All there is to it
Nick Cohen has extensive and complicated experience of the purity-sniffing Left. He’s done with it.
The one prophesy I can make with certainty amid today’s chaos is that many on the left will head for the right. When they arrive, they will be greeted with bogus explanations for their ‘betrayal’.
Conservatives will talk as if there is a right-wing gene which, like male-pattern baldness, manifests itself with age. The US leftist-turned-neocon Irving Kristol set the pattern for the pattern-baldness theory of politics when he opined that a conservative is a liberal who has been ‘mugged by reality’. He did not understand that the effects of reality’s many muggings are never predictable, or that facts of life are not always, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, conservative. If they were, we would still have feudalism.
The standard explanation from left-wingers is equally self-serving. Turncoats are like prostitutes, they say, who sell their virtue for money. They are pure; those who disagree with them are corrupt; and that is all there is to it.
Let me emphasize that last point.
They are pure; those who disagree with them are corrupt; and that is all there is to it.
I had an economics prof insist once that, as we grew older, we’d all become more conservative. It’s easy to be progressive (even socialist) when you’re young and poor but once you own stuff, he argued, you’ll want to keep it.
I have not followed that path. As I get older, I get more progressive, more socialist. I have more and earn an above average salary in my country but I am happy to pay taxes for services to benefit fellow Canadians and the rest of the world. When I got more, I built a longer table rather than a higher fence, as the saying goes.
This world is too small and our lives are too short for us to be conservative.
I was always pretty leftist; as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more so. My girlfriend was not so very leftist (she was an average somewhat liberal Canadian, I’d say) when we met but she’s gotten much more leftist the longer we’ve been together. And I have a friend who was fairly conservative (Reagan fan who voted for GW Bush in 2000) who now votes Democratic only and voices much more leftist views. (I’d like to take credit for their change, but I’m not convinced that’s the whole story, much as it might please my ego).
I think the “more conservative as you get older” is a myth just as the “no atheists in foxholes” is. I think it’s actually a way for the person saying it to avoid examining their beliefs (maybe because they subconsciously feel the grounds for their beliefs are weak).
I can understand the reference to ideological purity, the intellectual weakness of the contemporary ‘Left’ is the expectation that we have accept the ideology as a type of package deal. For example pure ‘ leftists’ can’t possibly be skeptical in regard to the supposed benefits of institutionalised multiculturalism, cultural relativism or mass immigration.
I’m rather cynical about those progressives who embraced right wing ideology as they aged. They are probably more attracted to the idea of an all-encompassing ideology than any particular ideology, since the Right is now in the ascendant they simply join the winning side.
SamBarge,
I certainly haven’t become more conservative with age either, and also I learned to be skeptical in regard to economics professors’ pontifications on human behavior.
RJW:
I forgot to add in my original comment that it wasn’t the first or last time an Econ prof stated a poorly developed hypothesis as if it was fact. Economics is like theology in that it’s a field of study that has convinced people it’s something more than voodoo.
In my early 20s I was center-right (except on some issues where I was more left)
In my early 30s I was center-left
By my 40s I became what many would call a radical leftist.
I’m about to turn 50. Let’s see what happens to me this decade.
You pretty much just described me, too, Jafafa Hots. In every detail.
Corbyn. This is about Corbyn and his supporters, right?
In my early twenties I was a die-hard right-winger. Kick the commies out of my country, end the Soviet occupation – that’s what real revolution meant to us. People like me viewed the western right-wingers (Thatcher, Reagan) as valuable allies. Western left? Phew! All they do is fall in love with leftist dictators, they are not trustworthy, they will betray us at the first opportunity – that was the attitude.
Years later, when reading Corbyn’s words about the former members of the Warsaw Pact (his “we should have gone down the road Ukraine went down in 1990” was much publicized here) I had a strong déjà vu feeling: yeah, that’s the western left showing its true nature again. They are callous, self-righteous, oblivious to everything which goes beyond their narrowly defined culture wars. Just fuck the idiots.
