Have you ever been in a policy discussion and had a conservative bring up the fact that Nazis were socialists?
“‘National Socialism,’ it’s right there in the name!”
This is, at its heart, an attempt to poison the well against the concept of socialism. Since “socialism” has come to encompass everything from full public ownership of the means of production to the most milquetoast left-wing policies, this can be deployed as a general argument against all things left-of-center. The argument is that this broad and vague concept of “socialism” has been stained by the moral transgressions of the Nazis, and that stain extends to and pollutes everything associated with socialism.
I can see why this argument has rhetorical power. It gets to something deep in human psychology: the idea that something can be dirty, impure, or polluted by a moral transgression. Something as deeply immoral as the holocaust is so abhorent that anything it touches, however indirectly, is infected as if by a contagious disease. When someone tries to weaponize this moral pollution against people or concepts they don’t like, I call it a “moral stain argument.”
The New York Times Magazine recently released the 1619 Project, “a special project that examines the many ways the legacy of slavery continues to shape and define life in the United States.” (source)
Matthew Desmond’s essay “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation” uncritically repeats claims from the New History of Capitalism (NHC) literature. The core argument of the essay is that American capitalism is particularly brutal because it had its origin in the brutal slave economy of the antebellum South. This is also one of the messages of the NHC literature.
Economic historians have contested many of the claims in this literature. Olmstead and Rhodes write that the authors of the NHC “mishandle historical evidence and mischaracterize important events in ways that affect their major interpretations on the nature of slavery, the workings of plantations, the importance of cotton and slavery in the broader economy, and the sources of the Industrial Revolution and world development.”
I’ll delve deeply into the historical and economic claims in the NHC literature in future podcast episodes, but right now I just want to point out that this is a moral stain argument. When Desmond points out that America has lower levels of unionization than Iceland and links that back to slavery, he’s tying the two concepts together. The implicit message is that low unionization is polluted by the moral stain of slavery and that we can only purge that stain by adopting pro-union policies in the present. Slavery is polluted because it is brutal and horrible. Now right-to-work laws have touched slavery and they are polluted too. See how that works?
The problem is that moral stains bear no relation to the actual costs and benefits of any given policy. Nobody on either side of this argument believes that America will lapse back into chattel slavery if it doesn’t reform its labour laws to be a little more like those of France. Unionization gives union workers more bargaining power, but it also makes labour markets less flexible and potentially worse for non-union workers. Where in that tradeoff is there room for a moral stain?
I’d like to see fewer arguments like this. I’d also like to see them called out when they are made. What I don’t want to see is people accepting the premise of a moral stain and engaging on those terms. “Actually it is unions that are stained because unions in the 1930s were guilty of racism!” No. Don’t be that guy.
Moral stain arguments are often hard to spot. They are often entangled with real concerns. When you link something you don’t like to American chattel slavery or Naziism it’s a clear-cut case of a moral stain because those things are in the past (though I’ll note that slavery is still practiced in some parts of the world today). The key feature of a moral stain argument is that its primary purpose is to create a link between something morally repugnant and something else that the arguer doesn’t like.
I think a good example was the moral panic about Uber drivers committing rapes during the height of the Uber controversy. Yes, there might be a reasonable argument to be had about whether ride-hailing causes more sexual assaults to occur. I disagree that it does, but one could make the argument. However, I think that this particular concern was raised primarily to link Uber with the moral stain of rape, since rape is more morally repugnant than traffic congestion. I think the critics were more concerned about other things, like protecting like taxi drivers’ earnings, but they went with sexual assault because people are so disgusted by it. Note that, although taxi drivers (and people from every other profession) have also committed rapes, these are considered to be isolated events rather than a pattern. It’s only Uber drivers who tarnish their entire industry when they sexually assault people. That’s a moral stain argument.
We shouldn’t let ourselves be convinced by moral stain thinking. Immorality is not an infectious disease that you can catch by touching something that touched something immoral. We also should try to avoid making such arguments, even implicitly. I’ve been very concerned watching history become an ideological battleground, where historians try to score points by linking their political opponents with odious ideas. The problem is that people are actually swayed by moral stain reasoning, so either side would lose ground in the culture war by abandoning it. And while I’d like to imagine that we could have a Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Bad but Effective Arguments, the sides aren’t cohesive enough for such arrangements. It’s ultimately up to the consumers of ideas to stop responding to bad arguments if good arguments are going to prevail.