The terms Left and Right were coined in 1789 to describe seating arrangements for the National Assembly during the early stages of the French Revolution. Those seated to the podium’s right wanted to preserve parts of the past; those on the left hoped, in the name of progress, to invent a new future. But the maneuverings of politics soon muddied the initial transparency of these terms into an enduring illegibility. The ideas of the bloody minded right-wing reactionary Joseph de Maistre, the intellectual arch-enemy of the Revolution, for instance, became an inspiration for the early socialists-and so it has gone ever since.

The flamboyant French litterateur Bernard-Henri Lévy, widely known in Paris as BHL, acknowledges the problem. In his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, he writes that ‘the famous split between Left and Right that has structured French politics . . . has become harder and harder to believe in.’ That is because, to his dismay, much of the Left, cuckolded by history, no longer believes in progress or modernity. He describes the contemporary Left, with its signature scowl of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, as ‘that great backward falling corpse which the worms have already started to chew.’ The corpse is what he confusingly calls ‘the right-wing left’

Despite his disdain for much of the current Left, and despite the fact that many of those closest to his point of view in France endorsed the presidential candidacy of the ‘right-wing’ flag bearer Nicolas Sarkozy, a personal friend, Lévy refused to abandon the Socialist ticket. His dilemma, he told Sarkozy, was that no matter how much he liked, respected, and even agreed with the French president, he couldn’t support him because ‘the Left is my family.’ Lévy’s new book is an effort-part memoir, part essay, part polemic-to explain the nature of those family ties.

‘And does my insistence, on sticking with the Left that has done everything to empty itself of its substance mean I’m clinging to yesterday . . . to nostalgia? . . . Yes, maybe,’ Lévy writes, ‘But not only.’ Lévy’s ‘not only’ refers to the images he treasures of his father in the uniform of the Spanish Republicans who fought Franco; of the great resistance hero Jean Moulin; of the brave socialist Prime Minister of the 1930s, Leon Blum. He acknowledges that ‘images are not enough’ and describes the events that shaped his loyalties and those of his parents. These include the Dreyfus Affair, Vichy France, and the Algerian War, as well as being a young man during the uprisings of May 1968. He wonders if he is worthy of his illustrious ancestors, such as the ‘young left-wing captains in Portugal in 1975 bringing down the Salazar dictatorship.’ But here again, he backtracks and adds, ‘It is true that none of these events can completely justify the clear division of Right and Left.’ He recognises that some on the Right supported Dreyfus and the events of May ’68, while ‘many socialists . . . pacifists and sometimes Communists’ took part in Vichy’s crimes. ‘These events,’ he concludes, ‘are split by the same dividing line that they purport to draw.’

Some readers will find themselves exasperated by Lévy’s very French form of discursive, emotional writing. It lacks both the concision and specificity of the best English-language essays such as Nick Cohen’s What’s Left which covers similar ground. BHL criticises Sarkozy for supposedly writing off the Arab and Islamic rioters of the banlieues who need to be incorporated into France, for example. But his moralising leaves no room to discuss the rigid terms of France’s statist economy, which makes it almost impossible to create jobs for the unemployed beurs, who have plenty of time to fester on welfare. And some of his concerns are far more salient in a European context than in an American one. Most Americans don’t realise that much of Tony Blair’s cabinet in England consisted of former far-leftists; or that Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s prime minister at the end of the 1990s, was formerly a communist; or that Lionel Jospin, French Prime Minister from 1997 to 2002, had earlier been a Trotskyist for two decades.

But, argues BHL, whatever the considerable failings of those older iterations of Leftism, until the fall of the Soviet Union the Left still had something like a positive agenda. Since then, Leftists-reduced to ‘the joint ownership of resentment’-have increasingly turned against their parentage, the Enlightenment. The Left now defines itself so closely by its hatred of America and Israel that anti-globalisation activists even draw on counter-Enlightenment figures-such as the philo-Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt-to create what BHL calls ‘a right-wing left.’

The Left’s once proud universalism has devolved into an ethnic particularism, of the sort that once found its home in the fever swamps of the far Right. ‘We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey-a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world-and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former’ and are thus to be defended, Lévy laments. Here he refers, among other examples, to the case of British Leftist playwright Harold Pinter who became, during the Bosnian slaughter of the 1990s, an ardent defender of Slobodan Miloševi?.

