Nock on Shaw
by Thomas E. Brewton

Most people today who know of playwright George Bernard Shaw at all probably acquired that acquaintance indirectly via the hugely successful Broadway musical "My Fair Lady," which was an adaptation of Shaw's "Pygmalion." To appreciate Shaw's role outside the literary field, it's necessary to understand a bit more about the late Victorian period in England and its impact upon political and economic doctrine in the United States.

Shaw was a founder in 1883, along with Beatrice and Sidney Webb, of the Fabian Society, which aimed at replacing the British constitution with the planned and top-to-bottom-managed economy of socialism. The essential difference between the Fabians and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who had written the notorious Communist Manifesto in England forty years earlier, was the Fabians' tactic of gradualist rather than revolutionary implementation of socialism.

Fabian gradualism was the model emulated in the United States during the same period under the banners variously of Populism in the 1890s, Progressivism from the 1890s into the 1920s, and liberalism in the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Among its earliest exemplars was Teddy Roosevelt, an 1880 graduate of Harvard, which was in the process of abandoning its historic mission of training Christian ministers and turning wholly toward the atheistic materialism that now dominates all of the Ivy League and most other colleges and universities today.

Teddy's young cousin Franklin Roosevelt, graduating from Harvard in 1904, got a full-throttle indoctrination in the materialistic conceptions of socialism. Graham Wallas, one of the early Fabians, taught at Harvard, where his star pupil was 1909 graduate Walter Lippmann, president of the Harvard Socialist Club and later co-founder with Herbert Croly of The New Republic, one of the most influential liberal publications before World War II. Mr. Lippman in later years, observing the wreckage of socialism in practice, became an adherent of our original constitutionalism.

Celebrated libertarian analyst Albert Jay Nock's "The Socialism of Mr. Shaw" gets him just right.

Mr. Shaw is a Socialist. In his view the extreme of collectivist Statism is a cure for all ills, like the old grandmother's pennyroyal. In politics it will abolish the party system, simplify procedures, and ensure the keeping of good and capable men in office. Mr. Shaw's State will establish equality of income, provide the right kind of education for children, settle the land-question, control production and distribution, keep everybody at work, and so forth and so on; and all in the public interest. Mr. Shaw unsparingly diagnoses the various ills to which the body politic is heir; his diagnosis is complete and correct; and for each and every ill he prescribes the one remedy - State action.

In 1797, ten years after our Constitution was drafted, Chief Justice Jay said in a letter to a friend that every political theory which does not regard mankind as being what they are will prove abortive. Just this is the root-trouble with Mr. Shaw's theory and with all other forms of collectivist Statism; they do not regard mankind as being what they are.

The fundamental, and by now almost permanent, damage to constitutionalism in the United States was the collectivization of power in Washington, at the expense of state and local governments, that eliminated the most important of James Madison's "auxiliary precautions" against concentration of power. Since the New Deal, the Bill of Rights has become, in effect, a discretionary document to be set aside whenever state-planners find it conflicting with individual rights such as private property, religious freedom, and the right to bear arms. It all goes back to socialism and progressivism and Shaw had a good part in undermining the old order.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.