultra-liberal media of the Bush Senior Era.

When I first read the Republican Revolution’s advocates — my first experience being Peter Kreeft — I found many of their arguments absurd, but gathered that they viewed the Bush Senior Era media as excessively liberal compared to the opinions of most Americans, and government policy even in the Reagan era as similarly much more socially liberal than public opinion.

What I have come to realise in the past few years, however, is that, notwithstanding their successes in lowering taxes for the very rich to almost nothing, and eliminating public services for ordinary Americans, the “conservative counterculture” that emerged with the Republican Revolution has failed completely to achieve the social goals which it promoted during the late 1990s, like:

1. dramatically reduced immigration, especially from countries of the Tropical World and/or of Muslims
   
2. a foreign policy less supportive of and/or more hostile to strongly Islamic countries
   
3. a return of women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers
4. an end to abortion and even to all artificial birth control
5. an end to violence in entertainment, music and even video games (whether by rigid censorship or public boycotts)
6. a return to traditional religious morality in public education

Author Oliver Wiseman in his ‘Have the National Conservatives Missed Their Moment?’ argues that the nationalist/social conservatives have completely missed their moment because of their inability to challenge conservative economic orthodoxy where it opposes the interests of social conservatives as noted in the previous list. He argues that this occurs even when conservative groups try to secede from a socially liberal society that they regard as corrupt, and much more critically that the problem is that:

“[“movement conservatism” or GOP orthodoxy] removes from the political arena, and consigns to the ‘private’ sphere, the very value judgments and critical questions that most affect our humanity and our civilization”

This point reveals why countercultures on the Right move into GOP orthodoxy. Unless the existence of the private sphere (and the private sector) per se is challenged, it is impossible to challenge anything related to the hyper-capitalism that has become politically hegemonic since the 1973 energy crisis. To challenge the private sector and private sphere involves radical class struggle by the working classes. This has always been impossible in the United States due to racism, by which the ruling classes are intensely invested in tight alliances with lower-class whites and providing them with privileges — from freedom of choice in residence to fairer policing — that prevents them seeing that they have much more in common with poor people of colour than the ruling class.

The cultural interests of poorer whites in the United States — many of whom initially seceded from a Europe intolerant of their churches — has served to create what James Löwen misleadingly described as “the white ghetto”, but is much more accurately called a white cloister. This rural (sometimes exurban) white cloister is completely isolated (substantially of its own choice, as Löwen showed in Sundown Towns) from urban America, and much more still from the wider world. Since the standardisation and nationalisation of media in the late 1970s, information sources and culture available within the white cloister have become more and more uniformly hyper-capitalist, which helps explain why it is less and less able to challenge Republican orthodoxy on the economic front.

Oil states as an analog to the United States – and resource rather than settler status as key?

During the 1990s and 2000s, I was extremely aware that the working classes of the United States and Australia were radically different from the powerfully Communist working classes of Europe. The working classes of the United States and Australia, indeed, opposed Communism as anti-Christian.

More recent reading, especially since the 2016 presidential election, has seen a much darker side in that the conservatism of the United States lower class, at least of its white component, is largely or even wholly driven by racism. The fact that, despite massive increases in the wealth of the richest 1 percent, stagnating real wages, and major decreases in religious observance (although they remain much higher than of European workers 150 years ago), poor white Americans are voting for Republicans in larger proportions than they did for Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide over George McGovern suggests that the role of religion is less marked than I had assumed.

In the 2010s – I think before the Trump victory – I looked online at a book titled Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by one J. Sakai. “J. Sakai” does not sound like a real name but web searches have failed to find out what his real name actually is. “J. Sakai” argued that the poor white population of America was much more different from the working classes of Europe, East Asia and Latin America than I had presumed previously. He argues that lower-class whites are essentially a petit bourgeois or a “labor aristocracy” and that as settlers they had the same interests as the ruling class.

Whilst I was sceptical of Sakai, I was much less sceptical of Michael Goldfield, who argued and argues that race has always been the mainspring of American politics. A recent article by Mitchell Peterson on medium.com demonstrating the the US is mapped towards a one-party authoritarian regime made me wish to look deeply at this. It is abundantly clear that poor whites are the critical group to reverse increasing income inequality and voter suppression. What I found was an (admittedly outdated, written in January 2010) article by Sebastian Lamb titled ‘J. Sakai’s Settlers and Anti-Racist Working-Class Politics’ which argued that defending the privilege of belonging to the dominant racial group is attractive to lower class whites and promoted constantly by the ruling class as a means of protecting itself. Concurrently the US ruling class invests heavily in making it as difficult as possible for white workers to unite with workers of color. Lamb argues that this emphasis on white supremacy has led to many distinctive traits of US politics and culture.

