The Professorial Coup

If yesterday’s election in Greece has not left me enthused*, it has certainly intrigued me. While the Anglo-American press has characterized Syriza, the dominant party (149 of 300 seats) in the new Greek Parliament, as “radical leftists,” their platform seems more center-left than socialist. The Wall Street Journal, in a surprisingly sympathetic article** (paywalled, alas), observes that many of Syriza’s legislative candidates are college professors, which makes their so-called “Keynesian-Marxist” governing philosophy easier to understand. Professors tend toward what one might call actual conservatism: the desire to conserve and use old institutions and techniques that have worked well enough in the past. Whatever its flaws, Keynesian deficit spending works well enough at stimulating a depressed economy, provided someone is willing to loan the government enough money. (Of course, the “Troika” of European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF are reluctant to do so.) I suspect, too, that college professors are more concerned by the high level of youth unemployment in Greece (40 percent, IIRC) than other professionals. No-one wants to consign their graduates to years, possibly decades, of unemployment. As for Syriza’s Marxism, I suspect we’ll see very little of it. It probably runs no deeper than the radicalism of Anglo-American students who dabbled in Marxism in the 1960s and became yuppies twenty years later, or of professors who called themselves “Marxologists” in the ‘80s and then spent their energy fighting over endowed chairs and parking privileges. I doubt we will see any Greek gulags. Unless they have decent faculty parking.

* Syriza’s coalition partners, the Independent Democrats, do not thrill me. They are center-right nationalists who don’t care for Germany, understandably enough in light of German bankers’ support for austerity, and oppose immigration, a somewhat more ominous position. They're still a better option than Golden Dawn.

** Charles Forelle, "Syriza's Rise Fueled by Professors-Turned Politicians," WSJ, 23 Jan. 2015.