What’s Left?

I sit here ready to begin an essay on the state of the British left and Nick Cohen's tonic critique of it, What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way. There are so many quotable strophes in this book, but one in particular struck me for its foresight:

For when their [the liberal-left’s] fury passes, what will they have left? They will look to their core principles for guidance, only to find that they, rather than their conservative opponents, have battered them to the point of destruction. If they talk about the urgent task of combating terror by spreading the freedoms they enjoy, the audience they taught to sneer at others will sneer at them. If they provide evidence of a totalitarian menace, the accusation of lying they have thrown so freely at others, will be thrown back in their faces. If they belatedly rediscover the moral imagination to show solidarity with those who share their values, their own charges of consorting with the dupes of American imperialism will be used in evidence against them.

In other words, they've fashioned a rod for their own backs by opposing Bush and Blair, not on principle but out of "visceral" hatred. The left has become improvisational, which is really the performative way of saying it has become nihilistic. Cohen understand this as someone who has spent his entire life on that side of the spectrum yet who hardly recognizes the types of people who should be his comrades and co-thinkers.

One aspect missing in What's Left is how Marxism, so far from being a dead mode of historical analysis, can in fact explain the degeneration of socialists into excuse-makers for jihad, the enslavement of women, the murder of homosexuals and the destruction of trade unions. Anyone who's read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte knows that the agitative middle-classes, who have lived through at least one revolution in their time, never think very far in advance when it comes to seizing political opportunities in the present. They will rob their future selves, in the name of vanquishing a temporary antagonist, of precisely the rights and privileges those future selves will need to survive. And when they thus find themselves victims of their own intellectual and moral shallowness, lack of consistency in action, and disregard for long-term strategy, guess who they'll never once think of blaming for all their misfortunes?

Nancy Pelosi cuddles up to Bashar al-Assad, who creates havoc and chaos in Lebanon the better to enable a Syrian reconquest of that neighboring country. If her efforts at negotiating a deal with Assad succeeded, and if, with his partner-in-peace status with the United States renewed he found it that much easier to coax Hezbollah into staging a coup in Beirut, where would that leave a rising generation of Lebanese citizens and their feelings towards the West? After Hezbollah immiserated Lebanon, what would teenagers coming of age during that immiseration think of people like Madame Speaker and her realist cohort? Talk of "root causes" of the sprouting of new enemies of this country fades into silence when it's not George W. Bush or Tony Blair worrying those roots in the name of anti-fascism and democracy.

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