What Lamb did not discuss, but might, is why the US ruling class has been so much more able to do this than ruling classes in other Enriched nations. I think a relatively simple answer exists:

1. that the US is vastly richer in natural resources than almost any other Enriched nation
2. capitalists who own natural resources are uniquely vulnerable to a united lower class because their assets are so physically immovable
3. ownership of natural resources gives capitalists more financial ability, as well as need, to divide lower classes

I believe that there exists a “hidden” and consistently ignored example elsewhere in the world of an analogous situation to the absence of a socialist party independent of the ruling class in the United States. This being the absence of any democratisation movement in the Gulf oil monarchies (except for an unsuccessful attempt in Baḥrain), as is noted by Sean L. Yom and F. Gregory Gause III in their 2012 ‘Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On’ which emphasises the role oil reserves play in preventing any democratisation movement in most of the oil states. That the United States’ vast and more diverse mineral resources could play an indispensable role in allowing the ruling class to so successfully and consistently divide white workers and workers of color is ignored by Lamb. So is the fact that the Gulf oil monarchies possess similar blood-based caste systems to the white/nonwhite racial classification in the United States. Once one sees this, it actually becomes logical to think that the racial caste system of the United States is more analogous to that of the Gulf Oil monarchies than of India or perhaps even South Africa. Yet writers like Michael Goldfield and Isabel Wilkerson (in Caste) never mention the Gulf oil states as a possible comparison to the United States, despite what I have said above.

If we look at the traits noted by Sebastian Lamb that distinguish the United states, and which he notes are due to racism, and then make a comparison with the Gulf States, one can in most cases see possible similarities as the table below shows 

US trait noted by Sebastian Lamb	Comparative Feature in Gulf Oil States
bad jobs	high frequency of low-paying jobs by expatriates in oil states
low pay	low-paying jobs taken by expatriates in oil states
	extreme relative scarcity of jobs full stop in states from which oil state expatriates originate
low level of unionization	unions are banned by law in all oil monarchies
the dominance of bureaucratic business unionism
no mass workers’ party organizationally independent of the ruling class	complete absence of movements amongst citizens of oil states for any democratisation
almost no public health care or welfare	exception because segregation is sectorial (public v. private) rather than geographic as in the US
the influence of patriotic nationalism and narrow individualism	extremely strong nationalism is apparent amongst citizen populations in oil states

As the table shows, there is one key difference: the Gulf States do have large public health and welfare systems for their citizen populations. The reason for this difference is that caste segregation takes upon a different form in the oil states from the United States. Whereas in the United States caste segregation takes the form of confining nonwhites to urban ghettoes or impoverished reservations, in the Gulf States segregation takes the form of privileged citizens working in the public sector with much greater security than expatriates who dominate all but the highest positions in the private sector. This is possibly because in the United States the expansion of the public sector coincided with nonwhite civil rights movements. These in turn coincided with imperialist competition with Stalinist Russia that forced a degree of racial reform on the United States to avoid being viewed as a pariah internationally and prevent mass international support for Moscow over Washington.

Despite this difference, it does seem logical to me that the US is politically similar to the Gulf oil states to an extent unrecognised. I even suspect that for the Republican Party and its academic supporters, the oil monarchies may be a political model of “privately owned government” (Hans-Hermann Hoppe) regardless of the powerful anti-Islamic bent of the Republicans.

Even the radical left, as can be seen in Gabriel Kuhn’s 2017 ‘Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomy of Imperialism’, has failed to consider that the US (and Australia) may be much more critically “resource states” than “settler states”. Of the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are undoubtedly true imperialist nations, as seen in their support for international Islamic terrorism and their ability to blockade greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Kuhn also does not recognise that New Zealand – although a settler state – has much more in common politically and economically with noncolonial European nations or the European periphery (especially Iceland) than with Australia or even perhaps the US.

