Reinventing socialism: the triumph of neosocialism is the defining characteristic of politics today

National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by Rupert Murdoch

THE 1990s increasingly reminds me of the 1890s -- that decade, exactly one hundred years ago, when Joseph Pulitzer was directing the New York World from his yacht and Lord Northcliffe was founding the Daily Mail. That, too, was an era of new technology and new markets when peace seemed universal and everything seemed possible. The French still call it la Belle Epoque.

That world was mostly divided between the great European powers. But they were, after all, liberal powers. They generally operated according to a rule of law, certainly more so than most of their subjects had seen before -- or, in all too many cases, have seen since.

The other day, someone showed me this quotation from a book called The History of the Freedom of Thought by the great Cambridge historian J. B. Bury, published at the tail end of that era, in 1913: "The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty."

Sound familiar? How about this?

"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between socialism and capitalism is over: capitalism has won." That's from Robert Heilbroner, the author and economist at New York's New School, writing in The New Yorker in 1989.

Or this?

"The century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an 'end of ideology' or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." That comes from Francis Fukuyama's much-discussed essay "The End of History."

The note of liberal capitalist triumphalism is identical in all three quotations. And, frankly, it's chilling. Because look what happened last time.

In 1914, the year after Bury's book appeared, the First World War broke out in Europe. It was followed by the Russian Revolution, the invention of totalitarianism, Hitler's rise to power, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution -- all this entailing tens of millions of deaths.

Let's be clear about this. The first half of this century at least, was an unspeakable tragedy.

We naturally hope that today's liberal capitalist triumphalists are right. Indeed, many of us have contributed to that triumphalism. But you have to wonder. Could anything unforeseen, unexpected, be coming at us today?

Caspar Weinberger's book The Next War, published last year, sketched out several alarming scenarios for a sudden collapse in world order over the next few years. Some of these scenarios are triggered by rogue countries that acquire nuclear weapons. But all of them are made possible by an American military and intelligence build-down that is, of course, already under way.

It is easy enough to shrug off this sort of exercise as far-fetched and alarmist. But, of course, practically no one in 1913 had heard of Sarajevo -- or would have thought that a political murder there could plunge the world into fifty years of devastation.

(Incidentally, a foreign-policy scenario that everyone does seem to have heard of is the idea that China is going to be our enemy in the twenty-first century. To be sure, it is theoretically possible that any two countries might come into conflict. But it seems to me that to have a serious rivalry, you have to have serious, ineluctable conflicts of interest. Where are these ineluctable conflicts of interest with the Chinese? Are they showing any real interest in the world beyond their immediate environs -- other than to trade with it?

Not that trade will solve everything. It was President Reagan's military build-up, rather than President Ford's detente, that broke the will of the Soviet Union. But China is not the Soviet Union. It is not the country that went into Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, and Angola, that built a worldwide navy, that strove for nuclear parity.

So I say, give trade a chance and give the Chinese credit for the almost unimaginable progress they have made in the last twenty years.)

NO, the danger that I want to discuss is not external, not foreign, and not military. It is operating within our own societies, right under our noses. Let me put it in this way: If socialism is dead, why won't it lie down?

Or, in terms of my own petty preoccupations: If we're living in such a paradise of free enterprise, why can't I get my Fox TV news service onto more American cable systems and compete?

Well, the answer in both cases is the same. Socialism is not dead, but alive and well and living in the regulatory agencies. It is because of regulation -- and the monopolies and oligopolies it inevitably fosters -- that there are such formidable barriers to entry in the TV news business.

The classical definition of socialism, of course, is that contained in clause four of the old British Labour Party's constitution: public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Socialism in that sense is dead. No one talks about nationalizing industries any more.