The left failed because it would not see what the right clearly did

The left has ample critiques of, in art and scholarship, the corporate and governmental administrative state, but practically has been unable and largely unwilling to oppose it because that is where its power base lies. Our successes have always involved some alliance between intellectuals, who are often disaffected members of the professional classes, and what for simplicity’s sake we may just call the poor. The neoliberal centrist stopped caring about the poor, but the left proper, and this is true necessarily and definitionally, knows this, but it has failed strategically and tactically.

The neoliberal progressives were invested in identity politics and various forms of social experimentation and transformation based on sex/gender and other things. The reason is that the intellectuals who are drawn to the left, which they often discover when at university, can readily want a freer life than the one they are now being trained for, not to mention what their parents wanted and expected of them. This drove the youth protests and counterculture that became so famous in “the Sixties” and it still does, and rightly. The same people may or not care about the poor, and in any case their political positions and commitments are based on moral considerations. This helped made possible neoliberalism, to which identity politics with its various forms proved massively useful, since in its basic structure there is nothing to challenge corporate power and that of the administrative (and military) state that rules (and runs the universities, which prepare people for this world), after they have been socialized into its norms. Always championing the cause of the poor, the underdogs, or excluded and marginalized, the tendency whose somewhat mythical conceptual identity I have called “the left,” a term in use since the French Revolution, we cannot of course deny that if you are black, female, queer, and lots of other things, including a foreigner sans papiers, you count for us precisely because in the present order of things you do or might not. That means things like black liberation and feminism are going to wind up distributing their features, elements, and effects variously. Identity politics simplifies by using broad recognized social categories since they have representational value governmentally for making claims, whether through official procedures or at barricades. With the simplifications, the most conservative forces have what they need to start the enforcing, now that the staff of enforcers has been diversified. Got flag, we’re rainbow-cool, now go back to work, and get your own straw this time. Fascism celebrates these compliant workers while appropriating the sounds of their protests against the system that has no alternative except some imaginary cultic spectacle.

There is no way of understanding fascism without discussing the false lefts and the ways their claims can be perverted. Mussolini did that and so did Stalinism. The fascist right typically takes some pages from the left. The one tactic that is doomed to fail is for leftists to ally with centrists (in America, “liberals” and “progressives”) by, fatally, taking the position that the defense against and alternative to fascism means defending the status quo the fascists want to abolish while, and by, only refusing the forms of opposition to that status quo that fascism feeds on. That means that there is something wrong with the corporate state, normally limited and moderated by its liberal constitutionalism and tolerance of the claims of minoritarian groups and interests and rights of their members. And what is wrong with it is not that those claims, or the rights of citizens and residents, and the liberties of dissenters, might not be honored enough as the state becomes authoritarian and closed instead of liberal and open. What is most wrong with the administrative corporate state is the way it subjects people to it as compliant subjects. The university-trained mostly even think on its terms, and cannot otherwise. The problem is capitalism, to which the administrative state, often with little difference whether its ownership is private or public, is essential. Progressives find their base of power in the administrative state. The right-wing populist opposition champions non-professional workers, abandoning utopian ambitions for a post-scarcity world with short working hours, open borders, and universal peace in a global empire managed by consensus of corporate and government executive officers. True, the right has no credible or durable alternative, and predictably will only impose austerity, use war to increase production, delay social and cultural transformations that are already underway until the next postwar era of prosperity (especially if the war is a large-scale yet limited one fought with an array of new biotech and cyberweapons more than massive bombings at least affecting infrastructure and production facilities in the richer metropoles who will organize the war). It will deploy various ideological tactics, opportunistically, using whatever works. This obviously means in America making a massive use or abuse of all kinds of ideological memes that have much traction among leftists and in a way that will work with “progressives” whose criticism is not far-reaching enough to get much beyond defending their own liberties, identities, or other forms of what in political economic terms are private property and its rights. The terms for understanding the authoritarian populist right must include seeing why and how some of the typical complaints that they have weaponized (as most governmental politics does, since its actions are related to its social base representationally) are valid and so should be taken seriously. Freely assuming the risk of disapprobation it entails, I share some of them, with some bitterness, following upon ample disenchanting experiences.