‘The Week’’s mistake

Today, a journal called The Week said in an article titled ‘Tucker Carlson joins the right-wing pilgrimage to Budapest’:

“All of which means that Hungary looks to be for populist conservatives in the 2020s what the Soviet Union was for the international left a century ago: a foreign model of a morally and politically edifying future.”

There are serious problems with author Damon Linker’s idea. The most important is that conservatives have always had far more political models available for them than the international left. As Jacobin Magazine notes here and here, it has been very rare than the industrial working class has had the political power to create regimes so much as acceptable to the academic Left, and no other group but large industrial working classes in tradable heavy industry has the power to do so. The academic Left has typically had either zero models to work upon or a small choice from:

• revolutionary Russia in the fleeting moment before the Civil War
• revolutionary Spain in a similarly fleeting moment before its own Civil War
• certain Stalinist regimes, chiefly Cuba
• less often, European social democratic regimes (which tend to be rejected when dealing with much more conservative electorates like Australia or the United States)
  

Contrariwise, conservatives have available models dating back to the establishment of Christianity or even earlier, although in practice almost no conservative academics advocate regime types dating back further than the eighteenth century. Even Politically Incorrect Guides that praise the Middle Ages (especially the Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen) do not offer medieval society as a serious model. Corresponding to this far greater choice of political models for conservatives, there has typically been competing conservative models of an edifying future, which can indeed be opposed to each other as firmly as conservatism is opposed to liberalism and to socialism.

One could argue that looking to foreign models is relatively new for conservatives, or at least new for conservatives since World War Two. Since 1945, conservatives have typically looked to pre-World War One Western societies for models, although even this gives considerable choice between constitutional oligarchies and a variety of diverse authoritarian regimes. However, in the interwar period, many foreign conservative models were available for the ruling and middle classes of surviving democracies, and although many gained virtually zero adherents, there were many foreign admirers of and sympathizers with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and even Engelbert Dollfuß’ and Kurt Schuschnigg’s Austrian Ständesstaat or Salazar’s Portugal.

Linker is also wrong about Orbán’s regime being any sort of pariah. It has had conflicts with the remainder of the European Union, but that is totally unlike revolutionary Russia, which constituted an existential threat to every single coexisting ruling class. Both anti-Communist Paul Kengor and Trotskyist Peter Binns note that Lenin said in March 1919 that:

“We are living, not merely in a state but in a system of states and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time [any length of time] is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states would be inevitable.”

Until after the Russian Civil War, no country anywhere in the world recognised Bolshevik Russia – for a ruling class that would be signing its own death warrant as the Bolsheviks – alongside Europe’s industrial working classes – were committed to the overthrow of every existing ruling class. Contrariwise, regimes incomparably more repressive and reactionary than Orbán’s – the Gulf monarchies for one, or even Putin’s Russia or Lusashenko’s Belarus – are not regarded as pariahs anywhere in the world because they support the power of the global ruling class.

Spencer does a “Hayward”

Although I have become more sceptical of the attitudes and motives of the Politically Incorrect Guides in recent years – seeing that they are at large a mouthpiece for the super-rich as the radical Trotskyist Left were saying before the first PIG was printed in 2004 – I still occasionally think about them and their perspective as a counterweight to the other side of politics.

Robert Spencer is an author I have had some respect for because of his revelations about the violent doctrines and history of Islam – something which I knew of from the Koran as a child but which was obscured until I read Spencer by books I read as a young adult in the late 1990s on the Satanic Verses affair. Spencer shows that Islam teaches extremes of violence and intolerance towards non-Muslims, which can be seen in the Sa^cudi monarchy whose fanatical Islam made them the best possible allies for the super-rich against revolution and even any non-elite political power.

Given Spencer’s focus on Islam, I was slightly surprised to discover that last year he had written a book on a topic the PIGs and their allies had previously addressed: ranking American presidents. Titled Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Spencer rates in one book all the presidents from Washington to Trump. When I looked at the book on Google Books, I was not able to get all the ratings, but I did get them online from Loren Rosson – to whom I give many thanks – at The Busybody.

Unlike Hayward, Spencer goes all the way back to the first presidents, but in the interests of making a one-to-one comparison of writers I will only compare with Stephen Hayward’s original The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. Rosson himself gave his own assessment, which as he says is with some conspicuous exceptions similar to those of Spencer.

