7.1 The Tragic Paradox of Radicalism

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

To celebrate the Fourth of July, William Lloyd Garrison lit a match to the Constitution and, as it burned, exclaimed, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!” Several hundred people had gathered for the annual picnic of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1854. Speakers included Sojourner Truth, Henry David Thoreau, and Garrison, the most renowned radical abolitionist of the day.

Garrison’s abhorrence of compromise led him to oppose the use of electoral politics and call for the North to secede from the Union. Rejecting compromise obviously leads toward polarization, and Garrison’s radicals were both polarized and polarizing.

Understanding the radicals’ rejection of compromise may be the key to understanding the source of polarization. And in fact, with the help of an expert radical, we will find that this antipathy to compromise comes from a radical “ethic,” a kind of moral thinking that was first described by Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology. Conveniently, Weber also describes a second, contrasting ethic which I will call the strategic ethic and which provides a useful definition of liberalism.

But is the radical antipathy to compromise still at the heart of our problems with polarization? Recently, the House passed a progressive emergency-spending bill for the humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. The progressives had first passed a better one that failed in the Senate, and the Senate had sent back a compromise bill backed up by an 84-to-8 vote. There was no choice as funds would run out in under a week. So 129 House Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, passed it over the “no” votes of all 95 members of the Progressive Caucus.

The progressives simply refused to compromise, and Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff slandered the compromising liberals as being as racist as the South in the 1940s. But the progressives felt no need to explain how not compromising would solve the problem that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied children, was going to run out of funding in four days. This is a perfect example of the radical ethic that I’ll discuss shortly and that Weber described in 1918.

But would a radical agree with me that radicals, in general, refuse to tolerate compromise? For the answer, let me turn to Michael Kazin, the author of American Dreamers, a book that surveys 200 years of American radicalism in order to argue the case for radical thinking. He’s a radical himself and a historian of American radicalism at Georgetown University. 

Speaking of radicals before the Civil War, he tells us that “radicals refused to tolerate error, compromise, and moral backsliding.” He also informs us that in 1904, Eugene V. Debs, Bernie Sanders’ lifelong hero, preached that “Only Socialism will save … the nation” and that the Socialist Party “would rather die than compromise.” Kazin’s view is unequivocal; radical detest compromise.

Radicals: Utopian Anti-Liberals

Kazin provides more insight into radical thought as he describes how 1960s radicalism fizzled out. “Most radicals,” he is disappointed to say, returned to the Democratic fold and abandoned their radicalism as their “dreams of revolution dissolved along with other whims of youth” once Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern turned against the Vietnam War.

However, he finds that a “zealous” minority “refused to give up either their [1] ultimate ends or their [2] antagonism toward liberalism.” By “ultimate ends,” he means a “radically egalitarian transformation of society.” Kazin also talks about “egalitarian dreamers,” who are obviously the America dreamers referred to in his book title, who he also calls utopian dreamers.

His second characteristic of radicals—antagonism toward liberalism—is expected because liberals favor strategic compromises. Kazin confirms this, saying: 

The challenge of uncompromising dissenters [radicals] made governing liberals and progressives appear to be problem-solvers.

In other words, “governing liberals” only appear to be “problem-solvers,” and they only gain that appearance because uncompromising radicals “challenge” them into solving problems. So in Kazin’s view, the radicals deserve the credit for pressuring the liberals to act but then the liberals get the credit because they “appear to be” the problem-solvers. The radicals are then antagonistic to liberals because they see the no-good liberals as standing in the way of progress and then getting credit for the progress that only happened because radicals pushed them.

The Ethics of Radicals and Liberals

Kazin digs deeper to find the ethics that underlie his description of radicals. He does this by looking at a revealing split that occurred in the radical abolitionist movement that helped lead to the formation of the Republican Party.

The schism of 1840 did reveal an inescapable aspect of left tradition: the ongoing clash between self-righteous purists [radicals] and anxious opportunists [liberals].

In this case, the radicals were Garrison’s radical abolitionists and liberals were some compromisers who were splitting off to form the Liberty Party. Their “vital compromise,” Kazin tells us, was to “stop demanding, for the present, the abolition of slavery where it existed.”

It may seem surprising that he calls his favorites, the radicals, “self-righteous purists.” But as we will see in the next chapter, he has a theory for how they are the essential ingredient for social change in spite of this character flaw. 

To explain the “inescapable aspect of left tradition” revealed by the schism of 1840, Kazin turns to Weber, a founder of sociology.

