I want to commend a piece at The New Republic by Win McCormack to your attention. Here’s its opening paragraph:
In her illuminating essay “The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasureâ€â€”itself a lost treasure, as so few people who consider themselves within the Western revolutionary tradition ever read or even know about it—Hannah Arendt explains a political concept Thomas Jefferson advanced toward the end of his life, involving the creation of what he called “wards†or “elementary republics.†Jefferson proposed that counties throughout the United States be subdivided into units small enough to permit citizens to conduct their politics on a face-to-face basis. Jefferson was vexed that the U.S. Constitution had, in theory, granted fundamental power to the people, without however giving them any tangible way to actually participate in the process of governing. The elementary ward republics he advocated would, he hoped, provide a means for citizens to exercise political power directly, rather than solely through their elected representatives.
The piece never really addresses the question it purports to be answering: why has European-style socialism never caught on in the United States? I think it’s because more Americans want to be rich than to be equal.
Something that people need to keep in mind as they turn to state socialism to promote their pursuit of stuff is that personal freedom and the freedom to create small, self-organizing groups, a quality so much a part of American society, is that state socialism is inevitably inimical to both. Soviets could not survive the Soviet Union. Such organizations cannot survive state socialism, state capitalism, or crony capitalism all of which inherently seek the consolidation of power within the state. The only way they can thrive is within a liberal democracy and capitalist economy in which the consolidation of power itself is considered an evil that must be fought every single day.
