The political philosophy of Stalin the Shark

The political philosophy of Stalin the philosopher Shark can best be described as Anglo-American Pragmatism.

The true genius of the English-speaking peoples has been our ability to, over centuries, develop a results-oriented culture of limited government and individual rights. We instinctively distrust ideologies, which is why there has never been a powerful communist or fascist party in any Ango-Saxon democracy. The first truly ideological party to rise in any English-speaking democracy is the current extremist repug party here in America; this is a key reason why extremist ideologues on the right cloak their purposes in the traditional parlance of pragmatic moderation, and why they must be defeated, ripped out at the roots. It's hard to overstate how fundamentally alien repugism - my terme d'art for describing extreme right-wing republicanism - is to our entire tradition and history. Note that it exists as a result of internal infiltration.

We have always found ourselves muddling in the middle between two poles: one of unrestrained individualism, as exemplified by the libertarians, who give complete primacy to the rights of the individual over and separate from society, the other of what can usefully be described as continental statism, which elevates the power of the state and of society wholly over the rights of the individual. Taken to their logical conclusion, the first would atomize society, the second would crush the individual. Neither outcome is desirable in my view.

Rather, I argue for finding a middle ground with the goal of arriving at a greater good, as determined by the democratic process. We have inherent rights which may not be circumscribed beyond a certain point. These rights are acquired at birth, not given by any mythical big daddy up in the sky - they are inherent, not given. However, we make a societal bargain to restrict them if doing so prevents far greater harm from arising; for example, my freedom of speech does not allow me to hand out porn on a playground, since this is likely to lead to corruption of youth. In this case, the rights of society trump my individual rights, as much as I may want to hand out Hustler. All of the rights enumerated in our constitution find some similar restriction applied to them from time to time. Thus, my right to bear arms may be restricted, though not taken away, in the interest of public order; my freedom of exercise may be restricted if it involves undesirable activities or intrudes on the same freedom of others; and so on. Essentially, we restrict our rights by a test of whether or not their exercise causes harm to ourselves and others, and I think that this is the best of both worlds.

The absolutists, both on the left and the right, recoil in horror from pragmatism. "How can you not see that there are absolute truths?", they yelp, desiring the crystalline clarity of simple prescriptions for their equally simple minds to understand. I always argue that it becomes us frail sharks and humans both to exercise a bit of humility, given that demonstrably, we are not always right.

The essential appeal of any ideology is that it offers a closed system of thought - read Karl Popper for more - that has an answer to everything within a closed frame of reference. This is the point of commonality between the few remaining children of Marx, Proudhon, or even Hitler, and the Sean Hannity crowd. The former natter on about dialectic materialism, "property is theft", or the superiority of the Aryan race. The latter adhere to what I call repugism.

Repugism can be described in historical and in systemic terms. Historically, I'd consider it a kind of bastardized, fundamentalist and cynical Americanism (by which term I refer to the attempt in the 1950s, by McCarthy and others, to develop a nativist ideology to compete with Marxism), whose core tenets are distrust of the economic power of the state, combined with a desire for state regulation of the personal, as well as a kind of hysterical inistence on American exceptionalism. Systemically, it is fundamentally negative, describing itself primarily in opposition to its ideas of what consitutes liberalism. Repugism relies on the caricature of liberalism it has created for its own survival; to that end, the hard right spends $300 million a year to finance media, think tanks, and the like. I call it cynical because the practical result of repugism in government has been to enhance the economic power of the state, via crony capitalism, by making business more dependent on favorable relations with those in power.

Conservatives, incidentally, used to structure their thought very much as I describe mine here, before they ossified into a mob chanting slogans about tax cuts and dead babies. This is why I call today's "conservatives" repugs; they have sundered themselves from what conservatism actually is. The constant carping about the "socialism" they claim to see in the Democratic party reflects a kind of self-projection, given that today's repugs think much the same as classical Marxists, even if they think about tax cuts instead of the means of production. The subject matter is irrelevant, to anticipate the yelps about "christianity" versus "godless atheism" - the systems of thought are entirely the same, even if repugism is noticeably less subtle than Marxism. There is a reason why some on the left refer to BushBots as "Busheviks", my friends, and this is it.

I do not demand perfection and absolutes in my thinking. I do not need or want Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Jerry Falwell, Leo Strauss or the easter bunny to give me the answers to everything, or a method to deduce every possible answer, because this is systemically impossible. As noted, I believe it requires a certain humility to accept that we may not know the final answers on a given subject; but with that humility comes a better grasp on what we actually can verifiably know and understand. People who casually throw around absolutes horrify me, no matter what their absolutes are.

I place a premium on rational inquiry; in a sense, this is my moral absolute. When confronted with a problem - say, Iraq - I expect a full summation of the best available data points to logically deduce what the problem is, and what likely outcomes accompany the proposed solutions. This, incidentally, is the classic model of Anglo-American governance, as much as it may horrify the tottering hard right and the pitiable remnants of the hard left.

This is also why, despite starting on my political journey as a republican, I am now a confirmed Democrat. The republican party was already changing in the 1980s; today, it is a snarling monstrosity of epithets and ideology that reminds me of Marx more than of Burke. The spirit of America is dead in that party, and has migrated to the center-left, where I happily find myself. American pragmatism, the kind that created and built this nation, today resides firmly in the Democratic Party, whatever legacy flaws we may still have.

This is why I am a Democrat, and it is why we will win the battle for the soul of America.