Oliver Bateman’s recent piece in Compact on the “post-left” includes some very kind references to my first book, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut. In the piece, Bateman says The Way is Shut is “the only true post-left monograph, though the author would reject the label.” It’s nice of him to describe my book in such singular terms. He is correct in predicting that I would reject the label. For me, that book is written from the standpoint of political despair, from what I call in Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies the “negative” mood. The post-left attempted to exit the left while remaining political; I exited the political while remaining on the left. To put it more precisely, I took up political despair as a position from which to observe, neither remaining in the political nor abandoning it. What remains of my left is little more than an ethos I attempt to live and maybe, when I’m at my best, to model.
What was my left? It was not the left of Leszek Kolakowski, whose piece, “The Concept of the Left,” is so popular in the Platypus milieu. It was not my aim to differentiate exactly between “ideology” and “current political tactics”. I am not committed to a set of tactics. I am a Platonist, in the sense that I am serious about the Good as an abstraction. I enjoy socializing with pragmatists, but I have never been one.1
Now, for me, the Good is something that has to be conceptualized over and over. It is never brought into being in its fullness, so particular instantiations of it are never complete, never whole, never perfect. It’s in this sense that the Good has to be treated apophatically - you have to be able to reopen it, to discover what it should mean anew. But this doesn’t mean that each conceptualization is mere tactics en route to an abstraction that is to one final day be grasped in its fullness. No, no. Each conceptualization is a conceptualization of the Good, i.e., it participates in but does not fully comprise the principle. The principle is in fact realized in each conceptualization, just never in a complete way. So, each conceptualization is both to be affirmed and negated. We are to recognize both what is good about a thing and also, if we can, what is missing in it. Everything is good, but the Good is not merely anything in particular, and everything could be better.
Forget either side of this at any point, and you fall into error. On one side, there’s the error of the Gnostics - who say that everything that has being is all bad. On the other side, there’s the error of the Stoics - who say everything that has being is all good. Gnosticism and Stoicism are two sides of the same coin. These two mistakes are combined together in some post-Christian, anarchist, and utopian socialist views that hold that everything is bad now, but everything will be made good later. All of these positions are marked by hubris - grand overclaiming about what is and about what is possible on the basis of the limited, finite experience of the world available to human beings.
Now, for me, it is not simply the case that the right recognizes what is valuable about things and the left recognizes what is missing in them. My left and right are not wings of Hegelianism. Rather, my left and right comprise different attitudes toward what is missing, toward the negative.
My “left” looks to identify what is missing in the social and in the political. If someone isn’t behaving, you don’t blame them or shame them - you look deeply into the situation, identify the real social and political causes of the bad behavior, and you look to rectify them. In this way, you create conditions for virtue, you make it possible for people to think and act. If you can’t figure out the source of the trouble, you adopt a position of humility - you don’t blindly lash out at the symptoms of problems you don’t understand, and you don’t make sweeping claims about the biology or culture of particular groups.
So, it was on this basis that I supported things like universal healthcare - to be able to think and act well, people need certain kinds of things. They need time to think about things other than their bodily needs. They need to be sufficiently comfortable with themselves that they are not continuously fishing for compliments and positive reinforcement. Their bodies and egos have to be in good enough condition for them to be able to think seriously about something beyond themselves. This enables them to devote themselves to a partner, a (not necessarily nuclear) family, a larger social or political community, or perhaps even to the principle itself.
I juxtaposed this “left” to a “right” that held individuals and groups responsible for their flaws. In its extreme form, this right would go so far as to essentialize - it would frame their flaws as stemming from some inescapable essence rooted in fundamental and unchangeable biological or cultural traits. This right wasn’t interested in looking deeply at the social and political reasons people are unable to think and act well. Instead, it hoped to use threats and opprobrium in a bid to force people to behave better. Shame those who respond to shame and intimidate the rest.
Much of what passes for the “left” was and is, in this sense, straightforwardly on the right. Indeed, even Kolakowski’s left is often the right, in so far as Kolakowski’s left has no problem with blaming and shaming individuals and groups if it seems tactically efficacious.
For me, it’s not just a tactic to refrain from blaming and shaming individuals and groups. It really is the case that everything that comes into being is imperfect and decays. To be the best we can be, we have to help each other deal with the consequences of human foibles. This means constructing (and continuously reconstructing, and from time to time developing new) social and political systems that bring out our best qualities. These qualities are the virtues, which are not some retrograde ancient throwback, but continuously necessary for day-to-day functioning. You do much better in your life if you have prudence (the ability to distinguish among situations and act appropriately), justice (the ability to determine how some particular person ought to be treated given who they are in society and what they’ve done), moderation (the ability to avoid becoming dominated by desire for pleasure or recognition or by the management of said desire), and fortitude (the ability to persist in the virtues even in challenging situations that produce difficult feelings in the body). Of course, the specific thinking and activity that comports with these virtues varies enormously across time and in diverse situations.
