When Hugo Chavez began ruling Venezuela, he sounded like a classic bleeding-heart – full of pity for the poor and downtrodden. Plenty of people took him at his words – not just Venezuelans, but much of the international bleeding-heart community. By the time Chavez died, however, many admirers were already having second thoughts about his dictatorial tendencies. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s handpicked successor, amply confirmed these fears. Almost everyone now plainly sees the mailed fist of the brutal dictator Chavez II.
Which brings us to two facts about the political world. Let’s call them Strange and Meta-Strange.
The Strange Fact: This transition from bleeding heart to mailed fist is common. Almost every Communist dictatorship launches with mountains of humanitarian propaganda. Yet ultimately, almost everyone who doesn’t fear for his life wakes up and smells the tyranny.
The Meta-Strange Fact: People rarely describe the Strange Fact as “strange”!
What’s so strange about the Strange Fact? Most obviously, the extreme hypocrisy. Governments that vocally proclaim their compassion for the meek – most obviously the Soviet Union and Maoist China – commit a grossly disproportionate share of mass murder and other violations of human rights.
What’s so strange about the Meta-Strange Fact? Well, picture the most vocally compassionate person you personally know, the person who seems most obsessed with the interests and feelings of others. Wouldn’t you be shocked to discover that they burn babies with cigarettes when you’re not looking? It’s one thing for people to fall short of saintly ideals; it’s quite another for people who uphold saintly ideals to be downright wicked.
What’s going on? Here are some possibilities:
1. Politics is a brutal game. When bleeding hearts take over a government, brutal outsiders smell their weakness, force their way in, bully their way to the top, and unleash hell.
The obvious problem with this story, of course, is that the bleeding hearts and mailed fists are usually the same people, though sometimes at different stages in their political career.
2. In this wicked world, the best way to pursue bleeding-heart policies is with a mailed fist. Sure, it would be nice if we could harmoniously adopt bleeding-heart policies. But in the real world, the forces of reaction and selfishness will try to obstruct and reverse bleeding-heart policies with every step. Unless, of course, you terrorize them into submission.
The obvious problem with this story, of course, is that countries that pursue bleeding-heart policies with a mailed fist look like total disasters. Most of them face horrifying civil wars; and even when the dust settles, the common man’s quality of life remains very low.
3. Hostile foreigners force bleeding hearts to adopt the mailed fist. When countries pursue bleeding-heart policies, evil countries like the United States try to isolate, punish, and overthrow them. The best way to protect your noble bleeding-heart experiment, sadly, is to prioritize the military and internal security. Then the international community has the effrontery to call these unwelcome defensive measures “the mailed fist.”
The obvious problem with this story: One of the quickest ways to anger countries like the United States is to blatantly use the mailed fist (especially if you combine your mailed fist with anti-Western rhetoric). Furthermore, if extreme bleeding-heart policies really were prone to provoke powerful foreigners, a sincere bleeding heart would moderate enough to appease these foreigners. “You don’t like my total war against illiteracy and disease? Fine, I’ll just do a half-war against illiteracy and disease.”
4. The bleeding-heart rhetoric is mostly propaganda; the main goal is the mailed fist. Even the most abusive romances usually start with a honeymoon period. Similarly, dictators rarely gain total power by growling, “Give me total power.” Instead, they woo the people with flowery words and symbolic gifts. Part of the goal, of course, is to trick your victims until you get the upper hand. But the flowery words and symbolic gifts are also effective ways to inspire gratitude in both recipients and bystanders.
This story often seems right to me, but it does implausibly downplay the bleeding hearts’ ideological fervor.
5. Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech. When activists blame the bourgeoisie for causing hunger, disease, and illiteracy, perhaps their main concern isn’t actually alleviating hunger, disease, or illiteracy. While they’d like these problems to disappear, the bleeding hearts’ top priority could be making the bourgeoisie suffer. The mailed fist systematizes that suffering.
It’s tempting to dismiss this story as cartoonish, but it’s more plausible than you think. Human beings often resent first – and rationalize said resentment later. They’re also loathe to admit this ugly fact. Actions, however, speak louder than words. People like Chavez and Maduro can accept their failure to help the poor, but not their failure to crush their hated enemies.
6. Bleeding-heart policies work so poorly that only the mailed fist can sustain them. In this story, the bleeding hearts are at least initially sincere. If their policies worked well enough to inspire broad support, the bleeding hearts would play nice. Unfortunately, bleeding-heart policies are exorbitantly expensive and often directly counter-productive. Pursued aggressively, they predictably lead to disaster. At this point, a saintly bleeding heart will admit error and back off. A pragmatic bleeding heart will compromise. The rest, however, respond to their own failures with rage and scapegoating. Once you institutionalize that rage and scapegoating, the mailed fist has arrived.
This story also seems pretty solid. It downplays the self-conscious Machiavellians, but only by recasting them as childish fanatics.
If you don’t know much about the actual history of radical bleeding-heart regimes, I’ll admit that stories 4-6 sound overblown and unfair. But I’ve devoted much of my life to studying this history. All I can say is: If your story isn’t ugly, it isn’t true.
P.S. Hugo Chavez is a really boring speaker, so if you’re curious about the general phenomenon I’m discussing, start with this little bleeding-heart speech by the murderous Che Guevara.
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Jan 30 2019 at 9:48am
#6 is the answer Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom.
Personally I think it is unwise to assume your opponents are secretly malicious, so #4 and #5 should be discarded in good faith. And 1-3 are the explanations the bleeding hearts give themselves during the scapegoating stage of #6.
And Venezuela is practically a textbook case for the evolution of socialist regimes, where the textbook is The Road to Serfdom. It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m betting you could identify every stage of Venezuela’s collapse, chapter by chapter.
Felix
Jan 31 2019 at 8:46pm
I’ve always figured the bleeding hearts have arrived at their policy positions by emotion, not logic, so every time reality mocks them with inefficiency and failure, they have to double down on the willful blindness, and it hardens their hearts even more to reality and logic. They have to lash out at the realist messengers who echo the bad news, and as time goes by, it takes less and less to get on their nerves.
It’s just a natural progression from “I know what is good for everybody” to “I have to shut up the naysayers” to “These people are ruining my society”.
Thomas Sewell
Jan 31 2019 at 10:06pm
The part of Hayek missed in this list is where implementing the bleeding heart policies requires power to be seized by the bleeding hearts so that they can implement their changes. In addition to anyone who may be sincere in their misguidedness, this accumulation of power attracts those to the bleeding heart’s cause who are best at at accumulating power and most enjoy exercising power over others.
Once the power hungry people are inevitably in charge of the movement and all it’s little bureaucratic divisions, by nature of being better at and more willing to accumulate power, then the movement ends up serving their ends, not the rhetorical purposes the movement ostensibly supported.
The only solution is to prevent anyone from obtaining that sort of seen-as-legitimate power over others in the first place, regardless of their stated intentions as to what they’re going to do with power once they have it.
Denver
Jan 30 2019 at 9:59am
7. Stockholm Syndrome.
People, including the people controlling the reigns of the state, hallucinate away the violence inherent in state action. “We need to use threats of violence and imprisonment to coercively punish someone simply because he’s collected wealth” sounds horrific. “The rich need to pay their fair share!” does not.
“Put a gun to anyone’s head who voluntarily engages in a wage contract, and refuses to be thrown in prison” sounds dictatorial. “Everyone deserves a living wage” sounds nice.
This is similar to Bryan’s 6, except it doesn’t require people to rationalize evil. They’re simply hallucinating away the gun in the room. And when you hallucinate away the gun, morally horrendous things can even sound obligatory.
Anon
Jan 30 2019 at 12:36pm
I believe that the last sentence you chose is essential the bleeding-heart — mailed fist dynamics. You cannot trust anything that ever comes from the other. This cultish behavior breeds the disasters later.
Sam Grove
Jan 30 2019 at 12:51pm
I would not dismiss #4 and #5 entirely.
Every political movement has a mix of temperaments, and while many may be sincerely beneficent, they are also often duped by those sociopathic personalities that wear a facade of caring for the downtrodden.
There is no complete uniformity of thought and temperament in politically categorized groups.
People who are not philosophically cohered may be willing to accept ends justified means.
Sniffnoy
Jan 30 2019 at 1:01pm
I think your last explanation is the closest one to correct, but I think it focuses on the wrong thing.
The key thing, basically, is this:
Which is to say, it’s not really about the failure, it’s about A. the leader’s character, and B. norms and mechanisms for mitigating the effect of such.