The oddity in Levy’s argument is that in its well justified focus on radical Islam, he acknowledges, only in passing, the impact of the conspiratorially anti-modern turn of what might be called the Foucauldian left which took hold in the aftermath of the 1960s. He discusses Foucault in the context of French intra-left debates, but never as a precursor to ‘the backward falling corpse.’ For Foucault, disillusion with the USSR, as with Virginia Woolf who finally discovered that Hitler wasn’t a nice guy, meant that it was their own liberal societies which were truly fascist. Woolf, and more systematically Foucault, sniffed out fascism everywhere in their own relatively tolerant societies. Foucault was the master of discovering ‘little everyday fascism.’ Similarly the leftist philosopher Louis Althusser, who had experienced what he saw as freedom in a German POW camp during WWII was dedicated to exposing ‘that most frightful, appalling and horrifying of all the ideological state apparatuses . . . namely, the family.’ For this cynical left, which barely makes an appearance in The Left in Dark Times, the achievements of liberal societies have only made matters worse. In the words of Jacques Derrida, one of the deconstructionist champions of the cynical left, ‘no amount of progress warrants us to ignore the fact that never, in absolute terms, never have so many men, women and children been enslaved, famished or exterminated on earth.’ No evidence is necessary since, as with the communists and fascists of old, liberalism is clearly the primary source of evil in the world.

Lévy has fought the good fight. His courageous book Who Killed Daniel Pearl, based on his extensive travels in Pakistan, unflinchingly described the radical evil of our time. But under the spell of a hopelessly confused nomenclature, BHL, sticking to his anti-Sarkozy guns, concludes with a call for what he terms ‘melancholy liberalism.’ The phrase may sound odd to American ears, but its content is quite familiar. It’s another name for the disillusioned liberalism of 1950s America, with its strong sense of nuance, irony, and complexity.

The liberal intellectuals of the 1950s, who would later be denounced by the 68ers as ‘sellouts,’ had a healthy fear of mass politics and what David Hume called political ‘enthusiasms.’ It was a chastened liberalism worthy of admiration. With their keen sense of history, they understood the importance of Stalin’s doctrine of ‘social fascism,’ which defined the German Social Democrats of the late 1920s as the ‘real’ enemy to the exclusion of the Nazis and paved the way for Hitler’s takeover. Those like the liberal socialist Irving Howe, who stood at the left of the 1950s liberal consensus, were the first to espy a new version of that madness. They saw in the New Left’s Vietnam driven insistence that America was in fact the sinister AmeriKa as a burlesqued replay of the doctrine of social fascism in which the liberals were, not merely wrong, but once again the ‘real’ enemy. More fundamentally, they understood that what both the Nazi and Soviet regimes had in common, their anti-liberalism and their shared hostility toward bourgeois democracy, was as important as their differences. Though the fifties liberals they still clung to them, the categories of left and right had failed them.

For all his subtlety and sophistication, BHL is in many ways following in the tracks of those American 1950s liberals. But haven’t we learned something since then? After following BHL’s stylish twists and turns in describing the creation of a ‘right-wing left,’ the reader is bound to ask at least two questions. First, when is it time to leave a dysfunctional family? And second, is it not time to free ourselves, as much as possible, from a hopelessly outdated and unavoidably misleading set of political categories?

This review originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Democratiya.

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This is excellent advice. But Bloomberg has never taken it. One of the few things economists agree on, for example, is that subsidized sports stadia are a bad investment of public funds. They are also one of Bloomberg’s passions. The mayor tried and failed to subsidize a West Side football stadium to the tune of roughly $600 million, but succeeded in sending similar sums toward his developer friend Bruce Ratner for a massive Brooklyn project, centered on a basketball arena, now stalled, for which there was no demand. He subsidized the Mets’ new home, Citi Field, and, through direct and indirect subsidies–some of which are now under New York state and congressional investigation–Bloomberg has been paying for the construction of George Steinbrenner’s new Yankee Stadium. The costs to the city so far are $458 million (with tax breaks provided to the two teams for the stadium projects further costing the city an estimated $480 million in revenue). Yet, the mayor tells Newsweek‘s readers that national infrastructure projects have to be funded "strictly on merit."

The man who has helped preside over the gigantic hole at Ground Zero–where rebuilding is many years behind schedule and massively over budget–nonetheless insisted in Newsweek that the federal government hold the states and the cities "accountable for building on time and on budget."

Newsweek‘s offices are in New York City; shouldn’t Bloomberg’s assertions have raised a few red flags? But on he went. The mayor, who has nearly doubled spending on education with no known return on the investment other than a vastly expanded PR staff and chaos in repeatedly reorganized schools, talked about "our [educational] success in New York." Did Newsweek notice that the additional $9 billion he’s spent on education hasn’t shown up in any improvements on national tests?

