Thus the twentieth century saw a remarkable regression from law and contract to a world of raw power.  In Germany, where Marxian socialism had obtained a significant presence, an unbalanced culture of community and power developed in the 1900s that celebrated both universal community and power, culminating in the excitement of 1914 and the eager resort to war reported by Modris Ecksteins in Rites of Spring.  After the debacle of 1918, in which the top-down orange revolution from the top had clearly failed, and after the 1920s in which a new German elite tried and failed to construct an orange creative culture from the left, the Germans regressed to red and followed a man who promised to return the most advanced country in Europe to the old pre-industrial values of blood and soil, race and lebensraum.  In a sense, the Germans had no choice.  After the failure of orange creative consciousness, both from the right-wing Wilhelmine Second Reich and the left-wing Weimar republic, and with a middle class reamed out of its bourgeois blue consciousness by a ruinous inflation, they had no choice but to return to the red world of power relationships, submitting to an all-powerful red leader of a homeland become once more a submissive tribe tied in blood through the purple world of kinship.  In this wrenching contradiction the greatest industrial nation in Europe based its politics and economy on pre-industrial notions of kinship and land acquisition and a naked display of power unmitigated by the restraints of law; it plunged from the wreck of 1918 to an even bigger disaster in 1945.  It was a melodrama of operatic scale with a dreadful moral: thou shalt not rush a people into the orange world of transcending-the-rules, a world in which the bloody wars of the untamed red ego are civilized into the creative games of the rule-bred orange ego, until they have learned how to live in a blue world of rules.

The collapse of a timidly modernizing regime in Russia led to the extraordinary Bolshevist coup of 1917 in which revolutionaries inspired by Karl Marx gave themselves license to invent the future as a perfect green universal community, a prototype for a world community of socialism.  But the internal logic of the Bolshevist program and the ruthless drive for power untrammeled by any respect for rules and law resulted in a regime of raw power, unleavened even by the nostalgic echoes of pre-industrial culture evoked by Nazism.  Lenin and Stalin found that socialism could only by implemented by declaring war on the Russian people.  This socialism was a curious creation, a forced top-down industrialization that was suited only to the manufacture tanks and guns, that would be needed, it turned out, for a gigantic war with Nazi Germany that exhausted both Nazism and socialism. 

After 70 years, the heirs to Lenin and Stalin found that they lacked the will and the ruthlessness to maintain the terror that had consumed the lives of tens of millions of Russians.  The destiny of a ferocious Soviet power, it turned out with divinely poetic justice, did not extend beyond building tanks and guns with which to defend against the equally murderous tanks and guns of Hitler’s Germany.  They lost their nerve, and submitted to the world-triumphant empire of the United States of America.

While the influence of the green communitarian left on Russia and the collapse of orange vitalism in Germany led to disaster, in the Anglo-Saxon world it led to a less extreme outcome, a century long strategic retreat by the blue believers in law and property before a coalition of anti-capitalists: a green elite offended by the marginalization of its members by the new industrial economy, and a red rank-and-file of pre-bourgeois working class that was as yet unready to move from a tribal society of status to the contractual society of law and property.  Both members of this coalition believed that the bourgeois proposition could not deliver participation in the fruits of industrialism to the broad mass of people without a massive intervention by the best people and a vast increase in government power.  In England, this coalition was institutionalized politically in the Labour Party at the turn of the twentieth century by a joint partnership between the high-born Fabians and the labor unions in which the Fabians provided the brainpower and the unions the horsepower.  In the United States, it was institutionalized by converting the Democratic Party in the 1930s from a party that had flirted with the institutional corruption of big city machines like New York’s Tammany Hall into a national machine party in which elite Progressivism was married to the pre-bourgeois go-along-to-get-along ethos of Tammany Hall and the labor union.  It abandoned the high-minded good government Progressivism of the early twentieth century that had been led by a high-minded college president and frankly turned itself into a national Tammany Hall, winning support by presenting the head of the party as an American cacique, a font of patronage to those who gave their support and a terror to those that opposed him.  Conveniently, this system of boss rule was inaugurated by the aristocratic Franklin Roosevelt who was not obviously the head of a political machine.  But all subsequent Democratic Presidents except the ineffective Jimmy Carter have been skilled machine politicians, first Harry Truman, from the Prendergast machine of Kansas City, then John F. Kennedy, of the Boston Irish mafia, then “Landslide” Lyndon Johnson who had got to the U.S. Senate with the help of a mysterious Ballot Box 13, and finally Bill Clinton, who learned machining in the one-party state of Arkansas.

The reformers imagined that they would be creating a sparkling new society that would be free of the dead hand of bourgeois law and the marauding bands of the robber barons.  The new society would rise above the petty rules and moralizing of the lower middle class, and it would curb the rape of land and people that had been the project of the nineteenth century industrialists.  Instead they would build a society of creativity and compassion, a universal community that would transcend the petty jealousies of nation states and balance of power maneuvering between the big powers.  They would replace the wastage and the crudities of industrial capitalism with a planned economy, with the commanding heights of the economy properly thought out and laid out by disinterested experts using the best minds and knowledge available to build a modern, clean, and prosperous world free of the dirt, the misery, the waste, and the frank oppression of the laissez-faire economy.  No longer would ragged immigrants toil in the needle trades from dawn to dusk in the Lower East Side tenements of New York City; there would be legislation to prevent the exploitation of immigrant labor.  No longer would the aged be cast out into the street when they were too old to earn their daily bread; there would be pensions to give old people dignity and respect.  No longer would immigrant children grow up unlettered and prey to the sweatshop and the greedy manufacturer; they would be taught their letters and numbers at the common school.  No longer would people fear illness, with its devastating loss of wages and perhaps every scrap of savings spent to procure the expensive medicines recommended by the doctor.  No longer would the transit gang cheat and swindle their way to riches with rickety streetcars and elevated railways; nor would monopoly electric utilities gouge the poor and the small businessman.  Instead public utilities would produce the electricity to power the streetlights, and safe clean public transit would carry the working man to his employment.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill