As Gary North reminds us in his recent essay “Dancing on the Grave of Keynesianism” (2012), the most probable scenario is that the welfare–warfare state in the West, like its mad distant and radical relative Soviet communism, will simply be crushed under its own weight.

The Era of Militant Statism

by Andrei Znamenski 

[Part 3 of “In the Shadow of Dr. Lueger,”Independent Review, 2013. Click here for Part 1 and click here for Part 2.]

During the age ushered in by people such as Dr. Lueger, the voice of the majority (a class, a race, a nation, or a religion) became the law of the land; minority groups had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s to be empowered through quotas and set-asides. In this popular group-think mindset, the individual was never even counted as a unit of political and economic life. All political and economic debates and decisions, both on the right and on the left, were framed in the language of large and (since the 1960s) small collective aggregates. In contrast to the definition of the twentieth century in general as “the age of extremes” (by the noted Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm [1996]), it seems the most appropriate label for the age discussed here (at least until 1945) would be “the era of militant collectivism and statism.”

In hindsight, it was probably an unavoidable evil in an age during which large segments of the enfranchised populace woke up for active political life. Full of envy, various groups of the “damned of the earth” nourished resentment of the well-to-do and even the middle class and demanded redistribution of wealth, linking their hopes of betterment to the power of central government. In the meantime, as a way to safeguard their interests, business leaders were busy getting into bed with that same government, trying to secure corporate welfare and entitlements. Moreover, both the former and latter together were enthusiastic about making their countries and ethnic groups into nations, protecting them against foreign economic competition, mobilizing movements of “us” against “them,” and eventually paving the road to World War I. Dr. Lueger and the like were the first to sniff the political air and play on all these sentiments, riding the lowest feelings of the crowd and mobilizing people by choosing collective targets represented by various “alien” class, ethnic, and racial groups.