“Moderation or Death” isn’t much of a Slogan

Schrödinger's Left & considered ambivalence

I decided while writing this that I would mostly avoid things

David Sessions

had discussed in his excellent response or that I thought

Secret Squirrel

might cover if he wrote something, as both are somewhat qualified in their fields than I, so if there are any obvious lacunae, that’s probably why.

It is a strange thing to notice yourself changing, to one day realize that you are no longer the person who set out down the road. Of course there is some kernel of selfhood-I persist in thinking this despite whatever the cognitive scientists or the Buddhists may tell us-but nonetheless we are all of us always in motion. In the crude realm of politics to which we now descend it’s always seemed odd how insistently a certain type of thinker maintains that their position has never changed, only the perfidious left/center/right etc. Part of me has always found this self-serving, perhaps even self-deceiving: did you really believe as much as you now want to have done, now that you're an apostate?¹ I suppose I've never really made up my mind about whether our politics are rational or not. To some extent this is just a version of that classic philosophic problem: nature or nurture. How much, when we shift one way or anther is in fact our own, and how much are we merely repeating patterns, the ideas of men and women long-dead & buried?

All of which is a way to somewhat circuitously attempt to explain why I found myself surprised at how much I disagreed with the latest by Republic of Letters guru

Sam Kahn

, a “dear John” letter to the left. At various points in the last five years I have myself been extremely sympathetic to, perhaps even believed things similar to what Kahn argues for in this piece. My experience of the populist left moment of the 2010s was one first of a fellow traveling born of a grim pragmatism-if this is what it takes to save the world, etc-and then of contraction, of feeling betrayed and manipulated during the first few optimistic years of the last presidential administration. During that time I became quite enamored of the embittered ex-leftists of the mid-20th century, the New York intellectuals, people like Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Dwight MacDonald, etc. If nothing else, it was probably a better way to swing to the right than becoming one of the various varieties of reactionary hipster that were proliferating at that time amongst those similarly disillusioned. A central part of Kahn's argument is that the left are, to put it in hoary Soviet terms, wreckers: their “appearance of conscience is based on nothing at all and stands in the way of pragmatism." He blames them for the "Democrats leftward pull during the woke era" which helped to deliver the 2024 election to Trump, arguing that the broad tendency should be jettisoned from the renewed liberalism that he argues will be necessary in the coming days. I generally enjoy reading Kahn's work on his Castalia blog, and the Republic of Letters is an essential read amongst the new publications that have been proliferating on Substack of late, but I have some fairly significant disagreements with this piece.

It’s no accident that, during Covid, the left became the most strenuous enforcers of mask mandates, and, during the Woke peak, of speech censorship: something about that collective action was irresistible. Unfortunately, that kind of unity will never actually emerge from the people — only, occasionally, from those in power imposing some kind of fiat — and that means that the core project of the left is, and always will be, a pipe dream. What the left tends to dedicate itself to, instead, is a principled opposition to anything that falls short of these goals of perfect collectivity and egalitarianism. Liberals have let themselves be tied to the left out of a kind of shared nostalgia for the ‘60s or for, who knows what, the Sacco and Venzetti trial or something, but it’s time to cut the cord. The left is consistently an albatross on liberal politics — Democrats’ leftward pull during the Woke era became the perfect campaign target for Trump — and liberals never seem to learn from the mistake. The left is incoherent and fanatical in its incoherence. It’s time for liberals to see that and to focus on being the group that’s actually trying to get things done.

To begin with, it was never entirely clear to me what is meant by "the left" throughout. I remember having this sort of discussion repeatedly with the soft-spoken midwestern scholar of US-Middle East relations who shepherded my undergraduate thesis on the neoconservatives to fruition: “what do you/Irving Kristol/Norman Podhoretz mean by the Left?” Reading Kahn’s piece, I often found myself privately asking similar questions. I understand that it may seem like splitting hairs, but anyone who has ever surveyed the almost impossible-to exaggerate fractiousness of this or that left tendency will have some sympathy for this confusion. Is it the Bernie Sanders left? the DSA? The PSL? the Trotskyists? the Maoists? Brooklyn progressives? You get the picture.

For that matter, it's not as though the center, the liberals have exactly covered themselves in glory over these last fifteen years. They have- I implicate myself in this critique as well-fairly consistently misjudged the mood and will of the public. I have no illusions at this late dat that there exists some sort of a socialist silent majority, but clearly there seems to have been a desire in the last decade for something different than what liberals were selling. If one thinks that “woke” was a catastrophe, it’s also difficult to deny that it was to a large extent legitimated by the liberal center wing of the Democratic party, often as a cudgel to be wielded against the left-populism exemplified by Bernie Sanders and “the Squad.” I agree with the argument that wokeness-so-called was originally a grassroots phenomenon, but I’m not sure it would have gone quite as far, quite as fast without things like Hilary Clinton saying in speeches that abolishing the banks wouldn’t end racism or sexism.² I certainly take the point about the left being poor coalition partners, idealist, insufficiently pragmatic for a turbulent representative democracy, etc. On the other hand they have (although the initial response to 10/7 from some quarters was reprehensible) had a real point about the center's refusal while in power to take meaningful actions to restrain the retaliatory horrors in Gaza, which now appear to be escalating into a regional war.

