Politics. When I was young lad “humping a ruck” through mountainous Vietnamese rain forests, there was a guy named Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, sending orders to the Air Force to bomb Cambodia and to the cops at home to crack down on people who wanted him to stop. The left back in those days called him a fascist. By today’s standards, on economic matters at least, he’d be half a hair to the right of Bernie Sanders.
If you’re still hanging onto those old notions of what left and right mean in the politisphere, that is. It was back then, when I was a teenage occupation troop, that the left-right model began to be confused with what we now call “cultural wars,” whereas before that right and left were understood to be economic matters. Honestly, it was already breaking down back then through the sly sexual revolution, drug culture, and unfocused rebellion for its own sake. The actual left then had already shrunken into warring cells.
The left has a hard enough time surviving its competing egos and sects, and a few years of consumerist prosperity will quickly suffocate even that. By the time I left the Army in the mid-1990s and joined a couple of leftist cadre organizations, there were still vestiges of the old class-orientation, though many of my comrades had taken to recruiting from the tiny pool of those who might be interested in our style of politics by scraping the corners of the cultural bowl for anyone who felt left behind and finding only a few “edgy” academics. Apart from a few outliers, like myself, the shrunken left — disoriented and disillusioned by the fall of the Eastern Bloc and China’s hard turn to capitalism — was largely comprised of these heterodox academics who spoke in a language understood only by one another.
I was attracted by the left because they said some things I knew to be true from experience that others were disinclined to say; and there was an element of my own “fuck you” to the establishment of which I’d been so long a part — because I knew them to be treacherous, even murderous, liars who’s co-opted me into being the same. So, I went through a long process of regret and repentance, but a long “fuck you” as well.
The Army, like today’s “left” and “right,” had been its own kind of bubble, and it was a very busy bubble; at least it was for me. Which is why my own leftist associations lagged behind the times a bit. My lefty conversion experience, such as it was, kicked into high gear when I was deployed to Haiti in 1994, where I got into some trouble with my own chain of command. Upon my return, I sought out information about Haiti, and the most valuable information I found was from left-liberal, leftist, and anarcho-leftist publications, which I consumed like a Rottweiler with a pot roast. I made contact with some of these outfits when I left the army less than two years later, and found myself in a new, unfamiliar, and invigorating milieu. I also started consuming Marx, and in short order, I became a communist. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.
As I said, this was when the left was in a state of crisis; though I’d discover that the left was always in some kind of crisis. I became philosophically stuck there on the left — where history and life begins with Hegel. I became an obsessed “activist,” as busy as the Army again, so I was more preoccupied with practical and strategic matters than I was with re-examining my own philosophical assumptions . . . or the philosophical roots of what was then the crisis of the left. My political activities were concentrated in three areas: leftist feminism, Black politics in the South, and war. What I hadn’t yet recognized was something already in train, and that was the left’s contamination by the Academy — with which I had little direct contact — to where much “leftism” had retreated. That transition had been first to “new” leftism — which, in retrospect, was a decades long flailing upon the discovery that the American working class was not a revolutionary force — to . . . and here’s where it went all hinky . . . Nietzsche, via Foucault.
The fault line this turn to “postmodernism” (or post-structuralism . . . whatever) had created on the “left,” once again too polymorphous to really deserve its own category, became clearest to me when I broke with my last cadre organization as they came to embrace the Nietzsche-Foucault-Butler “gender” insanity — which was a bridge to far into academic reality-denial even for me.
The left, I came to discover, was a dead letter on its own merits — just another false universalism — but whatever it had on offer (and it did) has been pretty much undone by it’s academic eagerness to assert wild stupidities, then demand that others validate them (or risk being called names). When my “comrades” started to demand that I call someone with a dick a woman because he’d declared himself that, I tapped out. (There were other reasons, too, but I knew from this turn that these people were neither serious nor sober.)
The right, of course, is now mostly a crowd of clueless and terrified people reacting against the “left’s” stupidities and contempt, lashed forward by power-hungry demagogues filling people’s heads with their own stupidities and a kind of counter-contempt. And like the left, the zaniest culture warriors on the right could be deflated in short order by about ten years of general prosperity — but that ship has sailed (another story).
When I see commentators today calling everything from Joe Biden to RuPaul leftists, I have to shake my damn head. When I see these same folks suggest that something called a “new right,” or a “counter-cultural right,” is an alternative to this sodden, ill-defined “left,” I experience a powerful sense of deja vu. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are leftist? Really? Because their records show them to be neoconservative neoliberals all the way down. You couldn’t fit a playing card between them and Dick Cheney.
