Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pegged. Yes he did, without ever laying eyes on the spirited millennial.
Solzhenitsyn in his 3-volume novel on Russia in the runup to the Bolshevik Revolution (August 1914, November 1916, and March 1917) sought to explain how Russia could turn into the 74-year nightmare called the Soviet Union. In so doing, he spends much time on the fashionable currents of thought among college students in the few years before the Revolution. His account is fascinating for its parallel with our own youth’s growing affection for socialism and a host of chic causes. In both generations, the enthusiasm for their infatuations is matched by an unwarranted confidence in their judgment.
Some might rightly use the word “arrogant” in describing the mental disposition of more than a few of our most hearty firebrands, then and now. Humility would require something other than an absolute faith in their youthful “answers” to life’s real or imaginary problems. Sounds like AOC. Combine the cock-suredness with a prescription that centers around the empowerment of the state and we have all the makings for disaster.
First, let’s take a look at an MSNBC townhall with AOC from April 1, 2019. Watch the whole thing to have a feel for the march of unexamined assumptions and faulty reasoning.
Now, compare the above with the book. In a scene from August 1914 (pp. 334-348), two university students on a Moscow holiday before they were to report to artillery school run into an elderly college acquaintance and professor on the street. The three agree to go to a pub for beer, food, and conversation. The back-and-forth is enlightening.
The two university students in the story are Sanya and Kotya and the elder sage is Varsonofiev. Here’s Varsonofiev making one of the young minds realize their affection for the state.
Varsonofiev: “But if you are a Hegelian you must take a positive view of the state.”
Kotya: “Well, I … I suppose I do.”
Kotya was unaware of this basic assumption in his thinking till the old guy brought it to his attention. He would have to embrace the state as savior for his reasoning to make any sense.
Does AOC show any evidence of a similar “Oh, I see” moment? Nowhere in her unchallenged comments on MSNBC does she say anything like, “We must give government more power”. Instead, it’s left unstated and abstract. Her favorite word is “mobilize” – a verb – as in mobilize everyone to the cause (her climate-change cure). Who’s doing the mobilizing? It won’t be AOC and her merry band of climate-change barkers who’ll convince the nation’s entire populace to voluntarily jump on board the train to the carbon-free utopia. If she’s relying on that, the growing number of dissenters will exercise an early-term abortion on the scheme. Clearly, she’s not telling the audience that an omni-competent state will have to be created to manage the people’s lives in the minutest detail. And, of course, AOC and kindred spirits will do the managing. It’s sooooo unstated.
What’s the historical experience of activists who created such all-powerful governments? The 20th century showed that the supposed failures of the marketplace were pale next to the ensuing government failures. Such a thought will never grace the mind of the youthful zealot. That would require the humility of recognizing the possibility of being wrong. Don’t expect it from AOC.
Another aspect of these conversations – whether in a Solzhenitsyn novel or AOC interview – is the prevalence of the procrustean fallacy. To be “procrustean” (adj.) is to enforce “uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”. For instance, activists frequently use “people” as if the people are an undifferentiated mass. The same would be true with the litany of ethnic, gender, and racial groups: all African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and evangelical white Christians think this or that. AOC does it with “all scientists”, along with the rest of the demography in tow. It’s how she tries to make her opinions incontestable.
Varsonofiev catches Kotya in the same falsehood. Here they are talking about the “people”.
Kotya: “What we need is a strict scientific definition of the people.”
Varsonofiev reminds him of the foolishness of attempting to know “the people” as a uniform whole: “Yes, we all like to look scientific, but nobody has ever defined what, precisely, is meant by the ‘the people’. In any case ‘the people’ don’t just comprise the peasant mass. For one thing, you can’t exclude the intelligentsia.”
Kotya responds by compounding the error: “The intelligentsia also has to be defined.”
Varsonofiev counters: “Nobody seems capable of that either. We would never think of the clergy, for instance, as part of the intelligentsia, would we?”
Trying to make Kotya understand the problematic nature of his thinking is doubly difficult when his answers are so obviously true … to him! Ditto AOC. Her responses to her self-defined prediction of environmental doom are festooned with “We’ve got to do ….” Our young congressional zealot gets away with it when MSNBC lines up on the stage (see the above video) fellow travelers in the climate-change apocalypse movement and create the false impression that all questions are settled and now all that’s left is building the omni-competent state … on the q.t. of course.
The scene wasn’t an exchange of views but more like the mutual reinforcement of the like-minded. The program had all the atmospherics of an evangelist’s tent-meeting revival.
More to the point on the arrogance of the young, in an exchange on the proper form of social organization, the old master set the record straight for our young interlocutors on our ability to make the best form of government.
Kotya: “So you don’t think that the rule of the people is the best form of government?”
Varsonofiev: “No, I do not.”
Kotya: “What form of government do you propose then?”
Varsonofiev: “Propose? I wouldn’t presume to do that. Who is so rash as to believe that he can invent ideal institutions? Only those who suppose that nothing valuable existed until the present generation came along, who imagined that whatever matters is only just beginning, that the truth is known only to our idols and ourselves, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is a fool or a scoundrel.”
I’ll get to the direct reference of youthful arrogance in a moment. It’s coming. But here Sozhenitsyn goes after another favorite gambit of people like AOC. It’s the “right side of history” thing. AOC is symptomatic of a kind of person who sees that their views are especially ordained since history, in their adolescent reasoning, leads to the present moment and their opinions. They are therefore justified in dismissing and silencing opposing views. Now that’s arrogance!
Varsonofiev continues: “Still, we mustn’t blame our Russian youngsters in particular, it’s a universal law: arrogance is the main symptom of immaturity. The immature are arrogant, the fully mature become humble.”
Pow! The eight-ball is sunk in the corner pocket. In AOC’s mind, the answers are so simple, and she won’t hesitate to bull rush her solutions down the throats of any who disagree. She has all the arrogance of the immature.
The presence of AOC on the national stage gives us a chance to peel back the scab on the festering wound that is the intellectual bankruptcy generated by our failed schools. AOC throws out terms from a textbook as if their presence in a textbook is all one needs to know of their veracity. She uses “market failure”, “externalities”, and “social cost” as if their use is ipso facto proof of any claim that utilizes them. Her understanding is that of a textbook and not the workings of a critical mind. She throws out the terms to impress her audience. It’s another form of arrogance recognizable to Solzhenitsyn.
A truly thoughtful mind would be more skeptical. Completely absent from her thought process was a limiting principle, the simple idea that there are other concerns to limit their application. If “market failure” condemns free markets, then its replacement, government, also elicits “government failure”. If “externalities” (effects on those not a party to an action) condemns capitalism, then what of government’s “externalities” of illegitimacy and crime stemming from the Great Society programs? If “social costs” (the costs that befall society as a whole) condemns free markets, do such negatives accrue to government actions, and are the alleged social costs a sufficient excuse to ignore the benefits of the action in question? For AOC, she appears to be ignorant.
Maybe Varsonofiev’s maxim should be altered. Instead of limiting the adage to the factors of maturity and arrogance, we need to add ignorance. Thus, immaturity leads to arrogance because it is based on ignorance.
The making of the omni-competent state democratic can’t paper over the hot mess. There are certain things that shouldn’t be a matter of democracy. Democracy can’t make the immoral moral. Democracy oughtn’t willy-nilly confiscate my property or invade my freedom of conscience. Democracy isn’t a license to trample on my God-given rights. Indeed, they come from God (or Nature according to Locke and Jefferson) and not the state.
If all this is true, we’ve just laid the foundation for free markets. Are you listening AOC?
RogerG