The socialist infrastructure - column

National Review, March 19, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Democracy-nuts, please note. Before the end of May, there will be elections: in the Soviet Union (city, district, and republic legislatures, this month and next). "Newly institutionalized political structures," to use the language of Leon Aron, a Sovietologist with the Heritage Foundation, "will be in place in key independence-minded ethnic republics following popular elections: in Lithuania on Feb 24; Moldavia, Feb 25; the Ukraine, March 4; Latvia and Estonia, March 18; and Georgia, March 25. And then there will be popular elections in Hungary, Rumania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia."

Now by the end of May, the politics of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe will be unrecognizable. But the political impact of these elections to one side, it is illusionary to suppose that in that space of time it will be possible to exorcise a generation of socialism. Not only because habits die hard, but because socialism is very much with us.

Mr. Len Karpinsky is a Communist Party member but also a prominent columnist for the liberal weekly, Moscow News. David Remnick of the Washington Post quotes his reaction to the speech by Gorbachev calling for the democratization of the political system: The idea is "a romantic mistake." He explains: "The heart of the party, its reformers and leaders, cannot just decide to pick up and leave behind a huge apparatus which still has a grip on every position you can imagine. The most important process is destroying the objective link between the party and administrative power, the bureaucrats who are innately conservative and who have no interest in change." The same day a report from Bucharest tells of the anxious confusion at a huge twenty-thousand-worker engine and heavy-machinery plant. How will they deal with choice, they wonder. One woman was quoted on the new situation in Rumania: "Before, we had one party. Now every party has an opinion. That is what worries me."

While Mr. Gorbachev is attempting to do something to free up Soviet energy so that perestroika can produce something besides political freedom for Eastern Europe--like, oh, shoes, soap, fuel, shelter--the bastion of capitalism in the world is considering a bill sponsored by a Republican senator which would turn over the care of pre-school-age children to federally subsidized agencies. That Orrin Hatch of Utah should conceive of such a plan at a time when the Euro-Asian land mass cries out for privatization suggests the narrowing of the distance between the polarities. Communism classically defined--the end of human conflict and therefore the advent of the stateless society--is as dead as the Ham and Eggs Movement. Socialism that calls for the nationalization of industries and payments based on giving to each according to his need is dead.

But so is the doctrine of subsidiarity dead, and that is a pity. That doctrine, enunciated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, was considered at the time a radical revision of the liberal individualism that characterized American society. The doctrine of subsidiarity acknowledges the role of the state, but does so most cautiously. It holds that no activity that can be performed by the private sector should be undertaken by the public sector. And held that no higher echelon of the public sector should undertake any enterprise that can be performed by a lower echelon of the public sector. By that standard, the Federal Government shouldn't undertake something that the individual states can do; and the states shouldn't undertake something that the cities or the counties can do. The notion that Washington, D.C., has to devise and to finance plans for looking after Johnnie and Mabel while their mother goes to work in Spokane, Washington, is the American equivalent of what Mr. Karpinsky is talking about when he says that the huge bureaucratic apparatus in the Soviet Union is the beginning of Soviet political reality. In America, the welfare state is king. A federal plan for looking after little children while their parents are working: one needs to repeat that over and over again, to wonder what ever happened to the doctrine of subsidiarity, let alone the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which left to the states those responsibilities not specifically delegated to the Congress.

The point of the sermon is that socialism is in the air. It is welcome that its extreme forms are being so eloquently resisted by brave men and women, from Berlin to the Urals. But the infrastructure of socialism is everywhere, and no scheduled election one hears of is designed to uproot it.