Timothy Birdnow

Here is a tremendous essay in First Things that sounds so very much like modern America. I remember a lot of this from my days studying Russian history. America is walking the path of Bolshevism, no question.

From the article:

How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that "all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: "Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin—"When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope”—would have been more accurately rendered as: "They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, "liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. Lenin, after all, was by no means the only bloodthirsty Russian radical. In 1907, Ivan Pavlov—not the Nobel prize–winning scientist, but one of the brightest theoreticians of the especially violent ­Maximalists—published The Purification of Mankind, which divided humanity into ethical races. In this analysis, exploiters, vaguely and broadly identified, constituted a race, "morally inferior to our animal predecessors,” which must be exterminated, children and all, by the morally superior race, whose best members were the terrorists themselves. Remarkably enough, this program evoked no indignation, among other Maximalists or even among other socialists, however moderate. Another prominent Maximalist, M. A. Engel’gardt, argued for a red terror that would kill at least twelve million people. As if anticipating the Khmer Rouge, one anarchist group sought to establish equality by killing all educated people.

And yet the liberals refused to use their position in the Duma to make constitutionalism work. They would not participate in determining the government budget but confined their activities to denouncing the government and defending terrorists. Even when Pyotr Stolypin, the most capable chief minister ­Nicholas II ever had, offered to enact the entire Kadet program, the Kadets refused to cooperate. Evidently their professed beliefs were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.

[...]

Unless an intelligent was wealthy or, like Lenin, could become a professional revolutionary living at his party’s expense, he had to work, but as a matter of honor he did not take his profession seriously. As Izgoev remarks,

The average, rank-and-file intelligent usually does not know his job and does not like it. He is a poor teacher, a poor engineer. . . . He regards his profession . . . as a sideline that does not deserve respect. If he is enthusiastic about his profession . . . he can expect the cruelest sarcasm from his friends.

[...]

The Landmarks contributors mention a second characteristic of intelligents: their devotion to a special set of manners, including dress, hygiene (deliberately poor), hair style (the famous "short-haired lady nihilists”), prescribed and taboo expressions, and a set of sexual practices that the Landmarks contributors describe as puritanical dissoluteness (debauchery practiced as a rite) fueled by "nihilistic moralism.” As Frank observes, the intelligentsia constitute

a separate little world with its own very strong and rigorous traditions, its own etiquette, mores and customs. . . . Nowhere in Russia are there such . . . a clear and strict regulation of life, such ­categorical judgments of people and situations, and such loyalty to the corporate spirit as in this all-Russian spiritual monastery, the Russian­ ­intelligentsia.

Most liberals proudly donned the uniform. This tragedy almost guaranteed the intelligentsia’s eventual seizure of power and the terrible reign that followed. For the Landmarks contributors, liberals’ attachment to illiberal movements derived from a psychological complex favoring conformism.

Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual ­commitments.

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