The thing about (A) is that the key distinction isn’t really bleeding-heart vs mailed-fist, it’s thinking vs just acting on tribal instincts. There are those who understand that the way to actually make things better is to pay attention to how things actually go; and there are those who just act on their social instinct that the way to make things better is to crush the outsiders (and everyone criticizing you is an outsider). Plenty of people espouse bleeding-heart ideas, but the latter will inevitably turn into mailed-fist given the chance, insisting it’s the only way to accomplish these bleeding-heart goals, even as they work against them. When you’re in the grip of it, you don’t distinguish between advancing the original goals on the one hand and crushing all opposition on the other hand, even as these become increasingly distinct. Why is it those who seem the *most* bleeding heart become mailed-fist, then? That’s less clear, but I’d say it’s likely because those who act this way, and will eventually become mailed-fist, aren’t too focused on aligning their statements with actual reality, and so will say more extreme things generally.
And of course with that goes (B); there are mechanisms for mitigating this sort of thing, but for whatever reason — I don’t really have any short explanation here, honestly it seems to me to be due to contingent historical factors — many of the extreme bleeding-hearts don’t see the need for them, or see these mechanisms as part of what’s causing their problem. Then they get rid of these mechanisms, and unpredictably-to-them but predictably-to-everyone-else they end up with a bleeding-heart-turned-mailed-fist leader. I guess this part is not that helpful without giving that longer contingent explanation but honestly I’m not very confident in it and also I don’t have time right now.
Eric Falkenstein
Jan 30 2019 at 1:23pm
I think it’s mainly naivete about the infeasibility of their endgame. So when their plans actually make society worse, this leads to an escalation of repression to silence critics and impose obedience. The intellectuals leading the initial revolution accept this at first as a few broken eggs but rarely become the mailed fists themselves.
Interestingly, Solzenitzin notes most intellectuals in the Gulag did not change their mind on the goodness of the revolution.
Floccina
Jan 30 2019 at 1:50pm
I think it is #6 and I think that the rhetoric that lower income people DESERVE more feeds into the violence in that they feel right to do it. They seldom say we are going to give more because we think we can afford it and it with give lower income folks more enjoyment. No it’s more it’s theirs’ and you owe it to them. That IMO can get dangerous.
Mark
Jan 30 2019 at 6:13pm
From my experience with far-left folks, I think the strongest explanation is ignorance (similar to explanation 6). They simply don’t believe in economics. As a result, they blame setbacks that are caused by market forces on enemies, and enemies must be crushed. This explanation isn’t limited to far-left folks either; like in this author’s concept of the “idea trap,” people often want to respond to setbacks with more government action, even when the government action caused the setback in the first place. So when people don’t understand economics, more setbacks lead to more government action in a spiral towards authoritarianism.
I also think 3 deserves a little more credit than given in this article. Foreign powers might be predatory towards a bleeding heart regime for reasons other than the fact that it is a bleeding heart regime; for example, they could sense that the bleeding heart regime will be weak. This explanation doesn’t work in the case of Venezuela, but it seems reasonable to think that the Bolsheviks for example were more brutal during the Russian Civil War than they would have been had there been no foreign intervention. Most visibly, they originally just arrested the Romanovs, and only executed them when it looked like the Bolsheviks were going to lose the war and the Czech legion was going to liberate the Romanovs. Many Russians also supported the Bolsheviks because the Kerensky government wanted to continue fighting World War I. In China, Mao’s obsession with heavy industry leading to the tragic Great Leap Forward can also be attributed in part to the proven military vulnerability of China to foreign powers during that time.
Hazel Meade
Feb 1 2019 at 10:59am
This. So called “Critical” theory teaches that everything is about power, so that all of economics (and more or less everything else) is essentially confabulated to support existing distributions of power and resources. So you’re correct they don’t believe in economics.
What’s funny is that if everything is about power then so is Marxism and critical theory and all of leftist ideology. It is all just a thin veneer disguising the naked will to power. And yet most leftists imagine themselves to be believers in some sort of objective “justice” in the distribution of resources.
But how to you define what is just without having some objective theory about what constitutes justice? A lot of what economics deals with is the distribution of finite resources, and it seems to me that most leftists, in discarding economics, end up living in a fantasy world where resources are basically infinite. The refusal to engage with economics basically means refusing to live a reality where resources are finite. Absent economic theory there’s no way to decide what a just distribution of resources is. So you end up with leftists demanding “free” healthcare and education and everything, with no thought of how the resources to supply those things can be obtained, because they don’t believe in economics.
I suppose this all sort of justifies explanation #4, because, on some level, certain elements of the far left genuinely do think it’s all about power. In embracing “critical” theory they are basically embracing the mailed fist, and all of the political rhetoric about the poor and downtrodden, really is something their own theory teaches is just propaganda.
Assistant Village Idiot
Jan 30 2019 at 8:08pm
Good article, and good comments. Do not take any disagreement as a dismissal of your arguments. I was a socialist, and believe I have been driven over time to explanations #4 & 5, though that is indeed unkind of me. However, I don’t believe that motives are ever unmixed. Those who started with kindly, compassionate motives retain at least shreds of them far down the line. The tyrants hire those who love cruelty for its own sake, but the sadists are always mere functionaries. Those whose cruelty is twisted kindness toward some other class remain the trusted insiders.
I think all of these are in the mix in individuals, in varying proportions.
Alex
Jan 30 2019 at 10:46pm
Number 5 makes a lot of sense to me.
From Eva Peron autobiography:
“I remember very well that I was for many days sad when I found out that in the world there were rich and there were poor. And the strange thing is that I wasn’t so angry about the fact that there were people who were poor as I was from the fact that there were people who were rich”
Barkley Rosser
Jan 31 2019 at 2:04am
I think this is made too complicated. There are plenty of “bleeding heart” regimes out there that are democratic and freedom loving and have no “mailed fist.” Think of all those Nordic social democracies. The ones that have a mailed fist generally have shown it one way or another even before they come to power, although many observers may ignore or just fail to notice its manifestation. This is obvious with those that come to power by a violent revolution or coup. In the case of Chavez, while he was elected, he had attempted a coup earlier. The mailed fist was pretty visible to any paying reasonably close attention.
There are some authoritarian leaders who arguably have mailed fist but did not show it before getting democratically elected. e.g. Erdogan in Turkey a d Orban in Hungary. But neither of those was ever much of a bleeding heart.
Jonathan
Jan 31 2019 at 3:01am
Noteworthy sentence:
It’s something that most people know instinctively but can not articulate it in their understanding. Perhaps in part because we don’t want to believe that this is true.
That the apex of our daydream quality of thinking about government can’t allow for such a fatal flaw to exist and yet it most surely does.
Miguel Madeira
Jan 31 2019 at 7:02am
Sugestion – many “bleeding hearts” are not “bleeding hearts” at all: they are extreme systematizers in the systematizing/empathizing continuum; they like policies to help the poor, not by real compassion, but because they like “solutions to problems”, and specially solutions based in abstract and impersonal mechanisms (then, for them government policies are better than private charity, and also a general tendency to think that everything is a problem “of the system” and not of individual failures) .
It is not much difficult to see how these preference for “systems” and abstract rules could degenerate in the “mailed fist” when applied to real, flesh-and-bone, humans.
Benjamin Cole
Jan 31 2019 at 7:25pm
Almost every Communist dictatorship launches with mountains of humanitarian propaganda. Yet ultimately, almost everyone who doesn’t fear for his life wakes up and smells the tyranny.—BC
By all means, Bryan Kaplan, expand, and use Beijing as your example.
Fred_in_PA
Feb 1 2019 at 12:29am
It seems to me that #3. Hostile foreigners force bleeding hearts to adopt the mailed fist. has the obvious flaw that, if the bleeding hearts were sincere, their toughness would be directed against those hostile foreigners, rather than against the supposed object of their intended beneficence, their own people.
Butler T. Reynolds
Feb 4 2019 at 9:53am
Ultimately, everything that government does involves the mailed fist. When that fist is used by the bleeding hearts, the damage is so much more devastating and obvious.
A conservative might used the mailed fist to expand the military industrial complex or to throw wealth down the NASA money pit, depriving the non-government sector from using that wealth and those brains more productively.
A centerist progressive might use the fist to build a public transit system that carries few but eats up the transportation budget, making congestion even worse.
While these things are destructive, it doesn’t have the body count involved when the fist is directed towards {social, economic, environmental, technological, housing}-justice goals.
The mistake is thinking that the mailed fist can be a force for good, if only controlled by the right people and directed at the right goals.
Alejandro Durán
Feb 4 2019 at 2:23pm
No matter what do socialism end has ended up the all the same -with a bloody tyrant, surrounded by a small sycophantic cadre, making the rest a life equal of a unlucky medieval serf.
I wonder if a non-Spanish speaker can fully get Che’s speech. It was corny in every respect, let alone cynical to the extreme. He of all people denounces assassination!
Alejandro Durán
Feb 4 2019 at 2:27pm
“No matter what socialism intends to do it has…” *
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