Conservatives are not much troubled by ideology, since there can be only so many competing visions among people who wish to keep things as they are. The right, as always, prizes conformity to established values. The left, as never before, prizes conformity to the values of the moment. It rewards people who can bring forth new wisdom to be made conventional, couched in new terms befitting a law unto itself. That is to say, it provides a living to intellectuals. Conservatism has its intellectuals, but they serve mainly as a Greek chorus to the tragedy of change. Conservative-minded Americans know what they like without consuming the punditry of the intellectuals. Together, they constitute the conservative project. Progressivism, however, has become entirely a project of academics and their social peers.
Even in the days when it was not entirely so, there was a Leftist intellectual caste whose thoughts and words working-class leftists found hard to swallow. This was due in part to the tendency of people who conceive of themselves as proletarians to be anti-intellectual snobs. Richard Wright’s sojourn in the Communist Party was blighted when the other rank-and-file comrades heard him "talk like a book." However, it was due also to the inevitably suspect status of people who, unlike Wright, cultivated a revolutionary orchard though they had no need of its fruit themselves: academics and patrons.
Today, the intellectual caste is the Left. Many observers note that this development has brought a shift in the substance of leftist politics from economic concerns to sociocultural ones. They might add that it has brought a rise in the value of language. A prominent linguist of the late twentieth century (I forget who) once remarked that belief in word magic had become mainly a trait of Western intellectuals. By that time, linguistic engineering held a prominent place in the Left’s attempts at social engineering. Educated leftists planted a language tree to supply straight, sturdy timber for this construction project (largely substitutes for words containing man, at first), but then the tree started putting out branches and twigs and leaves and blossoms of great intricacy as if one of its elite cultivators had been shoved inside by a witch. The Left came to talk like an expensive textbook. For purposes of bonding with the masses, that was bad enough; but it was not the worst.
The metamorphosis proceeded through an ever greater obsession with language and an ever greater abundance of words to be affected and words to be abhorred. Anxiety about correctness shaded into preciosity reminiscent of the days when well-bred people substituted limbs for legs. Now the Left talks like one of those little gilt-edged volumes once found in the better sort of home. Now it blushes like the dear reader of such a book. It shrinks from unruly speech, which it equates with violence or menace, while counting on word magic to secure a happy political ending. At last (one hopes), we've reached the point where mindless preciosity doubles back and merges with cynical propaganda to form a nullspeak wherein, for example, -phobe ("one gripped by a categorical fear or aversion") is ripped from its meaning and used as a scarlet suffix with which to mark political sinners. It's a wonder the play doesn't make the players feel too silly to go on with it, unless they calculate that it will influence lesser minds. Their own minds are not quite up to grasping how it undermines their position.
Richard Wright couldn't have foreseen this progression from the liberal to the ridiculous, but he gives us a model for beginning to confront it in his essay "I Tried To Be a Communist" (The Atlantic, August and September 1944). It concerns a zealous comrade called Young, newly arrived from Detroit, who joined the Chicago John Reed Club and soon "became one of the most ardent members of the organization, admired by all." Here are the essential parts of a long account:
At a meeting one night Young asked that his name be placed upon the agenda; when his time came to speak, he rose and launched into one of the most violent and bitter political attacks in the club's history upon Swann, one of the best young artists. We were aghast. Young accused Swann of being a traitor to the worker, an opportunist, a collaborator with the police, and an adherent of Trotsky. Naturally most of the club’s members assumed that Young, a member of the party, was voicing the ideas of the party. Surprised and baffled, I moved that Young's statement be referred to the executive committee for decision.
...
Determined to end the farce, I cornered Young and demanded to know who had given him authority to castigate Swann.
"I've been asked to rid the club of traitors."
"But Swann isn't a traitor," I said.
"We must have a purge," he said, his eyes bulging, his face quivering with passion.
...
One night ten of us met in an office of a leader of the party to hear Young restate his charges against Swann. The party leader, aloof and amused, gave Young the signal to begin. Young unrolled a sheaf of papers and declaimed a list of political charges that excelled in viciousness his previous charges. I stared at Young, feeling that he was making a dreadful mistake, but fearing him because he had, by his own account, the sanction of high political authority.
...
[Some time later, Young vanished without a word.]
One afternoon Comrade Grimm and I sneaked into the club's headquarters and opened Young's luggage. What we saw amazed and puzzled us. First of all, there was a scroll of paper twenty yards long — one page pasted to another — which had drawings depicting the history of the human race from a Marxist point of view. The first page read: A Pictorial Record of Man's Economic Progress.
"This is terribly ambitious," I said.
"He's very studious," Grimm said.
There were long dissertations written in longhand: some were political and others dealt with the history of art. Finally we found a letter with a Detroit return address and I promptly wrote asking news of our esteemed member. A few days later a letter came which said in part: —
Dear Sir:
In reply to your letter, we beg to inform you that Mr. Young, who was a patient in our institution and who escaped from our custody a few months ago, had been apprehended and returned to this institution for mental treatment.
I was thunderstruck. Was this true? Undoubtedly it was. Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it? Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one?
I made a motion that all charges against Swann be dropped, which was done. I offered Swann an apology, but as the leader of the Chicago John Reed Club I was a sobered and chastened Communist.
Let us be sobered and chastened Democrats before it's too late.
