Yes. The bit that really mattered was India and it has to be said that was handled very badly though you'd need to know more about it than me to know if the disasters were avoidable by anything the British could do. And of course some parts of the Empire perhaps wish we were still there. Well, Hong Kong I guess. Not sure there is anywhere else.
Pretty sure the fact we had a Labour government after the war wasn't the reason the British Empire dissolved. The entire (well, almost the entire) British establishment was on board with the idea.
Are you sure about that? My impression was that in the immediate postwar period, the expectation among European powers (UK included) was that the colonies would persist for decades at least. It was only the outbreak of resistance movements in these countries that led politicians in the UK/France/etc to change their minds.
You could be right and perhaps it was a bit of both. But certainly post Suez nobody doubted the outcome I think only the speed. France was much keener on maintain its empire than Britain was.
Yeah I agree with you that it was a done deal by then. I think Ghana was already well on the way to independence by 1951 when the UK decided to release Nkrumah from prison.
On Orwell's prediction that the British left-wing intelligentsia would embrace a pro-Hitler reaction, by arguing it is morally more urgent to defeat bourgeois democracy than it is to defeat fascism: This was ongoing in France at the time. In early 1941 Germany and the Soviet Union were still wary non-aggression partners. Ideologically the Soviet-approved line was that the primary enemy was to be Western imperialism and the social democratic parties enabling it, not Germany. In 04 July 1940, mere days after the fall of France, the French Communist Party newspaper L'Humanité could editorialize:
>LE PEUPLE DE FRANCE VEUT LA PAIX. Il demande d’énergiques mesures contre tous ceux qui, par ordre de l’Angleterre impérialiste, voudraient entraîner les Français dans la guerre...
>Il est particulièrement réconfortant en ces temps de malheur de voir de nombreux travailleurs parisiens s’entretenir avec les soldats allemands, soit dans la rue, soit au bistro du coin. Bravo camarades, continuez même si cela ne plaît pas à certains bourgeois aussi stupides que malfaisants ! La fraternité des peuples ne sera pas toujours une espérance, elle deviendra une réalité vivante.
>THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE WANT PEACE. They demand that energetic measures be taken against all those who, on the order of England's imperialists, would like to drag the French people back into the war...
>It is particularly comforting, in these unhappy times, to see so many Parisian workers engage in friendly relations with the German soldiers, whether it be in the street, or the neighbourhood bistro. Bravo, comrades. Keep it up, even if it upsets those certain members of our bourgeoisie who are as stupid as they are evil! The brotherhood of the people will not always be a distant hope, it will become a living reality.
So the notion that swathes of the left intelligentsia could find reasons to ally with the actual Nazis when they are literally marching down one's street, in order to fight Capitalism, was not unimaginable - it was happening across the channel. British left-wingers, both for and against, were well aware - Labour participating in the coalition National government of Churchill was a hot topic of contention.
This being said, Orwell's own line pro-democratic of attack was also not dissimilar and indeed mirrored the CPGB's own line during the period (which could not embrace anti-Englishness wholesale and instead embraced anti-National-governmentness). In The Lion & The Unicorn, he himself likewise argues for a General Election where the National government can be defeated, or otherwise a revolution from below to compel it, rather than focusing on fighting Germany. He criticizes left-wing revolutionary defeatism but himself is not optimistic, arguing (like the CPGB) that the British ruling class is simply too incompetent to win the war against fascism anyway, therefore the priority is to defeat the ruling class and achieve socialism before fighting fascism. He correctly recognizes that the key strategic ally are not any people in Axis-occupied Europe, who cannot meaningfully rebel, but instead the Americans - but in his six-point programme pushes for an alliance with the 'victims of the Fascist powers' and has nothing to say about the Americans. He recognizes that the war against Nazism is in the now, and that the urgency is to defeat it - but for solutions reaches for the (already by the 1940s) the old and tired hobbyhorse of tripartite education as a decades-long project to improve the quality of rule in Britain! Revolution to defeat the only remaining free European government, now - fight fascism in the ongoing state of war, later.
This is Orwell too insightful to really embrace the CPGB line wholesale but still too loyal, or unconfident, or intimidated, to really defy it.
Bowd, Gavin Philip. / The French Communist Party and Britain in the Second World War. In: Irish Journal of French Studies. 2014 ; Vol. 14. pp. 95-117
(I posted an earlier, lazier version of this comment which contained some factual errors; I've deleted it)
Also I just missed this - regarding the Jacobin critique - QAnoners are actually right about a few things. You can't just wave away the entire piece just because of one line that *sounds* dumb but is actually much more nuanced upon further inspection. The idea that the Jacobin piece is an indication of the kind of lefties that will try to appease fascism is just ludicrous. (There is a subsection of "lefties" who try to appease fascists - the Jimmy Dore and Rising crowd but they are almost universally mocked apart from their own fans)
Regarding the "aloof disdain" - perhaps it is important to point out the quite baffling state of American democracy. America is virtually an outlier in its two-party solution and its mind-bogglingly complex system of electing the presidential candidates through primaries and caucuses and whatnot. As if FPTP wasn't enough, the American system also favours a winners-take-all approach for states and then there's the electoral college. What you're looking at are very real problems that disincentivize people to vote because they feel the system is obstructive and an impediment to progress. You can't just dismiss it off as some kind of smugness - American voter turnout is quite abysmal for the richest country in the world.
As to your point that Biden is turning out to be the most progressive, I'm a little skeptical although I'll admit I'm not well read on this. But it does look like he's faltering on a lot of issues ($15 min. wage, the Jobs plan which supposedly doesn't go far enough, etc). But maybe he is very progressive. A lot of people hate him because of his abysmal record. It's frankly a massive surprise that *Biden* of all people is being compared to FDR - had you told anyone that 3-4 years ago they would've guffawed right to your face. So I'm not surprised that people aren't skeptical. Plus it's important to note that the reason Biden was forced to become progressive during the election was probably due to pressure from the Sanders, and thus, the left.
Biden may well be the most progressive President since LBJ, but all that amounts to is saying that he's more progressive than Obama. The only other Democrats in that period are Clinton (notably moderate) and Carter (whose presidency was far less successful than his post-presidency, and was noted for lots of deregulation).
And none of the Republicans are even in the ballpark. There were bits of Nixon that look progressive until you realise he was signing bills passed by veto-proof majorities, and other than that, we have Ford, Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, and Trump
Yes, so would you rather have Biden or a proto-fascist? And yea, the American election system is wack. Guess what, that is the field you have to play on. I doubt criticizing the election system will actually win you elections. So how would you actually make changes for the better?
