Nick Cohen's Postscript....

Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, is my favorite book of the year. I strongly urge everybody to go out and buy a copy as soon as possible. Although I am no longer of the left, Cohen has written an amazing story of how the left has betrayed the working class (through its identity politics) and now how it has gotten into bed with the Islamists.

Now, Nick has posted a postscript to his book, and I couldn't resist the urge to post a portion of it. But, please, please, go read the whole thing.

It is hard to define what it means to be left wing in the twenty-first century. Generally, people who say they are on the Left favour higher rates of taxation and the provision of public services by state monopolies, and are wary of private corporations and financial markets. Yet when their social democratic politicians take power they often turn to the market for solutions to the practical problems of running modern societies. They recognize that socialism in its extreme and moderate forms has gone. Parties of the Left in the democratic world are everywhere cautious and flexible, and can no longer inspire enthusiasm for state control because they no longer believe in it – and nor do most of their supporters when they are honest with themselves. Political writers have discussed the death of socialism and the triumph of market liberalism at length, but few have noticed a morbid consequence.

In the twentieth century, many on the Left were willing to support or minimize the crimes of the communists. To condemn Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, say, but ignore the victims of the Soviet Union and its satellite states was one characteristic double standard. To demand that the West scrap its nuclear weapons while implying that the Soviet arsenal was purely defensive was a second. In a usually ill-defined manner, they did not believe that communism was wholly rotten and that the progressive rhetoric in communist propaganda was all lies. Bar a few exceptions we discussed, however, they were resolute in their opposition to the fascist tradition.

In the twenty-first century, with socialism gone, the main threat to the status quo comes from Islamists whose attitudes towards women, Jews, homosexuals and free thought do not even pretend to be progressive. Indeed, in Iran, Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip and everywhere else they take power, they persecute leftists. Yet people who call themselves left wing cannot bring themselves to oppose them.

Far leftists go further and are open in their support for jihadis. The apologias from some liberals are so comprehensive that they must also support radical Islam in their hearts. Far leftists have to head to the far right because there is simply nowhere else for them to go now that the revolutionary guerrillas and communist regimes of the twentieth century are history. A love of violence and hatred of their own societies – well merited or otherwise – leads them to conclude that any killer of Americans is better than none.

To explain the catastrophic collapse of their hopes they have revived the false consciousness conspiracy theory, which has been present in socialist thought since the early defeats at the turn of the twentieth century, and given it an astonishing prominence. They hold that the masses rejected the Left because brainwashing media corporations ‘manufactured consent’ for globalization. Democracy is a sham, the political parties are all the same and human rights are meaningless. What fools call freedom is a smokescreen to hide the machinations of the real rulers of the world. The theory of false consciousness is very close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory of classic Nazism. Indeed its adherents often topple over into the antisemitic conspiracy theory of classic Nazism.

These may seem like fringe developments but the new ideology that emerged in dark, barely noticed corners of the Left fitted the consumer society well. Because there was no coherent left-wing political programme the most unlikely people could affect a leftish posture.

If I were a socialist writing fifty years ago, you might have read me and found yourself agreeing with a proposal I was making. But because I believed in socialism I would have to interject and say that I also wanted the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, penal taxation, stronger rights for trade unions and workers’ control. If not you, then other readers would have backed away at that moment, muttering that my ideas would lead to disaster. Modern leftists do not have to risk alienating readers with proposals that might be uncomfortable. They rarely have proposals for a new ordering of society. They are merely against the West in general or America in particular, both of which, God knows, provide reasons aplenty for opposition. The collapse in ideology also explains the general inability to support feminists, democrats and leftists in the poor world. If you do not have a positive programme yourself, how can you see strangers as comrades who must be supported? These betrayals may be scandalous but they chime with the psychology of consumerism. Shoppers have little time for Auden’s flat ephemeral pamphlets and boring meetings. They are commitment-phobes, with no appetite for the hard slog and the long haul.

Even leftish conspiracy theories do not feel as absurd as they once might have done. In the age of globalization, people who are prosperous and free can still feel that vast powers beyond democratic control run the world.

The result is that almost anyone can strike a leftish pose now. When I go into the homes of the richest people I know, I see Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore on their shelves and think, ‘Why am I surprised? Of course, they read them. The Left is no threat to them any longer. Being a leftist carries no costs.’