Max Weber would later point out, the difference between “an ethic of responsibility” and “an ethic of ultimate ends” is intrinsic to any enterprise in visionary politics.

The “ethic of ultimate ends” is the ethic of Kazin’s radical, utopian dreamers. This is confirmed by Weber saying it applies to those with “pure intentions.” So, for convenience, I will call this the utopian ethic. The “ethic of responsibility” is the liberal ethic, which I will describe as the strategic ethic. To summarize, Kazin endorses Weber’s definitions of two opposing ethics:

•   Radicals follow Weber’s utopian ethic.
•   Liberals follow Weber’s strategic ethic. 

These two ethics identified by Kazan and Weber explain a great deal about the troubles of the Democratic Party and our national polarization. And Kazin is persuasive when he traces this distinction from the 1820s to the present day.

Weber Explains the Two Ethics

Weber explains these “irreconcilably opposed” radical and liberal ethics in his well-known 1918 lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” cited by Kazin. According to Weber, the radical is, “in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord.’ ” The liberal ethic, however, requires that “one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s actions,” taking into account the “average deficiencies of people.” 

It may seem strange that Weber explains the radical ethic in Christian terms, but Kazin’s history shows this makes perfect sense. In his chapter about the communist influence in the 1930s, he explains:

From the perfectionism of the abolitionists [onward], every sizable radical movement in the past [before the 1930s] had articulated a version of social Christianity.

The Communists, who were opposed to organized religion, drove a wedge between the left radicals and organized religion, but that didn’t change the radical ethic, which is still with us.

But Weber does not tie the utopian ethic to religion, and he illustrates this more fully with an example straight from radical-left politics. 

You may demonstrate to a convinced anarchist, believing in [the utopian ethic], that his action will result in increasing the oppression of his class—and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, is responsible for the evil.

Even if you convince the (radical) anarchist that his action will “result in increasing the oppression of his class,” he’ll do it anyway if he considers the action to be righteous. (Remember that Kazin describes radicals as “self-righteous purists.”) Of course, this kind of ethical thinking is quite destructive, and Weber’s first comment on it is that “there is an abysmal contrast” between conduct that follows the radical ethic and conduct that follows the strategic ethic. And he makes it perfectly clear that it is the radical ethic that produces abysmal conduct. For reference, here are two compact definitions:

Utopian ethic: Do what is right according to your group’s utopian ideals. Any evil that results is due to the stupidity or wickedness of others and you have no responsibility.

Strategic ethic: Do what causes the most progress toward your liberal ideals. You are responsible for taking into account the deficiencies of the real world as best you can.

Here’s a modern example of the difference between the two ethics. Ralph Nader campaigned for president in 2000 in Florida. He and 100,000 Florida voters thought he was the right man for the job and “voted their conscience.” Had 538 of them voted for Al Gore instead, Gore would have been president, and we would not have had the Iraq war, and that would have saved 100,000 lives, 4,424 of them American. That was the real-world consequence of their votes.

Nader completely denies responsibility for this outcome. All the Nader voters I have spoken with felt at the time that the Supreme Court was to blame, so his voters had no responsibility. Precisely as Weber predicted, “in the [voters’] eyes, not they but the stupidities of other men are responsible for the evil.”

The “no responsibility” argument is so seductive that it’s worth a closer look. If I’m supposed to put up the bulletproof shield to protect Al Gore but I don’t bother to, and the court shoots him, the court is guilty—but so am I. Not as guilty, but guilty. Nader’s voters failed to put up that shield of votes, not understanding this is how radicals hold on to their irresponsible utopian ethic. As long as they can point a finger at someone else, they think they must be completely innocent.

As I’ve admitted, I made this type of mistake in 1968. And several million Democrats made this same type of mistake in 2016 (compared with 2012, a million switched to Jill Stein and likely more than that stayed home; others voted for Johnson). We can’t be sure they could have prevented Trump’s win by voting strategically, but that’s certainly a possibility. 

Just as a reminder that the utopian ethic is alive and well, here are a few of the myriad possible examples of the radical utopian, no-compromise ethics currently in play:

•   “Vote your conscience” regardless of electoral impact.
•   Oppose all foreign interventions.
•   Never use drones.
•   Punish anyone how says the n-word, even if they are black and only defending themselves against a racist.
•   Vote only for the best healthcare system, even if it can’t pass.

Bernie Sanders refused to vote for Clinton’s 1993 nearly-universal healthcare bill; that was a utopian vote. Although utopian rules often do no harm, their inflexibility is at times severely damaging.