With all due respect, what are you even on about? "that is the field that you have to play on"??????????????????? Your response to a shit system is "tough luck"? You do realize that the same can be said of authoritarianism right? Actually, Americans are largely in favour of third-parties and are quite open to ending the monopoly of the two-party system which is just ruining genuine political aspirations. So maybe you *can* win elections by criticizing the electoral system. Secondly, is that all that matters? Winning the elections? This is equivalent to saying that "gay rights can wait" because it is not electorally feasible. Do you want to go down that road?
>would you rather have Biden or a protofacsist?
I am completely clueless as to where this dichotomy even came from. Firstly, Biden won the election so why does this question matter? Secondly, it appears that any criticism of Biden must necessarily mean that I support a proto-fascist (Trump) - and if that's your opinion then I simply have no words to add. It's pretty much true that Biden is not as progressive as was expected. I am not familiar with the particulars of the adage, but isn't criticism a desire to fundamentally change things? By pointing out the lapses and failures in Biden's conduct (especially exposing the lapse between the actuality and the image) can definitely pressure the govt to become more progressive and can foster an environment that is more progressive. This is really basic stuff and I'm quite baffled that you don't seem to get that.
>how would you actually make changes for the better?
I believe in America there is a new proposed law called the For The People Act that does a lot of good things (key among them: reduce the influence of big money, reduce gerrymandering, etc). It passed in the House but got held up in the Senate where the Republicans filibustered it (no surprise) - and conservative and moderate Democrats sided along (in a sense) with the Republicans by refusing to end the filibuster rules.
Seems to me the reason Obama's 2004 convention speech catapulted him to the White House was that it was a resounding paean to American possibility and goodness. Looking down on BHO seems to be popular on the harder left these days, but I agree with Noah on the underlying power of nationalism/patriotism.
4 years ago I bought a giant American flag and began bringing it to every rally I attended. At first the reaction was, in the immortal words of Tom Wolfe, like my "eyebrows were crawling with lice." I simply said, when queried, "We need to take this back." Then others started bringing flags... Having a US flag decal on the back hatch for my Crosstrek is simultaneously a statement and protective camouflage. . .
While I agree with you on a lot of things, it seems like Orwell was an outlier in the Left sphere - considering that a large part of modern socialist tendencies (which was dampened during the war and postwar years and slowly declined) was an explicitly internationalist tendency that was quite adamantly anti-nationstate (imo those critiques still hold). The "reflexive anti-patriotism" was derived little from hating countries and more of belittling the concept of nations to make a broader point of universal equality to envision a world where arbitrary concepts (maybe a better word would be abstract) such as a nation (nations are a modern invention) don't exist or aren't a hamper to the free expression of people. Now I am very poorly read but I believe this is more or less the essence of the internationalist socialist tendency.
It could be true that a lot of very online leftists draw this critique of the nation state without understanding the circumstances or additional context surrounding that critique, which would make it look like they are reflexively anti-patriotic (yes there are those who are genuinely anti-patriotic).
But it appears that a lot of your critique is directed against strawmen. Yes there are terminally online people with truly horrible takes and perhaps the diversity of ideologies on the Left makes it possible for leftists to have (i would argue an equal proportion of crazy hot-takers compared to other people) an impressive diversity of poor quality takes.
Regarding the idea that "anti-Americanism" is new- it's quite wrong. Eugene Debs in 1901 made a speech castigating the founding fathers on their hypocrisy (and importantly, he did appreciate the *ideals*). Noam Chomsky has made several critiques to show that the Senate is an undemocratic institution which was iirc largely created to preserve the interests of the Southern states (aka slavery). None of these critiques are new - it could be that now with the mass media and a fertile ground for the propagation of these critiques, they are gaining quick currency among leftists.
And then you caricature leftists to be apparently foolish people who "recite litanies with near-glee" of America's very real problems, and those that definitely make it an outlier among developed nations. Also citing some random BLM Utah chapter as proof that lefties hate all kinds of symbols of the country because they're nothing but reflexively anti-patriotic is just ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous is the fact that you linked a PragerU tweet (was the intent to draw focus to the replies?) You don't seem to engage with their critique either.
Nevertheless the number of people who are "reflexively" anti-patriotic as you claim them to be are certainly in the minority. Even a socialist like Eugene Debs could appreciate the ideals on which America was founded; even Noam Chomsky thinks that for all of America's flaws, it could perhaps be the freest country with its impressive protection of the freedom of speech. So the people you criticize are almost certainly in the minority - and their critique doesn't hamper the progress of a general socialist/social-democracy movement. (Correct me if I'm wrong about this one)
I really like your pieces on econ but when it comes to philosophical and political questions I'm afraid you make very little attempts to actually engage with the perceived opponent and you often tend to resort to caricatures. Keep up the good work on econ though.
Interesting points, but to be very clear - the two house system and the senate giving each state equal representation was a compromise with small states not southern states. Its frustrating that every progressive complaint about the current system has to be linked to racism in some way. Its perfectly fine to criticize something beside racism! Conflating the two just weakens your broader discussion.
Yes, but you (and pretty much everyone else here) are being very thoughtful about your anti-patriotism. The caricatured version is a real thing in the world, and because it is so un-nuanced, it doesn't have any of the virtues you are listing, it is just a rally flag that also (like most flags) actively repels centrists and sideliners, let alone the other side.
I'm aware that the caricatured version is a real thing - but my point is that it is by no means representative of an entire political spectrum and it's even less representative because of the pretty significant differences b/w what's "real" (read IRL) and what's online. Again, we're all speculating, so I may as well jump into that well and say that the knee-jerk "anti-patriotic" left who balk at any mere mention of American symbolism are pretty much just terminally online people.
If you think about it, it is really hard to build a political movement without a sense of patriotism. (unless you're living in an authoritarian regime, then the question of national/regional identity and hence patriotism obviously becomes much more complex). The kind of lefties who are caricatured here are certainly going to face very real challenges in exactly the sense Noah described.
But I think the larger question we should ask is what exactly does patriotism mean? Otherwise it'll just be a jerk-off contest running around in circles. ( im stopping here on this tangent because its too much of a detour).
But if you think about (correct me if I'm wrong) wasn't Bernie Sanders' campaign quite on the patriotic side? Although I feel it was a bit more utilitarian, I still think that it can be interpreted as patriotic - if patriotism involves respect/love for the birth-land. So I genuinely don't get the active real-life political implications of a few (in a proportionate sense) extreme radicals.
Now all of this is even before we've debated the merits of patriotism.
