Help: What Does the Left Believe?
Cross posted at RedState
Here is an honest to goodness question for liberal readers or other well-informed conservatives: What books can give me a introduction to liberalism – its history, future goals, and distinctive ideologies?
In the twentieth century the right has been incredibly active intellectually, producing several ideologies and movements with specific authors I can rely on. Not all of these I would count as “conservative” properly. Some I find entirely repugnant and unworthy of associating with even as temporary allies. But in sum they seem to describe most of the intellectual culture of the American right in the 20th century. What follows is the shortest summation of the 20th century’s American conservatism (Loaded with Wikipedia links) that I can manage.
First you had the Old Right and the Agrarians of the 20s and 30s. For the Old Right you can look at Albert Jay Nock, and Mencken, you can turn to Garet Garrett. For the Agrarians you can turn to The Twelve Southerner’s I’ll Take My Stand, to their work in The Fugitive magazine. After World War II you had the re-emergence of Traditionalism- Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and others. On the other end you had libertarianism, and later its more radical step-child Anarcho-capitalism promoted by the intellectual heavy Murray Rothbard. In the middle you had “Fusionism” promoted in the pages of National Review by Frank Meyer which sought to reconcile Traditionalist ends with libertarian means. In the 1970s you have the rise of the Neo-conservatives Irving Kristol, Midge Dector and Norman Porhoretz, first as critics of left-wing Anti-Americanism and critics of Great Society domestic policy, later as foreign policy “hard Wilsonians.” Then the Religious Right of Paul Weyrich. On the less substantial fringe White Nationalism materialized. In the 80s and 90s, Paleo-conservatism combined elements of Traditionalism with a populist nationalism, promoted by The Rockford Institute and in the presidential runs of Pat Buchanan.
Each of these movements tried to give an account of history, of the current problems they sought to address, their own philosophical framework and political rationale. It is rather easy to make a study of them.
For the modern left this is much more difficult.
In the June 20th issue of the American Conservative, Arthur Versluis has an article provocatively titled “Death of the Left?” Have we witnessed the death of the Left? He says:
To answer such a question one has first to determine what the Left is. This is not so simple as it once may have appeared during the height of the Cold War when the world could be divided more or less into communist and capitalist. The division of the world between the spheres of the Soviet Union and of the United States (particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s) encouraged a falsely monolithic sense of those on the Left as “fellow travelers” of the huge bureaucratic communist state. But in fact, much of the Left’s history, especially from the 1960s onward consisted of efforts to develop an identity distinctively separate from the self-evident failures of state communism.
Indeed, one can see the range of positions on the Left at the meeting of the First International at the Hague in 1872, at which Karl Marx was able to manipulate the organization sufficiently to keep it moving along communist rather than anarchist lines. Marx’s flamboyant chief opponent was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who for all his own errors presciently warned against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism that would take power over working people. Needless to say, while Marx won – in part by moving the headquarters to New York – Bakunin’s critique was ultimately vindicated.
These same broad positions keep recurring throughout the history of the Left and certainly can be seen in the American Left since 1965. On one end of the spectrum we see those who overtly defend Stalinism or Chinese Communism and the assertion of centralized bureaucratic power. On the other, anarchist end of the spectrum are those who are extremely skeptical of state power in general, and whose aim, somewhat like Bukunin’s, is a more inchoate rage against the machine, an insistence upon revolution for revolution’s sake. The Left spectrum extends, in other words, from enforced collectivism to anarchic individualism.
The same could probably be said about the right it seems- if one counts Fascism on the collectivist end, and anarcho-capitalism on them uh... anarchy end. However, as I outlined before there are conservatives, close to the mainstream who identify themselves as Libertarian, Old Right, Neo-con, Paleo-con or what have you. Each refer to a distinctive ideology, outlook and lead to different policies. Each has a tradition. Now I have met very very few self-proclaimed communists of anarchists since I left Bard College. Versluis, talks about the dissolution of the Left into identity politics. There are any number of seminal works to come out of identity politics – “The Debt” by Randall Robinson on slave reparations comes to mind. There are several classics of feminism – though how many of them are read today?
The intellectual movement of the Left, outside of identity politics was the New Left of the 1960s - which again, it seems was more of an indictment of the military industrial complex and a vague promotion of “democracy” rather than a larger coherent political philosophy.
