This commentary is by Seth A. Steinzor of South Burlington, a retired lawyer who spent 32 years in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and is author of the three-volume verse trilogy “In Dante’s Wake,” published by Fomite Press.
Tom Licata’s Nov. 24 commentary betrays an almost complete ignorance of the things he is talking about.
Take “progressivism.” While this term has meant different things to different people over time, it reached prominence in America in the early 20th century as a reaction against income inequality and corporations’ excessive, unaccountable power.
Mr. Licata seeks to demonstrate that progressives aim to take away your rights and destroy your soul, but he misses what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about it: “Wise progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand.” Mr. Roosevelt was nothing if not an individualist, although Mr. Licata might consider him a RINO.
Nowadays, progressivism tries to remedy racial injustice, sexism, oppression on the basis of gender identification, and corporate environmental depredation. Consistent with the progressivism of a hundred years ago, it is based on protecting the individual from violation and oppression by more powerful forces and entities.
Take “socialism.” Like “progressivism,” socialism’s meanings have varied over time. Socialism has been around since long before Marx. Jesus’ teachings have been interpreted as socialist. Socialism revolves around the principle that a society should govern and/or regulate the wealth and property within it for the good of all society’s members, not just for personal or corporate enrichment.
Social Security and Medicare are socialist concepts. The strong social democratic tradition of governance in many European countries demonstrates that democracy and socialism are highly compatible. So do labor unions. If you like the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, minimum wage, employer-sponsored health insurance, workplace safety regulations, child labor laws, and such, you’re at least flirting with socialism. It uses collective action to correct the imbalance of power between individual persons and the far mightier entities that otherwise govern economic life for their own benefit.
Take “Marxism.” Marxism and socialism are not synonymous. Far from it. For example, German communists’ failure to join forces with German socialists in the 1930s was an important factor in Hitler’s rise to power. More to the point, what 20th century so-called “communists” created was not what Marx had envisioned. Marx said little about what a communist society would look like, and what he said was vague.
My point is that when you talk about Marxism and socialism, you are talking apples and oranges; and when you say, as Mr. Licata does, that “Marx’s class conflict theory failed” by not “instituting a kind of shared and communal existence that would replace the competitive free-market system,” you are blowing smoke, since Marx’s theory was never truly applied; and when you assert, as Mr. Licata does, that socialism’s purpose is “the domination of the individual soul by the state,” you are just making stuff up.
Mr. Licata doesn’t understand Elizabeth Warren’s statement regarding so-called “self-made” billionaires and entrepreneurs that “you didn’t build that.” They didn’t build the roads, the power grid, the cities, the education system, the legal system, the financial system, in short, the innumerable infrastructures both hard and soft upon which they relied and without which they would have been unable to do much of anything. Despite the obviousness of this, Mr. Licata seems to think she was talking about something else.
Take “critical race theory.” Mr. Licata decries “critical theory in the sense of using outright lies and constant criticisms (critical race theory, Black Lives Matter) to deconstruct America’s founding principles and institutions in order to start anew from year-zero — a kind of redo of the French Revolution.” This is near gibberish. “Critical race theory” originated in American law schools in the 1970s as an explanation why a legal system that is, on its face, neutral with regard to race keeps on producing racially disparate outcomes. That it does so is indisputable.
CRT is not and never has been taught on the grade-school level. It acknowledges the centrality of slavery and racism in American history and attempts to trace their effects upon current-day institutions. Republican critics of CRT seem to want to ban any discussion of race from our educational system, sort of as if Germans were to erase Jews from their textbooks.
To characterize CRT and BLM as using “outright lies and constant criticisms” betrays an oversensitivity to honest discourse about our country’s painful racial history, possibly stemming from white guilt and white privilege, which does not acknowledge misdeeds and is offended by claims of their importance.
Take the claim that CRT and BLM aim to “deconstruct” our basic institutions. Inigo Montoya might have said, “You keep on using that word deconstruct. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Mr. Licata’s likening CRT and BLM to the French Revolution is likewise puzzling. The French monarchy and aristocracy were overthrown in the name of individual liberty and the common people. Year One was intended to mark the beginning of this new social order.
For this self-proclaimed champion of liberty and individual rights to refer derogatorily to the Revolution is peculiar. Perhaps, his disdain for attempts to better the lot of minorities and workers indicates that his concerns are limited to a narrower class. Perhaps, he is nostalgic for the Bourbons.
