Horizon

Are they seriously contrasting "left-wing views" in opposition to "liberty and democracy"? Orwell might have had a thing or two to say about that.

Those Manhattan Institute puppies have conveniently short historical memories. They should read something like Heinrich Mann's The Man of Straw, which makes clear that in interwar Germany, for example, "democracy" was a dirty word, not spoken easily in small towns, because the conservative middle class did (correctly) consider it to be a dangerous left-wing view.

But Orwell wasn't writing in Weimar Germany, was he?

Well, erm, no. (Orwell in Weimar Berlin? Now, that calls up some impolite thoughts...)

But democracy wasn't frightfully popular with the British establishment in his lifetime either. Cf. Orwell's appalled 1946 discovery, via reader responses to an "As I Please" column, that property ownership requirements still existed for jury service.

Ahh, but during those formative years the reviewer is speaking of -- Republican Spain, appeasment Britain -- the enemies of democracy whom Orwell encountered were largely of the Left.

You too, standing history on its head?

Please. Tell. Me. You. Know. Better. Than. That.

Kindly recall that Franco's Nationalists and Fascists played a weensy part in the Spanish Civil War. In fact they occupied one whole set of trenches while the Communists and Trots and vague democratic idealists all had to share the other set facing them. I'll thank you to remember that the Fascists were shooting at all the varieties of Government supporters, including at Mr. Orwell. That's how he got the bleeding hole in his neck. Franco's Nationalists and Fascists in fact managed to win that whole sorry war, with the help of some Germans and Italians. Heard of an atrocity at a place called Guernica? The perpetrators were not leftists. They were Nazi Stuka pilots. Even a fair number of people you might consider to be conservative were sorry about Franco's excesses. You know, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, little things like that. I trust you might be willing to agree that Francisco Franco, if perhaps more a "nationalist" than an outright fascist, was at least not a leftist?

As for the runup to World War II, there was a fellow called Hitler whose atrocities broke records in several directions to an extent I think they might have heard about even in Texas. I certainly hope you will admit that Hitler was a fascist. He won the affection of a large segment of the British Right. Moseley most prominently but also quite possibly Edward VIII et al. They were not merely appeasing but actually approving toward Hitler, viewing him as protection against the "real" enemy of Communism. Go pick up any of the books by or about any of the Mitfords, you can even skip Jessica if you like.

While the Right was vaguely hoping Hitler would do something about those nasty Bolsheviks, leftists of various sorts -- kinds you like, and kinds you don't -- were actually in Spain fighting against fascists.

The people who became bizarrely denigrated during WWII as "premature anti-fascists" were Lincoln Brigade members and other left-wing activists who pointed out the dangers of Spanish and German Fascism long before the U.S. or British governments were willing to do a goddamned thing about it.

Or am I the only one left with a memory?

(As the last puffs of smoke emerge from my ears...)

Um, presuming all of the above was obvious, did you mean to limit the category of "enemies of democracy whom Orwell encountered" to people he had polite conversations with, as opposed to people who merely shot at him, Blitzed his apartment, held significant power in his country's government, harangued rallies he attended as a spectator, or sold him tobacco?

...or supervised him in the colonial military police?

Responding to your second post, yes -- that's precisely who I'm talking about. Do you not read Orwell as moving steadily rightward (okay, centerward) during 35-45?

You mean years, not ages, right?

Actually, not really. Under war pressures he probably swung sideways on the libertarian-authoritarian axis to the extent of admitting government and police can perform useful functions after all -- but as for left versus right, no. Not in the sense of getting any less egalitarian. At the end of the war he was still regretting the return of evening clothes and park railings to London, and as a war correspondent in newly liberated France in '45 he wished the people he met there were right in thinking England had become socialist. Some of his 1946 essays are as inconveniently radical as anything he wrote in the 'thirties. As for the Communists in Spain, he saw *them* as having slewed over to the right: he reports that as they gained power Barcelona became more hierarchical, economically unjust, and socially traditionalist as well as physically dangerous to people like himself.

I think this famous "conversion" he's supposed to have experienced in September 1940, in which he decided he'd do what he could for the British war effort, was really a matter of deciding he could trust his own government not to do anything outright barbarous. I'll try and dig up some of the Vol. 11 letters from Marrakech where (with evident PTSD paranoia) he was saying he feared Britain might go Fascist too, to the point where it wouldn't be any better. Fortunately he was wrong, and realized it in time to be useful.

CEJL is disappointingly sparse in the immediate prewar period. He jumps straight from burying printing presses in the ground to grumbling about the backwardness of the Home Guard.

You may be right on your larger point -- and some of his grousing about leftist intelligencia may have been a part of his egalitarianism -- I'll have to mull on it for a bit. Certainly Orwell never abandoned the assumption that bourgeois democracy was doomed, and the choice was between fascism, communism, or socialism.

Dunno about that exactly. I think you're projecting outside Marxist phrases onto Orwell.

In the 1930s, living in economic times a bit like ours, he believed on pretty good evidence that the middle class was doomed -- cf. "we have nothing to lose but our aitches" -- but democracy? Doomed? Why so?

In the 1930s, living in economic times a bit like ours ...

!

I've kept out of this so far but I'm not sure if I should let that pass or not.