Often the most important social movements have spectacular misuses. It happened massively with Christianity (institutional antisemitism, the Inquisition, early modern witch-hunting, today's priest sex scandals, and more), with Marxism, with modern nationalism (including its Jewish form, which has some unique features), and more. It happened with the various revolts against patriarchy as well as the European cultural hegemony that reached its height in the era that was also a height of colonialism with its murderous exploitation and that the American progressive faction seems agreed on happily enshrouding as if we were finally free of every past except the new empowerments of the excluded being gloriously marketed. And so it happened with feminism and gay liberation, inevitably. By the Seventies there was already a semi-official gay culture in America that historians will eventually read quite differently than its eager partisans did at the time. In some ways it was very obnoxious. Yet of course with an underlying set of arguments and complaints whose truths should be acknowledged, as with most such bids for recognition and the needed social changes represented as immanent possibilities. And it was very true of feminism, a movement that is far broader, better, and more necessary, in terms of how women who started talking about how family structures and social hierarchies that are everywhere oppress them, and perhaps even are part of something larger, not so easily grasped, named, or understood, that oppresses many or all of us, meaning that our society has or had become a bit too much of a corset or straightjacket. In the famous 1960s a worldwide youth revolt, necessarily vague most of the time as to what exactly it meant and wanted, was directed against precisely that. The twentieth century culturally was a time of massive cultural experimentation, including American music inspired principally by remnants of African culture, and so much else, and it freed many women and others in the relative sense that that concept generally can only be understood to mean, but of course there was a dark side, which is the essentially conservative, ideologically useful, empowerment of women and minorities that is done in a way that is meant to change absolutely nothing except the way the institutional practical and discursive social forms that often appear as something like "the system" is marketed as a brand that you must buy and show you appreciate or else.

There was and is a "feminism" of corporate and state functionaries whose only meaning is their personal empowerment realized through their employment in positions of professional power, which is wonderful news for them, and you had better have some respect, what do you not like "women", "blacks," etc. etc.? We'll get you for that, don't you see? And we'll cite you on that just because it's something we know we can use and get by with. Good news for the new bosses, bad luck for you, boy.

You are offered something, you had better buy it, you surely do want it, don't you, or do you misrecognize your own true inner desire that we the masters here now can of course read off you as if your skin were a thermometer displaying for all the contents of your sick but fortunately redeemable soul.

You will do as we say of course (otherwise we will hurt you). I suppose you might want to write about your experience here. Well, let me remind you, just as you can say anything to anyone as long as it is not about anything, you can say anything about anyone as long as it is not to anyone. So write for your magazine, that's fine, it's permitted; I suppose ten people will read it. As for us here, well buddy I wish you good luck.

The left’s basic position has to be that what we oppose, question, or “accuse” (Gk. categorein), is capitalism (for a host of reasons) and that all of the other forms of liberation are taken for granted. Since progressives focus on rights and liberties, and their particular social identities and forms of life, this gives us the operative principle of our identity with and difference from them. It’s true we have no broad strategy that could unify us, which is why the left today has no real party in the old sense, surely a relic of the Fordist and mass society disciplinary form of capitalism, but only fragmentary tactics, questions, etc. It’s also true of course we may have to struggle to defend our mere right to write or make art or do the work we do. But that’s what defines us. Liberal-lefts to me are all those who somehow cannot understand that.

If our government were an oppressive tyranny, people who say the kind of things I do will be accused of “terrorism.” Since you are “against” “the system,” which is at best an incoherent position intellectually (for causes that are undoubtedly psychological; don’t worry, we’ll find them), what else could that mean? Your criticism is “hatred,” and so is all your thinking, no matter how sharp it is and of course the more so the more it is, that is clear, well-articulated (and so not incoherent, the nonexistent (in the relevant situation) counsel for my defense might uselessly retort). So you are “violent,” and that is not because of anything you have done, God forbid any of us would think that, but it’s part of your character. You have a disposition to violence. We’ve diagnosed it in you. Now it’s written, so obviously a fact, since the professionals who wrote these reports are doctors, you can’t contest it, but only give expression to the way you are that we have identified. Admit it, you’ll feel better when you do…. That is, if our government were an oppressive tyranny.

