What's Left?

Alan Charles Kors from the December 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In his discussion of SDS, Ellis raises a deep analytical issue that relates to what the German sociologist Robert Michels, in his 1911 book Political Parties, called the "iron law of oligarchy." Based on the experience of European socialist parties, Michels inferred that even in the most ostensibly egalitarian organizations, structural and psychological imperatives lead inevitably to division of labor, hierarchy, and a set of leadership interests distinct from the interests of the organization's nominal constituents. (In contemporary terms, Michels discovered revolutionary rent seeking.) For Ellis, the SDS experience was Michels's model in reverse. SDS's aversion to bureaucracy and organization led not to stable hierarchy but to charismatic leadership, disguised and unaccountable. Instead of making the organization more "conservative" than its rhetoric, as in Michels's model, charismatic leadership made it ever more radical and disconnected. Ellis does not explore his notion of charisma and its political effects adequately, but his use of Michels is provocative.

Ellis's discussions of radical feminism and environmentalism are less successful. The people in these movements are his contemporaries, which may explain why he moves too often from analysis to polemic. At times, he simply reacts rather than weighing his words. His discussion of Catharine MacKinnon, for example, is often ad hominem, and it asserts rather than demonstrates inconsistencies and betrayals of her own values. In effect, he argues against MacKinnon as she argues against others.

By contrast, alas, Ellis takes very seriously the work of Susan Okin, who believes that gender hierarchy lies at the heart of social injustice and argues that even if husband and wife choose to live in a hierarchical marriage, the state should not allow it, "for the sake of the children." Ellis finds Okin "lucid," "powerful," and "unsettling"--above all, because she acknowledges the conflict between "personal freedom" and "social justice." In the end, his strongest argument against her is that the abolition of voluntary hierarchy in marriage would give too much power to the state. He should worry more about her than about the abolitionists.

Concerning the radical environmentalists, Ellis is entertaining and informative, but they fit ill with his model of "egalitarianism." They are here because their "misanthropy" illustrates well his secondary theme of left-wing detachment from and contempt for ordinary lives, which he believes is at the heart of the radical greens' agenda and worldview.

For Ellis, the real problem with all these groups is not that they illustrate something fatal about the left but that they make it more difficult for the left to succeed. Seeking the millennium in the wrong way prevents the quiet, friendly confiscation and redistribution of other people's property. Ellis offers a primer on how to avoid the wrong way: Do not 1) engage in politically correct Manicheanism, 2) idealize the oppressed, 3) hold apocalyptic visions, 4) tolerate authoritarian or charismatic leadership, 5) attribute false consciousness to others, 6) succumb to radical certainty, 7) deny the real distinction between public and private, or 7) think that crimes are justified if you deem them "unselfish." Well, there goes the whole left!

Ellis believes the political theorist Benjamin Barber has grasped the means of avoiding moral catastrophe: The left must be democrats first and egalitarians only after that. Barber, recall, thinks of the West as McDonald's, but that doesn't attribute false consciousness to anyone, does it? No contempt for ordinary lives there. From Ellis's perspective, Barber is saved by his willingness to let us be coerced only by a full 51 percent of our fellow citizens.

Richard Rorty, professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia, also wants the left to succeed, and he also has a theory about why that is not happening, which he lays out in Achieving Our Country. For Rorty, who has moved from analytic philosophy to skeptical pragmatism to terminal silliness, the real problem is that contempt for country and the illusion of scientific truth have led leftists away from their rightful role as "agents" into a self-defeating role as "spectators." Agents do things like organize effective coalitions to take the fruits of one person's labor or estate and give it to another person. Spectators do things like teach university courses about phallogocentric hegemonies. (This is the only good argument that I've heard in favor of courses about phallogocentric hegemonies: Better a tendentious, fatuous theorist than a thief.)

Rorty believes there was a time when the left was Whitmanesque, celebrating America, despite her faults, as a set of possibilities, and when it was imbued with the spirit of John Dewey, eschewing scientific certainties and seeking a civic consensus on what the nation could become and achieve. Marx got in the way. He had an unfortunate commitment to notions of science and historical certainty. There went Whitman's festive spirit and Dewey's democratic pragmatism.

The New Left got in the way. It could have thought of certain phenomena (slavery, Jim Crow, exploitation, Vietnam, and the like) as our "tragedies," but instead it thought of them as our "sins," which made America unforgiveable rather than something that could be transcended and achieved. This alienated people who belonged to unions and rather liked their country. There went the natural coalition between labor and academics who read Dewey.

Postmodernism got in the way. It was attracted to science, in Rorty's singular estimation. With no trace of irony, he writes that "the Foucauldian Left represents an unfortunate regression to the Marxist obsession with scientific rigor." It spoke a jargon that put off the average working guy. It engaged in speculation instead of reformist coalition building.

Rorty's fondest hope for the species is that the "Cultural Left," which has done so much to reduce cultural "sadism" through what the defenders of the corporations call "political correctness," be united with the "Reformist Left," creating an effective coalition, just in the nick of time, to defeat the forces of "selfishness."

Why just in the nick of time? Consistent with his belief that there is no real correspondence between our "fictions" and any objective reality, Rorty asserts that 75 percent of the American people are descending into an underclass ripe for demagogic and chauvinistic totalitarianism. According to his analysis, "the average married couple, both working full time" already cannot "take home more than $30,000." If that family's "take home" versus its actual earned income--$51,000 in 1997--concerns him, he might consider lowering its taxes. Given that America provides neither public transportation nor public health insurance, "this income permits a family of four only a humiliating, hand-to-mouth existence." (He should travel more.) It will get worse. "Globalization" will drive down most people's wages in the industrialized West, and we soon will have an embittered, immiserated 75 percent of our people ruled by "the richest 25%," including "platoons of vital young entrepreneurs" who travel first-class on transatlantic jets (the horror!).

This will lead to "the formation of hereditary castes," with the ruling caste making "all the important decisions." They will buy off authors like Rorty, and readers bright enough to read him, to give the appearance of a "political class," "for the sake of keeping the proles quiet." They will get the intellectuals to devote themselves to culture. When the remaining middle class realizes that it also is going to be "downsized," however, it will refuse to be taxed "to provide benefits for anyone else," and "something will crack." Convinced that "the system has failed," voters will seek a strongman, and "a scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here may then be played out." Blacks, browns, women, and homosexuals will lose all of their gains, and "the words `nigger' and `kike' will once again be heard in the workplace." The new strongman will make his peace with the "superrich," and everyone will wonder how it happened so easily: "Where, they will ask, was the American Left?"

How might America avoid this catastrophe, and "the American Left" that damning question? First, the left must abandon theory for action. Second, it must form alliances with the patriotic labor unions, abandoning its anti-Americanism. Against selfishness, such a resurrected "American Left" would devise "a People's Charter," a list of constantly published and reiterated specific reforms, "imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets." Then we can achieve "our country."

These books unintentionally provide a partial answer to the question of why the left has fallen on such hard times. The left has learned almost nothing from history. It has not read or listened to those who predicted the fate of the New Deal, of socialism, or of state bureaucracy. Its understanding of economics is on a par with William Jennings Bryan's understanding of Darwinian biology. Its understanding of human motivation is untroubled by the world of fact and unchallenged by theories hostile to its premises.