Capitol Ideas / The Apiculture of Socialism
Bethell, Tom
This was to be Jimmy's hour. Here was a scamp mountebank from jerk. water America whose knowledge of government and of history was somewhere between that of the bathroom attendant at "21" and...
...That's hive talk...
...The collectivist hive is automatically anti-American because America, more than any other country, has stood squarely in the path of the steady worldwide movement toward socialism that the hive labors endlessly to bring about...
...He wore dungarees, pole-climbing boots, and work shirts...
...Of (continued on page 36) C A P I T 0 L I D E A S THE APICULTURE OF SOCIALISM by Tom Bethell George Gilder's new book Wealth and Poverty, the most original work of economics to be published in many a year, contains so many texts worthy of a sermon that your preacher hardly knows where to begin...
...But when you hear a left-wing nun say: "Ten years ago I nearly left the order, but then I saw the changes taking place in the church and I decided to stay," you should know, as the bees in the hive know, that it "translates" into something a god dleal more sinister than it sounds on the surface...
...He wagered that the New Politics, as it was called, was most likely to keep him loved and respected and in a house filled with clean sheets...
...The truth is of course that there are millions of non-avowed socialists in the United States-more than ever recently because in the past 15 years the conditions that give rise to the development of socialism have flourished...
...In America we are led to suppose that socialists scarcely exist at all beyond a small but doughty band led by J.K...
...invades Poland), there is a minimal response by the West...
...But the socialists are still there, lurking in every nook and cranny of the body politic...
...Then he held his inspirational telephone call-ins, his fireside chat, his town meetings...
...But because left-wingers never call themselves left-wingers, no one else does either...
...Socialists have simply started to call themselves something else-"social democrats," for example, or, in America, "liberals...
...And they stitl dream of the New Dawn...
...put it on "Meet the Press'' today that the aim must be "not to let any daylight show between the United States and its European allies...
...He smiled with a grim determination that sent small children leaping for cover...
...Joe Sobran, the National Review editor and columnist, has likened the contemporary system of socialist communication to a beehive...
...They were thereby compelled to adopt a low opinion of America and a benign view of Communism as justifications for their unpatriotic behavior...
...In particular, this applies to people who refused to fight for their country and subsequently became eager to persuade themselves and others that they were motivated by something other than cowardice...
...Translated it reads: Give Helmut Schmidt veto power over anything we may decide to do...
...But it is the alleged death of Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington editor anda Washington editor of Harper's...
...Crosland asks, having found that "no single constant and consistent body of socialist doctrine exists...
...Some Americans internally defected from their own country as a result of the Vietnam War...
...When you read Kenneth Woodward in Newsweek describing the Maryknoll nuns as "a socially committed religious community, dedicated to solidarity with the Third World's poor," then you hear the humming of the hive...
...I add the qualifier "independent" because so many journalists have put themselves at the disposal of the hive...
...Therefore the Third World-the hive's term for the collection of nations whose governments it has satellized in the past 25 years or so-is violently anti-American and will remain so indefinitely...
...Hive signals come through unmistakably in Anthony Lewis's column in the New York Times...
...In the process they became willing workers in the hive, only too willing to accuse their country of racism, sexism, and imperialism...
...Senate has tilted to the right in recent years...
...But there is something important that he doesn't tell us about radical nuns, one of the prime horrors of our time: They have stopped believing in God and in an afterlife...
...A peanut farmer, who had lied his way to the governorship of Georgia playing the Kluxian toot one minute and Negro blues the next, now had confected a song and dance incorporating Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, the Allman Brothers, and a dozen or so liberal aphrodisiacs...
...When you consider that in the European democracies socialists number about 30 percent of the electorate, it is hard to accept that things are so very different here...
...There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy," Sobran wrote recently...
...Johnson's observation that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel was forever on their tongues...
...Therefore he will begin at the beginning, with the first two sentences of the book: "The most important event in the recent history of ideas is the demise of the socialist dream...
...Ron Dellums...
...He quotes R.H...
...Igor Shafarevich, the Soviet mathematician who was compelled to circulate his thoughts on socialism in samizdat, has few illusions on the subject and in the end, one suspects, comes closer to the heart of the matter than the deluded alumni of Rugby and Winchester...
...Galbraith, Michael Harrington, Gloria Steinem, and Rep...
...The betrayal of conscience that is entailed by such a change then shamelessly masquerades as a triumph of conscience...
...Is it time we heard the crack of the censor's whip here, too...
...Does anyone believe that the U.S...
...Jimmy Carter's reference to our "inordinate fear of Communism" was, well . .. nectar...
...Here is a paragraph from his December 15 column, "Hard Choices in Poland": If the Soviets move, how should the West respond...
...Renegade nuns show us the hive in action as vividly as anything...
...The first necessity is not to take this particular step or that but, whatever we do, to act together...
...In order to translate the language of the hive, it helps to determine the purpose of socialism, but this turns out to be oddly elusive, as C.A.R...
...They gambled that any fool could be a successful president so long as he was receptive to their foolishness...
...That is why all the news media assaults on Reverend Falwell and his Moral Majority will come to naught...
...This was the New Age liberals' most reckless gamble since Watergate, when they wagered that a little coup d' e'tat could be indulged in with impunity...