George Orwell was very much a Little-Englander socialist, who maintained (or adopted) many attitudes that were part of specifically English working class culture i.e. anti-intellectualism and opposition to feminism and birth control. His ideal would have been the working-class man going to a trade union meeting while the working-class women stayed in the kitchen surrounded by ten children while cooking up a big pot of proletarian stew.
It seems like one of the primary impacts of the internet in general is an overall decline in patriotism. As connections and communications around the world increase, so too does empathy with those from elsewhere and a general erosion of the feeling of "special" for nations.
(However, if anything local civic pride is increasing. Especially as geographic mobility increases; people live where they want to live and are proud of it. But that is a completely different point.)
But every action has a reaction. The increasing empathy with others worldwide that the internet has enabled, that has played a part in the overall decline of patriotism is dubbed "cultural marxism" by the far right fascists. {Cultural marxism is an insidious evil that must be stopped at all costs} is one of the core driving principles of the far right, and can explain much of their worldview.
One of the most basic protests against "cultural marxism" is aggressive hyperpatriotism.
> The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious…the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism…The only approach to [the working class] is through their patriotism.
While I rather doubt there will be a single response, I cannot help but feel that anyone grappling with this question must seriously consider the relationship between patriotism and immigration.
"While I rather doubt there will be a single response, I cannot help but feel that anyone grappling with this question must seriously consider the relationship between patriotism and immigration."
There isn't necessarily a conflict, especially for a country with a long tradition of immigration. In Canada there's a close connection between immigration and patriotism - immigration has helped to submerge Canada's long-standing linguistic and regional divides. Joseph Heath: http://induecourse.ca/canadian-exceptionalism/
"Immigrants have helped to build the Canadian nation, not just by increasing our population. One of the major differences between immigrants and old-stock Canadians is that the former tend to identify and owe allegiance to the central state, and are thus far less likely to have any sort of regional identity. When people immigrate, they think of themselves as moving to Canada, not to Western Canada, or Newfoundland, or Ontario. They identify with the national symbols.
"Many young people fail to realize how weak Canadian nationalism was even one or two generations back. I’m old enough to remember singing God Save the Queen, rather than O Canada, in school. Growing up in Saskatoon in the 1970s, one saw very few Canadian flags (there was significant resentment of the maple leaf, given that none of us had ever seen a maple tree – it grows only in Eastern Canada). It was only when I moved to Toronto that I got used to seeing Canadian flags all over the place. One of the first things I noticed was how often these flags were being displayed by immigrants.
"The important point is that this has not happened by accident, it is all a consequence of a plan that was adopted, during the 1970s, to strengthen the federal government by cultivating a stronger sense of national identity, focused on Ottawa, and on national symbols. It is therefore no surprise that there is a correlation between patriotism and support for immigration – immigrants have been the carrier class for much of the new patriotism that has been developing over the past three or four decades."
Leftists need to actually absorb the story that Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to tell in _Hamilton_, and remember that while our nation has failed, from the beginning, to live up to its ideals, it _was_ founded on some really great ideals, and we've been arguing about the details, and fitfully trying to improve, ever since. (It's a tragedy that John Laurens, who was one of the most vocal and charismatic abolitionists of the Founding generation, didn't survive to participate in the early decades of the Constitutional Republic.)
I would disagree with the statement that decolonization wasn’t helped/harmed by British politics.
At least in the case of India, the rapid partition and disappearance of the British military played an important part in the violence that followed. With the newly formed countries of Pakistan and India having to both secure their borders in the scramble and absorb millions of refugees while British support vanished unleashed horrible amounts of violence.
Also I think the Left Wings support of decolonization bolstered socialism as the “right” economic model to follow after decolonization. Which resulted in low growth for decades in India.
If I remember correctly, the left wing support for decolonization was not why "socialism" was considered the best economic model to follow. Socialism was considered because the Indian anti-colonial movement was very much overlapped with the socialist and leftist currents in Indian politics back then. Nehru, often called the nation-builder, was very impressed by the Fabian Society and adopted their ideas of socialism. Similarly a lot of the leaders of the Independence movement like Gandhi and Bose shared socialist ideals. As to the idea that socialism was actually implemented in India - what happened in india was the developmentalist model or the ISI or dirigisme (not that these are interchangeable but they are accurate terms to characterize the economy). The private sector in India was very much in favour of protectionism that is so oftenly despised - and this economic policy took a former colony achieving zero or even negative growth during the 20th century to 3-5% growth for sometime. The real growth stalled when Indira Gandhi, a brutal autocrat, came into the picture. (it was slowing for a while even before her too).
Target-rich blog post there! It's mostly Noah explaining why he disagrees with the pro-socialist parts of Orwell's essay but agrees with the anti-socialist, anti-anti-patriotic parts. Thus Noah wields last century's essay against the left of this century. I'll fire at some of the targets.
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To Noah's credit, he's honest enough to show us the chart he used to decide that British nationalizations, an "experiment with socialism", "may in fact have dealt a serious blow to the country’s living standards" from WW2 into the 1970s.
But two of Noah's 3 comparison countries are France under dirigisme, and the USSR, which was more socialist than the UK and growing faster! So his low-nationalization control group isn't really a low-nationalization control group. Come on, Noah, at least look up Abadie, Diamond, & Hainmueller's papers and figure out how to run a clean synthetic control!
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Noah's evidence of "some leftists [choosing] to affect an air of aloof disdain toward all of U.S. politics" is one YouTube video, "Grillpill: Explained", starring literally just one guy, Matt Christman.
And Matt doesn't affect "aloof disdain toward all of U.S. politics" in that video! Matt DOES write off sinking energy into arguing politics online, or into the Biden-versus-Trump contest as a "sterile investment" (about 8-10 minutes in), but posting and one election aren't the entirety of US politics! Matt even mocks self-styled political nihilists (jump to 14:25) and people who dismiss "electoral politics" as "done" out of sour grapes (28:14).
In my view Noah's just revealing a bias here, his own difficulty seeing ways to engage with US politics other than posting and the head-to-head quadrennial extravaganza.
"There is no endgame for this sort of smug anti-Americanism. A leftist revolution to overthrow the country and establish a new one in its place is highly unlikely. And barring that, there’s really nowhere for anti-Americanism to go". But that's a false dichotomy! At the risk of sounding like a truth-is-in-the-middle dork, America-bashing can feed into political goals that lie between "nowhere" and "leftist revolution".
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Noah makes his own Orwell-style conditional prediction: "if the Right ever actually pulls its head out of its Trump-shaped ass", "people who just a few years ago were marching in the street wearing pussy-hats or yelling “defund the police” may find themselves voting Republican".
