Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Merker: Old Regime Overthrow and Aftermath
The First World War began with a local calamity, an assassination in the Balkans, realizing Bismarck’s prophecy that “one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”
But it ended with the dissolution of four empires: Russia, Austria-Hungary, German, and Ottoman, and that
devastation opened windows of opportunity for every interest opposed to the previously established orders, cultural no less than political. Institutional dislocation gave them increased room to maneuver[.]
The Bolsheviks conquered Russia in a coup d’état in the midst of war; the Fascists conquered Italy and Germany after the war.
To Lenin, the seizure of power was the hard part; the rest was easy. Capitalism had “simplified large-scale production” to such an extent that “armed workers” could take over and “fill out the required receipts.” Oh Vlad, honey.
A key to understanding is that
With the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 the prospects of the partisans of overthrow everywhere underwent an abrupt and qualitative transition.
If Lenin and the Bolsheviks could take over the ruins of the Czarist regime, then anything was possible for a devoted activist. Lenin organized the Comintern to coordinate the efforts of “124 communist parties” and others from all over the world.
As Lenin put it, you never knew “which spark… will kindle the conflagration” that leads to regime change. So communists should “set to work to stir up all and sundry… to gain victory over the bourgeoisie”.
And “the partisans of overthrow” have stirred up all and sundry ever since in their quest for “the seizure of power”. Because “bending the arc of history”. And who succeeds at this? The “hardest of the hard”: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Khomeinis.
There were plenty of efforts to establish “worker rule” after World War I, in Germany and Eastern Europe, but they all failed, because as World War I had demonstrated, the workers “overwhelmingly sided with their own nation’s cause in war”. Nationalism was the royal road to power, as Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated.
Communists and National Socialists were revolutionary rivals… They shared implacable contempt for liberal democracy… [and] competed for similar constituencies, particularly among the many unemployed[.]
Hitler and Mussolini fought for the nation; later on Stalin, I recall, fought for “socialism in one country.” And the key to power is to declare war on a small minority. Josef Hell found this out in 1922 in interviews with Hitler. First Hitler spewed his emotional hatred of the Jews. Then he sobered up and delivered his strategic vision:
[In all revolutions,] a struggle for ideals… for any kind of improvement, necessarily… must be supplemented by a struggle against some kind of social class or caste.
And The Jews, all over the world, tend to be a small minority. The skilled politician can unite the nation against that small minority for a quick win. See my Four Wars, and Grok’s analysis.
There is, of course, an economic difference between Communism and Nazism.
Politburo communism, then, can be defined in rough and ready terms as dictatorship dedicated to the abolition of private enterprise, while Fascism in the same terms amounts to dictatorship that tolerates or exploits private enterprise for its own ends[.]
Merker observes that of the three regime types that dominated the interwar period, World War II was a resounding defeat of Fascism by an alliance of Communism and liberal democracy. The Cold War was a conflict between the anti-fascist allies of World War II. Fascism, needless to say, continues to thrive in “post-Mao China, and post-Soviet Russia”.
It could be said that the three regime types existed as local experiments until the convulsions of the World Wars crystallized them. What we call “liberal democracy” was “wrung from the wages of two world wars.” The question remains:
[how] to convert Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom, equality, tolerance, and popular sovereignty into institutional arrangements in the West.
One key item is the gradual enlargement of the franchise. Today we take the universal right to vote for granted, but it is very new.
Historically, vast numbers of humans have lived under conditions in which a governing elite commandeers, by naked force of the threat of it, whatever surplus the population under its control produces beyond the mere means of subsistence.
Yet since the Enlightenment the idea has got about that “the exercise of governmental power is legitimized by “the consent of the governed”. The popular franchise would “wrest the reins of government from the hands of despots”. In reality,
The promise of rights or other general benefits can be used as what amounts to a bribe by those interested in using the consent of the governed to boost their own power[.]
And so
it is perhaps not surprising that a widening franchise has gone hand in hand with the massive expansion of the modern state.
The question is whether the universal franchise has really been a good thing. But there is this:
It is the only instance of practically realized absolute equality among individuals on record in human affairs.
But not, obviously, “equality of political influence”. Voters may be voting for a specific benefit, but in practice
they are placing a bid for exactly how the official use of the power of compulsion is to be deployed in the society they inhabit.
As Bastiat wrote:
Remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force[.]
And we easily forget that everything delivered by government, whether despotic or democratic, involves “the official use of force in our lives”. You would think that
Fashioning… a civil order of peaceable social intercourse would seem a worthy challenge for the exercise of popular sovereignty through the franchise.
Instead we have seen “an unprecedented expansion of the peacetime state” into almost all domains of social life. And it was all pioneered by Bismarck’s Germany after 1870. A centralized state could be “an instrument of national greatness.”
It is no surprise that Communist and Fascist despotisms expand the power of the state. The question is why it also happened in liberal democracies. Is it low-income voters? Or women? In fact, it’s complicated, and Merker proposes to use “the trope of composite voter preferences” to analyze the “complexities of voting behavior outcomes”. And that is to say nothing about “the tug of war between British and Continental Enlightenment currents in shaping the world in which we live”.