Our public language has become little more than prevarication and manipulative spin.
I left the left when the left left me, but I’ll be damned if I’ll go to the right, an equally soggy category. When I left the left, I decided to explore other avenues of thought, and I discovered, to my surprise, that there was a group of thinkers whose philosophical acumen exceeded anything I’d seen on the left or right, one which swallowed whole Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the rest: Christians.
Like almost all others on the left, I was the philosophical captive of modernity and, like most Americans, I was the situational captive of a hyper-plural culture within which the most vocal and prominent people calling themselves “Christians” were themselves part of an enormously shallow and mostly idiotic Christian nationalist heresy which now constitutes a goodly portion of the right.
I was never quite as bold or arrogant as many on the so-called left as to make specious and dismissive commentary about Christianity, because I at least recognized, before I joined the God-botherers, that I had no real intellectual grounding in Christianity beyond what I’d learned studying English literature five decades ago (which had already proven to me that there were some extremely smart Christians).
Likewise, my philosophical ignorance was compounded by my ignorance of philosophy’s inevitable companion — history. Even as a Marxist, who professed interest and grounding in historical processes, I was trapped in Marxism’s universalizing pretension and its restrictive conflict focus. That’s not to say that Marx was useless to me; on the contrary, I still recommend Marx — not as a philosopher, but as a social critic — to everyone and anyone. His descriptions, incomplete as they may have been, are indispensable; whereas his prescriptions are the embodiment of that old saw, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
History gives philosophy its many contexts. Philosophy lifted out of history is like a plucked flower, folded into a book and dried. You can make some pretty art out of it; but it’s no longer alive. It all started a long time before Hegel announced that he was the smartest man in the world (I mean, he was actually really smart), but we’re not going to do an historical compendium of philosophy. It wasn’t linear anyway. It’ll be enough just to check out Kierkegaard on Hegel (which is like pulling two ploughs through wet clay, I admit). You’ll get the idea. Then compare Dostoevsky to Lenin. Read The Communist Manifesto alongside Rivers North of the Future, and you get the same contrast. Soulless, technocratic, systems thought, delivered with a few inch-deep references to the personal experience of our human condition, alongside thinkers who were unafraid of the phenomenological, unafraid to speak of the ways in which death hovers over our every moment, unafraid of the hot mess that is the human psyche, and unafraid to face the fact — well-demonstrated by history — that we can never manage our way into some uncomplicated, stable, and even luxurious future.
Christians of the kind who attracted me — philosophical and otherwise — failed to conform to the left-right line, because that line is fundamentally “post-Christian” shading into anti-Christian.
The leftish evasion of the brokenness of the human condition is only matched by the right’s belief — one given the lie by centuries of the church aligned with power — that we can manage our way around that brokenness through prohibitions and forcible control — what Illich called the criminalization of sin — backed by disgust-fueled hatred of those on the outer-edges of conformity.
I heard the Orthodox Christian Jonathan Pageau — who entertains conversations with “conservatives” — bring one of his rightish interlocutors up short recently with an interesting metaphor regarding the current “left-right” gender/culture war — which is a left-right far removed from the more prudent self-restrictions of the past to matters of economy. He described a medieval Gothic church.
In the church, the altar is at the intersection of the cruciform building and the highest point attached to the floor in the sanctuary. It is over this altar where the priest raises the Eucharist for its blessing, holding it above his head — a place joining heaven and earth — like Jesus, who is embodied (blood and flesh) in the wine and bread. Jesus, the Eucharist, is the center-most point in a God-formed existence.
But it wasn’t the whole church. In the pews were everyday people leading everyday lives who came and went. On the outside of the churches, on the margins, were sculpted gargoyles — figures with strange forms, sometimes scary, sometimes expressing various emotions, sometimes whimsical.
They were not the everyday, not the “normal,” but they were still built onto the margins of the church — still part of God’s creation. There is an implicit hierarchy afoot here: The everyday encompasses most of us, but there are marginal forms, and then there is our highest aspiration — the reconciliation of heaven and earth accomplished by Christ and reenacted with communion.
Prior to the pinched, punitive, and puritanical bent that took hold during the Reformation (a flu the Catholics caught for a couple of centuries from the Protestants), all aspects of life were celebrated. Medieval Europeans had a lot of feasts and holidays. A lot more than we do. Medieval Europeans — from peasant to monarch — like to eat, drink, and be merry. They were a bawdy lot who discussed sex quite openly and loved a good off-color joke.
