June 2020 saw a short paragraph in praise of the demonstrations that were going on in American cities ("[t]hat grand movement to build a society free from racism") as contrasted with the actually anarchic nature of the Republican Party. True enough as far as it went. In this house, criticism of Trump and his crowd continues unabated; but after a while I found that when the spirit moved me to write political criticism, it most often turned my face into the wind blowing from the left. Objectively, this is a puzzle. There shouldn't be much policy to dislike on that side of me.
The New York Times once ran a guest essay containing a quiz designed to let you see which of six imaginary political parties would be the best fit for you. My responses placed me closest by far to the American Labor Party, though decidedly to its left on the cultural axis and (gulp) almost as much so on the economic one. While age was trundling others to the right, it had spirited me to the left flank of a notional labor party. Imagine my surprise. I find that I want things I'll never live to see, such as a gun-free America; things I might live to see if kept on ice for a good while, such as a robust welfare state; and things I could see right now if only the "anti-racist" dust would settle, such as an America proceeding to dissolve the significance of race. Of course, there's something missing from that list of progressive credentials: ideology. With ideology out of the way, it's easy to notice the symbiotic relationship between reactionary demagogues and radical dilettantes who can't grasp the harm done to the progressive cause by talking in Marx Deco jargon, trashing intelligible feminism for the sake of current vogues in gender politics, and proselytizing for neoracism. It's an error to shrug off the offenses of leftists, arguing that those of rightists pose the greater threat to the general good, because the two are joined. If the Right is the villain, the Left is its unwitting lackey. Take away the lackey, and the villain faces a harder task. Replace the lackey with a competent, popular alternative, and the villain is nowhere.
A small but conspicuous element, the radical Left, is undermining progressive politics at a dangerous juncture. That's why a progressive-in-the-wild may feel compelled to stake out contrarian territory. For The Family Property, this has meant urging the Democratic Party to reject bad company, scorning the game of advocacy and the gamble of trying to move society by audacious feats of leverage, and blushing for progressives who fall into intellectual arrogance by aping academics. It has meant taking a stand against biological class warfare and, now, witnessing the fall from self-conscious enlightenment to vicarious savagery that comes of allyship with exotic bigots. Now and then, it has seemed necessary to mention that all this commentary comes from a primitive leftist point of view and not a Trump-averse rightist one.
Contrarian territory has its dangers. It's a wild wood in which you can stray off till you forget where you came from. A commentator with a large readership may, on finding that the majority of readers give the warmest reception to the most biased polemics, get to be an ingratiating polemicist. The term for this phenomenon is audience capture. Actually, it's a hazard for contrarians and non-contrarians alike.
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A contrarian is a swimmer against the current. In the context of political commentary, the term can mean one who criticizes prevailing trends regardless of their orientation. More to the point, though, it distinguishes a dissident member of a camp from a member of a naturally opposing camp. A conservative who criticizes the progressive camp is not a contrarian. But what does it mean to be a contrarian progressive?
A camp is both a patch of ground and a gathering of people. The progressive ground is my proper place, but that doesn't mean that others who have gathered there are people after my own heart or that their visions and strategies — let alone their fads and conceits — seem right to me.
I've always detested Leninism and groaned at Marxism. I shun the fabrication Marxism-Leninism and maintain that Marx was reduced to a political phantasm when Lenin stepped off the train a century ago. His presence thereafter took the form of busts in the offices of Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist commissars, whose tyranny he justified to the world's Leftists while they underwent initiation into the new party-line Mysteries. By the time Khrushchev conclusively discredited Stalin, the Left had learned to shuttle between motte and bailey while heaving false Scotsmen over the stockade in defense of a humanitarian ideology that, in practice, couldn't be stopped before it killed again. Stalin? He was not a true socialist. Mao? Not a true socialist. Nor was Tito or Kim or Mengistu or Ceausescu or Mugabe.... Ah, but Castro! As brutal dictators-for-life go, that was more like it. His victims numbered in the thousands at most. He kept up appearances as a man of the people. Here, then, is an admissible socialist. And yet so is the progenitor of them all, Lenin, in circles where time and etiquette have effaced the record of his wholesale atrocities.
