Totalitarians and useful idiots

Shock at what left-progressivism has become is historically illiterate.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism—being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour—attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.¹

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.²

Progressivism systematically does both—give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy—which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training—is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.

How Steve Bannon baited the American left into overplaying its hand

Yes, it is done by networks coordinated by interactive signalling, not centrally directed by a Party. Nevertheless, it has the same feature of reaching into all aspects of life, of refusing to leave people alone. It does not matter the realm—comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies, wherever—it will be invaded by such politics.

There is the same demand to conform and punishing of those who don’t. There is the same reaching-and-imposing into every social realm—work, sport, games, entertainment, education …—totalitarian impulse, using familiar mechanisms of control, just with updated language and coordination mechanisms via networks for a social media age. The same worship of activism and insertion of activism into everything: which is what commissars, Zhdanovism, Lysenkoism, censorship and represent; what Critical Social Justice seeks; what Party-states manifest.

We do see genuine innovation in social control, with private-public partnerships being used to censor and to debank people, to cut them out of ordinary commerce and finance. In other words, the same totalitarian urge to control we see whenever left-progressivism gets institutional power but updated to current circumstances.

This is left-progressivism in its historically dominant form, in its when-in-institutional-power form. It is simply historically illiterate to be surprised by this. To, even worse, not recognise it as Left.

Max Adamo (1870), ‘The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794’. Wikimedia commons.

For this pervasive demand for control and dominance goes right back to when the term Left began in the French National Assembly; to the rule of the Committee of Public Safety, and the horrors of the Vendee. To when the Jacobin model of political action began.

The Jacobin model of politics is politics unlimited in means—as everything is justified if it releases people from their oppression—and unlimited in scope—no part of society or human action can be permitted to impede the project of liberatory transformation.

The Jacobin model is not tied to a particular political project. On the contrary, it can be hitched to almost any political project, other than any project that seeks to limit and pluralise politics and political action. But it suits progressivism best precisely because progressivism is about transforming society.

This includes the right-progressivism of Fascism and Nazism. For Communism was not Hitler’s enemy; it was his rival, his competitor. His enemy was liberal, democratic mercantile society, aka “capitalism”. He copied and adapted the operational techniques of Communism, and admired Stalin, while despising Churchill and Roosevelt. Hitler was very sincerely a National Socialist, an ideology that emerged out of a zone of ethnic tensions developing the mass politics of an industrialising era.

Ins and outs

There are some distinctions to be made here. The philosophical Left includes a range of views about how to transform society to achieve pervasive equality. It includes anarchism and syndicalism, for example. Yet, apart from some local effervescences, these have rarely been politically significant and always lose out to some form of Jacobin politics seeking to mobilise state action.

Nor does the Left that keeps re-emerging in the above ways—the Jacobin Left—include the more equality-focused versions of broader movements. Despite the sometimes weird US usage of the term liberal, it does not include left-liberalism, as long as their liberalism is more important than their leftism. It hijacks the aura of past civil rights movements but is not a new manifestation of their struggles to be included as full members of existing society.

Left-liberalism can generate a certain type of useful idiot, particularly if they buy into some version of the fable of progressive innocence, or if they lack a sufficiently discerning sense of evil. But that is a weakness the Jacobin Left exploits, it is not the thing itself.

When someone like Jordan Peterson talks about liberals, he does not mean the Left: or, as he describes them, the radical utopian Left. Something that, for instance, YouTuber Just Some Guy clearly does not understand.

The Jacobin Left also has to be distinguished from social democracy and the tradition of labour politics. Such politics also has a large dose of political liberalism. Historically, they were very much grounded in working class politics, and in representing the working class.

As modern societies have seen huge increases in both university graduates and bureaucratisation—and so the rise of what French political economist Thomas Piketty nicely labels the Brahmin Left—Labour and Social Democratic Parties have drifted away from their working class electoral base. This has a great deal to do with the resurgence of the Jacobin Left. That drift from connection to, and from representing, the working class that has been both cause and effect. That is, it has been an interactive process of moving away from the working class and of driving away working class voters.³

“Speaking for”, not representing

The Jacobin Left forever speaks about speaking for various marginalised groups. But their speaking for is self-appointed, it does not mean representing. On the contrary, those of the Jacobin Left are ever-ready to judge who is an acceptable, or not, member of such groups and to define the proper role members of the designated marginalised or oppressed groups should play, regardless of members of such groups actual views. Activists are almost never chosen by the group they purport to speak for.

Many Labour and Social Democratic Parties are living off the electoral inertia—the residual political branding—of past representation as their former working class base drifts away. The labourist model of representing is being replaced by the Jacobin—the Brahmin—model of self-declared speaking for.