One form of celebration was carnival — a public party (think Mardi Gras) where stuff from the margins was given full reign. Men dressed as women, women as men, peasants made fun of nobles, people wore crazy masks, there was lewd dancing, and so on. Most of life was everyday. Sometimes you had to celebrate Christ and the Saints. Sometimes, you had to celebrate the marginal. All part of God’s creation. There was an altar in the church, the pews, and the gargoyles outside. All part of the great cruciform church.
Pageau’s conservative guest had some obvious issues with this metaphor, because his puritanical conservative default was to roll in like a modern Cromwell and batter the gargoyles into dust. To his mind, he had a right to hate the odd, marginal ones — sexual minorities, cultural minorities, (for some “conservatives”) racial minorities, even the unfortunate people captured by the fashions of a time; and in the interest of order, he’d have a right to manage the brokenness away with a sword if necessary . . . ignoring the fact that he who wields the sword is broken, too. (Jesus disarmed Peter, after all, but right wing culture warriors won’t proof text you with that one.)
Pageau reminded him that what brought them together — a critique of this cultural left — had to differentiated. Pageau’s critique of modernity’s antipathy to hierarchy and the complementarity of forms as beings means you don’t center the marginal and marginalize the center. One doesn’t worship the gargoyles; but one doesn’t destroy them either. Pageau’s critique of the pop-postructuralism that has destroyed the old left is that it wants to center the margins. Conservatives want to blast away the gargoyles; liberals want to place them on the altar, if not tear down the whole building. It’s liberal modernity’s flattening effect, which finds it analog in the reduction of the entire world into rootless, desperately self-optimizing “individuals,” “resources” and “commodities.” That’s a pretty old-leftish observation.
I was a gargoyle, and I’ve hung out with quite a few different kinds of gargoyles. God loves the gargoyles, too. Shit, if God can love Elon Musk, he can love anything. I will never be a conservative. And though I’ve repeatedly said I understand the resentments against liberal perfidy and stupidity that have provoked people to “vote Republican” as a giant “fuck you” to own the libs, this is not a sober and reasonable reaction.
“Fuck you” is insufficient grounds for any decision . . . unless you’re like eight years old . . . and its generally not only insufficient, but malignantly counterproductive. The last reason I’ll never be a conservative is that what they appear to want to conserve, even many who claim to be Christian, is the worship of an idol called the nation — which most “conservatives” I know mean, whether they say so or not, is ethno-nationalism.
I left the left, and I invite others to leave the right, the left, and the center. There’s a wide road to walk down. You don’t have to stay in these artificial lanes.
"...Nietzsche, via Foucault." I'd add Herbert Marcuse into that chain of influence, too. Marcuse doesn't get name-checked much any more by Left-identifiers, but the New Left intelligentsia swooned over him in the 1970s because he talked such a good game. (Deferential respect for skill at sophistry- the manipulation of verbal language as a power exercise- seems to be a tenet of professional courtesy for many academic theoreticians. And political "scientists" too, as well.) Marcuse's ideas are foundational to the incoherent, self-indulgent semi-ideology formulated by elements in the US "Left" in the 1980s as a strategy of popular appeal, to replace old-line economic class-confict Marxist ideology.
Perhaps the most prominent consequence of buying into Marcuse's line is the trend toward defining Oppression downward at the slightest pretext- that game so fervently pursued by the PMC/college-kid "cultural Left" (?) and their enablers. Much of that comes out of Marcusean concepts like "repressive tolerance" (i.e., the liberal tolerance practiced by Western democracies is actually a sham to keep the masses oppressed), "the politics of Eros" (hedonism, sensuality, and transgressive personal behavior can be redeemed from their 'alienated status' of individualist gratification- by incorporating them as political demands, within a Progressive Social Movement!), and "intolerance for the Intolerant" (i.e., anyone who opposes our transcendent Utopian agenda of Cultural Liberation is an Intolerant Bigot, and must be Silenced! Because Freedom!)
In the pantheon of Left-identified ideological Theorists, I view Marcuse as the biggest con artist since Mikhail Bakunin. (Granted, the competition is steep in that category, and there may be some names that have slipped my mind.) Neither of those mountebanks has any sincere use for any economic, social, or political ideology, other than as a set of references that they can verbally manipulate.
