Say Anything Blog

By Jonathan A. Gallant, in The American Thinker:




This is just too good!

Here is a puzzle to contemplate. What can possibly explain the enormous, the stupefying failures of the Left in the 20th century? What went wrong? We start with ideas that seem, considered in the abstract, self-evidently attractive in principle: liberty, equality, fraternity, community, production for use. But we end up, over and over, ith a succession of vastly destructive train-wrecks driven by megalomaniacs such as Stalin, Rakosi, Ceausescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Robert Mugabe. Hold those names in mind for a while, we will return to certain of their characteristics. But first let us consider something else, which I think offers a clue.

What has the American and British Left been doing in recent years? Well, very recently the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq gave them something exciting to demonstrate about, but in the 1990s the lack of a plausible cause did not hold them back. In those days, remember, they were out protesting against the insidious danger of international trade, against the injustice of MacDonald's selling fries to people who wished to buy fries, and against the horrible injustice of ....wait for it...genetically modified plants! These causes represent the spiritual line of 1641, 1789 and 1848? These arguments are the intellectual descendents of the Grand Remonstrance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Communist Manifesto?

Wait a minute. How did the struggle for the Rights of Man dwindle to an obsession with the racial purity of soybeans? In their campaign against the genetically modified soybean, our contemporary activists in fact found themselves on the same side of the barricades as such advanced thinkers as the Prince of Wales.

How progressive.

[...]

Then, we have the Left's rediscovery of the principle of lifetime executive tenure. This characteristic of the ancien regime is no longer even found in corporations, reputedly the least democratic modern institution. But it is standard in every political system venerated on the Left, from General Secretary Stalin through Chairman Mao to the champion of them all, President Fidel Castro, now in his 47th year in office. In fact, the Left has even rediscovered the prinicple of hereditary dictatorship, once the divine right of kings. Kim Il Sung, the Dear Leader of North Korea, was succeeded by his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. And President Castro's designated successor is his younger brother, Vice-President Castro. So Fidelismo, the darling of every kind of sentimental Leftist, follows the same principles as the Romanov dynasty in which Tsar Peter succeeded his brother Tsar Feodor III in 1682. How progressive.

[...]

How progressive.

The demand for the abolition of Israel is particularly grotesque coming from the Left, in that Israel is the only place on earth where basic ideas of the traditional Left were implemented without the famines and impoverishment typical of the USSR, Red China under Mao, and elsewhere. During Turkish and British rule in Palestine, much of the land that was purchased for Jewish settlement was devoted to the kibbutzim, collectives organized along utopian socialist lines. There were eventually more than 250 of these communal, worker-owned productive enterprises, and at their height they comprised 130,000 members, accounted for a significant part of Israel's gross domestic product, and contributed disproportionately to its political culture. If people who call themselves "Left" were serious about alternatives to private capitalism, then one might expect them to be concerned about the survival of the one country on the planet where an experiment in the actual practice of Socialism achieved a partial success, in contrast to the disasters everywhere else.

Old Leftists used to shrug off these disasters as the breaking of a few eggs to make an omelet, even as the promise of the omelet became steadily phonier. Even Leftists who criticized details of Soviet organization, like the Trotskyites, never, never entertained the thought that the USSR should be abolished altogether on account of its deficiencies. Yet today, most Leftists insist that Israel's departures from utopian standards unmet anywhere else on earth calls for its destruction. Their disregard of the history and significance of the kibbutzim demonstrates without question that bourgeois Leftists are not serious at all about alternatives to private capitalism in the real world. But in that case what is their posture based on?

It is a curious spectacle: our self-described "progressives" aligned with devotees of Edwardian Church-of-England superstition, with the practice of hereditary rule, and with the Muslim Party of God, while crying for the abolition of the state which protects the only partly successful collectivist experiments on earth. These disconnects between the historic traditions of the Left and its contemporary behavior had become so grotesque by the turn of the 21st century, that I wondered whether this very incoherence could be a clue to the puzzle of the Left's failures. In other words, is the essential clue to be found in psychology of Leftists, rather than the intellectual tradition to which they pay lip service?

[...]

Communists, Trotskyites, and Socialists of the 1930s were sometimes seriously involved in the labor movement, and to a small extent in other forms of voluntary social construction. But by the 1960s, in the USA every labor union, virtually all of the cooperative movement, and all that mattered in the civil rights movement, had become entirely distinct from self-consciously Left political groups. Since the 1960s, the latter have no longer worked on building any communal institutions more substantial than the next sit-in at the college dean's office.

[...]

A learning curve so glacially slow as this represents something more than an ordinary learning disability. It represents a politics in which striking an attitude trumps any data from the outside world. Hence, adherents of the Old Left spent 40 years talking (and talking and talking) as if it were still November, 1917. This posture of willed ignorance (still observable at The Nation magazine as late as 1999) is surely one explanation of how Leftists so easily allowed ideals, or at least stated objectives ("all power to the soviets", "peoples' democracy", and so on) to be betrayed.

There is another factor in Leftists' peculiar blindness to the case after case in which their own slogans were betrayed. Think about all the western Leftists you know, and how they lead their lives. Mouthing slogans of communal ownership, do they actually live communally? Claiming to believe in a system of "sharing the wealth", how many of them share their own wealth with disadvantaged strangers? 95% of the Leftists I know live their own lives, like my friend in Britain, in a perfectly Tory fashion. I believe that this imposture at the core of bourgeois Leftist life is why they fail to detect all the other impostures: it is the same reason that fish cannot detect water.

[...]

This psychological pattern--the subordination of everyone in "the movement" to a domineering or manipulative personality and the kind of human relations this embodies--- has been a veritable cliché on the hard Left for a very long time. These little personality cults also explain why Leftists never found anything ominous or peculiar about the megalomania surrounding Stalin, or Mao, or Castro (or, more recently, Saddam Hussein). Leftists cannot detect megalomania for the same reason, once again, that fish cannot detect water.

And here at last we have the explanation of the dreadful outcomes I alluded to at the start. They are an outcome, not of the Left's intellectual traditions, but of the kind of personalities who congregate in Left groups and the kind of human relations the groups embody, time and time again. When the big-talker-in-chief is only precious Bob Avakian, the social psychology of his devotees doesn't matter to anyone else. Precious Leader has his adoring audience, and the devotees get to congratulate themselves for playing the role of his adoring audience and hence (in their own fantasy) the vanguard of humanity. No one outside the groupuscule is the worse for these charades.

But when a faction calling itself "Left" manages to seize power somewhere, their Big-Talker-in-chief might be a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot. In that case, his psychology, and that of his groupies, and above all their standards in human relations, all become consequential for the kind of social construction they will carry out, and therefore for everybody else's life expectancy. An example of where this psychology can lead is provided by the mob behaviour of the young Chinese Red Guards implementing "Mao Zedong thought" during the lunatic Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

In short, maybe the trouble with the Left, the source of its endlessly repeated failures, can be summed up in a single word: Leftists.

Read the whole thing.

This article, though extensive, only scratches the surface when it comes to revealing the tragic shortcomings of leftie politics and social policy. Definitely worth a read.