When the left saw the same thing, they took the plunge into irrationalism - the old holdout of the European far right - deliberately. Worshipping foreign tyrants as "authentic", getting hot and bothered for Nietzche and his later French publicists, identity politics, the worship of youth rather than learning, slumming and waht Arendt called the "backstairs literature" of conspiracy - all of them were tropes of the irrationalist European far right when they had no reasonable arguments left. The left went for them the instant the old anti-communist wing of the party imploded.
The new left never had ideas on its side. It had sophistry and rhetoric and attitude. All of it borrowed from failed European radicalism of an earlier generation. Orwell, Koestler, and Arendt despised that radicalism, looked on it as a disease, a flight from reality. The new left was never about anything else. The cultural heights lost, they decided to fight on in the sewers.
For a while that gave them a certain catchet, it let them take over university departments in the humanities and social sciences for instance. But they took them over as a wrecking crew, not as thinkers. As soon as that was done, there was nothing to attract the young to the same old sophistry, so clearly empty and tired. Denouncing the patriarchy doesn't go very far with a young woman who has never met her father. Assailing privilege from positions of tenured comfort isn't very convincing, and radical relativist skepticism says nothing to young people who have literally never even encountered the belief in objective truth.
What are the great wits of the left up to these days? Recycled conspiracy crap, apologies for the most inhuman tyrants, antisemitism, thought police, a veneer of nature worship over crass self indulgence, partisanship without bounds, party directed hatred - look closely. That's Weimar. And not the Weimar of the left.
Well put.
Bump.
It is an oversimplification approaching cant to use the P word - paradigm - in political discussion, but I think Peretz may have reduced a good deal of liberal fluff to a couple of base ideas that even he has not thoroughly examined.
Still, liberals know that the right's ideologically framed--but class-motivated--retreat of the government from the economy must be resisted.
Now we have the C word - class - and therein lies one of the major difficulties with current liberal doctrine - an overdependence on Marxian class theory as the unmoved mover of society. In point of fact, it isn't so much the democratization of capitalism that is the signal accomplishment of American economy, it is the degree to which class mobility renders class itself obsolete as a means of understanding social dynamics. This is truly heresy, but I think it deserves serious consideration.
There is nothing wrong, necessarily, with an emphasis on the group protecting and enabling its constituent individuals, which is the liberal emphasis (the conservative emphasis, contrarily, is that the individual protects and empowers the group, equally valid and more appealing to the individualist). Where this goes wrong is the insistence that the group properly describes everything important about its constituents and that they have little reality outside it. It is this assumption that leads the liberal to insist that a black man who is a CEO of a major corporation and living in a million-dollar mansion is "oppressed," not by virtue of his considerable individual accomplishments but by virtue of class membership.
That's the fallacy of class theory, and until the liberals examine and modify it they will be at the mercy of an antiquated, disproven ideology whether they succeed in winning an election or not.
The new left never had ideas on its side. It had sophistry and rhetoric and attitude. All of it borrowed from failed European radicalism of an earlier generation. Orwell, Koestler, and Arendt despised that radicalism, looked on it as a disease, a flight from reality. The new left was never about anything else. The cultural heights lost, they decided to fight on in the sewers.