President	Hayward rating	Spencer rating	Rosson rating
Thomas Woodrow Wilson	F	0	0
Warren Gamaliel Harding	B+	9	9
Calvin Coolidge	A+	10	8
Herbert Hoover	C-	0	5
Frenklin Delano Roosevelt	F	1	3
Harry S. Truman	C+	6	8
Dwight David Eisenhower	C+	6	8
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	C-	5	6
Lyndon Baines Johnson	F	1	3
Richard Milhous Nixon	C+	2	4
Gerald Rudolph Ford	C+	5	6
James Earl Carter	F	0	7
Ronald Wilson Reagan	A-	9	6
George Herbert Walker Bush	B	2	5
William Jefferson Clinton	F	0	7
George Walker Bush	B+	1	1
Barack Hussein Obama	F	0	3
Donald John Trump		10	2

Those presidents coloured in light purple – Richard Nixon and the two Bushes – are the biggest differences between Hayward and Spencer. I am well aware that conservatives like Spencer and Thomas Woods (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) view Nixon as neither a strong president nor sufficiently right-wing.

Initially my Google search was not able to see how Spencer actually views Nixon and why in Spencer’s opinion Nixon was “very damaging for America”. However, a second look showed that Nixon is disliked by Spencer because he opened negotiations with Máo Zédōng. Máo Zédōng is viewed by many on the American right as the worst mass murderer in history – Paul Kengor says Máo murdered seven times more people than Hitler. Stephen Hayward said very little about Nixon’s opening to Máo’s China, merely noting

“Nixon’s opening to Communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliché of counterintuitive politics: “Only Nixon could go to China.””

whilst saying that Brezhnev’s Russia was engaging in a “massive arms build-up throughout the 1970s”, a time when Stalinist Russia’s crisis was clearly evident to those who looked. The Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe would quite likely have collapsed regardless of who was in power in the White House and Capitol, unless they consistently purged would-be reformers over many decades like Kim Il Sung or embraced major economic reforms as China and Vietnam did. Neither policy was feasible in a continent with a long history of working class struggle even during the repressive Stalinist years – a history which the Stalinist nations who did survive lacked.

I am also aware that the Bushes have been heavily criticised by conservatives like Brion McClanahan (9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America) for circumscribing personal liberty, for instance via the Patriot Act. It is difficult to argue about the Bushes, who had little concern for personal freedom, nor for merely protecting Americans against terrorism. If Bush junior had been so concerned, his first step would have been abolishing diplomatic relations with Sa^cudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and banning entry by their citizens or people with Sa^cudi, Qatari or UAE passport stamps, not by invading states opposed to al-Qa^cida like Iraq. However, powerful ties with the authoritarian monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council are in the vested interest of the super-rich – the only group whom the major US parties represent – since their theological opposition to socialism means they are the most reliable ally for fighting a war against the interests of the majority. That the Gulf monarchies are the major supporters of global terrorism is immaterial. Any assessment of Bush junior’s real relationship to freedom should take this into account.

With Bush senior, had he left Hussein alone, Iraq would almost certainly have fought a war with Sa^cudi Arabia that would have weakened both regimes and dramatically weakened the threat of global terrorism. (Pat Buchanan in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War argued in a perfectly analogous manner that the best way to fight both Nazism and Stalinism was to let them fight each other). Again, the PIGs I have read never say this about Iraq, and these omissions need to be considered when studying such books.

“Tax grade” part II

Ever since my brother developed the concept of “tax grade” to explain Stephen F. Hayward’s rankings of the presidents from Wilson to Obama (and his presumptive high ranking of Trump), I have had a look at Hayward’s grades and found some interesting patterns in the grades over time, as can be seen from the following graph:

This graph – with two grades between each grey line – illustrates the “constitutional grade” (higher grade being shown higher on the graph) of United States presidents between 1913 and 2017 according to Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama.