The article closed with Bloomberg’s heartfelt advice to the next president to "demonstrate that your talk of bipartisanship is not just talk." Here his deeds have generally been as good as his words. He has been willing to spend vast sums to buy support in both parties to achieve the greater glory of Bloomberg. He has the money, resources, and advisers to be his own party and is less bipartisan than he is an alternative political pole, one that offers Michael Bloomberg as the sole program.

A knockoff of Berlusconi, he’s a man with a media empire who has dedicated his efforts to saving not his city or country but himself from the boredom of buying influence by merely giving away pieces of his fortune. A lifelong Democrat, he suddenly became a Republican in order to run for mayor in 2001. He later left the GOP to become an independent, and his staff is now exploring the chances of his running as a Democrat for reelection in 2009.

Whatever his formal identification, Bloomberg is desperate to remain on the national stage. For the past year, he ran a shadow campaign for national office. He toured the country and ran ads touting his educational "achievements" to boost the idea that he was the indispensable man for America’s future. Long before Newsweek turned itself into his doormat, he had garnered adoring articles in Esquire, Vanity Fair, and GQ explaining how he had risen above the ordinary categories of politics to accomplish extraordinary fiscal and educational feats. But Bloomberg, whose billions make it possible to insert himself into any campaign at almost any time, saw his presidential and vice-presidential hopes dashed. He has been reduced to buying a third term as mayor of New York.

Until a few weeks ago New York had a term-limits law–twice ratified by public referenda–that limited the mayor and the city council to eight years in office. Bloomberg could have held a referendum on overturning them–a referendum he was very likely to win given his 70 percent approval rating. But there were dangers in taking the democratic path. The referendum would have been scheduled for February 2009, and, as Baruch College’s Doug Muzzio notes, voters are likely to be hit before then by hikes in their property taxes, water bills, and subway fares. The tough times, though softened for the political class by Bloomberg’s deep pockets, might have produced only a narrow victory unbefitting a Great Man. Instead, operating on the basis of ambiguities in the city charter, Bloomberg strong-armed the city council into overturning term-limits: threatening to cut off funds to their districts and stop his "anonymous" donations to the nonprofits they count on to get out the vote if they opposed his plan.

Bloomberg–who, according to some sources, has convinced himself that he’s doing the public a favor by refusing to get out of the limelight–expected, quite reasonably, an easy ride from the oft-intimidated, oft-bought, scandal-ridden city council. When it came to the question of how the horses hauling Central Park carriages were being treated, the city council held 13 hearings. Term limits were rammed through after just two days of "deliberation."

The trouble was that in allowing Bloomberg to run for a third term, the council members were also voting a third term for themselves, and this velvet coup ran into unexpected public opposition. Newsweek’s hero was compared to Putin, Hugo Chávez, and Tony Soprano by respected journalists, and the council, which is almost always nearly unanimous in votes, in the end backed Bloomberg by a count of only 29-22.

While the path may be clear for Bloomberg’s third term, there remains the question of whether he will serve it out? City Hall, notes political consultant Jerry Skurnick, is a poor consolation prize for someone who believes he’s entitled to a place on the national or international stage. During his shadow presidential campaign, "Mayor Mike" repeatedly pantomimed non-denial denials about his intentions. The Newsweek article set off a similar display of mummery–complete with nods and winks–about how he wasn’t looking for a spot in an Obama or McCain administration.

For the time being Bloomberg, who presided over the great spending spree of the last few years, has been reduced to insisting that only a genius like himself can save Gotham from the fiscal dangers imposed by Wall Street’s collapse (and his own maladministration). This seems odd since the man who spoke of New York as "the luxury product" has shown no interest in nurturing small businesses, which are essential for regenerating the economy and have been squeezed hard by his administration’s search for revenue. Though Newsweek might not have noticed it, there was a net middle-class out-migration from New York City even in the midst of the late lamented boom.

For the last five years, while Bloomberg has been playing a golden tuba as the sky was raining Wall Street money, there was little point in criticizing a man whose unprecedented concentration of personal and political power made him as much feared as admired. But the skepticism and even open hostility elicited by his power grab has, for the moment, cracked his carapace of invulnerability. If the city is lucky, this will be the beginning of a 2009 mayoral campaign that will have to deal with a New York shorn of Wall Street as we once knew it. Who knows, Newsweek might actually take note of the city where its editorial offices are located and cover Bloomberg as if he were something less than the sum of his PR clips and bank accounts.

This article originally appeared in the Weekly Standard.

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