Beyond a few cranks? Nope. Highly unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future (rest of the 2020s). Either part.
Pundits like Saagar Enjeti and J D Vance can fantasize about a post-Trump realignment that sees Republicans address problems hitting the working class, but mysteriously the actual mainstream right keeps screeching about "cancel culture", the need to cancel "critical race theory", dubious medical practices (ivermectin over masks), and social media censoring the wrong people (like, um, Holocaust-denying fascist Nick Fuentes). Swing voters gonna swing, but GOP culture-war horseshit isn't gonna stop and isn't gonna suddenly attract pussy-hats and police-defunders as a bloc.
Oh yeh, and Trump's ahead in polling for the 2024 R primary.
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Noah concludes that some leftists have been "removing themselves from relevance" with their skepticism, and risk "accomplishing far less" than an empire's dissolution just by being anti-patriotic. But the sort of evidence he has — a 70-year-old essay and its unchecked prediction, an over-interpretation of a podcaster's YouTube monologue, an overly generous reading of Biden's record, his own bizarre prediction — is so weak that his conclusions don't read to me as serious factual claims. They smell like wishful thinking...or a heavy-handed attempt to rhetorically discipline liberals and leftists.
"But two of Noah's 3 comparison countries are France under dirigisme, and the USSR, which was more socialist than the UK and growing faster!"
Is Dirigisme more socialist than the UK's post-war economic model though? Why is having more social housing, a nationalized health service, and less income inequality (French 1%ers had a greater slice of national income in the mid-1960s than even their American counterparts), less socialist than nationalizing banks and car companies whilst having less wealth inequality?
Also, both France and the USSR were more economically backward than the UK, so of course, they grew faster! Let us not forget the massive growth war-torn Germany experienced in the post-war years whilst under an ordoliberal model.
It's also worth noting Britain actually tried to adopt Dirigisme in the 1960s. Harold Wilson largely gets the credit for this with his "white heat" rhetoric, but Douglas-Home started off the policy, and a version of it was put forth by Jo Grimond and the Liberal Party.
There's room for debate about whether French dirigisme was more socialist than the UK's post-war model, but my point doesn't hinge on the precise answer. As long as one accepts that it was non-trivially socialist, it doesn't belong in Noah's low-socialism control group.
It's plausible that France and the USSR grew faster because they "were more economically backward". That would then be another confounding factor dirtying the comparison Noah wishes to make.
As for Germany, I let it be since it's just one of Noah's 3 comparison countries, and Noah's treatment of it seemed sloppy to me: he calls it "West and East Germany" in his main text, and labels it "Germany" on his graph, but the suspicious dip around 1990 implies that he's plotted West Germany alone.
And much of the post-war growth with which West Germany outpaced the UK was basically just catch-up. Eichengreen & Ritschl's paper "Understanding West German Economic Growth in the 1950s" (http://sfb649.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/papers/pdf/SFB649DP2008-068.pdf) digs into this in detail, even dwelling on the comparison with the UK in particular, and concludes that the institutional/ordoliberal explanation for the Wirtschaftswunder is overrated. The main explanation is instead West Germany rebounding from the late-war shock, and its pre-WWII hangovers of WWI's destruction(!), unemployment (still 11% in 1950) and a large, inefficient agricultural sector (still employing 22% of workers in 1950).
George Orwell is one of my favorite writers and I'm thrilled that you decided to write about "The Lion and the Unicorn"!
Regarding socialism, I think for many socialists and communists, the war time mobilization of countries fighting in the world wars was an example, a model for what planning could do.
In a sense Orwell was right to the degree that the UK needed to mobilize industry if it had a chance to defeat Nazi Germany but he missed that even when he was writing the book the UK had mobilized to a greater degree than Germany.
One of the big failures of Nazi Germany and one factor that lead to their defeat was their inability to mobilize their economy to the degree that their adversaries (the UK, the US, the USSR) managed to do.
Germany's mobilization matched that of the Allies in 1944 and by then it was too late.
Regarding patriotism, that has been a weakness of the American left for a long-time though it's not just the left.
I think liberals have also failed to capitalize on the patriotism of the American people, a mistake that conservatives have not made.
Conservatives have been very good at using the symbols of American patriotism while at the same more than willing to sell out the interests of the US. I'm thinking of the Trump-Putin relationship and how many conservatives where more than willing to go along with it.
Going back to the anti-patriotism of the left, it is an issue that has hindered the growth of the left in the US and is not universal to the left in every country.
In Latin America the left and far-left is very patriotic.
One of the factors that helped Communist parties in France and Italy after the Second World War was the role they played in the struggle against the Nazis. Even in our neighbor to the north, Canada, the left often partakes in some of the symbols and themes of Canadian patriotism.
There are good reasons why the American left is so critical of patriotism. As Samuel Johnson wrote "patriotism is the last refugee of the scoundrel" . I would modify that to often (witness the conservatives I mentioned above) but not always.
Also the US as the global hegemon is perceived by the left has playing a role, maybe the leading role, in sustaining an unjust global system that the left is committed to changing.
Still, the inability of the left to combine a critique of today's injustice while avoiding the trap of knee jerk anti-patriotism will limit the growth of the left.
It also is an issue for more mainstream liberals though arguably to a lesser degree.
Great article! If I recall correctly (it's a while since I read it), one of Orwell's points was that for the working classes to be fully invested in the war effort they needed a stake in the promised postwar order, and not a return to the status quo as happened in 1918. This was to be the socialist program suggested by Orwell and set out by the government in the 1942 Beveridge Report. Not just nationalisation but healthcare and a welfare state. Perhaps why we Brits seem to worship the National Health Service!
"not a return to the status quo as happened in 1918"
Was that really the case?
Lloyd George massively expanded National Insurance, whilst the real wage gains and reduced working hours British workers had acquired were mostly intact during the following decade.
Interesting. I had the impression post-1918 was considered a disappointment (eg returning troops left homeless) but I'm likely wrong.
Either way, I just looked through Orwell's article and found what I was looking for: "Either we turn this war into a [socialist] revolutionary war... or we lose it, and much more besides." I suppose this wasn't the case in WW1 because the enemy wasn't ideological.
Yes. The bit that really mattered was India and it has to be said that was handled very badly though you'd need to know more about it than me to know if the disasters were avoidable by anything the British could do. And of course some parts of the Empire perhaps wish we were still there. Well, Hong Kong I guess. Not sure there is anywhere else.
Pretty sure the fact we had a Labour government after the war wasn't the reason the British Empire dissolved. The entire (well, almost the entire) British establishment was on board with the idea.
But they did oversee it, which was good.
Are you sure about that? My impression was that in the immediate postwar period, the expectation among European powers (UK included) was that the colonies would persist for decades at least. It was only the outbreak of resistance movements in these countries that led politicians in the UK/France/etc to change their minds.
You could be right and perhaps it was a bit of both. But certainly post Suez nobody doubted the outcome I think only the speed. France was much keener on maintain its empire than Britain was.
Yeah I agree with you that it was a done deal by then. I think Ghana was already well on the way to independence by 1951 when the UK decided to release Nkrumah from prison.
On Orwell's prediction that the British left-wing intelligentsia would embrace a pro-Hitler reaction, by arguing it is morally more urgent to defeat bourgeois democracy than it is to defeat fascism: This was ongoing in France at the time. In early 1941 Germany and the Soviet Union were still wary non-aggression partners. Ideologically the Soviet-approved line was that the primary enemy was to be Western imperialism and the social democratic parties enabling it, not Germany. In 04 July 1940, mere days after the fall of France, the French Communist Party newspaper L'Humanité could editorialize:
>LE PEUPLE DE FRANCE VEUT LA PAIX. Il demande d’énergiques mesures contre tous ceux qui, par ordre de l’Angleterre impérialiste, voudraient entraîner les Français dans la guerre...
>Il est particulièrement réconfortant en ces temps de malheur de voir de nombreux travailleurs parisiens s’entretenir avec les soldats allemands, soit dans la rue, soit au bistro du coin. Bravo camarades, continuez même si cela ne plaît pas à certains bourgeois aussi stupides que malfaisants ! La fraternité des peuples ne sera pas toujours une espérance, elle deviendra une réalité vivante.
>THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE WANT PEACE. They demand that energetic measures be taken against all those who, on the order of England's imperialists, would like to drag the French people back into the war...
>It is particularly comforting, in these unhappy times, to see so many Parisian workers engage in friendly relations with the German soldiers, whether it be in the street, or the neighbourhood bistro. Bravo, comrades. Keep it up, even if it upsets those certain members of our bourgeoisie who are as stupid as they are evil! The brotherhood of the people will not always be a distant hope, it will become a living reality.
So the notion that swathes of the left intelligentsia could find reasons to ally with the actual Nazis when they are literally marching down one's street, in order to fight Capitalism, was not unimaginable - it was happening across the channel. British left-wingers, both for and against, were well aware - Labour participating in the coalition National government of Churchill was a hot topic of contention.
This being said, Orwell's own line pro-democratic of attack was also not dissimilar and indeed mirrored the CPGB's own line during the period (which could not embrace anti-Englishness wholesale and instead embraced anti-National-governmentness). In The Lion & The Unicorn, he himself likewise argues for a General Election where the National government can be defeated, or otherwise a revolution from below to compel it, rather than focusing on fighting Germany. He criticizes left-wing revolutionary defeatism but himself is not optimistic, arguing (like the CPGB) that the British ruling class is simply too incompetent to win the war against fascism anyway, therefore the priority is to defeat the ruling class and achieve socialism before fighting fascism. He correctly recognizes that the key strategic ally are not any people in Axis-occupied Europe, who cannot meaningfully rebel, but instead the Americans - but in his six-point programme pushes for an alliance with the 'victims of the Fascist powers' and has nothing to say about the Americans. He recognizes that the war against Nazism is in the now, and that the urgency is to defeat it - but for solutions reaches for the (already by the 1940s) the old and tired hobbyhorse of tripartite education as a decades-long project to improve the quality of rule in Britain! Revolution to defeat the only remaining free European government, now - fight fascism in the ongoing state of war, later.
This is Orwell too insightful to really embrace the CPGB line wholesale but still too loyal, or unconfident, or intimidated, to really defy it.
Bowd, Gavin Philip. / The French Communist Party and Britain in the Second World War. In: Irish Journal of French Studies. 2014 ; Vol. 14. pp. 95-117
(I posted an earlier, lazier version of this comment which contained some factual errors; I've deleted it)
Also I just missed this - regarding the Jacobin critique - QAnoners are actually right about a few things. You can't just wave away the entire piece just because of one line that *sounds* dumb but is actually much more nuanced upon further inspection. The idea that the Jacobin piece is an indication of the kind of lefties that will try to appease fascism is just ludicrous. (There is a subsection of "lefties" who try to appease fascists - the Jimmy Dore and Rising crowd but they are almost universally mocked apart from their own fans)
Regarding the "aloof disdain" - perhaps it is important to point out the quite baffling state of American democracy. America is virtually an outlier in its two-party solution and its mind-bogglingly complex system of electing the presidential candidates through primaries and caucuses and whatnot. As if FPTP wasn't enough, the American system also favours a winners-take-all approach for states and then there's the electoral college. What you're looking at are very real problems that disincentivize people to vote because they feel the system is obstructive and an impediment to progress. You can't just dismiss it off as some kind of smugness - American voter turnout is quite abysmal for the richest country in the world.
As to your point that Biden is turning out to be the most progressive, I'm a little skeptical although I'll admit I'm not well read on this. But it does look like he's faltering on a lot of issues ($15 min. wage, the Jobs plan which supposedly doesn't go far enough, etc). But maybe he is very progressive. A lot of people hate him because of his abysmal record. It's frankly a massive surprise that *Biden* of all people is being compared to FDR - had you told anyone that 3-4 years ago they would've guffawed right to your face. So I'm not surprised that people aren't skeptical. Plus it's important to note that the reason Biden was forced to become progressive during the election was probably due to pressure from the Sanders, and thus, the left.
Biden may well be the most progressive President since LBJ, but all that amounts to is saying that he's more progressive than Obama. The only other Democrats in that period are Clinton (notably moderate) and Carter (whose presidency was far less successful than his post-presidency, and was noted for lots of deregulation).
And none of the Republicans are even in the ballpark. There were bits of Nixon that look progressive until you realise he was signing bills passed by veto-proof majorities, and other than that, we have Ford, Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, and Trump
Exactly. Couldn't have said it better
Yes, so would you rather have Biden or a proto-fascist? And yea, the American election system is wack. Guess what, that is the field you have to play on. I doubt criticizing the election system will actually win you elections. So how would you actually make changes for the better?
With all due respect, what are you even on about? "that is the field that you have to play on"??????????????????? Your response to a shit system is "tough luck"? You do realize that the same can be said of authoritarianism right? Actually, Americans are largely in favour of third-parties and are quite open to ending the monopoly of the two-party system which is just ruining genuine political aspirations. So maybe you *can* win elections by criticizing the electoral system. Secondly, is that all that matters? Winning the elections? This is equivalent to saying that "gay rights can wait" because it is not electorally feasible. Do you want to go down that road?
>would you rather have Biden or a protofacsist?
I am completely clueless as to where this dichotomy even came from. Firstly, Biden won the election so why does this question matter? Secondly, it appears that any criticism of Biden must necessarily mean that I support a proto-fascist (Trump) - and if that's your opinion then I simply have no words to add. It's pretty much true that Biden is not as progressive as was expected. I am not familiar with the particulars of the adage, but isn't criticism a desire to fundamentally change things? By pointing out the lapses and failures in Biden's conduct (especially exposing the lapse between the actuality and the image) can definitely pressure the govt to become more progressive and can foster an environment that is more progressive. This is really basic stuff and I'm quite baffled that you don't seem to get that.
>how would you actually make changes for the better?
I believe in America there is a new proposed law called the For The People Act that does a lot of good things (key among them: reduce the influence of big money, reduce gerrymandering, etc). It passed in the House but got held up in the Senate where the Republicans filibustered it (no surprise) - and conservative and moderate Democrats sided along (in a sense) with the Republicans by refusing to end the filibuster rules.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/voting-rights-legislation-gerrymandering-deadline-for-the-people-act
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/14/democracy-voting-campaign-finance-hr1/
Seems to me the reason Obama's 2004 convention speech catapulted him to the White House was that it was a resounding paean to American possibility and goodness. Looking down on BHO seems to be popular on the harder left these days, but I agree with Noah on the underlying power of nationalism/patriotism.
4 years ago I bought a giant American flag and began bringing it to every rally I attended. At first the reaction was, in the immortal words of Tom Wolfe, like my "eyebrows were crawling with lice." I simply said, when queried, "We need to take this back." Then others started bringing flags... Having a US flag decal on the back hatch for my Crosstrek is simultaneously a statement and protective camouflage. . .
While I agree with you on a lot of things, it seems like Orwell was an outlier in the Left sphere - considering that a large part of modern socialist tendencies (which was dampened during the war and postwar years and slowly declined) was an explicitly internationalist tendency that was quite adamantly anti-nationstate (imo those critiques still hold). The "reflexive anti-patriotism" was derived little from hating countries and more of belittling the concept of nations to make a broader point of universal equality to envision a world where arbitrary concepts (maybe a better word would be abstract) such as a nation (nations are a modern invention) don't exist or aren't a hamper to the free expression of people. Now I am very poorly read but I believe this is more or less the essence of the internationalist socialist tendency.
It could be true that a lot of very online leftists draw this critique of the nation state without understanding the circumstances or additional context surrounding that critique, which would make it look like they are reflexively anti-patriotic (yes there are those who are genuinely anti-patriotic).
But it appears that a lot of your critique is directed against strawmen. Yes there are terminally online people with truly horrible takes and perhaps the diversity of ideologies on the Left makes it possible for leftists to have (i would argue an equal proportion of crazy hot-takers compared to other people) an impressive diversity of poor quality takes.
Regarding the idea that "anti-Americanism" is new- it's quite wrong. Eugene Debs in 1901 made a speech castigating the founding fathers on their hypocrisy (and importantly, he did appreciate the *ideals*). Noam Chomsky has made several critiques to show that the Senate is an undemocratic institution which was iirc largely created to preserve the interests of the Southern states (aka slavery). None of these critiques are new - it could be that now with the mass media and a fertile ground for the propagation of these critiques, they are gaining quick currency among leftists.
And then you caricature leftists to be apparently foolish people who "recite litanies with near-glee" of America's very real problems, and those that definitely make it an outlier among developed nations. Also citing some random BLM Utah chapter as proof that lefties hate all kinds of symbols of the country because they're nothing but reflexively anti-patriotic is just ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous is the fact that you linked a PragerU tweet (was the intent to draw focus to the replies?) You don't seem to engage with their critique either.
Nevertheless the number of people who are "reflexively" anti-patriotic as you claim them to be are certainly in the minority. Even a socialist like Eugene Debs could appreciate the ideals on which America was founded; even Noam Chomsky thinks that for all of America's flaws, it could perhaps be the freest country with its impressive protection of the freedom of speech. So the people you criticize are almost certainly in the minority - and their critique doesn't hamper the progress of a general socialist/social-democracy movement. (Correct me if I'm wrong about this one)
I really like your pieces on econ but when it comes to philosophical and political questions I'm afraid you make very little attempts to actually engage with the perceived opponent and you often tend to resort to caricatures. Keep up the good work on econ though.
Interesting points, but to be very clear - the two house system and the senate giving each state equal representation was a compromise with small states not southern states. Its frustrating that every progressive complaint about the current system has to be linked to racism in some way. Its perfectly fine to criticize something beside racism! Conflating the two just weakens your broader discussion.
Yes, but you (and pretty much everyone else here) are being very thoughtful about your anti-patriotism. The caricatured version is a real thing in the world, and because it is so un-nuanced, it doesn't have any of the virtues you are listing, it is just a rally flag that also (like most flags) actively repels centrists and sideliners, let alone the other side.
I'm aware that the caricatured version is a real thing - but my point is that it is by no means representative of an entire political spectrum and it's even less representative because of the pretty significant differences b/w what's "real" (read IRL) and what's online. Again, we're all speculating, so I may as well jump into that well and say that the knee-jerk "anti-patriotic" left who balk at any mere mention of American symbolism are pretty much just terminally online people.
If you think about it, it is really hard to build a political movement without a sense of patriotism. (unless you're living in an authoritarian regime, then the question of national/regional identity and hence patriotism obviously becomes much more complex). The kind of lefties who are caricatured here are certainly going to face very real challenges in exactly the sense Noah described.
But I think the larger question we should ask is what exactly does patriotism mean? Otherwise it'll just be a jerk-off contest running around in circles. ( im stopping here on this tangent because its too much of a detour).
But if you think about (correct me if I'm wrong) wasn't Bernie Sanders' campaign quite on the patriotic side? Although I feel it was a bit more utilitarian, I still think that it can be interpreted as patriotic - if patriotism involves respect/love for the birth-land. So I genuinely don't get the active real-life political implications of a few (in a proportionate sense) extreme radicals.
Now all of this is even before we've debated the merits of patriotism.