Radicals vs. Liberal Thinking

Kazin calls radicals “uncompromising dissenters,” “utopian dreamers,” and “self-righteous purists.” But how do they actually think when using their utopian ethic, and how is that different from liberal thinking?

The difference is that the utopian ethic is rule-based (for example, “vote your conscience”) while the strategic ethic provides few if any rules. Instead, the strategic ethic requires the liberal to consider all the consequences of taking an action or not taking it and then compare the two sets of consequences. That process is the very definition of strategic thinking.

Of course, there are many rule-based ethical systems, including many religions, that have nothing to do with left political radicalism, so we need to say more. Utopian ethics specify rules (usually unwritten) that are interpretations of “Don’t compromise your utopian dream.” Also, note that a utopian ethic is a set of rules shared within a political group, such as radical abolitionists.

The strategic ethic says to compromise but only in ways that maximize progress toward one’s liberal dream. Everyone is entitled to their own strategic views. Here’s a short summary of the two types of thinking:

Radicals obey or outperform the group’s rules. And to win righteousness points, they call out those who don’t.

Liberals try to figure out the best strategy for maximizing progress toward a liberal or radical dream. They win points by demonstrating creativity in their strategic thinking.

Radicals are attracted to the rule-based approach for three reasons. They like to “know” they’re right, know their opponents are wrong and, most importantly, have their group acknowledge their righteousness. These sources of satisfaction depend on having a set of rules shared by their group. Liberals give up those satisfactions for strategic flexibility. This is the fundamental divide in ethically-oriented political thinking:

The Paradox of Radicalism

Only simplistic rules will work for the kind of people who gravitate to rule-based systems. The rules may be numerous, but they must make it easy to see who’s right and who’s immoral. 

A subtle one-rule utopian ethic that says “always use the best strategy” would completely miss the point. No one would be sure who was right. But the obvious problem with simplistic rules is that they often fail when applied to the complex real world. And sometimes, as when Ralph Nader threw the election to George W. Bush, they give disastrously wrong answers. This dangerous effect is what I call the paradox of radicalism. The best intentions can lead to the worst outcomes, even when this is foreseeable.

The paradox of radicalism: Following the utopian ethic leads to some dreadful consequences for the radical cause that could be avoided by thinking outside the rules.

Of course, any guiding principles can lead to drastic mistakes—stuff happens. The difference is that voting for Nader in Florida was a mistake caused by an intrinsic flaw in the utopian ethic. So the downside of the utopian ethic is that it suffers from both random mistakes—due to the unexpected—and mistakes that are built into any system of simplistic rules.

Historical Examples of the Paradox

“Radicals in the U.S.,” Kazin explains, “have seldom mounted a serious challenge to those who held power.” Instead, they’ve “carped from the fringes of national politics.” But radicals sometimes do make headlines when they have a visibly negative impact—due to the Paradox of Radicalism. Here are a few major examples of that paradox.

The Anarchist’s Bomb. The Knights of Labor blossomed in 1869, and by 1886 had grown to a membership of 700,000. That may have been the most radical year in labor history. Then, in Chicago, at 10:30 p.m. on May 4, 1886, an anarchist threw a bomb into a phalanx of police, killing one on the spot and prompting a shootout between those attending a labor rally and the police at Haymarket Square. Eight police and at least nine civilians were killed.

Immediately, the paradox of radicalism took hold. The country turned against labor organizations. Kazin reports that “a reputation for revolutionary terrorism sentenced the anarchist movement to an early death.” The Knights of Labor was falsely accused of the bombing and began losing membership, never to recover. But the anarchists were celebrated by fellow radicals. (This might well have been the incident Weber was thinking of when he gave his “anarchist” example.)

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Antifa radicals in Oregon, busy helping Trump

The Man with the Muck Rake. The height of the Progressive Era was catalyzed by a flood of still-unmatched progressive investigative journalism from 1902 to 1906. Ida Tarbell’s The History of Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle are still in print. But their success drew in the radicals, whose “investigative journalism” became outrageous. That’s when the paradox of radicalism took hold. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt grew so upset with the radical fringe (and only the radical fringe) of that journalism movement that he gave his famous “Man with the Muck Rake” speech. That caused even Ida Tarbell to be ridiculed as a “muckraker” and essentially ended the era of progressive investigative journalism.

