To avoid a long rambling essay, the reason politicians are vague has already been spelled out in far better terms by George Orwell. In his essay “Politics and the English Language” he explained why using polysyllabic babble, too many big words, in place of what the writer or speaker feels is true blunts not only their argument, but political debating as a whole. Go read that essay instead of this, but for the chronically lazy: “Political language-and with variations this is true of all political parties, from conservatives to anarchists-is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.” Now ignoring that politicians are little more than pure wind to begin with, political language has changed in that there are few politicians who try to hide their misdeeds through a long sheet of Latin based words that would require a dictionary to unravel, at least in the United States. The political vice in our case is using emotional language to make our point, even when the breakdown of terms leads to two groups arguing past each other. My example of this would be in the debate over border security. I recently did a research paper and when trawling through websites I could tell just by the language used what side of the debate, and how far on that side the writer was. Liberal sources which favor a reform of the naturalization process instead of protecting the border whereas more conservative sources favor border building, each of these had their own language. Liberal sources tended to refer to those in the country illegally as “undocumented workers” whereas conservative sources called the same people “illegal immigrants” with the fringe right shortening it to just “Illegals” which might explain the lack of progress in that area. Namely, if we cannot define our terms how can we debate the issue? I will admit that the converse might also be true in that our unwillingness to debate the issue manifests itself as an inability to define the terms, but given how eagerly most politically savvy people debate the issues, myself included, that is a bit unlikely. This leads back to the other two words in the title socialism and
managerialism. The word socialism and it's adjective, socialist have acquired a negative connotation. This is a problem because many progressive people in history such as George Orwell, Charles Fourier, and arguably Thomas Paine either identified themselves as socialist or espoused ideas similar to socialism. To be clear there cannot be a definition of socialism that is as precise as any concrete object. Anything that is intangible cannot be defined, but socialism is a good example of one intangible with a fairly consistent definition. Historically it was the label of the very liberal that was often a straw man for conservatives, even though by today's standards some of their platform planks, particular in 1917 when they advocated for woman's suffrage, are noncontroversial. At the time it was controversial but I guess the political shift caused by the great depression was that powerful. Socialism was always considered a bad idea, but during the cold war the focus was more on communism and socialism was seen as the half way marker between communism and capitalism, and was therefore a-okay. this is in contrast to today where everything President Obama has done is considered socialist, even when it does nothing in regards to socialism or is in direct contrast to socialist ideas. In one sense it might have been preferable if he had taken the route of socialism, for example by putting the money from the stimulus in the hands of every citizen instead of the banks, but that was never his bill and politically speaking, vetoing the stimulus would have been disastrous.
The common thread in many objections to socialism are objections to something else entirely. James
Burnham wrote several essays on
Managerialism, a concept that has largely fallen out of the political consciousness. This is for a very good reason,
Managerialism is a sophisticated cover for power worship and a desire for a meritocracy wherein the intellectual would be given the power. To put it in the words of Orwell himself, "when one examines the predictions which
Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified." The crux of this theory is that all societies follow the iron law of oligarchy and that ultimately people form neat little hierarchies, and thus we should just drop the pretence. This is what I and many other people, from reactionaries(far right) to radicals(far left), object to with a socialist or communist style of government is the potential for corruption, a la Stalin's takeover of the soviet system creating a party elite that created an oligarchy in all but name only. The final point of this blog post is to be careful of what you call what. Socialism is a spectrum of economic policies.
Managerialism is a philosophy of power
worship. Do not mix them up.
He also pointed out how all social issues are political issues and there is no keeping out of politics, but that's another essay for another time.