What is called the left has no real commitment to the virtues, except in cases where it feels the performance of commitment is pragmatic. Because it is only pragmatically committed to the virtues, it does not construct institutions that reliably produce the virtues in its members. This produces a vicious cycle in which the left suffers continuously from systematic character weaknesses that undermine its ability to think and act and therefore prevent it from constructing the kinds of institutions that would rescue it from this situation.
In keeping with my commitment to my left, this is not a problem that can or should be solved with opprobrium - attempting to shame the left for its lack of virtue is both unproductive and wrong. Rather, there is a need to construct new organizations that train leftists not in the doctrines of particular modernist thinkers, but in the basic, fundamental character traits necessary for effective thinking and action. These aren’t just pedagogical organizations, they are committed to bildung, to theurgy, to doing the work of the principle in the world. Such organizations require economic resources, and they also require a minimum level of decent social conditions in which to operate. In the absence of these things, these organizations struggle to come into existence or can only exist for an elite few.
But even in such periods, my left retains a commitment to creating conditions under which more people gain the capacity to think and act well over time. We must not forget that everyone we meet could have been something more. We must not reify the stratification, treating it as a natural feature. At the same time, we must not forget that true elites are good - they are the bearers of valuable human qualities that have been difficult to produce in large numbers of people. In studying how they came to acquire those qualities, we have the opportunity to learn about how to create conditions under which others might access them.
It was my aim in What’s Left to contest the concept of the left, not from the point of view of a historical left or out of fealty to an interpretation of any particular dead theorist, but for the purpose of aligning the concept of the left with the Good. This failed totally and completely. What is called “the left” today has nothing to do with my left. Most of those who were interested in my kind of thing have abandoned politics in favor of the Four F’s (faith, family, fandoms, futurism). Those who remain political today have not embraced my left in some other guise. Some stayed with what is called the left, subordinating themselves to dominant ways of thinking. Others went to the right, not realizing that they would have all the same problems again over there. I don’t think many other people ever did take up my approach. Those that did take it up have since given it up.
They’ve done this, I think, because they are determined to remain political, or at least economically viable - they want to sustain themselves as political commentators, and therefore they need to think in terms that are competitive in an online media marketplace in which politics has become an aesthetic carapace for commercial products. Their terms and frameworks have become a way of selling content that capitalizes on feelings of outrage (wrath mixed with envy) and smugness (pride mixed with sloth).
But it does no good to try to blame or shame them for this - they are engaged in this activity because they need to make a living to be able to go on thinking at all. To try to preserve some possibility of thinking, they adopt professions that seem to support this thinking but are in fact incompatible with it. For if you make a habit of rolling around in the muck, you slowly become a pig, and pigs are certainly not to blame for their squalid routine. To liberate these people from the muck, we would need, again, to build economically viable institutions that better support them in developing their best qualities.
There seems to be no immediate possibility of this kind of institution-building. This leaves me without any immediate politics. I can accept that - I don’t have to blame and shame myself (or anyone else) for the fact that I don’t have a viable politics at this time. Instead, I adopt the standpoint of political despair - I liberate myself from the injunction to be immediately political.
This allows me to be not the Gallic cock or the owl of Minerva, but a vulture socialist. I observe the political and social malaise (for me, the chronic crisis) for the purposes of understanding the situation, making a future intervention only if and when conditions permit it.
Most of the people I talk to these days are not vulture socialists, but that's okay. Because I don't have an immediate politics, I don't need to establish a political position with my interlocutors. It's okay for them to be different from me. I know what I'm about! I just tell them what I see, and they’re free to listen or not. Either way, I’ll keep circling, until something happens down there.2
As Socrates says of Callicles in the Gorgias, I consider many pragmatists, Gnostics, Stoics, and utopian socialists to be dear friends. Notice how it is possible for Socrates to regard Callicles as a dear friend even though Callicles rejects not just a particular conceptualization of the Good, but the Good as an abstraction? Plato does not think about friendship the way, e.g., Carl Schmitt does. For Plato it is perfectly possible to be friends with someone who is deeply mistaken about important matters. Socrates remains committed to helping Callicles think and act as well as he can, and it’s this devotion to Callicles that makes it just for Socrates to regard him as a friend. You can be friends with people with whom you cannot do politics and vice versa.
Or I fall out of the sky.