If Gopnik is somewhat
unpersuasive in his discussion of G.K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism, he is likewise unconvincing when he tries to argue that Chesterton's political ideals were fulfilled in Franco's Spain:
... he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the
Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of
honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or
killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All
anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his,
ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole
Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too,
with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an
atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis -- a lot
more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy.
Here I'm with
Commonweal's Matthew Boudway, who
writes:
There are many good ways to interpret Chesterton's distributism, and
there are good ways to criticize it. But this is not one of them. It is
a very long way from the Napoleon of Notting Hill to Alcázar.
Chesterton was, as Gopnik insists, a localist, but there was
really nothing localist about Franco's regime, which was characterized
by strict centralization, cultural uniformity, and militarism -- things
Chesterton always opposed. (Ask a Catalonian about Franco's tolerance
of localism.) Chesterton's main criticism of "Prussianism," and later
of Nazi Germany, was not, as Gopnik says, that it resembled Judaism in
its belief in a chosen people, but that it was essentially militarist
and autocratic. Despite Chesterton's "medievalism," it is not at all
obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best
embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the
theory's greatest weakness. What is clear is
that distributism was as different from Franco's brutal politics as it
was from Bernard Shaw's socialism. Gopnik is impatient with such
theoretical distinctions. For him, it is all about tendencies: all
radical critiques of capitalism tend toward Communism, which has
failed, or toward some kind of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. One is
allowed to have a few mild reservations about capitalism, of course,
and even to look down at the pitiless people who seem to have fewer
reservations (i.e., Republicans), but any less mild
opposition to our political economy, whatever its name or origin, is
headed toward trouble: if not the Gulag or the gas chamber, then the
Inquisition.
Tellingly, that the word "
distributism" doesn't even appear in Gopnik's essay. There are plenty of things to be said against Chesterton's vision of political economy - for instance, that like other attempts to forge an agrarian third way it's unmoored from the structure of modern economies and from contemporary politics as it's actually practiced. (I wouldn't go quite that far myself: I think there are real insights to be gleaned from distributism - some of which found their way into
Grand New Party - even if its adherents have a habit of falling back
on Middle Earth when asked for real-world example of their ideal society in action.) But whatever you think of distributism's merits, surely a politics whose chief weakness is that it's so impractical as to have (
almost) never been tried ought to be immune from the sort of lazy
reductio ad fascism that Gopnik's employing here.
Mr. Douthat,
It would be fair to say, however, that Chesterton and his allies supported Franco over Azaña, did he not? Not that that makes them bad people. Supporting Franco over Azaña doesn't make Chesterton a fascist any more than doing the reverse makes one a Stalinist. I happen to think that the Spanish Republic probably had a more favorable ratio of good to evil than Franco, but I don't think it was an easy choice to make, since they had plenty of evil to their credit as well. In any case I hope that your fellow conservatives can remember this when you next start throwing around the "Stalinist" terminology.
As regards the main point, I don't know much about distributism but it seems like it could be fairly be described as a form of Christian corporatism? That line of thought had two major descendants. One, 'democratic', led to Christian Democratic parties in Europe and some of Latin America. The other strand was authoritarian, and saw further development in regimes such as Franco's Spain on the right, and Velasco's Peru on the left. A Christian corporatism need not be authoritarian but one can't simply write the authoritarian ones out of the record.
Indeed I would tend to think that in the modern era, the established interests who want to preserve modern cosmopolitan capitalism are powerful enough that only some powerful and at least semi-authoritarian force (whether a party, an army, a church or a workers' movement) can prevent them from squashing any attempt at the sort of localism that Chesterton values. I think that within certain limits, and to a certain extent, that might well be worth the price. Gopnik evidently disagrees.
Posted by Hector | July 29, 2008 9:37 PM