OK, not quite. We're merely in a "jobless recovery" with big chunks of the middle class unable to buy a house or courting foreclosure if they try. By one recent estimate 840,000 people are homeless in the U.S. on any given night. The purchasing power of the U.S. minimum wage is lower than at any time since 1955.

Comparing the less-than-ideal economic circumstances of today with the Great Depression is a bit like the tiresome Bushhitler analogy - a trivialization of past and present ills alike.

What's different now is that the immiseration is affecting the top ten percent less than it used to. Things are worse than "less than ideal" for millions of people.

What's different now is that the immiseration is affecting the top ten percent less than it used to

And that's the only difference you can come up with? In a thread in which you which accused someone else of standing history on its head? Sheesh. OK, I'm done here.

Regarding homelessness, Martha, do you that the situation nowadays regarding the proportion of homeless that are either chemical dependents or mentally ill is preferable than it was during the era of pervasive institutionalization?

Please note I'm making no claims about what that proportion is.

Alan, the other difference is that institutions collapsed during the Depression in situations where now they would consolidate, which made for more disruption. Things happen to people by inches now, except in the case of the traumatically displaced hurricane survivors. And check with me in a few years when the ARM foreclosures have begun to bite deeper.

Ben, you're assuming quite a few things in that question.

"Chemical dependent" is not a lifelong or unstoppable condition like "epileptic." People drink or use when they're bored or scared or feel overpowering emotion or don't want to think about something awful. It's no secret that homelessness and unemployment tend to push people that way.

But, yes, it used to be that drunks and addicts lived indoors in lodging houses and cheap hotels in bad neighborhoods that took a live-and-let-live approach to odd behavior. It wasn't such a bad way to let troubled people be as human as they could.

"Insane asylum" incarceration really never contained all the odd or dangerous people in the U.S. -- and on the other hand those places imprisoned quite a few people simply because their families found them inconvenient.

The trouble with the opening of the asylums in the 1970s was, all these newly freed people who had possibly never lived on their own were supposed to get care in the community, and the social services didn't come through for them.

It's a distancing, dehumanizing myth that people living homeless should be viewed as imprudently released mental patients. The great opening of the gates is thirty years in the past now, and all you have to do to become homeless is get evicted, and anyway we're not now in a period of universally open gates by any stretch: 2 million people in prisons and jails now, a fair proportion of whom might once have been put in the mental institutions instead.

Mental disability really is one reason why people do badly in a society. At levels of extreme poverty you see a lot of dyslexia and depression and bitterness over bad early lives, and usually a low tolerance for paperwork. Yes, there's a sprinkling of criminal insanity too, but you find that everywhere. Look at Enron. Look at this Austrian maniac who went to work every day and did his job and took home his paycheck to a house where he kept an abducted girl locked in a basement.

On the other hand, I'll say a thing that may warm the cockles of your conservative heart, which is that the drug culture of the '60s and '70s permanently addled a lot of people who might have done OK without the chemicals.

Martha, you're reading quite a few things into that question.

Want to rephrase it then?

Well, I'm not sure it's worth it, but here's a shot:

At least some of the homeless today would have foremerly been locked up against their will. Do you think the current situation better or worse than that?

Let's unpack this some more. Why do you think "At least some of the homeless today would have formerly been locked up against their will"? And why do you find this question important?

I think the question important because -- so long as we do not live in a utopia -- it presents a case study in the trade-offs associated with political decisions and the difficulty of using economic indicators to make irreproachable political arguments.

We all agree that homelessness is bad, and we all agree that locking people up is also bad. These are, however, trade-offs: if we are horrified by forced institutionalization, we must accept that people will enjoy their liberties in ways that we may not approve of, and which might just be unhealty and against their own interests. It so happens that closing the institutions in which we previously we hid the marginal means that we now see them, and lament either their condition or their unsightliness.

My original question was intended to point out the positive -- yes, positive -- side of one fraction of your homelessness statistic. People are asserting their liberties in ways we don't approve of -- perhaps because we're not enabling them to escape those choices, perhaps because we're enabling those choices -- but this is a direct result of our refusal to confine them any longer.

Ben, are you claiming that the only way to get some people indoors is to lock them there?

Don't you suppose the extent of competition for cheap housing might be more relevant?

...and have you considered whether the old pattern of throwing people into hellholes was an effect or a cause of mental illness? I know one man who is a long-term addict and basically unemployable because his parents had him institutionalized in his teens for the crime of being bisexual.

Kindly answer while imagining he is listening.

Martha, I have no idea who you're arguing with.

If I'm not addressing a point you're trying to make, then what do you mean by, "We all agree that homelessness is bad, and we all agree that locking people up is also bad. These are, however, trade-offs..."

See, I don't think they're tradeoffs at all. I think if everyone could afford housing who wanted it we'd find that a lot of people, crazy or not, would be living indoors after all. It's the severe shortage of low-cost housing that allows low-rent landlords (subsidized or not) to be picky about the behavior of their tenants.

Actually, Martha, you've addressed a great number of points I never made, positions I do not hold, and attitudes I do not have. I hope you've had fun venting your spleen at some strawman conservative ranting about panhandlers. Since I am not that strawman, however, I'll just retire from the field and leave the two of you to go at it.