Remnant Review
Here is a piece of advice that can save you money, time, and emotional despair: do not get involved with any intellectual or political organization that is exclusively anti-.
An anti-organization is doomed from the day it starts. Nobody will commit his life to an organization that is exclusively anti-, except the founder of such an organization and a handful of initial recruits. These recruits will move on, but the founder may not. He defines his life's work in terms of his cause, which is strictly anti-. Few people will ever commit to somebody else's cause on this basis.
An anti-organization is an organization built on despair. Its goal is to roll back something supposedly evil. The problem is this: the current organization is sufficiently efficient to have gained a large following. Its following is so large that someone has decided to devote the rest of his life to challenging it. But if he does not have a positive program that is also practical, he will gain followers from the ranks of the disgruntled. The disgruntled go from anti-movement to anti-movement in search of meaning. They never find it. That is why they always move on.
COMMUNISM AND ANTI-COMMUNISM
The most famous anti-movement in the history of mankind was Karl Marx’s original communist movement. Marx never wrote a book on what communism would look like after the revolution. He never wrote a chapter on what it would look like. He wrote the famous 10 points of the Communist Manifesto to talk about the transition after the revolution but before the establishment of the Communist paradise.
Think of his famous theory of class conflict. Do you know that he never defined what a class is? Almost nobody is aware of this. The Marxists have covered it up from the beginning, and almost nobody has read all three volumes of Das Kapital. Only the first volume was published in his lifetime. I read all three when I wrote my book, Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968). It is only in the final page of the third volume that we read this: “The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class? – and the reply to this follows naturally from the reply to another question, namely: What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?” Two brief paragraphs follow. Then we read this: “Here the manuscript leaves off.”
Marx had so few followers at his death in 1883 that fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral, and about half of them were family members.
The Communist movement never came to any conclusion about what the final Communist paradise would look like. It was a movement based entirely on its opposition to capitalism and capitalist social ethics. The various Communist nations suffered tyranny and the execution of at least 150 million citizens based on an anti-philosophy that never offered a positive picture of what Communist society would look like, and it had no developed theory of how to get from the socialist revolution against capitalism to the Communist paradise.
Today, there is almost nothing left of Communism outside of North Korea and Cuba. It is today a movement of losers. But it was always a movement of losers. They had no positive philosophy of what should replace the capitalist order they despised. The optimism of the movement was based on self-delusion. It was based on rhetoric, but the rhetoric never had either factual support or logical support. It was a fraud from 1845 onward.
I was brought into the conservative movement by a speech given by an Australian physician, Fred Schwarz, in 1956. He had founded an organization called the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. That one-hour speech transformed my life at age 14. I became a devotee of anti-Communism. But Schwarz always had an enormous problem. He talks about it in his autobiography. He said that people would come up to him after one of his anti-Communist speeches, and they would ask for guidance as to what they should do. He steadfastly refused ever to give any advice. He told them that he was like a physician offering a diagnosis. Well, he also offered an implied prognosis, namely, that if we did nothing, the Communists were going to win. The trouble was this: he was a social and political physician who had no recommended treatment, nor did he recommend any other intellectual physician with a treatment. His was an entirely anti- movement.
THE POSITIVE CASE FOR LIBERTY
The woman who took me to Schwarz's speech also was an early subscriber to The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). FEE began publishing the little magazine in 1956. Sometime in 1957 or early 1958, she let me read one of the issues of this magazine. The magazine offered a philosophy of liberty. It was not an anti- magazine. It was a pro-liberty magazine.
In 1971, when I became a senior staff member of FEE, I had a few private discussions with the founder, Leonard Read. I did not have many of these one-on-one discussions. He was never a mentor to me. He never sat down and gave me an outline of what he wanted FEE to become after his death. He gave no attention at all to that question. But he did make it clear that he did not believe that the organization should ever become an anti-organization. He did not like criticism of living political or philosophical thinkers. It was all right to mention what was wrong with another thinker within the context of a positive presentation, but he did not approve of anti-articles. He was convinced that the only way to establish liberty is with a positive philosophy, any positive presentation of what society would look like under the rule of liberty.
Every organization that is exclusively anti- has no philosophy of victory. It has no philosophy of optimism. It has nothing to offer its recruits except a lifetime of frustration spent in the intellectual trenches, in an attempt to roll back whatever the anti- movement is opposed to. The movement that has power, influence, and money does have a positive philosophy. It offers hope to the recruits. It offers hope to all of its advocates. It has a vision of victory. In the case of Marxism, there was no statement of what Nirvana was going to look like, but the members were taught from beginning to end that communism was going to be victorious. Scientific socialism guaranteed this.
There’s an old phrase in American politics: "You can’t beat something with nothing." Leonard Read believed this. I believe it.
Any reasonably intelligent person can make a case against almost anything. It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to present a negative case against any real-world organization or institution. Like human beings, institutions are flawed. But if the critic has no recommended replacement of the prevailing evil system, he is spinning his wheels. He is wasting his time. He is going to be disappointed at the end of his life, and maybe earlier. People will not commit to a defensive war against a supposedly all-powerful movement. What’s the point? If there is no hope of victory, and if there is no plan to achieve victory, then the time, money, and emotional capital invested in the anti-movement will prove to have been wasted at some point.
If a movement has no positive vision of what should replace the evil world of today, it has no way to evaluate the probable success of opposition to the present order. If you don’t know whether you are moving forward, you are wasting your time in moving at all. You may be moving backward.
Politicians do not win elections based on negativity. They present a positive vision to their constituents. Their plan may be irrational, but at least they have one.
When someone tells you that the public schools are evil, inquire about the schools he supports. When someone tells you that the Common Core curriculum is a disaster, ask the person what curriculum she uses to train her children. Ask to see the textbooks, if there are any textbooks. Ask to see the lesson plans. Find out about the teaching methodology. Of course, find out about the price. You can’t get something for nothing. In other words, find out what’s good before you spend a lot of time studying what’s bad. Before you spend any money on fighting what’s bad, find out how much money you’re going to be asked to pay to replace the bad thing with a good thing. At least find out about the details of the good thing.
All of this should be obvious, but it isn’t. The conservative movement since 1945 has been overwhelmingly an anti- movement. It was anti-Communist in the late 1940's. It was anti-Soviet Union from 1948 until 1991. But the movement never developed a comprehensive curriculum, K-12.
The conservative movement also has never produced a single detailed study of Roosevelt’s New Deal which covers both his domestic economic policies and his foreign policies. The only book that attempts this was the 1948 book by the anti-FDR journalist John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth. But it was not a scholarly study, and the documentation was weak. I read it in 1958. I recognized that there were gaps in the documentation. It is now 60 years later, and it is still the only anti-FDR book that is comprehensive in its criticism. I have outlined the multi-volume set that we need. Read it here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/2279.cfm.
CONCLUSION
Avoid any movement that is strictly anti-. Avoid individuals in such a movement who are trying to recruit you into it. If you are not willing to commit to the alternative paradigm or program that is supposed to replace the evil world order, then don’t get involved in the anti- movement at all. You may decide to read books published by it. You can find out about this or that scurrilous program of the present world order. You can be a fellow traveler, but don’t write any checks.
When you are approached by an enthusiastic member of the anti- movement, say this: "What you’re describing sounds bad. What do you propose as an alternative? How do you propose to implement it?” If there are no clear answers to these two questions, you would be wise to avoid any further investigation.
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