Atomic Spies. The Democrats won the presidency five times in a row from 1932 through 1948. But from its earliest days, the Roosevelt Administration had been infiltrated by members of the Communist Party USA. CPUSA agents were conducting espionage for the Soviets by 1942 or likely earlier, and by 1944 they had infiltrated the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. But in 1946, the U.S. started cracking Soviet diplomatic cables they had been collecting for a decade—the Venona cables. One of the first discoveries was the A-bomb espionage. But that was only the tip of the iceberg.

The Republicans were able to use the resulting scandals and spy trials to discredit the most progressive segment of the American left because more than 100,000 had been drawn into the CPUSA. Of course, Senator Joe McCarthy (and his sidekick and eventual Trump mentor Roy Cohn) was a despicable fanatic and deserves the blame he gets for gross exaggeration and false accusations. But this in no way excuses the fact that the CPUSA duped so many progressives about what it was really up to.

The Venona transcripts show that, at a minimum, 349 Americans, some high up in the federal government, had covert ties to Soviet intelligence agencies. Without the radical Communists’ traitorous behavior and support for Stalin, the paradox of radicalism would not have taken hold. Hundreds of progressives would not have been sent to prison, and another 10,000 would not have lost their jobs. And America would not have shifted so far to the right.

War on the U.S. Government. “The Weatherpeople,” Kazin tells us, “were perhaps the most inept terrorists on the planet,” their worst act of destruction being to blow up their bomb factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three of their own. Nonetheless, they did set off 25 bombs. They worked in support of the Black Panthers, who sometimes initiated shootouts with the police.

As reported in Chapter 3, the turn to radicalism in the late 1960s contributed significantly to the loss of 20 million Democratic voters, a blow the Democrats have yet to recover from. Yes, other forces deserve blame, too. But the radical fringe made terrible mistakes, and liberals with radical sympathies—and I include myself—failed to distance ourselves from them. This was a result of following the old Communist “ethic” of “No enemies on the left,” which came to mean never criticize radicals.

The Radical Root of Polarization

Radicals implement their utopian ethic—never compromise the group’s utopian principles—as a set of simplistic rules. Like religious rules, these establish a standard for purity or righteousness—call it what you will.

That means every one of these rules is a purity test. To those subscribing to a particular radicalism, these rules are obviously true. So anyone who breaks them is doing something deliberately unethical and is, therefore, an immoral person. Falling for this moralistic conclusion is the purity trap discussed in Chapter 7. And that is the main source of emotional polarization inside the Democratic Party and a major source of national polarization.

The utopian ethic of radicals also explains the millennialism discussed in the previous chapter. Here’s how: All millennialisms have a goal of achieving a utopian society, which is a crucial part of the utopian ethic. An apocalyptic form of millennialism avoids an incremental approach and instead tries to suddenly transform the system into such a utopian society. This is exactly what the uncompromising part of the utopian ethic is aiming for. 

So the utopian ethic of radicalism, which is a religious mode of thought, is the source of left-wing millennialism. And as we saw in the previous chapter, most left mythology is designed to support such millennialism.

Conclusion

Have I overstated the case against radicalism? Again I turn to Kazin because he has checked into all the nooks and crannies of 200 years of radical American Dreamers. And no one can accuse him of being biased against them.

In his final subsection, “The Uses of Utopia,” Kazin begins a paragraph stating, “Surely this is a time for awakening the better angels of our nature.” But that paragraph concludes:

In the United States no less than in the Islamic world, we need a moral equivalent of the passion that drives vengeful believers.

—Michael Kazin, American Dreamers

Kazin bases his own call for radicalism on a religious model—vengeful Islam. There is something fundamentally wrong with an ethic that can so easily slide from our ‘better angels” to the “vengeful believers” of the Islamic world. Note, too, that 9/11 was still a recent memory when he wrote this.

Surely, Kazin believes he can separate some good “moral equivalent” from the bloody radical “passions” that drive vengeful Islamic believers. But this is precisely the central flaw of radicalism—the belief that there is some form of righteous purity that is so right-minded and inspiring, that it will overcome the negative effects of an unthinking, rule-based set of purity tests.

In fact, this transition from better angels to vengeful believers is a perfect metaphor for the fate of all socialist republics. They start out seeking to build a utopia with better angels and end up with vengeful believers brutally enforcing a failed system. That this has happened time and again is not some unlucky coincidence. It is an inevitable result of the radical utopian ethic.

Radicals are locked into their belief system by the self-reinforcing nature of the radical ethic. Once you adopt it, you become convinced that questioning it is unethical. This is nothing new or unusual—it is found in most pre-Enlightenment ideologies and in every cult.