The question returns: what ideologies, what intellectual traditions are a direct influence on today’s Progressives? I can find tons of books bashing Republicans for hypocrisy (Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them), or other crimes. In Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas I can detect the influence of populism, and Marxist constructions about false consciousness in Frank’s work – but the main charge seems to be that the Republicans are guilty of misdirection. Only one liberal book that I have seen in the last few years lays out a larger case against conservatism: Reason by Robert Reich – which justifies progressivism through the rejection or the circumscribing of tradition and religion in politics.
Versluis names one other book influencing the Left, (one I’ve heard hyped by Janeane Garofalo) Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Versluis opines that this book “represent(s) (an) effort to steer the Left past the bloated corpses of totalitarian communist states and toward some vaguely imagined new secular aeon. The precise outline is not all that clear , but it does have some familiar aspects, among them the recurrent theme of participatory democracy… In the place of Marx’s term ‘proletariat,’ Hardt and Negri use the word ‘multitude,’ which, they believe, better allows for the preservation of identity politics within collectivism.”
The recent book, The Conservative Bookshelf by Chilton Williamson, (though tilted away from neo-cons towards paleo) demonstrates an attempt at a conservative reading list in which only one book, Treason by Ann Coulter is focused on criticizing one political party- while the other forty-nine deal with the larger questions of history, art, philosophy and religion on the right. Can I get a list of just ten such books for the modern left today?
This list would exclude works like What Liberal Media by Eric Alterman– as too narrowly partisan and (I think) it would exclude The Communist Manifesto – as irrelevant to the current progressive mind. Will someone on the Left ever write a counterpart to Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Elliot? Or is the Progressive cause too amorphous? Has it exhausted its utopian visions- whether anarchist or communist, and now consists only of what Roger Scruton calls “the culture of repudiation” – that is a hostile critique of religion, tradition and prejudice?
I'll pick up Multitude - sometime this summer- any help with making a list?
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Looks like this post has caused alot of pious-liberal-hand-over-liberal-heart- "I believe" posts over here on DailyKos -one of the bigger liberal online communities. It's also prompted a few thoughtful responses.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Reader Comments (18)
As for Jesus being a liberal - he makes for a poor standard bearer. He did not charge the apostles with setting up a progressive tax system but with spreading the Gospel. On women's rights- he indeed spared the prostitute from stoning - yet he tells her "Go, sin no more." Whereas it seems liberals would say "Go, you never really sinned." While many liberals accept Jesus as a model for forgiveness or non-violence - they certainly don't believe in his rather stern message about sin and redemption, nor in his "narrow" (that's his word "enter the narrow gate") way of obtaining salvation - nor do they pay serious mind to the fact that more than any figure in the Scriptures he speaks of Hell. This is not even to touch key passages such as in John 6 - where he commands those who would be his disciples to eat his flesh. They seem to edit his statement "I am the way, the truth and the life" to "I am your way, your truth, and your life, if you should so true in the privacy of your home and never mention it too loudly in public, unless at a civil rights rally"
-- Matthew 6:5-6
But also: "Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may give light to all that are in the house. Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. Mathew 5: 15-16
There is a difference between trying to prove one's righteousness in public- condemned in Mathew 6:5 - and the Great Commision,
... the whole multidude of his discples began with joy to praise God with a loud voicem for all the mighty works they had seen, Saying: Blessed is he who cometh king in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven, and glory on high. And some of the Parisees, from amongst the multitude said to him:Master rebuke thy disciples. And he said to them: I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones will cry out. - Luke 19: 37-40
The left isn’t a belief, but a propensity or enthusiasm towards a particular error. It's an error of the principle of individuation carried over into practical application.
The left are those men who lean unnaturally towards pantheism. Just as virtue is the mean, so likewise is the truth and reality. Those who lean too far in the opposite are the Individualists such as the libertarians of which the libertines are an extreme narcissist variety.
A nice benchmark for spotting a leftist is to look at his position in regard to the principle of subsidiarity. If he unnaturally stresses the perfect at the expense of the imperfect, he is a leftist.
This is also why the anti-immigrationists also tend to be nationalists. Nationalism is an unnatural propensity towards political pantheism, while their anti-immigrationism tends to see men not as individuals but as collectives.
You mistake the unnatural for the natural if you assume the US leviathan is a natural state. Societies are by nature unified. The anti-immigrationists wish to foist a unity on a leviathan which is naturally not unified, and which cannot be unified. This attempting to unify that which is naturally not unified is typical of pantheists.
As Aristotle writes, to all things there is a natural limit. The nationalists fail to recognize that limit. And in their failure of recognition, they attempt to foist a unity on the unnatural creature of the own making.
If the nation-state is by nature unnatural, then it should not be preserved in so far as is said to exist. The anti-immigrationists in the US are not seeking to preserve small natural political bodies, they are seeking to preserve the nation-state. Where is the minuteman project taking place? At a border of the nation-state.
If you wish to see how far leftward the US has gone, just look at the anti-immigration movement and their worrying over the preservation of the leviathan.
If you are not persuaded in anyway by the arguments in the Federalist for an extended Republic - then we have really lost any ground on which to argue about immigration. It seems you are not even sure if our current nation state exists: "in so far as it is said to exist".
If the failuire to enforce our laws results in what I see in my own town (for my ant-immigration stance is not borne of mere abstraction) - as harmful to my community, and my reasonable desire to stem this harm is unnantural- then nothing touching on politics today is natural. With a much easier rhetorical sleight of hand I can say that immigration is contributing to the growth of "leviathan" - and further eroding any chance of natural community. I don't have to hurl tedious theological insults at you to do it either.
Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
If you wish to dispute that nationalism's roots lead elsewhere than towards pantheism' I wonder where you think those roots lead to.
And no I am not persuaded towards seeing a Continental wide Federalist Republic as a good. Although I might be persuaded towards seeing my home state of Colorado as a Federation of Sovereigns, although it is most likely to large to avoid consolidation.
Have the heights of men and his arts ever been achieved in a setting larger than the city-state?
From what I’ve read, you don’t strike me as too far afield into nationalism, nor was I thinking of you when I wrote above concerning nationalism and its roots in pantheism..
And besides, it could be worse, you could be a material heretic from acceptance of the atomic theory which is a materialist pantheism which expressly denies principles of the Faith.
As for the atomic theory - I'll not comment.
Ronald Dworkin, as I understand him, gets into the redistributionist justifications for mainstream liberalism.
Richard Rorty is good to know about, but a bit more outside of the mainstream I think. I enoyed Peter Augustine Lawler's essay on Rorty in his Postmodernism Rightly Understood, but not having read Rorty himself I can't comment on its accuracy other than that Lawler hasn't mislead me anywhere else.
Also check out Stanley Fish, who is in my view also a bit outside of the mainstream left, but he is an influential Superstar Academic.
Some of the Kos people seem to think that the Enlightenment authors are the sole property of Left-Liberalism, but of course they have had a huge influence on mainstream American conservatism, which is simply right-Liberalism in the big scheme of things. Hell, George Will cited Mill's "Experiments in Living" to justify allowing US states to redefine marriage! (Speaking of Mill, here's a good review of Mill's underlying motivatons in writing On Liberty: http://www.nhinet.org/carey15-1.pdf )
Nietzsche is never mentioned, but he's one of the guys behind the Sweet Mystery of Life clause in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, but the Trancendentalists fertilized the ground for some of his ideas here in America.
Murray Rothbard, an eccentric advocate of mostly-reprehensible anarcho-capitalism, has an interesting take on early 20th century progressivism: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard28.html
Whoa! Nobody mentioned Rousseau!!! That's a giant gap in liberal theory! He's behind most everything from Free Love to Drug advocacy to Environmentalism to the infatuation with oppressed Third Worlders! He's not much of a direct influence anymore, but you definitely should read him.
These recommendations fall under the categories of Ideology and Legal Philosophy. I suspect lefty takes on their own history aren't much amenable to treating influential authors, for several reasons. Have you noticed how in some lefty eyes the progressive of yesterday is the reactionary of tomorrow? Look at how William Jennings Bryan has been ignored and unfairly derided as a fundie obscurantist, despite his support for Women's Suffrage, labor, and later in life Pacifism! Also, the lefty take usually intentionally downplays "great men" histories, in favor of populism. I would still like to know a good history of leftist politics anyway, especially the Labor movement to which I am very sympathetic.
And just to state the obvious: the Left-Right political spectrum is an incredibly bad taxonomy. Surprisingly, Wikipedia has a good article exploring this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum