Eerily Similar

John writes:

As more details emerge about Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged perpetrator of Friday’s vicious terrorist attacks in Norway, I can’t help but notice how eerily similar some of his rhetoric is to some of the ideas floating around on the American Right, and not just the underground far-right. The wild claims that President Obama was somehow leading or abetting a Marxist/Islamist alliance to destroy Christian America were not just found on extremist neo-Nazi websites, but could be seen on Tea Party signs and heard on right-wing talk radio.

Of course, none of this means that Tea Party members or avid listeners of right-wing radio host Michael Savage are going to go out and kill people. However, ideas have consequences, and it is important to be wary of certain ideas that threaten to dehumanize people. Before left-wingers start to gloat, it is also important to remember that the Left has also had its share of violent terrorists as well, and that the language of class war, taken too far, can also lead to violence.

Politics has always involved strong language, and I would not want to see a “speech police” developed to quiet firebrands, including those who develop the conspiracy theories that often fuel (even if unintentionally) extremist violence. But the fact that so many people believe tales about a Marxist plot to take over the world, when Marxism as an organized, active ideology is perhaps at its weakest point in over a century, is just one example of how conspiracy theories can take one’s mind off of understanding the world from the standpoint of reality. Once we understand the world as it is, then hopefully we can change it for the better. As Pope Leo XIII advised: “There is nothing more useful than to look at the world as it really is — and at the same time look elsewhere for a remedy to its troubles.”

And:

The July 21, 2011 Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich is pretty much what you would expect from the Malthusian elite. Malthusianism is one of those bad ideas that just won’t die. My guess is that, like many bad ideas, Malthusianism continues to live because certain very rich people find it an attractive vehicle for their prejudices while all the while declaring their prejudices to be nothing more than the "inconvenient truths" of science. John Médaille wrote an excellent blog post on the subject of Malthusianism back in 2008 and I highly recommend it as an answer to the likes of Harte and Ehrlich.

Besides Malthusianism, many other nasty ideas originating from the dark recesses of classical liberalism are making a comeback, and laissez-faire economics is perhaps the least worst. Biological determinism, for example, has made a major comeback in the last several decades on the back of exaggerated claims of some scientists and journalists who are willing to bend the truth in order to gain more grant money or more profitable advertisers. Malthusianism and biological determinism are useful tools for the elites because they put a brake on the discussion of social reforms that may harm their interests.

For the followers of Malthus, the problem is too many people, not too little development or an uneven distribution of the Earth's material product. For biological determinists, the problem of poverty has little to do with government policy that favors the wealthy or with an unfair distribution of power within firms. Instead, it is entirely the result of the basic biological inferiority of the poor.

Not surprisingly. Malthusianism and biological determinism end up feeding off one another. If one believes that poor people, and especially poor people of color, are simply too biologically deficient to develop proper economies, then it makes more sense to limit their reproduction so that they do not become a burden on themselves or on the wealthy societies that end up having to support them.

Malthusianism and biological determinism are perhaps the most extreme examples of the "there is no alternative" ideology promoted by Margaret Thatcher and others like her. When liberalism is challenged in a sufficiently powerful manner, it has always fallen back on supposedly scientific arguments to avoid dealing with the hypocrisies that characterized the original liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While traditionalist conceptions of the "Grace of God" or the "Mandate of Heaven" were always pregnant with the idea that a ruler could lose the favor of the Divine, especially if they were cruel or unjust towards the poor (look at how the powerful were reprimanded by the prophets of the Bible for crushing the poor!), bourgeois liberalism has always supported a kind of conceited, pseudo-scientific meritocracy that, in its worst moments, produced significant human suffering.