Hitler? Thank Performative Radicals

Reject Extremism. Your Party Wins.

Inst. #6 from Dr. King’s Authentic Radicalism

The godfather of political sociology was in Munich — unaware of a lost nobody across town. He warned his audience of starry-eyed radical students of “a polar night of icy darkness.” They should have listened.

A Radical Performing. Photo: Gage Skidmore on Flickr

Part 1. Introduction

A Theory of Extremists

During and after the First Red Scare, as anyone could have guessed, the extremists themselves suffered the most repression. What were they thinking? Max Weber, the father of political sociology, provided the classic answer.

He explained it in a lecture at Munich University just a few months before the Palmer-home bombing, which led to the Palmer Raids of our first Red Scare, and made a dire prediction.

What lies before us is not the “summer’s front” [a time of hope and promise] but, initially at least, a polar night of icy darkness and harshness.

Weber’s lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” is one of the founding texts of modern political sociology. And he predicted exactly the type of radical setback that we’ll be discussing in the next few chapters. He was speaking to an audience of radical students who were allied with Kurt Eisner, a young, idealistic socialist. Eisner had recently led a workers’ uprising in Munich and been declared head of the People’s State of Bavaria.

When put to a popular vote, Eisner’s party won only 2.5%. Weber gave his lecture six days later, on January 28, to warn of the danger. On February 21, Eisner was assassinated by right-wing nationalists. On April 7, anarchists and socialists declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic, and then a communist faction seized control.

On April 28, the Freikorps, a loose collection of anti-communist paramilitary militias, surrounded Munich. The “Red Army” of Munich panicked and took upper-class hostages, then executed 10 of them. Outraged, the Freikorps launched a merciless attack on Munich, killing roughly 1,000, mostly left-wing radicals, in two days.

Hitler, in Munich as part of the regular German army, had his career advanced by the right-shift in Munich’s politics. Sent to spy on the tiny German Workers’ Party, he found it to be anti-Semitic and nationalist and quickly rose to the top. Nazism was the ultimate radical-left setback.

The far-left never stood a chance of grabbing power by force. What were they thinking? Weber described the extremists as subscribing to the “ethics of conviction,” which he defined as follows. A man with such ethics believes that

“if an action performed out of pure conviction has evil consequences, then the responsibility must lie not with [himself] but with the world, the stupidity of men — or the will of God.”

This is a great way to simplify my politics. I just need the most righteous conviction, and I don’t need to think about consequences because all that matters is that I must not deviate from my conviction. Of course that makes no sense if you care about the end results. But many people hate having to choose the best way to, say, raise workers’ wages, knowing that if they choose incorrectly they might fail or make things worse. Responsibility is burdensome.

A contemporary example is “voting your conscience” — meaning you just vote for, say, the Green Party, because it’s the “right thing to do,” even though it may help the candidate you least prefer.

In short, it just feels so much better to agree with your friends that you’re the ones with the most righteous position and that’s all that matters. The shortcut of the ethics of conviction is what tempted Seattle’s general strikers, the anarchist bombers, and the 30,000 American communists who pledged their allegiance to Vladimir Lenin. Without their ethics of conviction, there would have been no Red Scare.

Damaging the Democrats

The First Red Scare did little if any damage to the Democrats — while severely damaging the labor movement — because the irresponsible radicals were not part of the Democratic Party or associated with it. Both parties saw the radicals as un-American and outside of either party.

This situation continued until 1933, and even then FDR wisely kept his distance. “A Radical,” he said, “is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air.” But in 1933 Henry Wallace, FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, started hiring socialists and sometimes communists. By the end of the year, Republicans were hearing about this and the separation between Democrats and the far-left started breaking down.

So who was more to blame, Henry Wallace or the radicals? Actually, when radicalism is properly defined — as a change that gets to the root of a problem — Wallace was a radical. He favored fundamental — radical — changes, on a global scale, and spelled this out in his “Century of the Common Man” Speech to international acclaim.

So Wallace and the communists he hired were all radicals. Were they all equally to blame? Does Weber provide the answer? No. Using his definition of ethics of the conviction, he would conclude that both failed to take responsibility for their actions.

Let’s test that against the most famous spy case of the McCarthyism era — the case of Alger Hiss who was hired by Wallace in March 1933, the month FDR took office. Both hiring a communist into FDR’s new government and spying for Stalin were irresponsible, which is the very definition of the ethic of conviction — not taking responsibility for one’s actions. Weber would classify them as equivalent.

But Wallace supported America, and the Democratic Party, and Hiss supported the Soviets and felt no loyalty to the party. This is a crucial distinction as we strategize about saving the Party and healing America. While we need to reject the out-of-touch radicalism of both, it is worth going out of our way to reach people like Wallace because they can be won over to a responsible kind of radicalism. And there are many in the Democratic party who, like Wallace, are loyal to America and the Democrats, but have been deceived into believing irresponsible radical ideas.

I’ll call radicals who follow an ethics of conviction (a term even I can not remember) “performative radicals.” They appear and sound radical. But because they don’t think through the consequences, their impact is usually the reverse of what they claim.