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't you conflating patriotism with nationalism? Great points btw
Fair enough. I agree
George Orwell was very much a Little-Englander socialist, who maintained (or adopted) many attitudes that were part of specifically English working class culture i.e. anti-intellectualism and opposition to feminism and birth control. His ideal would have been the working-class man going to a trade union meeting while the working-class women stayed in the kitchen surrounded by ten children while cooking up a big pot of proletarian stew.
It seems like one of the primary impacts of the internet in general is an overall decline in patriotism. As connections and communications around the world increase, so too does empathy with those from elsewhere and a general erosion of the feeling of "special" for nations.
(However, if anything local civic pride is increasing. Especially as geographic mobility increases; people live where they want to live and are proud of it. But that is a completely different point.)
But every action has a reaction. The increasing empathy with others worldwide that the internet has enabled, that has played a part in the overall decline of patriotism is dubbed "cultural marxism" by the far right fascists. {Cultural marxism is an insidious evil that must be stopped at all costs} is one of the core driving principles of the far right, and can explain much of their worldview.
One of the most basic protests against "cultural marxism" is aggressive hyperpatriotism.
> The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious…the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism…The only approach to [the working class] is through their patriotism.
While I rather doubt there will be a single response, I cannot help but feel that anyone grappling with this question must seriously consider the relationship between patriotism and immigration.
"While I rather doubt there will be a single response, I cannot help but feel that anyone grappling with this question must seriously consider the relationship between patriotism and immigration."
There isn't necessarily a conflict, especially for a country with a long tradition of immigration. In Canada there's a close connection between immigration and patriotism - immigration has helped to submerge Canada's long-standing linguistic and regional divides. Joseph Heath: http://induecourse.ca/canadian-exceptionalism/
"Immigrants have helped to build the Canadian nation, not just by increasing our population. One of the major differences between immigrants and old-stock Canadians is that the former tend to identify and owe allegiance to the central state, and are thus far less likely to have any sort of regional identity. When people immigrate, they think of themselves as moving to Canada, not to Western Canada, or Newfoundland, or Ontario. They identify with the national symbols.
"Many young people fail to realize how weak Canadian nationalism was even one or two generations back. I’m old enough to remember singing God Save the Queen, rather than O Canada, in school. Growing up in Saskatoon in the 1970s, one saw very few Canadian flags (there was significant resentment of the maple leaf, given that none of us had ever seen a maple tree – it grows only in Eastern Canada). It was only when I moved to Toronto that I got used to seeing Canadian flags all over the place. One of the first things I noticed was how often these flags were being displayed by immigrants.
"The important point is that this has not happened by accident, it is all a consequence of a plan that was adopted, during the 1970s, to strengthen the federal government by cultivating a stronger sense of national identity, focused on Ottawa, and on national symbols. It is therefore no surprise that there is a correlation between patriotism and support for immigration – immigrants have been the carrier class for much of the new patriotism that has been developing over the past three or four decades."
Leftists need to actually absorb the story that Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to tell in _Hamilton_, and remember that while our nation has failed, from the beginning, to live up to its ideals, it _was_ founded on some really great ideals, and we've been arguing about the details, and fitfully trying to improve, ever since. (It's a tragedy that John Laurens, who was one of the most vocal and charismatic abolitionists of the Founding generation, didn't survive to participate in the early decades of the Constitutional Republic.)
I would disagree with the statement that decolonization wasn’t helped/harmed by British politics.
At least in the case of India, the rapid partition and disappearance of the British military played an important part in the violence that followed. With the newly formed countries of Pakistan and India having to both secure their borders in the scramble and absorb millions of refugees while British support vanished unleashed horrible amounts of violence.
Also I think the Left Wings support of decolonization bolstered socialism as the “right” economic model to follow after decolonization. Which resulted in low growth for decades in India.
If I remember correctly, the left wing support for decolonization was not why "socialism" was considered the best economic model to follow. Socialism was considered because the Indian anti-colonial movement was very much overlapped with the socialist and leftist currents in Indian politics back then. Nehru, often called the nation-builder, was very impressed by the Fabian Society and adopted their ideas of socialism. Similarly a lot of the leaders of the Independence movement like Gandhi and Bose shared socialist ideals. As to the idea that socialism was actually implemented in India - what happened in india was the developmentalist model or the ISI or dirigisme (not that these are interchangeable but they are accurate terms to characterize the economy). The private sector in India was very much in favour of protectionism that is so oftenly despised - and this economic policy took a former colony achieving zero or even negative growth during the 20th century to 3-5% growth for sometime. The real growth stalled when Indira Gandhi, a brutal autocrat, came into the picture. (it was slowing for a while even before her too).
Target-rich blog post there! It's mostly Noah explaining why he disagrees with the pro-socialist parts of Orwell's essay but agrees with the anti-socialist, anti-anti-patriotic parts. Thus Noah wields last century's essay against the left of this century. I'll fire at some of the targets.
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To Noah's credit, he's honest enough to show us the chart he used to decide that British nationalizations, an "experiment with socialism", "may in fact have dealt a serious blow to the country’s living standards" from WW2 into the 1970s.
But two of Noah's 3 comparison countries are France under dirigisme, and the USSR, which was more socialist than the UK and growing faster! So his low-nationalization control group isn't really a low-nationalization control group. Come on, Noah, at least look up Abadie, Diamond, & Hainmueller's papers and figure out how to run a clean synthetic control!
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Noah's evidence of "some leftists [choosing] to affect an air of aloof disdain toward all of U.S. politics" is one YouTube video, "Grillpill: Explained", starring literally just one guy, Matt Christman.
And Matt doesn't affect "aloof disdain toward all of U.S. politics" in that video! Matt DOES write off sinking energy into arguing politics online, or into the Biden-versus-Trump contest as a "sterile investment" (about 8-10 minutes in), but posting and one election aren't the entirety of US politics! Matt even mocks self-styled political nihilists (jump to 14:25) and people who dismiss "electoral politics" as "done" out of sour grapes (28:14).
In my view Noah's just revealing a bias here, his own difficulty seeing ways to engage with US politics other than posting and the head-to-head quadrennial extravaganza.
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Noah links a March post to renew his claim that "Biden turned out to be the most progressive president since LBJ". Fine, I'll link my March comment pointing out that Biden's basically playing a re-run of the Obama administration (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/biden-is-triangulating-the-left/comments#comment-1496317).
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"There is no endgame for this sort of smug anti-Americanism. A leftist revolution to overthrow the country and establish a new one in its place is highly unlikely. And barring that, there’s really nowhere for anti-Americanism to go". But that's a false dichotomy! At the risk of sounding like a truth-is-in-the-middle dork, America-bashing can feed into political goals that lie between "nowhere" and "leftist revolution".