 What I noticed on close examination is that:

1. of the theoretically possible “constitutional grades” from A+ to F, only seven are actually given by Hayward to any president between 1913 and 2017
2. the possible grades not given by Hayward to any president are:
1. A
2. B-
3. C
   
4. D, D+ or D-
5. E, E+ or E-
3. all grades higher than B minus (as I noted no president received a B- from Hayward) occur before 1930 or after 1980
4. all grades of C plus or C minus (there is no straight C as I noted) occur between 1930 and 1980
5. between 1930 and 1980, there is some overlap between Republican and Democratic presidents, although every failing grade is still given to Democrats Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter
6. contrariwise, before 1930 and after 1980, all Democratic presidents get failing grades, and all Republican presidents receive grades of B or higher

My brother believes that this difference occurs because before 1930 and after 1980 there was little acceptance by the US ruling class of the idea that taxing the super-rich was legitimate, and that the Politically Incorrect Guides are entirely about eliminating taxes on the super-rich. Whilst I appreciate my brother’s comments, I do see flaws.

‘The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom’

The Politically Incorrect Guides and allied groups have always been critical of an activist Supreme Court, preferring that the Constitution be viewed as a means of preserving the power of those groups whom pre-Communist Manifesto philosophy thought legitimate participants in politics. They frequently criticise the Supreme Court, especially during the final two-thirds of the twentieth century, for legislating from the bench rather than interpreting the law.

Robert A. Levy in 2008 produced a book titled The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. In strictly chronological order, the cases are:

1. Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934)
2. Helvering v. Davis (1937)
3. United States v. Carolene Products (1938)
4. United States v. Miller (1939)
5. Wickard v. Filburn (1942)
6. Korematsu v. United States (1944)
7. Penn Central Transport v. New York City (1978)
8. Bennis v. Michigan (1996)
9. Whitman v. American Trucking Association (2001)
10. McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003)
11. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)
12. Kelo v. City of New London (2005)

It’s interesting that this list is not the stereotypical list of the PIGs, although it is even narrower in its focus, with a 50—50 split between New Deal cases and very modern ones. The Warren Court, criticised by the Republican Party of today for its judicial activism, is entirely absent, although Berman v. Parker from the same year as and overshadowed by Brown v. Board of Education, paved the way for case #12 by ruling that private property could be taken for public purposes.

Dissecting and Understanding ‘Citizens United and Conservative Judicial Activism’ – step by step

Ever since I read Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama, the politics behind the United States Supreme Court has been of interest to me, because of that book’s focus on Court appointments.

My mother and brother have said that “originalist” judges praised by that name and word in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents are simply tools of the Catholic Church, the Republican Party, and super-rich businessmen and bankers. More scholarly writings I have read over the past four years suggest that this may be the case.

This morning, after waking up at 10:00, I read an article from the University of Illinois Law Review by Geoffrey R. Stone titled ‘Citizens United and Conservative Judicial Activism’ (in reference to the 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1999. Stone argues that the conservative majority in the Roberts and Rehnquist Courts is not motivated by originalism nor by judicial restraint, but by an ideology of unfettered capitalism identical or similar to that of the Politically Incorrect Guides.

Stone says that ever since the 1990 decision Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy always viewed corporations, including for-profit corporations as possessing the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Stone argues that this led them and Bush junior appointees Roberts and Alito to:

“eschew the narrow grounds of decision available to them, even those suggested by Citizens United itself, and actually order the parties to file briefs on the much broader and more controversial question of whether Austin and McConnell [v. Federal Election Commission] should be overruled”

The Politically Incorrect Guides argue that the First Amendment provides equal rights for freedom of speech, assembly, or the press and that this cannot exclude corporations. Socialists argue that the First Amendment and Bill of Rights constituted efforts to restrain protest against a highly undemocratic Constitution.

However, Stone argues that:

“on such questions as the constitutionality of affirmative action, regulations of commercial advertising, gun control laws, and campaign finance regulation, judicial restraint would lead to politically “liberal” results, and judicial activism would produce politically “conservative” results.”

The trouble with Stone’s argument here is that it is easy to observe that, at face value, the Second Amendment forbids restrictions upon gun ownership in any form. If “the right to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed” is taken literally, that means minimally that restrictions on gun ownership cannot be constitutional, although other laws, such as compulsory registration of guns, certainly do remain constitutional under a restrained view of the Second Amendment. As for commercial advertising or campaign finance regulation, there is nothing in the Constitution mentioning them, so it is natural that from the perspective of the Politically Incorrect Guides, they are completely protected and judges can never strike them down per se. Affirmative action is an even more obvious error: Stone cannot see that it strikes down freedom of association almost by definition. It is true that laws allowing racially restrictive covenants, which the little-known Corrigan v. Buckley case from 1926 legitimised when done by private citizens or organisations, do contradict equality of rights from a judicially restrained perspective. Between 1880 and 1940, judges certainly did narrow the Fourteenth Amendment beyond what it says at face value. This is likely because it – and even more the Fifteenth Amendment and 1960s civil rights legislation – were (and still are) viewed by the great majority of white Americans as elitist reforms by Northeastern lawmakers and their allies. This is the topic of Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

