The failure of its central forecast, however, showed the essential theory to be false and thus confronted socialists with a dilemma

I am not a keen reader of political philosophy. I read the minimum I can in order to understand what is going but I much prefer history and science and poetry and travel, etc. But sometimes you need to. You can't just feel a position is wrong, you have to understand why they think it is right.

I ordered Heaven on Earth by Joshua Muravchik to try and understand the history of socialism here in the US which is a distinctly different history than that of socialism in Europe. It helps that Muravchik was a red diaper baby. He has a pretty intimate view of that history.

So far, I am just occasionally dipping in here and there. Socialism is pretty turgid and a history of socialism, well, turgid squared. But Muravchik is a good writer with some interesting insights. From page 118.

The publication of Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism in 1899 followed by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in 1902 distilled the crisis of Marxism. The elegant answer that Marx and Engels had hit upon to the question of how a socialist revolution might be achieved had collapsed. Their answer was the proletariat, but their expectation that it would grow increasingly universal, impoverished and revolutionary had been confounded. The progress of the capitalist economy was raising living standards throughout society and providing more channels of entry into the middle class and beyond. In addition, the growth of trade unions and the democratization of political processes provided the workers with safer methods of fighting for their interests than taking up arms.

Until this point, there had been something to Marxism’s claim to be “scientific,” namely that its forecasts rested on empirical observations of mid-century capitalism. (Never mind that some later scholars faulted the data.) The failure of its central forecast, however, showed the essential theory to be false and thus confronted socialists with a dilemma that was to haunt them throughout the remaining life of their movement. They could retain their identity with the workers by pursuing further incremental gains and giving up any serious notion of revolution; or they could keep their devotion to the revolutionary transformation of society but focus their hopes on forces other than the proletariat.

That paragraph in particular seems to me to describe the arc of the AGW movement. From its very first forecasts in the late 1990s, the central prediction has been consistently wrong. We should have seen rising global temperatures and yet we have seen a twenty year hiatus. We should have seen more hurricanes and we have seen fewer. We should have seen rising ocean levels but we have not. On and on. I don't claim that the failure of its central forecast has shown the essential theory to be false. But it certainly does call it into question.

And the dilemma is similar. Pragmatists can now buckle down and return to incremental gains on the environmental front as was being done so successfully until the environmental movement got hijacked by an ideological movement to centralize power and authority into the hands of experts. Or they can keep their devotion to the revolutionary transformation of society through totalitarianism but focus their hopes on forces other than AGW.

An interesting parallel.