Long ago, I recoiled from the new fetishes of a liberalism starting its slide into academic captivity and later realized that I was mostly seeing a cohort of people who had earned self-assurance being supplanted by people born to it. Though I belonged to the second cohort, it was my lot to feel rubbed the wrong way. The incomparable Michael Kelly cut straight to the heart of the matter:
The left-liberalism that considers itself the true faith (but which eschews the name it appropriated and ruined and now calls itself progressivism) ... is an ideology of self-styled saints, a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many people as possible: If it were a person, it would pierce its tongue.
When the liberal degeneration had been going on for years, conservatism miraculously overtook it in a rapid collapse under the weight of a demagogue. Thereupon I witnessed the squandering of opportunity by my own side and knew that the opportunity had been misread. Donald Trump had cleared the way for a competent, sensible liberal alternative that might have brought the founding of a sustainable Democratic majority in national politics. However, ideological progressives thought they saw an opening for revolution.
This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.
And so we saw an attention-grabbing push to normalize democratic socialism. Not social democracy, which would, alas, have been hard enough to sell, but democratic socialism. This was alien to most of the Democratic Party's officeholders and faithful voters. In the congressional elections of 2018, candidates who espoused socialism of any kind were outliers among successful Democrats. The four progressives (including three socialists) soon to be renowned as The Squad contributed nothing to the party's return to power in the House of Representatives, as they had taken over safe seats. Nevertheless, they inspired liberal commentators to treat them as the vanguard of a new wave in American politics. It tended to be forgotten that not every wave is of the future. Meanwhile, young Democrats who had proved their broad appeal — the very people the party needed as its faces of the future — became faces in the crowd.
Confidence in a leftward destiny had already begun to fortify itself with intoxicating visions of demographic triumph. These were wishfully drawn from a 2008 US Census Bureau report predicting that the US would become a majority-minority country by 2040. However, that calculation rested on a system of racial classification absurdly like the one-drop rule of the Jim Crow South, and the dreams that were spun from it rashly assumed, to boot, that non-white immigrants would be leftist in their own politics or would at least attach themselves to their leftist patrons. It was all an egoistic delusion of the Left. There can be no functioning majority where there is no cohesion except among activists. The thesis of demographic triumph was faulty in all its parts, but social-justice progressives' delight in it was so much greater than their critical faculties that they believed it. They chattered about it. They publicly exulted in it. Yet when Republicans told the same story with the aim of alarming white voters, they deplored it as though they'd never heard of such a thing.
Critical faculties recede where intellectual arrogance advances. Threadbare Marxist brain-cudgellers would at least have avoided the mirage of demographic triumph, but their sleek Leninist successors differ from them in a way that must be sought between the lines of theory. The theoretical difference is that Marxists concern themselves with the interests of urban workers while Leninists concern themselves with the modernization of agrarian societies. V. I. Lenin merged the two through the medium of vocabulary but also introduced a strategic difference that has transformed the character of the "Marxist-Leninist" Left.
Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by "us." The Introduction of "the Party" is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's "party of a new type" involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and "we" are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement.
— John H. Kautsky, 1994, Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism, p. 43
This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. Intellectuals are to lead; to lead where they list, with nothing to keep them from improvising signposts out of brainstorms as they go along.
There was the crusade to nowhere about defunding the police, and now the centrifugal quackery about sex and gender. There's the academy-driven denial of racial progress. There's the climate cult that shuns discussion of ways to cope with impacts that are already inevitable, preferring a monomaniacal campaign against fossil fuels combined with maximal alarmism about the future. In case after case, the Left demonstrates the impulse to proud perversity noted by Michael Kelly. Encompassing all the individual cases is a sphere of solipsism wherein no arc is particularly long, but each one bends toward self-justification.
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The pursuit of progress, in the sense of social improvement, is the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion. You may believe that imagination and compassion have already brought us to a state of equipoise worth keeping, in which case you're a conservative; or that they've overshot the mark, in which case you're a reactionary; or that we ought to follow them further, in which case you're some sort of liberal or progressive. But there's a separate sort of progressive who rearranges "the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion" into an imaginative leading of reason in ruthless devotion to one or more interests. Such progressives are the temperamental descendants of Lenin's we. It's because of them, the branded Left, that I stay busy as a contrarian.