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Noah makes his own Orwell-style conditional prediction: "if the Right ever actually pulls its head out of its Trump-shaped ass", "people who just a few years ago were marching in the street wearing pussy-hats or yelling “defund the police” may find themselves voting Republican".
Beyond a few cranks? Nope. Highly unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future (rest of the 2020s). Either part.
Pundits like Saagar Enjeti and J D Vance can fantasize about a post-Trump realignment that sees Republicans address problems hitting the working class, but mysteriously the actual mainstream right keeps screeching about "cancel culture", the need to cancel "critical race theory", dubious medical practices (ivermectin over masks), and social media censoring the wrong people (like, um, Holocaust-denying fascist Nick Fuentes). Swing voters gonna swing, but GOP culture-war horseshit isn't gonna stop and isn't gonna suddenly attract pussy-hats and police-defunders as a bloc.
Oh yeh, and Trump's ahead in polling for the 2024 R primary.
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Noah concludes that some leftists have been "removing themselves from relevance" with their skepticism, and risk "accomplishing far less" than an empire's dissolution just by being anti-patriotic. But the sort of evidence he has — a 70-year-old essay and its unchecked prediction, an over-interpretation of a podcaster's YouTube monologue, an overly generous reading of Biden's record, his own bizarre prediction — is so weak that his conclusions don't read to me as serious factual claims. They smell like wishful thinking...or a heavy-handed attempt to rhetorically discipline liberals and leftists.
"But two of Noah's 3 comparison countries are France under dirigisme, and the USSR, which was more socialist than the UK and growing faster!"
Is Dirigisme more socialist than the UK's post-war economic model though? Why is having more social housing, a nationalized health service, and less income inequality (French 1%ers had a greater slice of national income in the mid-1960s than even their American counterparts), less socialist than nationalizing banks and car companies whilst having less wealth inequality?
Also, both France and the USSR were more economically backward than the UK, so of course, they grew faster! Let us not forget the massive growth war-torn Germany experienced in the post-war years whilst under an ordoliberal model.
It's also worth noting Britain actually tried to adopt Dirigisme in the 1960s. Harold Wilson largely gets the credit for this with his "white heat" rhetoric, but Douglas-Home started off the policy, and a version of it was put forth by Jo Grimond and the Liberal Party.
There's room for debate about whether French dirigisme was more socialist than the UK's post-war model, but my point doesn't hinge on the precise answer. As long as one accepts that it was non-trivially socialist, it doesn't belong in Noah's low-socialism control group.
It's plausible that France and the USSR grew faster because they "were more economically backward". That would then be another confounding factor dirtying the comparison Noah wishes to make.
As for Germany, I let it be since it's just one of Noah's 3 comparison countries, and Noah's treatment of it seemed sloppy to me: he calls it "West and East Germany" in his main text, and labels it "Germany" on his graph, but the suspicious dip around 1990 implies that he's plotted West Germany alone.
And much of the post-war growth with which West Germany outpaced the UK was basically just catch-up. Eichengreen & Ritschl's paper "Understanding West German Economic Growth in the 1950s" (http://sfb649.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/papers/pdf/SFB649DP2008-068.pdf) digs into this in detail, even dwelling on the comparison with the UK in particular, and concludes that the institutional/ordoliberal explanation for the Wirtschaftswunder is overrated. The main explanation is instead West Germany rebounding from the late-war shock, and its pre-WWII hangovers of WWI's destruction(!), unemployment (still 11% in 1950) and a large, inefficient agricultural sector (still employing 22% of workers in 1950).
Article about Socialism, nationalizing industries, Orwell, Attlee and 40s UK politics.
Ctrl + f: "NHS". 0/0. How?
George Orwell is one of my favorite writers and I'm thrilled that you decided to write about "The Lion and the Unicorn"!
Regarding socialism, I think for many socialists and communists, the war time mobilization of countries fighting in the world wars was an example, a model for what planning could do.
In a sense Orwell was right to the degree that the UK needed to mobilize industry if it had a chance to defeat Nazi Germany but he missed that even when he was writing the book the UK had mobilized to a greater degree than Germany.
One of the big failures of Nazi Germany and one factor that lead to their defeat was their inability to mobilize their economy to the degree that their adversaries (the UK, the US, the USSR) managed to do.
Germany's mobilization matched that of the Allies in 1944 and by then it was too late.
Regarding patriotism, that has been a weakness of the American left for a long-time though it's not just the left.
I think liberals have also failed to capitalize on the patriotism of the American people, a mistake that conservatives have not made.
Conservatives have been very good at using the symbols of American patriotism while at the same more than willing to sell out the interests of the US. I'm thinking of the Trump-Putin relationship and how many conservatives where more than willing to go along with it.
Going back to the anti-patriotism of the left, it is an issue that has hindered the growth of the left in the US and is not universal to the left in every country.
In Latin America the left and far-left is very patriotic.
One of the factors that helped Communist parties in France and Italy after the Second World War was the role they played in the struggle against the Nazis. Even in our neighbor to the north, Canada, the left often partakes in some of the symbols and themes of Canadian patriotism.
There are good reasons why the American left is so critical of patriotism. As Samuel Johnson wrote "patriotism is the last refugee of the scoundrel" . I would modify that to often (witness the conservatives I mentioned above) but not always.
Also the US as the global hegemon is perceived by the left has playing a role, maybe the leading role, in sustaining an unjust global system that the left is committed to changing.
Still, the inability of the left to combine a critique of today's injustice while avoiding the trap of knee jerk anti-patriotism will limit the growth of the left.
It also is an issue for more mainstream liberals though arguably to a lesser degree.
Great article! If I recall correctly (it's a while since I read it), one of Orwell's points was that for the working classes to be fully invested in the war effort they needed a stake in the promised postwar order, and not a return to the status quo as happened in 1918. This was to be the socialist program suggested by Orwell and set out by the government in the 1942 Beveridge Report. Not just nationalisation but healthcare and a welfare state. Perhaps why we Brits seem to worship the National Health Service!
"not a return to the status quo as happened in 1918"
Was that really the case?
Lloyd George massively expanded National Insurance, whilst the real wage gains and reduced working hours British workers had acquired were mostly intact during the following decade.
Interesting. I had the impression post-1918 was considered a disappointment (eg returning troops left homeless) but I'm likely wrong.
Either way, I just looked through Orwell's article and found what I was looking for: "Either we turn this war into a [socialist] revolutionary war... or we lose it, and much more besides." I suppose this wasn't the case in WW1 because the enemy wasn't ideological.