The Tea Party Stalinists: Stalin’s Heirs on the Romantic Right

Maybe it's time to look in the mirror

The so-called Tea Party movement has performed extremely well in the Republican primaries today feeding off of the same line of thought that produced the comparisons of President Obama to Stalin.  It is ironic then that as a historian of the Soviet Union, and of ideology in particular, I believe that if we want to use Stalinism as our reference point, it is maybe the American Right that is down the road whose sides are lined with purges and terror.

What made Stalinism both so unique and yet so universally frightening a phenomenon was that its violence was not just about the real political acts, but about crimes of thought perpetrated by believers as well as unbelievers. The question of why the purges struck those who believed in Marxism-Leninism the hardest was I think best answered by Arthur Koestler who in his novel Darkness At Noon proposed that it was the drive to purify the Revolution in order to mobilize the population toward building socialism that made the Stalinist system hunt down internal enemies. My friend and mentor, David Priestland, picked up Koestler’s thread when he analyzed Stalinism as the outcome of Russian socialism’s romantic wing, which held individual inspiration and belief above more the technocratic socialism of Lenin and Bukharin. Under Stalinism belief had to be more than an act of external loyalty—it had to be the individual’s complete immersion in the Soviet identity. For example, a great Soviet strategist and Civil War hero, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was not purged because he did not believe in Marxism-Leninism but rather because his ideas for offensive warfare supposedly betrayed an inter-doubt about the doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” and thus were already a seed of disloyalty.  The logic of the purge required its victims to prove a negative in order to survive—their outside loyal actions were often the proof of the real inter-disloyalty.

This concerns me because of how viral romantic politics have become recently. For example, American debates on the nature of Islam have had a strong romantic undercurrent—it is not enough for a Muslim to simply condemn terrorism, they must not have a single seed of “anti-Americanism” in their souls, which somehow stands out in their actions. This makes it very hard for anyone engaged in a debate to present a nuanced position involving American foreign policy. The same can be said of the “secret Muslim” rhetoric surrounding Obama or Newt Gingrich’s recent accusation that the President is a “Kenyan anti-colonial.” What all these accusations have in common is that they force their target to prove that they truly believe in something in the depths of their subconscious, even if their external actions show that they are indeed true believers. As a historian, Gingrich should be ashamed to expropriate a truly Stalinist logic of assigning subjectivity without weighing experience, and in the same breath, I should note that I do not think the American Right’s populist wing is consciously Stalinist (I’m glad we cleared that up—ed.).

However, it is not just a coincidence however that the American right is unconsciously shaking hands with Stalin. Romantic tendencies in ideology tend to come out during moments of crisis. What many do not realize is that the shift to “Socialism in One Country” and Stalin’s subsequent rise to power was spurred by a war scare in 1926 which made many in the Communist Party realize just how insecure the Soviet Union was. Thus, the start of collectivization, rapid industrialization and the subsequent starvation and imprisonment of millions was a response to quickly strengthen a state that felt its international situation slipping. The same can be said of the United States today, which has been struck by financial and military crises. In such times of uncertainty, romantic politics become especially tempting—not only presents a list of enemies to hate but it also presents a narrative of personal salvation through rebirth. Stalin’s energized shock workers, the Stakhonovites, are a great example, as are the Jon Galts of Tea Party mythology.

The Tea Party and assorted other conservative activists attack Obama as cool and detached because to them it is a sign of doubt—the greatest crime one can commit in a truly Stalinist regime. Obama is the enemy not because he is black or a foreign name but because those and other qualities mark him as the romantic Right’s most hated enemy—the intellectual who does not embrace ideology to its fullest and the bureaucrat who only pays lip service to the cherished ideal. Thus, the logical outcome is to purify and purge; first the Republican Party then the country.

—Yakov

Related posts:

1. Does China Still Have a Soviet Problem: An Essay on Ideology, Globalization and Political-Economy
2. A Response to “Does China Still Have a Soviet Problem”