What Stone does not understand when he says

“The Framers of our Constitution wrestled with the problem of how to cabin the dangers of overbearing and intolerant majorities.”

is that – like all philosophers before The Communist Manifesto – the Founders viewed the urban population who have constituted a majority since the 1920 Census as ipso facto overbearing. The Founders viewed large cities as necessarily opposed to liberty because they would take wealth from smaller tighly-knit communities to fund their expensive services, as discussed by Jonathan A. Rodden in his 2011 ‘The Long Shadow of the Industrial Revolution: Political Geography and the Representation of the Left’.

A limited suffrage that excludes urban populations who own negligible land, women and for some theorists people of color, was universally accepted when the Constitution was written, although in the highly rural United States this allowed a broad male suffrage. It is natural that the Republican Party, who represents almost precisely that section of the population who were enfranchised when the Constitution was written, desires laws restricting voting rights, abortion, taxation, limits to campaign funds, public welfare, gun control and so on. Stone is right that such decisions do not sit well with the majority, but he does not understand that the urban majority of today’s American population is precisely that section against whom the Founders desired antimajoritarian decisions. That rigid sundown laws have excluded blacks, and lack of economic opportunity other nonwhites, from almost all of rural America outside the plantation South where blacks were disenfranchised until the late 1960s, is an extremely problematic issue by any account, but what the solution would be under “judicial restraint” is not perfectly clear.

What the conservative Justices want to do is to cement Republican power, and the Constitution as understood by the Framers and according to the political values that prevailed at that time allows them to do such, for the simple reason that suffrage laws of the eighteenth century match so perfectly with modern voter demographics.

“Tax grade”?

When I first read Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama, I loved memorising the “constitutional grades” Hayward gave to each President. Although I could sniff out bias in them at a very early stage, I still was interested to see the rationale behind Hayward’s grade for each President.

Despite finding them interesting, I always saw anomalies even when the AABWCT (academia are biased, we’ll correct them) surface message was replaced by BACVR (be a Catholic, vote Republican) as the underlying morale of the Politically Incorrect Guides:

1. Why was Truman given a much higher grade than other Democrats except Kennedy?
2. Why was Coolidge given the highest grade if his Supreme Court appointment was so liberal?
3. Why was Ford given a relatively good ranking if his Supreme Court nomination was so liberal?

My brother said after a full digestion of the grades in conversation that the concern of Hayward is not with the Constitution at all. In my brother’s opinion, Hayward’s “constitutional grade” should be renamed “tax grade” – he believed and believes that the purpose of the PIGs is simply to encourage Americans to accept the complete elimination of income taxes on the super-rich – and that every grade offered by Hayward simply reflects partisanship and tax policy. The F grades given to every Democrat since Lyndon Johnson reflect the fact that the PIGs view civil rights as:

• illegitimate laws legislated by a liberal Northeastern elite with no popular white support
  
• contrary to natural law that differentiates between the races
• the source of social conflict between the races
  

President	Grade	Hayward’s interpretation	My brother’s interpretation
Woodrow Wilson	F	“The McReynolds appointment notwithstanding, between Wilson’s direct attack on the constitutional philosophy of the Framers and his appointment of Brandeis and Clarke, he deserves an F grade.”	“Wilson’s was a Democrat who used the Sixteenth Amendment to tax the very rich, and his rapid increase of this tax during World War I to over 70 percent, gives him a tax grade of F.”
Warren G. Harding	B+	“For the excellence of his Supreme Court nominations and the respect for the Constitution demonstrated by his conduct in office, Harding deserves a high grade as president. Countervailing factors – his lack of a deep constitutional philosophy, his proposal to amend the Constitution to create a six-year presidential term, the boost he gave Herbert Hoover’s career – knock his overall grade down to a B+.”	Harding lowered taxes for the rich from the high levels they had been at during World War I, so that the rich started to be able to get richer than possible under Wilson. He thus receives a B+ tax grade.
Calvin Coolidge	A+	“Despite this one disappointment [his only Supreme Court nomination, liberal Yankee Harlan Fiske Stone], Coolidge still deserves an A+ grade for his principled constitutionalism.”	“Coolidge consistently lowered taxes for the rich and kept them at the lowest level they have been at since the Sixteenth Amendment, so he receives an A+ tax grade”
Herbert Hoover	C-	“Between Hoover’s weak grasp of constitutional principles and his mixed record of Supreme Court appointments, his constitutional grade is a C-.”	“Hoover was an income tax-raising Republican [who raised taxes to attempt to combat the Depression], so his tax grade is C-”
Franklin D. Roosevelt	F	“Between FDR’s radical Progressive views about the principles of the American founding, his court packing scheme, and his left-leaning Supreme Court appointments, it is a shame that he can’t be awarded a constitutional grade lower than F. His counterproductive economic policies and hyper-partisanship are just extra credit.”	“FDR’s rapid increases in taxes on the very rich to fund public works and welfare for the lower classes, and his support of the Communist Russians against the Nazis who protected the wealth of the super-rich, means it is a pity that he cannot be granted a tax grade lower than F.”
Harry S. Truman	C+	“Truman’s Supreme Court appointments seemed to be driven mostly by old-fashioned considerations of political patronage. Neither his judicial appointments nor any of his writings or speeches give much evidence that Truman had any discernable constitutional philosophy. For these reasons he deserves as his constitutional grade a gentleman’s C+.”	“Although Truman was a Democrat, he lowered taxes on the very rich after World War II and was extremely vigorous in his opposition to Communism, so his tax grade is C+.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower	C+	“Eisenhower deserves high marks for general steady leadership in the uncertain postwar decade of the 1950s, for defending the nation ably (one of the most important constitutional responsibilities of the commander in chief), and for sensible modernizations of the office of the president. Above all, Eisenhower’s calm, steady leadership enabled America to settle in for the long haul of the Cold War. As the quiet and calm 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s and demoralizing 1970s, Eisenhower’s presidency started to look pretty good in retrospect. But for his Supreme Court appointments – especially considering the harm Earl Warren and William Brennan did to constitutional government in America – his constitutional grade must be cut down to a C+.”	“Eisenhower was a Republican and hence our ally, and he helped fight Communism under Cold War conditions, but he maintained very high marginal tax rates on the very rich. His tax grade is a C+.
John F. Kennedy	C-	“John F. Kennedy probably put little serious thought into the judicial philosophies of either Goldberg or White, but his accidental pick of White mitigates some of his abuses of executive power, earning him a bump in his constitutional grade to a C-.”	“Although Kennedy was a Democrat, he was a Catholic and he cut taxes on the rich to a small degree, so his tax grade can be raised to a C-”
Lyndon B. Johnson	F	“Between his dreadful Court appointments [Abe Fortas and Thurgood Marshall], his heedless expansion of government bureaucracy and the welfare state, and his duplicity in passing a civil rights law that warped constitutional principles of equality under the law, Johnson’s constitutional grade is an F.”	“Johnson was a Democrat who did the unspeakable sin of providing civil rights for black people who do not deserve such rights. He also greatly increased government spending via the Great Society, thus encouraging inflation and higher taxes, so his tax grade is an F”
Richard Nixon	C+	“Between Nixon’s acquiescence in or even sponsorship of so many constitutionally doubtful expansions of the regulatory statutes – the Endangered Species Act, the creation of OSHA and the EPA – and his botched appointments to the Supreme Court [rejection of Carswell and Haynsworth, liberal nominees Blackmun and Powell], Nixon’s constitutional grade has to be marked down to a C+. If it were not for his abortive attempts to rein in the government in his second term and his vetoes of bad legislation such as the War Powers Act (his veto was overridden), his grade would be even lower.”	“Nixon’s sponsorship of regulation like the Environment Protection Authority and Endangered Species Act that restrict business, and his inability to contain the tax that is inflation, mean that his tax grade is a C+. If he had not tried to rein in spending in his second term, his tax grade would be even lower”
