Meeting Your Heroes: None Dare...Ch. 4

First off: a bit of a format change. I had been using a library procured version of this book in hardcover, but I kept racking up fines. I returned that version but am now working off of a PDF that doesn't have the same page numbering. I'll work toward getting a different version, but for this week, we're just going with the first few pages of chapter 4.

I make it a point to never learn anything about the people I'm a fan of. Nothing, zero. I don't want to know, I just want to enjoy the things that they make without having to worry about their personal views on things. Did Kurt Smith (of Tears for Fears) support Brexit? No idea. Did Britney Spears vote for Biden? Couldn't tell you and I willfully stay agnostic about their positions (also it's a fun playlist to combine the two as Tears for Fears and Britney Spears...it kind of rhymes). Think of  Paul Ryan's shock that Rage Against the Machine had political views. The old adage about not meeting your heroes is about the reality of not living up to the myth that we have built up in her heads.

However, there are not meeting your heroes and there's doing zero research into them. Whether Kurt Smith supported Brexit is one thing, but whether or not he committed a hate crime is another (he didn't as far as I know). 

This week's post is about doing the very basic research involved in evaluating sources. In Continental Philosophy there's a huge problem with fans of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a Nazi, not a "born into the wrong place at the wrong time" Nazi, like former Pope Benedict--but a true believer in the party. That's something you should know as a fan of Heidegger and something that you have to wrestle with internally. Allen is going to make the same mistake here as he begins the chapter attempting to argue that the super-rich has funded the COMMUNISTS. 

The first claim that Allen makes, and we are going to follow this reasoning here, is that Marx wrote a plan for socializing a country. A claim that Allen thinks is shocking, but isn't. That would be like being shocked that Darwin believed in natural selection. It's kind of Marx's bag to believe that socialism was a cure for the ailments of 19th-century industrial society. 

Allen then moves on to condemn the graduated income tax. This is something he claims was supported by the Populist movements but was a secret plan by the uber-rich and the socialists. Here is what I'll never understand: why anyone is opposed to a graduated or progressive tax system. Especially considering who Allen's audience and target are: his audience is likely not the rich but middle to lower class individuals who would only benefit from this system. Further, given that his target is the super-rich, a graduated income tax would only harm them. His argument here seems to be that silver bullets work on these werewolves, but the werewolves actually own the silver bullet manufacturers so therefore we need to find a different way to harm them because using silver bullets actually helps the werewolves. 

Nevertheless, the real push in these populist movements came from people like JP Morgan who funded the radicals. The only evidence he has is from Quigley, whom we should remember, was very explicit that Allen didn't understand him--therefore we get to toss that out entirely. 

Then Allen cites Oswald Spengler's book "Decline of the West" and this is where we come full circle. In discussing the financial backing of the socialist movements of the United States, Allen wants to claim that it's all about money. For him, it's the only possible motive that anyone would do anything, but some Socialists are idealists and genuinely support the position. None of that matters because we aren't talking about Socialism we are talking about SOCIALISM. Allen thinks this Spengler guy is his evidence when he cites him:

 "There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, in the direction indicated by money, and for the time being permitted by money-and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact."

That seems pretty damning. However, like all conspiracy propagates, Allen lifts this quote completely from the context. Spengler was a straight-up fascist, writing after WWI this book was about the inevitable fall of any civilization which he believed was more akin to a living organism than a political/legal arrangement. In other words, he was pretty much a follower of Georg Hegel, which, in my book, just makes him intellectually vacuous--but that is a different story for a different kind of blog. Perhaps Allen, instead of looking for thousand-page books to find quotes that he knows his audience isn't going to fact check, should look at who and what he's referencing. 

First off Spengler is criticizing European Socialism which he thought was corrupt in the above quote. But Spengler supported German socialism which he thought was different. Spengler also supported German nationalism in the 1920s but thought that Hitler was a pretender and wasn't a fan of the anti-semitism that seemed bound up in Hitler's movement. In other words, take out the anti-Semitism and German National Socialism is all right with Spengler. Let's be clear, the Nazis were bad for things other than their racism. I should also note that it is curious that Allen cites Spengler's book as being published by Modern Library in 1945. This is strange because the original book, volume 1, was published in 1918 after WWI. I'm positive that I've made a date error in my dissertation, but it would be a matter of confusion the publication date of an article with the earlier date of a revision--a difference of perhaps a year. In this case we are dealing with a mistake that spans decades and the only motive that I can think of is that Allen wants to further divorce this quote from its context. A book on German nationalism claiming that societies' fall is inevitable is a bit more difficult to pull quotes out of if it comes between the Kaiser's attempt to conquer Europe and Hitler's attempt to conquer Europe. 

Allen moves on to attack the graduated income tax by citing an overly long quote from noted socialist and leftist, Gabriel Kolko, in his Triumph of Conservatism. There is an odd parenthetical inserted here where Allen claims that Kolko really meant to say "Triumph of Big Business." Here's the problem: Kolko would be against everything Allen is for and for proper socialism in the United States. The overly long quote (which I'll insert at the bottom of this post) concerns the reason that big business has welcomed federal intervention into its affairs: to lessen competition. In other words, people like Morgan used their influence to create laws that stifled their competition's ability to exist. Kolko uses this situation to argue that the problem is how regulation was used not THAT regulation exists. Yet Allen goes on to make this an indictment of the graduated income tax. How he gets there is by just making th claim and relying on no one actually reading the long quote or knowing how Gabriel Kolko is. 

A page or so later, Allen claims that the anti-trust legislation which broke up companies like Standard Oil, combined with the graduated income tax allowed people like Rockefeller to amass capital at the expense of their competition. This seems to be a magic trick as the graduated tax would affect the Rockefellers the most rather than work at their behest. Of course, the issue then is that Rockefeller could write the expense off by creating charities and making donations--which is what he did. And we must remember that Allen hates charities and organizations. I guess it's all coming together for the conspiracy (rolling eyes). Though at least we might be getting a coherent conspiracy out of him, that's something. 

Here is the long Quote: 

""... the significant reason for many businessmen welcoming and working to increase federal intervention into their affairs has been virtually ignored by historians and economists. The oversight was due to the illusion that American industry was centralized and monopolized to such an extent that it could rationalize the activity [regulate production and prices] in its various branches voluntarily. Quite the opposite was true. Despite the large numbers of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests. ...""