Cries out in literate despair

A sort of Addendum about the post-left and other developments

The last time I wrote in a dedicated way about the rightward shift of our time I got a lot of really good feedback which in the end convinced me that the term I was using to describe that movement (neoconservative) was probably too specifically freighted to a time (the early 1970s) and a people (upwardly mobile white ethnic urban professionals dismayed by the civil rights movement and youth radicalism in the 1960s,) not to mention the foreign policy misadventures of these thinker's spiritual and sometimes literal children in the aughts, to be a useful term in our moment.¹ A fascinating podcast episode from

Daniel Oppenheimer

’s Eminent Americans about the post left with Compact's Geoff Shullenberger offers one possible alternative label, and I wish I had listened to the episode before writing my piece, because it covers from a different angle much of the same territory. The following is an effort to publicly think through some of the points raised in these conversations, and is like its predecessor, a bit messy. Sorry!

One fundamental difference between the old neocons and the post left has to do with the extent to which each absorbed influence from the left. For the neocons this mostly had to do with a certain level of intellectual seriousness, an ability to explain the world in terms other than those inherited from Aristotle or John C. Calhoun. In the case of the post-left however, one finds leftist hermeneutics supplemented by actual leftist arguments about empire and capitalism, often now in the service of making an argument for racial particularism or supremacy or insinuations about marxist interventions into government. Edward Said at a John Birch society meeting is sort of the affect of the tendency. Arguments from within the left tradition against the left tradition is the way it might be described, an argument that the interest of the revolutionary or reformist intellectuals who nominally direct the program(s) are obfuscated and do not and cannot match those of the masses. Notable precursors to this argument worth mentioning here are Christopher Lasch and Camille Paglia, with particular attention to Alvin Gouldner and his Dark Side of the Dialectic trilogy. From The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, to give a flavor of what I mean:

In revolutionary politics aiming at mass mobilization, a visibly leading role for members of the new class is dissonant with the movement’s populistic, egalitarian or communal emphases. There is pressure, then to disguise, gloss, ignore, deny, or distort the New Class’s importance in movements of a revolutionary character. The New Class in revolutionary politics has been an invisible class

Certain strains of paleoconservatism (again,

John Ganz

knows much more about these thinkers than I do) especially those of Sam Francis & Murray Rothbard are extremely relevant here from the more official right. While neither Alexandre Kojeve nor Francis Fukuyama are particularly affiliated with this movement, I think there is something described by their thought which the intellectual post-left is reacting against, and I would look into them as well.

Francisco Jose Perez Macedo, “The Bureaucrats of Medicine”

I've found it fascinating as someone who was broadly speaking on the left in the 2010s and has studied american politics & the right how Covid resurrected this very mid-20ch century set of discourses and anxieties about managerialism, world government, and (speaking of Alexandre Kojève) the universal homogenous state. In 2019 this is not how most of us would have imagined things to have shaken out-as I have written before, memory cheats, so one can never be sure, but my recollection is that even the right appeared to concede in those vanished days that part of our contemporary crisis lay in the Clinton/Reagan diminishment of the ability of the state to do good. (What one meant by "good" and "do" of course differed enormously depending on where one stood, of course.) A basic cynicism about both the possibility of doing good and the motivations for doing so seem to me characteristic of the post-left. This is very unlike the neoconservatives, who while early adopters of neoliberal economics were often concerned with maintaining the stability of institutions and the body politics, and seems quite consistent with the way the pandemic appeared in some way to overturn the social contract and strand our culture in uncomfortably Hobbesian territory.

As far as similarities between the neoconservatives and the postleftists go, I would single out the role that race played or appears to have played in both cases. A very frequent early neoconservative tic was to make arguments that seemed (or in the case of someone like Norman Podhoretz, were sometimes admitted to be by their author) motivated by by racial status anxiety-“the libs are going to take away what I and mine have worked for and give it to a black person!” seeming to lurk in the background of various arguments. The post-left has seen an ugly revival of interest in biological racism and eugenics, some of which was already occurring in the 2010s, but which appears to have been accelerated at the end of the decade. If the neoconservatives of the 1960s and 70s very often were sent down their conservative paths by the militant turn in the civil rights movement and the New Left's response to the 1967 Six Day War, the corresponding incident for the Post-left or contemporary left-right sojourner would seem to mostly be the events of 2020, and especially the George Floyd protests. To a minor degree I can understand the thought process: how it would be fairly easy for a skeptically inclined person to watch the way the crescendo of protests and uprisings across the summer of 2020 culminated in the recrudescence of the gerontocratic status quo in the person of Joe Biden and decide that anti-racism was only ever a con to put Democrats in power, but this is not by any means whatsoever to excuse the race science or the other bigotries, which are obviously abhorrent and despicable² I don't think one has to agree with the Afropessimists to acknowledge that there is something deeply Girardian about the way race works in America. The image of the poor black American, and particularly the criminal poor black American, serves a vital role in American culture, is arguably the glue which has allowed this country to build a remarkably diverse and-relative to its complexity-culturally harmonious society. The achievement of the last hundred and fifty or so years isn't nothing, but it is deeply imperfect, and also one sees why someone might believe the whole edifice of American culture needed to burn down given that the abjection of an entire category of people seemed so vital to its operation. I would frankly be lying if I told you that I had any idea whatsoever how to solve this problem, and I understand why some might not want to hear any of this right now, but whether we wish to hear it or not, this has been and remains perhaps the issue in American life.

I feel an appropriate note on which to end this discussion would be to note the emergence, halting and uncertain, of what may or may not be a new type in our political-intellectual ecosystem. Parallel to the rise of the post-left is what one might call a "post right." It does not seem a substantial phenomenon, but still one sees the type around. They seem characterized by a belief in human inequality, often in the same racial and biological terms as the far right, but position themselves more or less amongst the center-left intelligentsia. Richard Hanania seems to be the most notable of this type today, but there are others.³ I sometimes see these people proclaimed to be simply extremists in centrist drag trying to shift the overton window to the right, but I'm not sure I entirely buy this, or at least I don’t think that’s the only thing going on here. I think what's happening in part is the right equivalent of the chapo-to-red scare phenomenon of the early 2020s, a kind of oppositional-defiant shift in response to reactionary victory. “Elite human capital” guys who seem to believe that the center are smarter than the right, and are going where they think the IQ points are, maybe? Right now there are significantly fewer of these than there are post-leftists, but if the ideological churn continues, and particularly if the Trumpist right succeeds in cementing itself as the American establishment, one expects their numbers to grow. All of which is of course deeply undesirable.

1. Shout out in particular to

David Sessions

for providing a very detailed response.

2. Edit: I worry that all this talk makes it seem like I think the post left or left to right shift of our time is primarily a racial phenomenon. I do not, although I wouldn’t want to entirely minimize it either. I myself felt much of the same disillusionment I’m describing, despite for the first little bit at least having no real problem with Joe Biden. Indeed by some metrics I could be described as post-left myself, considering that I’ve set aside in this decade many of the assumptions I held about how the world worked during the 2010s. The racial unpleasantness does exist, however, and prevents me from wanting to use that nomenclature around people who don’t know what I meant by it, that I have no truck with Steve Sailer etc.

3. I used to know someone who every time he came up in our discussions would say something like “I can’t believe that his last name is literally the name of a false prophet”