More to come.
| Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:59:48 GMT |
Merker: The Rise and Fall of Victorian Morality
During the life of Queen Victoria, from 1819 to 1901, Britain transformed itself from an agricultural and trading empire into “the leading industrial economy of the 19th century”. Population doubled, and per-capita GDP tripled.
Needless to say, to undergo the greatest change in methods of production since the introduction of agriculture, and to do so in the span of less than a century (roughly from 1790 to 1840), is bound to entail considerable social disruption.
And Britain did so without a political disruption. It passed Factory Acts, and reform of working conditions, and expanded the franchise. But the political regime endured.
This political continuity goes against the “Stein-Marx ‘materialist conception of history’”. For Marx, the Bourgeois revolution was to be followed by a Proletarian revolution. Yet, by 1872 Marx was forced to concede that, “in England, ‘the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means’”.
How could this “world historical economic revolution” occur without political disruption?
It was due in part to a universe of voluntary associations, including
self-help and mutual-aid societies… charity schools, ragged schools (for destitute children and orphans), Sunday schools, societies to promote piety and virtue, others for the relief of aged widows, penitent prostitutes, the dear, dumb, blind, and otherwise incapacitated, mothers meetings, soup kitchens, maternity charities, crèches… working men’s associations, slate clubs, medical clubs, lending libraries, natural history societies… holiday funds, penny banks, saving banks, visiting societies, temperance societies, pension societies, and more.
Meanwhile government and religion weathered the disruption, and often thrived.
But over and above all this were cultural norms.
[C]entral cultural norms pertaining to family, sex roles, personal responsibility, work ethic, public demeanor, decorum, and standards of respect (“respectability”), not only retained their traditional orientation, but were in some respects deepened and consolidated in this era.
Call it “Victorian morality” or “Victorian ethos”. And it extended down to the “laboring poor”.
The Victorian ethos was… eminently compatible with — and perhaps even a causal contributor to — a culture of diversifying enterprise that supported a rising population, rising standards of living, and international great power status based on a vast maritime empire.
And all this was going on while the Brits led the world in ending slavery.
Victorian virtues were domestic virtues.
They centered on the family, and… defined what was required of you to earn the respect of your fellows… as a function of your manners, attitudes, and behavior.
To succeed in a life of Victorian virtue was to have “character”. Its culture promoted life-long marriage, division of domestic responsibilities. Divorce was very rare, and even without modern contraception, illegitimate births declined from a peak of seven percent in 1845 to four percent at the end of the century.
Was this all very stuffy and cramped? Not according to Robert Wright in The Moral Animal.
[I]n the case of either sex, Victorian sexual mores have the effect of promoting male parental investment in spouse and offspring[.]
Victorian Britain gives us a glimpse
of a culture in which the exertions of ordinary people — anyone, in fact — are channeled in socially productive directions by making social respect contingent on living up to a code of rectitude and responsibility that lies within everyone’s capacity to fulfill, given will and earnest effort.
So what went wrong? Why do we regard the Victorians as stuffy and cramped?
First, there were the “partisans of overthrow” and the myth of the “unfinished revolution” in France. If you believe in revolution, then the success of ordinary morality and its ethic of “hard work, rectitude and personal responsibility/accountability”, then Marxism and revolution “would be a dead letter”.
Second, there were those that looked down on efforts to provide
education, poverty, insurance… by private initiative and voluntary organization as an unsystematic and ineffective way to deal with the problems that should, they insisted, be the responsibility of government.
Social reformers were therefore on the same side as the partisans of overthrow. They both wanted the power to realize their ambitions. But by validating the power of the state they created an opportunity for corporate and financial interests to get in on the state power game:
government contracts, subsidies, concessions, tax exemptions, tariffs, capture of regulatory agencies… and additional forms of rent seeking[.]
Third, there were those opposed to “Victorian attitudes to sexuality and sexual mores”. They wanted to live “unconventional sexual” — even libertine lives.
What about women’s liberation? Elizabeth Roberts, in A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940, found that working-class women were down with “Victorian values”.
“Victorian values” were embraced by the Victorian working class no less than by its middle class, but women by and large expressed contentment with their lives shaped by those values, to the point of experiencing a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in their roles and wives and mothers.
For the ordinary middle class and working class, the “Victorian ethos” was a good thing. But for those who itched for something else, “with other visions of the good life and the kind of society that might realize it” the ethos had to be dismantled. And so it has, piece by piece.
How the enemies of the Victorian ethos advanced their cause is the subject of Book 2: Down a slippery slope greased by two world wars.
| Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:38:21 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When government teachers teach your kids Critical Race Theory, it isn’t Critical Theory; it is just regime propaganda.
America does not have a “white supremacy” problem. It has a “spoiled, unhinged, white liberals” problem. — Kayleigh McEnany
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
The Left's Crimes Against Humanity: A Bill of Indictment