For one thing activism and bureaucracy have in common is gaining authority (or a sense of authority) from being superior deciders.⁴ The more folk lean into that, the more attenuated the representing becomes. One of the great advantages of internationalisation to elite networks—of laundering ideas and policies through international bodies such as the UN and the EU—is precisely to use speaking for to subvert and trump representing.

Doctrinal disputes

It is also important to not put too much weight on doctrinal disputes. Yes, an old-style Marxist such as Eric Hobsbawn can insist on the primacy of universalism against identity politics. But the Jacobin Left regularly updates itself. If abandoning such moral universalism is strategically beneficial, then it is abandoned.

There is something both quaint and sad when someone who embraces the dialectical conception of history seems surprised, even mortified, when the dialectical processes of Leftism pass them by. Old-style Marxists, who refuse to abandon Marx’s economism—despite its clear falsity—are in the same situation as radical feminists who discover that Trans trumps them.⁵

It is the equivalent of Trotsky complaining about Stalin’s socialism in one country. You may think you understand “true” Leftism, but your very isolation, your being left behind, shows that you don’t.

Key stages in the decline of academic Marxism

As a description of how “history” works, the Dialectic is nonsense. As a description of how the Left works by updating and abandoning, it is pretty close to spot on. It is Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision operationalised, including by being regularly updated, discarding who and what is no longer useful. The notion that Homo sapiens can be profoundly transformed by appropriate social action; that there are final solutions to social problems; that we are not embedded in a web of trade-offs all the way down—this is the core vision. Everything else is subject to dialectical processes of updating (and abandoning).

It is an intoxicating vision, a deeply metaphysical vision, that has shown, again and again, it can generate zealots who work relentlessly to bring it to fruition. The imagined future becomes the realm of unimpeachable (i.e. divine) authority; the past and present the realms of sin; that which anchors the vision is sacred; those who disagree, who speak against it, are blasphemers; and those who oppose it are heretics, are witches, to be identified and hunted down; they are infidels to be crushed.

Equality is regularly invoked as the over-arching value of the Left. But the entire claim to the trumping moral urgency of the central vision; the claim to superior understanding of social dynamics; of the centrality of Theory; of the need to centralise and coordinate social action for achieving that transformative future; is a claim to be the superior deciders. This is a profoundly unequal vision of social action. Indeed, catastrophically so, given how it blocks inconvenient feedback and rolls over people. There is nothing more catastrophically unequal than the tyrannies and mass murders that prosecuting the vision has let loose.

So…

Leftism is the politics of activism inserted into everything. Activism that is power without responsibility, that sanctifies bad/aggressive behaviour. Activism’s moralisation of social aggression attracts the morally disordered—i.e., manipulative, Cluster B personalities, in the Victorian era known as the morally insane—while providing moral cover for them. The more morally grandiose the aims, the greater the cover, and the greater the sanctification of social aggression.

Power itself attracts such personalities—especially power with weak or no accountability. Of course the Jacobin Left crowds out other approaches and then, when in power, lets loose pathocracy, rule by the morally disordered, the morally insane.

So, we are left with the Left as it operates in history. A mixture of totalitarian zealots, former useful idiots who have realised something is wrong and current useful idiots who haven’t. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on do count. That is the Left as it actually functions, the rest is just a fairy story whose beguiling appeal some have woken up from and others have not.

References

Scott Atran, ‘“Devoted Actor” versus “Rational Actor” Models for Understanding World Conflict,’ Briefing to the National Security Council, White House, Washington, DC, September 14, 2006. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6801978.pdf

Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6123217_Sacred_Barriers_to_Conflict_Resolution

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), Penguin, [1970] 1993.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Quill William Morrow, 1987.

1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage—what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

3. A striking part of this process has been the feminisation of the Left. The stirring iconic invocation of (male) worker and soldier has dramatically fallen away. The blue-haired HR scold has become more emblematic, very much encapsulating the notion of superior deciders admonishing a wider citizenry who are always hovering on the edge of wrong-think and wrong-act. The various anti-discrimination Acts have not only generated a lot of forced association, they have also created a pervasive bureaucratic network based on the presumption that the citizenry has to constantly policed in thought, emotions and action.

4. As they increasingly represents people who are insulated from feedback from their policies—or, even worse, whose career prospects improve if social pathologies get worse—such Parties have increasingly embraced a form of politics that is both deeply unserious when it comes to world affairs, or for the flourishing of their societies, while also being toxic toward the same. Indeed, they are so blind to feedback they can repeat past failures: such as the Starmer Government in the UK apparently considering its own version of de-kulakisation.

5. Yes, there are still believing Marxists. But they typically do not have to deal with—in any serious way that affects them—the falsity of Marx’s economic theories. We Homo sapiens are very good at rationalising away problems with our deeply held beliefs.