It turns out that that Hitler’s Germany was able to defeat France and Britain because Germany acted more like an egalitarian democracy, while France went in for authoritarian central planning. And then Germany lost the war because, after the first victories, Hitler insisted on tight control and central planning.

This story has a sort of tragic duality. The Germans won because they had been able to plan more like a democracy than democratic France or Britain – they constantly questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas – but they would never do so again, precisely because of their triumph over France. Hitler rapidly convinced himself it was all his own work, and the independent authority of the army was permanently destroyed.

Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

David Roberts at Grist wonders if it was aimed at teabaggers, but then rejects that idea and thinks it’s aimed at people like himself — self-righteous green moralists?

But why does it have to be one or the other? Why couldn’t it have been aimed at both, with a different message takeaway message for each of the two opposing groups?

Or maybe the takeaway message is that obnoxious greenies should buy Audis and make the company a lot of money, and then the teabaggers will be justified in their opinions of Audi drivers.

No wonder the Obama administration seems to have such a narrow, constrained outlook on life.

I got the chart from Say Anything blog, which got it from The EnterpriseBlog, which says it came from a JP Morgan research report. But I like the post at the Say Anything blog because of the comments, especially those about the role of public workers. It seems some people got kind of defensive about it.

Rise above partisanship for the good of the state? Yeck. Sounds way too totalitarian to me.

And now I see that John Schwarz is involved.

What we need is more partisan bickering, not any “rising above bipartisanship”. Partisan bickering is what made our country great. (Think back to the terrible things that the Adams and Jefferson factions said about each other. They were both right in their nasty, vicious criticisms of the other side, and their comments still apply. But we got a workable system out of it, to some extent because they wouldn’t let each other get things done.

The problem is, there are many other contenders for that honor. To name a few:

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
• Jimmy Carter
• Hugo Chavez
• Al Gore
• Wen Jiabao
• Kim Jong-il
• Robert Mugabe
• Vladimir Putin
• Than Shwe
• Manuel Zelaya

There is no question that Barak Obama also belongs in that list. But has he really done more than all of those worthies?

Putin’s reasoning is lame, of course. There are lots of other reasons a dictatorship might want to be rid of an expatriate dissident than to keep secrets from getting out. It wasn’t for the sake of protecting secrets that Trotsky ended up with the sharp end of an ice axe in his head, for example. Even if Litvinenko himself talked in terms of secrets doesn’t mean secrets were the reason for his murder.

What I wish I knew, though, is what Putin thinks he’s doing when he makes such statements. Is he trying to fool people into thinking his government didn’t order the killing? Or is he just trying to corrupt people into taking such excuses seriously when everyone knows the reasoning is bogus. If people can be made to pretend Putin somehow makes sense when he says these things, even though they know better, they are in some measure submitting themselves to his psychological control.

That can happen, but is it what Putin has in mind when he asks people to believe outlandish things? It would be nice to know.

It’s interesting that this came up after an exchange I had in a now-stale thread at The American Scene, where a commenter wrote:

Hayek’s thesis is that incremental increases in the power and breadth of the state lead to authoritarianism. We have 50 years’ worth of big-government Western democracies to examine, not one has tended to authoritarianism.

My response:

They haven’t? What, exactly, is your definition of authoritarianism?

He:

It excludes western-style democracies, at a minimum.

Me:

I think I understand. Western-style democracies have not tended towards authoritarianism, because authoritarianism excludes western-style democracies, no matter how authoritarian they have become.

And then Jacqui Smith does me the favor of providing an example. I didn’t even need to go to the trouble of bringing up that country’s anti-social behaviour orders, by which it has trashed a thousand years of progress in rule-of-law.