...As the Wonderboy walked down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day noble visions flickered in their minds...
...Because in undergoing their transformation they have learned one fundamental truth: Religions can only be attacked from within...
...The Soviet Union has of course become something of an embarrassment to collectivists but it must nevertheless be succored and supported, for without the Soviet Union the hive would collapse...
...they don't even consciously cooperate, for the most part...
...The First Amendment has done wonders for quantity, less for quality...
...Gilder incidentally does not elaborate on this theme...
...Bees in a hive don't "talk" to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions...
...External assault merely strengthens the resolve of believers...
...He is of course correct to say that socialism has been almost completely discredited in practice, which turns out to consist of labor camps in the Gtlag, governments guarded by troops and tanks, four-to-six hour harangues by the maximum leader, queues and curfews, military economics, central planning perennially spoiled by "bad weather," coercions, confessions, and the never-ending suspicion that one's neighbors and children are moonlighting for the secret police...
...The label-change has proved necessary because enough people now know what socialism brings in its wake to make it almost impossible for the plain, unvarnished socialist to get himself elected...
...Does anyone believe that...
...Unfortunately, however, all this has not resulted in the abandonment of the socialist dream...
...In the process they have transformed themselves into bulldike socialists who will spend the rest of their lives attempting to destroy in others the loyalties and beliefs that they destroyed in themselves...
...He carried an empty suitcase...
...The hive's job in America is to see to it that, if the Soviet Union does something too blatantly aggressive (e.g...
...In his remarkable book The Socialist Phenomenon, recently translated into English (Harler & Row, 1980), Shafarevich points out that a crucial goal of socialism is the breaking down of religious, family, and property ties and loyalties...
...Left-wing individuals and organizations have disguised their agenda by adopting a new system of communication-one in which the crude old formulas such as "state ownership of the means of production" never appear...
...An essentially vacuous Snopes, he had listened intently to the political debates and watched all the demonstrations...
...their agenda has simply been dressed up in new rhetoric...
...water America whose knowledge of government and of history was somewhere between that of the bathroom attendant at "21" and that of a modestly educated welfare queen...
...socialism that I want to discuss here...
...He was making all the right moves, as they say...
...So degenerate had the New Age liberals become that the mere sounds of these bromides pacified them...
...Woodward slips revealingly, and no doubt unconsciously, into the Marxist mode when he uses the word "solidarity...
...We will be sternly warned not to "overreact...
...The fellow-travelling Institute for Policy Studies is described by the Washington Post as a "liberal think tank," and by the Times as an "independent research organization...
...You might ask why renegade nuns don't simply leave the church if they have stopped believing in God...
...This is the big change that has overcome the politics of the western democracies since 1945...
...The New York Times has steadily degenerated into an important cell of the hive, in recent years adopting positions indistinguishable from the Village Voice...
...Dreams always die when they come true, and fifty years of socialist reality, in every partial and plenary form, leaves little room for idealistic reverie...
...Yet so superficial and juvenile had the bromides of New Age liberalism become that the scamp could intone them fluently...
...None of its constituent parts-Communist, socialist, liberal-runs the whole thing...
...Yet in the end, as the sap at the helm directed the-ship of state off the reef and into the next maelstrom, the liberals turned queazy, held their sides, and prayed for Dramamine...
...Demolition is afoot...
...Of course Jimmy too was gambling...
...Was Jimmy a true blue liberal of the New Age...
...They didn't go to Russia but they joined the hive...
...Gilder's goal is to retrieve the laurels for capitalism, establishing that it is based on morality rather than on the more frequently acknowledged selfinterest ("capitalism begins with giving...
...Finally they leapt from the sinking ship, abandoning Jimmy much as they had abandoned LBJ over a decade before...
...Crosland shows in his interesting book The Future of Socialism (second edition, 1963...
...Since coming to Washington I have never once seen a congressman or a senator described in the Washington Post or the New York Times as "the left-wing representative from . . . " But there have been plenty of" right-wingers...
...Marshall Shulman, until recently the adviser on Soviet Affairs to the Secretary of State...
...The queen bee lives in the Kremlin...
...Tawney, socialism's shining saint and bore, to the effect that "socialism is a word the connotation of which varies, not only from generation to generation, but from decade to decade...
...The translation of hive talk and hive signals into plain English is one of the most challenging tasks confronting the independent journalist today...
...Yet the intelligentsia of liberalism warmed to him...
...The world collectivist movement goes forward...
...Will someone please tell me why the most interesting ideas of the 1970s seem to have begun life in furtive, hand-tohand circulation inside the Soviet Union...
...The remainder of his book is about capitalism, whose "failure to win a corresponding triumph" is the "second most important event of the recent era...
...But they manage never to sting one another...
...What is socialism now about...
...I hate to disagree with Gilder's very first sentence, but I confess to a less sanguine view of the matter...
...In a brilliant apergu, Sobran has observed that those defectors who "pupate" into the hive experience their metamorphosis into the worker bees of collectivism as "liberation...
...Thus the contemporary socialist hive operating in the West is a kind of a receiving station for defectors: defectors from instilled beliefs, home truths, native wisdom, God, country, flag, and honor...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
