No Time for Complacency

The left will regroup, and return with a even more dangerous spirit of vengeance.

Everyone should savor the defeat and humiliation of the left from Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the election last month. By all means enjoy barrels of popcorn as the Democrats assemble in circular firing squads, the media ponders their approaching doom and loss of credibility with the public, feckless university leadership reckon with the ruinous ideological pillaging of our campuses but lack the spine to do anything meaningful about it while their enrollment continues to decline, and the wokerati suddenly find themselves on the defensive for the first time.

But this is no time for complacency, let alone thinking that a lasting victory has been accomplished. By all means enjoy a sack dance in the left’s end zone, but know that while the left is licking its wounds, it will regroup and return with an even more dangerous spirit of vengeance.

It is hard to know what form the left’s re-emergence will take, or how long before it comes back into full view. The left will “go to ground” for a while, as it has done after previous setbacks.

We’ve seen this movie before. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which came after the left was defeated in successive elections over the previous decade in the United States and many other western democracies, everyone rushed to declare “the end of history,” which entailed not just the final triumph democracy but also market capitalism. The moment was thought to represent the final and decisive rout of socialism and revolutionary politics. More than few thinkers aside from Francis Fukuyama thought we had concluded a 200-year historical phase of ideological revolution that could be dated from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

America, and much of the rest of the democratic West, began its “holiday from history,” as Charles Krauthammer put it, in which everyone foresaw open markets and rising prosperity as far as the eye could see. This view was vindicated to some extent in the 1990s, as the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe rebuilt themselves into genuine democracies and reformed their economies, while the tech revolution advanced everywhere. Marxism was passe, with figures like Rush Limbaugh saying we should keep a few Marxist professors in the academy as museum pieces. “Political correctness” on college campuses became an embarrassment, and began to recede.

In retrospect the post-Cold War years are regarded as the hey-day of “neoliberalism,” when overconfidence in what we used to call “democratic capitalism” blinded everyone to the adverse asymmetries of free trade, expanded immigration, and overdominance of big finance that contributed to a slow boil of populist resentment of our institutions around the globe. Multilateralism in foreign policy has likewise run aground, giving way to the worst global instability since the 1930s.

The radical left remained mostly quiet during the 1990s. There were no major protest movements before the anti-world trade riots in Seattle in 1999 that seemed anomalous and baroque at the time. Climate change became the new leading issue for environmental activists, but it did not yet show signs of becoming the fanatical cult it is today, partly because the consensus was that a few UN treaties would solve the issue.

There were few noteworthy leftist intellectual efforts that caught on. The most prominent new leftist effort of the decade was Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s sprawling “post-Marxist” book Empire, which sold well upon its publication in 2000 and created a sensation, but didn’t hold up to scrutiny even among most leftists. Today it is a forgotten book, though it can be said to have offered a preview of coming attractions with its elevation of the abstruse stylings of Michel Foucault, who was catching on fast as the successor thinker for Marx. Percolating out of view were the Leninist versions of post-Marxism in the form of “intersectionality” and critical legal theory, which were both precursors for critical race theory.

It is hard to say exactly when the radical left began to emerge from its shell shock and campus bunkers to resume their assault on our civilization. A number of arbitrary dates and events can be proposed, and the corporate scandals of 2001 and then the financial crisis of 2008 gave a new lease on life with the superficial claim that capitalism had failed. Barack Obama was the “moderate” face of the radical comeback, which exploded into full-scale wokery during his presidency, reaching new heights with the George Floyd affair in 2020.

Looking back to the triumphant “end of history” moment around 1990, it is worth taking in the warning of Harry Jaffa, who was having none of it. He wrote in 1991:

The defeat of communism in the USSR and its satellite empires by no means assures its defeat in the world. Indeed, the release of the West from its conflict with the East emancipates utopian communism at home from the suspicion of its affinity with an external enemy. The struggle for the preservation of western civilization has entered a new – and perhaps far more deadly and dangerous – phase. [Emphasis added.]

Jaffa went on to anticipate exactly what was coming at us a decade ahead—the cult of “diversity” and “racism” to be found in every corner of our society:

“Diversity” is demanded by those who will tolerate no deviation from the “politically correct.” And what is “political correctness” but another name for “the party line”. It is Leninism/Stalinism without Lenin or Stalin. “Racism” is the generic term for any kind of “false (formerly bourgeois) consciousness,” that is to say, for any opinions not considered politically correct. It has nothing to do with what once was called race prejudice – an unreasonable depreciation of other human beings because of their race, color, or ethnic origin. The charge of “racism” is made by the very people demanding racial quotas, race norming, and segregated racial and ethnic centers. To point out the contradiction in these demands – or indeed of any demands made by the politically correct – is to bring on the accusations of “logism,” which means the use of reason, a vice held characteristic of “Eurocentrism”. The contempt for “Eurocentrism” as an endemic vice corresponds closely to Marx’s contempt for the false consciousness engendered in the ruling classes of all societies founded upon private property. “Racism” itself is then nothing but the endemic quality of human consciousness, prior to the transformation of human egotism into human altruism. “Political correctness” is nothing less than the blind and willful insistence upon the fulfillment of the goals of revolutionary Marxism/Leninism, without any reference to that failed enterprise itself, or to any rational political analysis. Indeed, the new political correctness differs from its predecessor only in its insistence that no reason needs to be given as to why it is correct. It is a synthesis of the goals of Marxism with the philosophical (or anti-philosophical) horizon of nihilism.

How will the left regroup this time, and what might it look like? It is hard to say prospectively, but radical leftism is always just a variation on a theme. You can describe the left as merely a socially constructed ideology (heh) for an insatiable will to power and rule; or, as Whittaker Chambers understood it, as a Christian heresy that “Ye shall be as gods,” able to transform human nature through political power; or as the mere sanctification of envy and resentment, as thinkers as diverse as Thomas Sowell and Rene Girard might explain it. Or all of the above.

Whatever the new vocabulary, issues, and chance events the left decides to exploit, you can be certain it will come back, and use all of its institutional and cultural power to resume its offensive on our way of life. Hence the left should be crushed when they are on the defensive. I keep hearing voices of caution argue that the next Trump Administration shouldn’t attack higher education, or abolish federal funding for PBS, etc. I say the opposite: mass firings of radical college faculty are much to be desired, as a start. Cutting every dime of the multi-millions in federal funds that sustain leftist NGOs is a minimum goal for the Republican Congress. Bankrupting mainstream media organizations would be a bonus.

Churchill once said of the Germans, “The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat.” The same is true of the left. The left isn’t quite at our feet, but to the extent they are, it is time to stomp on their necks. They’ll aim to do the same with us if they gain the upper hand again.