Then the liberals who come to its defense would join even unwittingly in the psychological inculpations iterated reflexively. For after all, the only important thing about what you say is the fact that you are saying this sort of thing, and that it is you saying it. You are that man, it’s you, person of interest, special guy, we love you, it’s ok, what do you want me to tell you. I’m trained in psychotherapy too you know. And even before that, your liberal-left friends will say but you are against “big government” like a right-wing libertarian, that’s not the answer (and besides, we respect, and side with, the professionals doing their job). Worse, some of the thugs you obviously hated were black. There’s no way any self-respecting left-liberal progressive magazine is ever going to appreciate what you say just as any group of good left-wing activist will not. They went to university, studied these things, and fought the demons of their own bad attitudes, why can’t you do that. And you say, hey, look, that’s fine, you may even have a good point there, but right now I want out of this prison, can you help me get out?

It must be something unusual that is particular about and so obviously wrong, since something did go wrong, with me, that caused what happened to me to happen just as might have if we lived under some such tyranny. And ha ha says my Marxist friend, be an anti-Communist etc. etc., that war is long over anyway, so your political thinking is totally ineffective, and I say, well it sure seems like it could only be ineffective here, especially since I don’t have my books or access to them, and no way of writing, and I’m a writer. I’m a writer, and I have no way of writing.

”Are you Jewish?” “I’m a writer.” “I asked you…”. “I know. If you’re curious I’ll tell you I like Judaism, some things in it anyway, though I don’t know anymore what to do with such identity questions. My take is that all of them are either interesting problematic or irrelevant. Anyway I’m a writer, that identity I can claim as I think I understand it well enough.” “I appreciate your thoughtful eloquence but I need to fill out the form and say what is your religion.” (“So what’s with you, motherfucker, I mean who the hell are you anyway?” To such questions (the two kinds of persons you encounter in a prison or an institution like one?), one only responds with laughter, but he’s not asking about me as a person, but filling out a document, though he thinks these are the same thing, I think they’re not, and in any case the purposes of this institution here as I see it are opposite to any and all of mine, which for me to articulate will be understood as my stance of disobedient rebellion. He realized). “I said I’m a writer.” “Are you going to refuse to comply by answering my questions?” “I do not wish to be registered under a religion that is officially recognized. I have no legitimating identification to offer you. I have nothing to say to you and prefer not to answer, except to say I don’t want to be here, which I guess is obvious.” “I understand that you don’t want to be here, but…”. [Laughs.]. “Look, if you don’t want to be here, there are ways ….. “ [Looks at him intently, does not answer]. “[Closing his file of papers]. If you don’t want to talk to me, we’ll just keep you here until…”. “I want to see my lawyer.” “This isn’t a place of legal procedures but medical ones.” “I have no medical problem now that is of any proper concern to you or anyone here. I only want to go home.” “We first have to examine you medically, are you refusing to cooperate?” “I’ll do my best.” “To cooperate or to refuse to?” “Yes.” “Which? I’ll take that to mean you agree to cooperate, since you will find there are very unpleasant consequences for you if and when you do not.” “As a political prisoner, I consider I owe you no such thing.” “I’ll write you down as rebellious and a risk of violence. Thus you obviously have the potential to hurt other people or yourself.” “It seems to me you have been trying everything you can think of to get from me some statement of my consent to something or other, I’m sure it doesn’t matter which as long as you understand you’ve got my cooperation.” “Which you refuse.” [Silence]. “I’ll take that to mean —- “ “[interrupts with laughter].

Before he finished writing the scene, he decided it’s a good idea to also include some black fellow inmates and as allies. Maybe this will get past the censorious thinking of some left-inclined readers enough that they actually continue reading. (Actually, he did like them, they struck some wee rapport, and perhaps they are his allies, certainly sharing an experience, notwithstanding the idols of the local ball team and its preacher’s criteria). He laughed, bitterly.