Gerald Ford	C+	“While Ford’s use of the veto against a runaway Congress and his general demeanor in conducting himself in office in the aftermath of the Watergate disaster count strongly in his favor, his appointment of [John Paul] Stevens knocks his constitutional grade down to a C+.”	“Ford was a Republican who failed to lower the tax of inflation, so his tax grade is a C+”
Jimmy Carter	F	“Jimmy Carter is the only president of the twentieth century who did not appoint a single justice to the Supreme Court, so he doesn’t have a legacy in the third branch of government comparable to those of other presidents. He deserves an F grade for his respect and defense of the Constitution, nonetheless, for an unusual reason: his unprecedented and outrageous behavior as an ex-president. Carter does not seem to understand that the nation has only one president at a time. He has consistently undermined his successors in ways both direct and indirect.”	“Carter was a post-Civil Rights Democrat who was always our enemy, so he gets an automatic F.”
Ronald Reagan	A-	“Because of Reagan’s overall record of understanding, articulating, and implementing principled constitutionalism, the two disappointing Supreme Court appointments [Sandra Day O‘Connor, Anthony Kennedy] only lower his constitutional grade to an A-.”	“Reagan was a Republican who was the first to lower taxes on the rich since Calvin Coolidge. He did not lower them nearly enough to maximise wealth to the highest possible extent, but his radical tax cuts give him a tax grade of A-”
George Bush senior	B	“President Bush 41 (as he is often called to distinguish him from his son) deserves credit for a steady hand in conducting foreign policy—which satisfies the president’s most important constitutional duty: defending the nation. His appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is also a very large factor weighing in Bush’s favor. But his major blunder with Souter and his acquiescence in expanding government regulation knock Bush’s constitutional grade down to a straight B.”	“Bush 41 lowered taxes to some extent, but also raised them when he should not have done so, so as he is our ally his tax grade is a straight B”
Bill Clinton	F	“Clinton clearly knew what he was doing when he chose as his Supreme Court nominees justices who would defend and expand the liberal agenda. If there were a lower constitutional grade than F, Clinton would deserve it.”	“Clinton is a Democrat and our enemy whom we tried to defeat in Congress and the Supreme Court for many years. He supported or compromised with civil rights and maintaining taxes on the rich, so his tax grade is an F”
George Bush junior	B+	“For his vigorous defense of the president’s constitutional power to defend the nation against the threat of terrorism and for his two solid Supreme Court appointments [Alito and Roberts], Bush deserves a top grade for presidential performance. But his regrettable signing of the McCain-Feingold bill after saying he thought it was unconstitutional knocks him down half a grade to a B+.”	“Bush junior continued to lower taxes and he is our ally as a Republican. However, his acceptance of the McCain-Feingold bill and his increase on spending in the Middle East knock his tax grade down to a B+”
Barack Obama	F	“Because of his radical constitutional views and aggressive politicization of the judiciary, even Obama’s defense of executive prerogative cannot save him from a constitutional grade of F.”	“Obama is black and a Democrat, so he is our enemy. He stands for those Americans who reject the traditional American values, so regardless of what he does with the economy his tax grade can only be an F”
Donald Trump	≅A		“Because Trump is the ally of true America, and he has cut taxes on the richest individuals dramatically, his tax grade is an A”

Trump was not discussed in the original or the updated Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. My brother has constantly said that, although Trump does not understand the Constitution and never mentions it except rhetorically, he would receive a very high grade simply for cutting taxes on the very rich.

I would wish for more ability to discuss the issue more precisely, but my brother has never accepted the offer nor wished to do so, except to say that one reason why every post-Civil Rights Act Democrat gets an F is that the writers have memories of them as opponents, which they lack with Truman or even Kennedy.

In the case of Carter, who appointed no Justices to the Supreme Court, my brother was very critical of their argument. It is also strange that although the Politically Incorrect Guide notes Reagan’s record of conservative appointments to lower courts, it says not one word about Carter’s appointments thereto, although Carter made what was then a record number of appellate and district court appointments for a single term (this being due to many new seats being created). Many of Carter’s lower court appointees, notably the long-lived Ninth Circuit pair of Stephen Reinhardt and Harry Pregerson, were extremely liberal compared to lower court appointments of Clinton or Obama who had to deal with Republican Senates for substantial parts of their presidencies. Nor does the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents say anything about lower court appointments of preceding or following presidents, although if they were discussed even briefly it could alter grades if Hayward be true to his word.