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The principal difficulty with the left is that once Marxist precepts became ingrained in the political movement it ossified, it became inflexible, and instead of adapting to a changing world attempted to deal with it by merely redefining it so that it fit into the Marxist mental models of economics and history. This would be adequate if the world still looked like it did in 1848, with a nascent industrial proletariat as a rising class and a multipolar, imperialistic power relationship among governments. But the world has moved on, yet the Marxist mindset will not allow the left to accommodate its attitudes, or even its tired rhetoric. For example, "the oppressed" used to mean something pretty specific: a productive class whose economic effort was exploited by a parasitical bourgeousie. The word is the same these days, but the meaning now has been expanded to non-productive, non-industrial classes whose only resemblance to those described by the original meaning of the word is poverty. That's where it is even so sharply-defined; its meaning also has suffered from an increasing vacuity and nebulousness by being constantly redefined over time.

So too with Marxist historical theory. The U.S. is regarded as imperialist not so much for its activities, (many of which, as the author points out, do not really fit that description), but because according to that historical theory the most powerful country must, ipso facto, be imperialistic by definition and all its political activities dedicated to that bent. Rather than allow the model to be modified (in many ways this is more a religious orthodoxy than a political model) the Marxist simply squints his eyes hard enough so that the appearance of the world fits the model. At some point the eyes close completely and the viewer is in a blind, purely theoretical world with little connection to reality. So too the American left.

There is, in addition, an element of intellectual laziness in the propensity of the left to define, and especially to mischaracterize or caricature its opponents, and leave its own definition to a comfortable and conveniently vague "we're against that." This is how they can define the right as authoritarian and fascist, take the "power to the people" cant as a political stance, and ignore their own authoritarian and fascist means of attempting to effect that stance. That's the other guys, dontcha know, not us.

What we are seeing here is a classic case of severe cognitive dissonance being realized by its victim. This is a healthy thing if the victim does something about it, such as the reexamination of precepts the author is attempting. But the other classic response to cognitive dissonance is much more prevalent in the American left - denial.

Bill:

Isn't the problem that, should the left give up these four traits, there would not be anything recognizably left about it? These traits come from somewhere. I believe they are an outgrowth if the personality that finds itself comfortable on the left. It would be no fun to be on the left if you could not have infantile thoughts and behave in infantile manners. These people like feeling alienated and guilty. If you took away these four traits, they would have to invent four new silly behaviors.

Accordingly, I think the problem is much deeper than Walzer imagines. These types of traits have a firm base in the needs of people who infest the left. They will not give them up willingly. The problem for Walzer is to develop some alternative that does not look like Middle of the road liberalism.

But the problem goes further--middle of the road liberalism is driven by the ideas of the hard left. Bill Clinton apologizing all over africa, Gore's endorsement of Kyoto type solutions. These are weak versions of the reparations folks and the ELF. If the hard left went away because of its silliness, the middle of the road left would have to reinvent it.

"There exists a subterranean world, where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when that under-world emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people. And it occasionally happens that this subterranean world becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

When norman Cohn wrote that in his Warrant for Genocide, he was referring to Nazism, but the shoe certainly fits when it comes to the criminal totalitarian Left. Given the body count racked up by communist totalitarians, Hitler was a rank amateur, Kamal Attaturk was a relative piker.