The News: Well, How Did They Get There?

Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

A relatively short post, but I want to recommend reading Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet’s essay “Losing the Plot” on left-wing intellectuals and writers who end up in the company of the far right, travelling a “horseshoe” arc.

It’s an old story, and to some extent Joyce and Sharlet are only chronicling the latest chapter in it. (They’re perfectly aware of this and bring up a couple of notable past examples.) In the company of several other graduate students in the 1980s, I had dinner with the famous Marxist historian Eugene Genovese right at the exact moment he was beginning a hard public shift over to far-right cultural politics. I was especially interested in his work because he had been such a big influence on South African social history along with E.P. Thompson, substantially through the scholarship of Charles van Onselen. I think we all left the dinner with our heads reeling—Genovese’s seminar paper presented earlier in the day wasn’t very far off his past scholarly output but the man at the dinner wasn’t what any of us thought a leftist or Marxist sounded like. Among other things he professed a belief that abortion rights advocates were unnatural, freakish women who hated and feared all children.

Following what Joyce and Sharlet lay out and thinking about the deeper history, which I think you can see as a pattern all the way back to the first dawning of fascism in the 20th Century, it seems to me that there are two kinds of thinkers and activists on the left who are prone to “lose the plot” in this way. The first are the kind of people who are overwhelmingly certain that only economic hierarchy, only socioeconomic class, matters in struggles for social change. They aren’t always Marxists or even socialists, though they often are. This group I think in turn either consists of people brought up in professional or elite households who turn against their upbringing in revulsion or working-class people, often who had a youthful exposure to socialist or communist organizing (this includes Genovese, for example). When they find themselves in the political company of the bourgeoisie of their time and place, when the ‘left’ seems to them to be consumed by cultural issues, to be informing style and leisure culture, to be compatible with bourgeois life, they decide that there must be something wrong with the left as it stands. They will often write stridently about the need to re-embrace an exclusive focus on class struggle, to pursue a more austere and uncompromising culture of struggle, to be more pure.

What I think is different in our current era, a difference that Joyce and Sharlet get at, is the person seeking total struggle, an exclusive focus on class justice, and a kind of stridency about politics, is easily fooled to think that’s on the far right. It’s not wrong to say that globalization, credentialism and many other structural changes in the world favor an educated, urban, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and that liberal and left causes are mostly drawing their energy and funding from that sociocultural world. Moving to the far right seems to bring a kind of class war back into focus and with it a kind of intense fervor and disgust for the cultural life of the leftist mainstream. But it’s all a fake, as the article points out—the former leftists have drifted, as Genovese did, into a world that is entirely about cultural ressentiment, in many cases just as elite or upper-class as the leftism they have disavowed, and in no way desiring a more equal or just world.

Sometimes the purists wake up and realize that they’ve made a mistake, but most of the time, they just transfer their flag and embrace a new struggle. Mussolini started as a communist, and his shift over to fascism was not peculiar or unprecedented.

The other kind of person who makes this sort of “horseshoe move”, I think, is just chasing the transgressive pot of gold at the end of any political rainbow. Joyce and Sharlet don’t mention Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, but I think Nagle’s analysis prefigures theirs—that a set of very online people pursued transgression for the lulz and found out that you got the biggest reaction when you transgressed by expressing strong racism, strong misogyny, strong defense of imperialism and slavery, and so on. Over time, playacting for the sake of getting a rise became real to many of them.

You can look back and see the type in the history of the Western left. Lenny Bruce would have been on the far right if it was the only way to be outrageous. The Situationists and the Yippies would have been as well. (Jerry Rubin made it halfway there.) Once liberal and left views became a kind of bourgeois common sense, the polite norm of dinner parties, a kind of reconstitution of Christian moralism, they became the garlic to the vampire of transgression-seeking. You can’t get the kind of attention a certain sort of person craves for being just another one of those folks giving voice to an emerging consensus morality. And as Joyce and Sharlet observe, in the post-2005 world, attention via social media and public culture was suddenly lucrative in a new sort of way, and the most lucrative attention by far was on the far right, where numerous millionaires and billionaires have been assembled ready and willing to lavish money on their favored bomb-throwers.

The article largely argues that we just need to understand what pushes some people to travel the loop of the “horseshoe” from what seemed like a left or radical commitment to fascist or authoritarian culture war. They gently suggest at one point that maybe cruel, self-righteous or ‘mobbing’ responses to some of these individuals might drive them towards some other political location where people are welcoming or friendly to them (however manipulatively).

I think that’s a fine observation that loops us back into some familiar disagreements about whether liberals and leftists are too hostile to dissent and disagreement within their broad coalition (often across precisely that line—liberal to progressive to radical).

I’d add something else, to suggest that when those two groups of people make the horseshoe loop around to the far right, they were always foredoomed to do so and that many of them were never an asset to those of us determined to make the world a better place. It’s often easy to see the signs of later political commitments in their early thought. For example, Genovese was always driven by a bleak loathing for Northern critics of the slave-holding South because he saw them as the tribunes of an even worse industrial capitalist order rising on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s not hard to see something ugly coiled up inside of that even in his early work, some reactionary fantasy about a precapitalist arcadia, even one built on slavery.

But it’s not the substance of their early thinking that should tip us off, but instead its affective orientation. Let me put it this way. The person who approaches a struggle to make a better world as if they are the master chef and we are all the eggs that must be broken to get there does not believe in a better world. The person who wants to be harder than the rest of us, more willing to do a horrible thing, who wants to be pure in their devotion, does not believe in a better world. The person who writes about Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid but whose defense against charges of misogyny was that he hates everybody is not dreaming of a better world.

The person who just enjoys offending against polite society can be entertaining, fascinating, charismatic; they can create an opening for real reform or transformation, however accidentally. But they’re not chasing a better world. The person who tells you that only someone born after the revolution can be better is someone who only wants power in this one.

So first and foremost, if you want to know who is going to circumnavigate the horseshoe from one place to another, it’s not so much “extremism” in the abstract that should tip you off, but someone who plainly has no interest in living into the values or changes they demand, someone who is gratified by upsetting people without any vision of why, someone who wants to always feel they are better, more pure or more committed than anyone else. The horseshoe’s journey is most easily trod in the absence of humility.

Image credit: Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash