Let me remind you also of some excerpts from the political program of that party, adopted in Munich, on February 24, 1920:
We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living.
The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: …an end to the power of the financial interests.
We demand profit sharing in big business.
We demand a broad extension of care for the aged.
We demand … the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments.
In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education. . . . We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents. . . .
The government must undertake the improvement of public health—by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor … by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth.
[We] combat the… materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good’
There is, however, one difference between the type of fascism toward which we are drifting, and the type that ravaged European countries: ours is not a militant kind of fascism, not an organized movement of shrill demagogues, bloody thugs, hysterical third-rate intellectuals, and juvenile delinquents—ours is a tired, worn, cynical fascism, fascism by default, not like a flaming disaster, but more like the quiet collapse of a lethargic body slowly eaten by internal corruption.
Did it have to happen? No. Can it still be averted? Yes.
If you doubt the power of philosophy to set the course and shape the destiny of human societies, observe that our mixed economy is the literal, faithfully carried-out product of Pragmatism—and of the generation brought up under its influence. Pragmatism is the philosophy which holds that there is no objective reality or permanent truth, that there are no absolute principles, no valid abstractions, no firm concepts, that anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb, that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist—provided a consensus says so.
If you want to avert the final disaster, it is this type of thinking—every one of those propositions and all of them— that you must face, grasp, and reject. Then you will have grasped the connection of philosophy to politics and to the daily events of your life. Then you will have learned that no society is better than its philosophical foundation. And then— to paraphrase John Gait—you will be ready, not to return to capitalism, but to discover it
*Der Natlonalsozialismus Dokumente 1933-1945, edited by Walther Hofer, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bucherei, 1957, pp. 29-31.
For many more quotations of this kind, revealing the altruist-colleo tivist base of the Nazi and fascist ideology, I refer you to The Fascist New Frontier.
21. THE WRECKAGE OF THE
CONSENSUS BY AYN RAND
Two years ago, on April 18, 1965, I spoke at this Forum on the subject of “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus.” I said: “The clue to the core, essence, motive, and real meaning of the doctrine of ‘Government by Consensus’ [is] the cult of compromise. Compromise is the pre-condition, the necessity, the imperative of a mixed economy. The ‘consensus’ doctrine is an attempt to translate the brute facts of a mixed economy into an ideological—or anti-ideological— system and to provide them with a semblance of justification.” The brute facts of a mixed economy are gang-rule, i.e., a scramble for power by various pressure groups—without any moral or political principles, without any program, direction, purpose, or long-range goal—with the tacit belief in rule by force, as their only common denominator, and, unless the trend is changed, a fascist state as the ultimate result.
In September of 1965, writing in The Objectivist Newsletter, I said: “Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everyone; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone.”
It is startling to observe how rapidly this principle took effect—in an age that takes no cognizance of principles.
Where is President Johnson’s consensus today? And where, politically, is President Johnson? To descend—in two years, in an era of seeming prosperity, without the push of any obvious national disaster—to descend from the height of a popular landslide to the status of a liability to his own party in the elections of 1966, is a feat that should give pause to anyone concerned with modern politics.
Lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 16, 1967. Published in The Objectivist, April and May, 1967.
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If there were any way to make compromise work, President Johnson is the man who would have done it. He was an expert at the game of manipulating pressure groups—a game that consists of making promises and friends, and keeping the second, but not the first. His skill as a manipulator was the one characteristic that his “public-image builders” were selling us at the height of his popularity. If he could not make it, no amateur can.
The practical efficacy of compromise is the first premise that Johnson’s history should prompt people to check. And, I believe, a great many people are checking it. People, but not Republicans—or, at least, not all of them. Not those who are now pushing an unformed, soft-shelled thing like Romney to succeed where a pro has failed.
What are we left with, now that the consensus has collapsed? Nothing but the open spectacle of a mixed economy’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy, the random wreckage of its naked mechanism, with the screeching of its gears as the only sound in our public silence—the sound of crude, range-of-the-moment demands by pressure groups who have abandoned even the pretense at any political ideals or moral justification.
The consensus-doctrine was a disguise, a shoddy, cheesecloth one, but still a disguise to give a semblance of theoretical status to the practice of plain gang warfare. Today, even the cheesecloth is gone, leaving the anti-ideology to function in the open, more brazenly than ever.
A political ideology is a set of principles aimed at establishing or maintaining a certain social system; it is a program of long-range action, with the principles serving to unify and integrate particular steps into a consistent course. It is only by means of principles that men can project the future and choose their actions accordingly.
Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men’s minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory—above all, without memory, so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victims.
In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and are relied upon to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged, and are switched at will, when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang’s. Thus men’s moral criterion becomes, not “my view of the good— or of the right—or of the truth,” but “my gang, right or wrong.”
This is what makes today’s public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many
wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: “Who is right?” one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: “Which gang do you want to support?”
For example, consider the issue of the war in Vietnam.
Everything is wrong about that hideous mess (but not for the reasons which are shouted most loudly), starting from its designation. A “cold war” is a brazen contradiction in terms. It is not very “cold” for the American soldiers killed on battlefields, nor for their families, nor for any of us.
A “cold war” is a typically Hegelian term. It rests on the premise that A is non-A, that things are not what they are, so long as we don’t name them; or, practically speaking, things are what our leaders tell us they are—and, unless they tell us, we have no way of knowing. This sort of epistemolo-gy is not working too well even in regard to the ignorant hordes of Russian peasants. That this should be attempted in regard to American citizens is, perhaps, the most disgraceful symptom of our cultural disintegration.
When men are being killed by a foreign army in military action, it is a war, a whole war and nothing but a war— regardless of what temperature anyone chooses to ascribe to it.