Still .. a right wing gene, manifesting itself with age? In my case, it’s exactly the opposite. My present political views are pretty leftist. Is there anything discernible that manifests itself with age? If so, what can it be?
This summer we visited (together with my daughter) an open air museum of Polish village. We entered a traditional house and viewed the exhibitions: a sickle, a wooden churn, a flail, a coal iron. And suddenly I realized that I feel at home. This is my childhood. This is the house where I lived. I’m at home and I know these objects, no one has to explain their purpose to me!
But my 15 year old daughter (very leftist, earphones, an iPhone in her pocket) was looking around curiously, expecting some explanations. So I provided them.
Your mind becomes a museum and that’s about the only thing which manifests itself with age. Without consulting Wikipedia, you can become a guide for modern, leftist 15 year olds. Nothing else than that, I’m afraid.
Only sometimes, after you hear them using the word “Marxist” as a synonym for “sexy and cute”, you will inwardly shudder.
(Sorry, all of the above is probably too east-European to swallow.)
Malcolm Fraser was our right-wing PM in the seventies. He was famous for making the statement “Life wasn’t meant to be easy” in response to questions about how his policies were making life harder for the poor and disadvantaged in our country.
He went on to be the head of Care Australia and resigned from his political party because he thought they were arseholes. He went from being one of the most maligned politicians in Australian history (google Gough Whitlam) to being viewed as a respected statesman by both sides of politics.
Becoming more left wing as you age: people really do it. You respond with increasing empathy to others as your experience widens, or shut down in fear at the loss of past certainties, and people stop buying your books.
Ariel @7
“Only sometimes, after you hear them using the word “Marxist” as a synonym for “sexy and cute”, you will inwardly shudder.”
Yes that attitude definitely depends on one’s age group, most people who grew up during the Cold war, even if they lived in the West, would regard Marxism as a sinister ideology.
It’s amazing how quickly the former communist totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe have faded into history, particularly in the West, in little more than a generation. There’s an endless stream of histories of the Nazi regime on the MSM, but very few documentaries on the communist governments of the Warsaw Pact.
To be fair on Marx, I’d be far more worried about Leninism and Stalinism than about actual Marxism.
‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are still made pointless by the shadow of the vast tyrannies of the 20th century. A huge number of well-meaning progressives were duped by Lenin-Stalin-Mao-Castro-Ho-Hoxha etc. etc. and their eventual renunciation of that pseudo-religion is not really a move to the ‘Right.’
But so often, their revulsion towards the purity-sniffing moral decadence they had indulged, DOES lead some into uncritical worship of icons of the Right. David Horowitz seems a near-perfect example.
Lyndon Larouche, the ‘Spiked’ gang, quite a range of Libertarians…it would be worthy project to catalog, or diagram, the connections between the old toxic left and the new toxic right.
Goddamn.
Answering it only now, when the thread is already old and dead, feels strangely appropriate.
RJW #9:
No, I do not find it amazing at all. Seriously, who cares? What would be the audience of such documentaries?
For the leftist viewers, this would be an unwelcome and awkward topic (I noticed many times that the left doesn’t like to be reminded of this). For all the rest, it’s not much more than a local history of the region which at present has no particular strategic significance. It doesn’t concern them. It’s alien and not interesting.
The Nazis are different in that their symbolic role in the West became very special. With communism, there is no chance, just forget it. The western reactions to communism have been much too ambiguous for that. The Nazis are interesting to the wider western public like … like Darth Vader: after all, they are the symbol of evil, aren’t they? How fascinating! Communist regimes? Nah. “Good people like us” sympathized with them, so they can’t function as such a symbol, no, no way. In effect, we will punish even a mere denial of Nazi crimes, but as for communist crimes – well, no, thank you very much, this sort of a victim card won’t play well in our enlightened societies.
That’s why it’s boring and dead to practically everyone except the old timers on my side of the iron curtain – the ones who still remember. Go with this anywhere else and you are a loser: your perspective will be either uncomfortable or simply uninteresting. No, there is nothing particularly amazing here.
(As I said at the start, writing this comment on a dead thread feels very appropriate.)