This is related to a point that eventually led toward disillusionment with the aforementioned postwar liberalism I was so enthused with for a while: I like many of those guys (and Mary McCarthy) but they mostly tended to be a loyal opposition for the Pentagon & Langley’s various misadventures overseas during the Cold War. Even Susan “the white race is the cancer of the earth" Sontag decided by the end of her life that a little liberal imperialism could be a good and noble thing. If one is interested in avoiding Great Power saber-rattling that might lead to the end of the world this makes these thinkers less useful than might have appeared to be the case four or five years ago. This is maybe personal, and for what it’s worth I hope I’m wrong, but I do sometimes wonder if that kind of liberalism is really strong enough stuff for people to lay down their lives for. Certainly they did 80 years ago, but a lot has changed since then! To paraphrase

Henry Begler

paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens quoting Isaiah Berlin, “Moderation or Death” isn’t much of a slogan!

This is not to say that I have vast amounts of love for the Actually Existing American left. One sometimes gets the sense of it as more a movement for the downwardly mobile middle than for the actual working class, either over or under-intellectual, and ridden with dogmas acquired from funny tweets or podcasters in 2017. I’m quite sure I’m being unfair, and to be clear, my individual anecdotal experience doth not mass movement make. More troubling to me now is a critique that I picked up during my sojourn amongst the suburban post-leftists and dead Straussians. At least since the Gamergate era in 2014-15 if not probably much earlier, the American left has been plagued by a tendency to circle the wagons, to reflexively defend the rotten timber of American life on the grounds that those making the critiques are reactionary maniacs who don't believe that there is such thing as a society.³ What many have come to expect for much of the last decade is thus the ostensible tribunes of revolution defending institutions widely despised by the public, allowing themselves to be persuaded that objecting members of the populace are simply ignorant and uneducated, unworthy of speech rights or participation in political decision-making. In the dregs-of-pop-cultural terms this means defending bad art and obvious grifters, in high-level political terms it looks like AOC and Bernie defending Biden even after he had disqualified himself for the presidency on national television. I don’t think one has to be a free speech absolutist to say that this has been a disastrous development for our politics. It has made us-I leave open what is meant by us-look like sinister, censorious losers who can't make our arguments on an open playing field. This is not to deny that the right enjoys certain structural advantages, or that the battle isn't an uphill climb, merely that it seems clear certain strategies of the last decade should remain there.

The position in which I find myself now is not one of return to the left-I was in some ways never a part of it to begin with-nor of embrace, but rather of reopening to the possibility that there might be some truth to the diagnoses of this or that morbidity within liberal democracy & capitalism. Last week I shared a quote from the 20th century French philosopher Henri Lefebvre that I think captures some of this orientation. I lack Lefebvre's Marxist faith (my apologies to the scientific socialists for using the language of belief here) but the quote itself is apropos:

Marx’s thought may today play a similar role as does Newton’s physics in relation to modern physics, the physics of relativity, nuclear energy, atoms and molecules: a staging post for going further, a truth at a certain level, a date -in a word, a moment -which prohibits, on the one hand, dogmatism, ‘Marxist’ rhetoric, and on the other, presumptuous discourse on the death of Marx and Marxism.

There are likely no longer grounds such as might have seemed relevant in the late 19th or early 20th century for dogmatism or binary thinking on these points, although try as I may I’ve never been able to entirely dismiss the brighter part of the left's structural arguments against capitalism. I'm mostly not persuaded by their calls for the violent overthrow of absolutely everything, but it's hard not to look around at the way things are and think "well it can't go on like this for another lifetime, can it really?" though I've been reading the Penguin classics edition of Das Kapital, which has these very grimly ironic 1970s introductions where Ernest Mandel keeps saying "any year now, it's sure to fall." Probably one can no longer say “socialism or barbarism," but at the same time it seems equally dogmatic, equally shortsighted to proclaim the uselessness of as broad a tendency as this. Over the last few months I've (re)embraced the approach of agnosticism on these matters, and it's finally in that spirit that I object to the idea that "the left should off itself."

1. This may be too cynical, too obviously derived from having read too many Norman Podhoretz books.

2. I don’t want to steal arguments from anyone so I’ll keep it short, but my memory is that quite a bit of whatever is meant by “the excesses of wokeness*” was done by liberals, by the type of person a late 2010s leftist would’ve called a “radlib.”

* The problem with this term is that one is never sure when it is used whether the grievance is legitimate-there was quite a bit of very annoying, of-use-only-to social-climbers custom in that era-or someone is upset about the existence of trans people in public life or not being able to say slurs.

3. Gamergate is probably the most politically important event of the last decade that is frankly not worth knowing about unless you personally experienced it, but the simplest way to explain it to an online person who somehow had no idea what it was might be to say that it was a bunch of video game nerds speedrunning the Red Scare-extended universe arc of “left-ish criticism of a corrupt status quo” to “suburban reaction with a largely nihilistic, extremely online politics almost entirely structured around owning the libs” in about a year and a half.

Max Read

does a pretty good job in this article from February of summarizing what this wound up looking like in practice:

In broad strokes, Gamergate was a campaign of targeted misogynist harassment against a number of games journalists and commentators (and, eventually, me and the website I worked at) spurred by a set of intricate and boring and extremely unimportant accusations of “bias in games journalism.” For those of us who were involved at the time, it’s generally remembered as the moment we all realized Something Bad Was Coming.