I was fleetingly curious yesterday to see what Trump had found to talk about in his 250th anniversary speech—given that all the traditional themes of our American civic religion are off-limits to him. He can't talk about how we're a nation of immigrants—since we are apparently no longer proud of this, and Trump is trying to undo the fact. He can't talk about how our history represents a gradual unfolding of greater rights and justice, since here too: Trump is trying to reverse this trajectory.
So when it comes time for Trump to celebrate two and a half centuries of American history, I wondered, what would he find to say?
From the sounds of it, he took the laziest route available: the speech degenerated into red-baiting. America was to be described as "great" and "strong" in some utterly vague and vapid sense (any attempt to specify the nature or source of "greatness," after all, might have led into verboten themes of democracy, liberty, multiculturalism, etc.) But this "greatness" is menaced and "strength" is sapped by all the "communists" now allegedly winning primaries in blue states.
Here I felt guilty. I had just been complaining about some of these same primary-winning DSA progressives in recent posts. I argued that their view of economics was naïve; and I pointed out that at least one of them had, at least once, appeared to make excuses for Putin. Now that Trump is bashing them, though, I suddenly felt like I had been adding to a gratuitous pile-on.
This is ever the peril of being on the anti-communist Left. We are "embarrassed by undesirable allies," as Arthur Koestler puts it in The Yogi and the Commissar. We end up taking the same position—at least on this one issue—as reactionaries and conservatives who are "right for all the wrong reasons," as Koestler says.
Let us recall, though, that there is also a long tradition of reactionaries who are wrong for the wrong reasons. Indeed, some conservatives had admired Soviet despotism precisely because they understood it far better than its left-wing apologists had ever done.
In E.E. Cummings's EIMI, if memory serves (I can't track down the passage at the moment), he quotes at one point an American capitalist who praises the Soviet experiment precisely because they keep their workers on a much tighter leash. "They don't have strikes here and demands for higher wages!"
Indeed, from that point of view, the Stalinist state was a capitalist's paradise. There, the factory manager's "powers over the employees [...] are actually greater than the powers of ownership in capitalist countries," Koestler writes.
"Labour legislation" in the Soviet Empire, he adds later, "attained rigors which surpassed those imposed upon the workers in both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany"—citing as examples laws that tied workers to a specific factory and permitted summary discharge for being so little as twenty minutes late to work.
Obviously, there was always a lot here for fascists and reactionaries to love! Indeed—as Koestler shows—the Stalinist state even outdid the West when it came to "family values" imposed at the barrel of a gun. He cites Soviet legislation introduced in the 1930s that criminalized abortion, persecuted homosexuality, and strove to incentivize higher birthrates by penalizing bachelors and families with fewer than three children.
What is there is such a program for J.D. Vance not to love?
André Gide, in his Return from the U.S.S.R., appears particularly troubled by the same laws—for understandable reasons. "[F]rom a Marxist point of view," he asks, "what can one think of that other, older [Soviet] law against homosexuals? This law, which assimiliates them to counter-revolutionaries (for non-conformism is hunted down even in sexual matters), condemns them to a sentence of five years' deportation, which can be renewed if they are not reformed by exile." (Bussy trans.)
It is fascinating to me how much history appears to repeat itself today, even in the post-Soviet era. Once again, we have fellow-traveling leftists making excuses for a Russian dictator. Once more, we have red-baiting reactionaries attacking them as "communists," without really understanding why they condemn them. And once more, we also have some far-right conservatives who understand the nature of the Russian autocracy better than its leftist apologists—and admire it for that reason.
After all, when Putin courts American religious conservatives and white nationalists by depicting his country as the land without "wokeness"—and when American fascists like Tucker respond to his siren call with starry-eyed admiration—they are much closer to perceiving the real character of his regime (which is really a "joyless experiment in force and fear," as E.E. Cummings called the Stalinist state) than the leftists who defend him out of some misguided "anti-imperialist" impulse.
Putin is indeed creating the sort of religious nationalist, chauvinist, authoritarian state that our American neo-fascists would love to erect in imitation on our shores.
Trump in his Putin-admiring and Putin-excusing mode, then, is much closer to the truth than in his red-baiting mode. Trump is right to detect an affinity between his project and that of the Russian autocrat—just as the American conservative businessman E.E. Cummings quotes was more observant than the fellow-travelers. What capitalist in the 1930s could not see how quickly Stalin suppressed strikes and reduced proletarians to quasi-slavery and not feel his bosom respond?
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