The practical uses of Ideology of any sort are horribly overrated, of course, especially by their adherents. They lend themselves all too easily to monomania. But at least a well-constructed ideology (of whatever persuasion) partakes of enough logic and internal coherence to serve the purpose of a useful gloss, and a framework for investigation into social and political questions. Postmodernist "Leftism" is too entirely too emotionalist and capricious to meet that standard; as you (Stan) and others have noted, it's ultimately a Nietzschean Will To Power quest, and egotistical to the bone. Ironically enough, those are characteristics that partake of an essentially Hard Right (although not in any sense "conservative") approach to political questions: mystic essentialism, the charismatic personalist leader as embodiment of popular will, herd behavior mantled as a vital component of egoist individual self-realization, antirationalism (ex. the insistence by the most lunatic fringe of the Wokist pseudo-Left that informal logic, the pursuit of objectivity, and the ideal of impartiality are bogus concepts enshrined by White Supremacy.)
Hard Right politics is ad hoc, not ideological. For the adherents, it has the advantage of approaching political challenges entirely practically, with clarity about its priorities (cynical) and means of appeal (unscrupulous.) Its disadvantage (for everyone, including the adherents) is that those strategic priorities are ordered by alpha-male primate-pack antihumanism. They're a set of goals that don't even belong in the realm of politics, which is a messy but nonetheless necessary arena that requires a rough working consensus on good faith principles in order to have a basis for negotiating and reconciling conflicting interests.
Without dilemmas, there would be no need for politics. But dilemmas are inevitable, at least in any society found in a geographic region with a population density greater than 1 person per square mile. Therefore, politics. Hard Rightists typically claim to be "anti-politics", but what they really mean is that they want to possess the power to settle all social questions to their own Id-based satisfaction. ("So much Winning!") For all of the lip service paid to Individual Rights by the Hard Right, the subtext of the pitch is that the "Individual Rights" that the adherents insist on as their G~d-given imperative invariably just happen to coincide with the arbitrary power prerogatives that their favored Primate Pack seeks to maintain (or re-establish) as the established permanent status quo in a zero-sum game. Any challenge to the group monopoly is viewed as looming Tyranny.
This is how the post-modern American Hard Right has gotten to brand itself as the vanguard of a Popular Resistance Movement. Wherever there's any evidence that the favored Primate Pack that formerly controlled ~100% of Everything (the Pack defined as native-born citizens of unmixed European ancestry, in the case of the US) no longer holds their former monopoly of arbitrary power, the Hard Right frames that situation as Losing, and a slide in the direction of Existential Threat and impending Pack Extinction. The favored Primate Pack is being Victimized, by unworthy usurpers. And they demand Redress, of that Grievance. The unstated premise is that the goal is the Restoration of ~100% monopoly power to settle every question, about Everything. A monopoly which has traditionally been the situation in the halls of institutional power in this country, from the White House and the Capitol to the jails and prisons. As a matter of strict historical precedent. The notion that the widening of the franchise and the common ability to exercise political power over the past 170 years or so is entirely in line with the highest ideals enshrined in the founding documents of the country- at its best, ideals that are universalist, even though not explicitly stated as such- is viewed by the Hard Right as a contestable opinion rather than an axiomatic fact. The evidence that they use to support their view is the way that the country was actually run in practice at its founding; what the leaders of the country did, rather than what they said. Not that they're necessarily all that familiar with the crises of conscience expressed in the written record by some of those leaders, anyway; this is the Hard Right we're talking about, and theory and ideals only work for them if the statements support the narrowly defined aims of the Pack, and its Leaders. (Or "alpha males", a phrase in the vulgar pop-Darwinist lexicon that's popular with Right-leaners, and even much of the wider general public nowadays. Notwithstanding its implication: that humans are just another primate species driven almost entirely by instinct, with only the faintest glimmerings of reflective self-awareness. A hopeless situation that pretty much forecloses the possibility that humans might have a unique capacity to exercise Free Will. A potential that, despite being markedly delimited and constrained in many respects, nonetheless permits enough latitude for the role of self-determined agency and choice to make all the difference between consciously self-aware species and other animals. Conceivably. If it exists, of course ;-D )
Granted, I only have a lowly BA in Cultural Anthropology- and I got an old-school "thick description" ethnographic/phenomenological education in the discipline, at that. (I could have opted to head down the highway to UC Berkeley and have my brain po-mo'ed into porridge, but fortunately I avoided that dubious fate. Unwittingly, at the time.)
Notwithstanding my lack of postgraduate academic credentials (and my personal bias toward the practical and empirical realm over ideations related to symbolism and theory) I think I have sufficient erudition cred to offer my opinion that Jonathan Pageau's informal disquisition on the symbolic role embodied by gargoyles in the statuary of medieval Gothic cathedrals is the deepest semiotic insight I've read in years. Charles Sanders Pierce couldn't have said it any better.