There's been a bit of discussion lately on the podcasts I regularly listen to about whether and how the Left 'eats it own'. The possibility of renewed radicalism on the millennial left, a radicalism with a real prospect of winning and holding political power within the lifetime of those alive today, is meeting with a predictable backlash. A whole generation of centre-leaning media and political personalities - Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jon Haidt etc. - are promoting their belief that contemporary political polarisation is at least in part a reaction to the left's renewed radicalism. I have grave doubts about the sincerity of such people: blaming the left serves as an excuse to spout their own shitty beliefs, and "concern trolling" about the future of the progressive movement is as much about fighting for their own political power and prestige as it is about seeing the left as a whole succeed.
Conservatives and reactionaries have never needed the left to excuse their existence. Yet centrists historically spend more time fretting about socialists provoking fascists than actually trying to achieve progress. While actual leftists battled Nazis on the streets of Weimar, Germany's centrist elite handed their country over to Hitler. Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" castigates white moderates more concerned with order than progress. Meanwhile, people friendly to marriage equality and gay rights - some gay themselves - are unfairly blaming the trans community for impugning the LGBT community as a whole. Everywhere, centrists are so concerned with respectibility and group consensus that they fail of offer effective defense of either individual rights or progressive social outcomes.
The Left Devours Its Children. And That's a Good Thing.
I address this phenonmenon in the Introduction to my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". Belief in the possibility of capital-P "progress" is what makes socialists, well, socialists. We are inclined by both ideology and innate disposition to be open to new experiences and cultural innovation because we trust that they will enrich the life of our community. However,
"If the left’s animating beliefs are [defined by] single issues alone, it will continue to lead to left-wing politicians, parties and their supporters becoming more and more conservative as they age. Progressivism can devour its own children. Because social advancement is the natural outcome of the human condition, if we have our vision fixed only on the road immediately in front of us, sooner or later we’ll run out of road."
There's a reason why many Gen-X centre leftists, who grew up in a cultural environment characterised by neoliberal economics and soft social liberalism are increasingly defining themselves as centre-right "classical liberals" as the civil rights struggles of their childhood are resolved and a harder edged socialist economics returns to prominence. There's a reason the Boomer neoconservatives abandoned the left during the Cold War struggle against communism. There's a reason why many TERFS use the language of second wave feminism and anti-capitalism to attack trans people right alongside the misogynistic and pro-capitalist right. These people are angry and frustrated; I believe them when they say their beliefs haven't changed. They feel like it's the 'Left' that's moved, not them. But there was never and will never be a Platonic ideal of the 'Left'. What these people are experiencing is the first hand flow of time and progress. This the fate of our kind: to see society carry on past us.
The progressive Australian political Podcast "Boonta Vista Socialist Club" asked what issue would tip them over the line from progressive to conservative. One co-host replied "poly acceptance" - a regrettable answer, as that issue is coming and coming soon. Another said "furry acceptance", a funnier and better reply. We all face the slow dawning realisation that many of our favourite TV shows (and actors and comedians and directors) are 'problematic'. There are two possible responses to this realisation. One is to do as #GamerGate did and throw a political temper tantrum that drives you into the willing arms of the far right. Another is to accept the complexity of the relationship between past and future. We can laud those who opposed slavery, even if they also held troubling views of race. We can praise the suffragettes fights for legal equality, even some held authoritarian views, for example, on eugenics. Part of being a progressive is acknowledging the achievements of the past while recognising that they never go far enough. The struggle for liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a matter of continual myopic optimisation - we will never achieve utopia, but not for want of trying.
Moreover, the inflexibility of the individual serves to some degree as a useful brake on the dreams of the radicals. The truth is, moving too far too fast does invite a backlash. Revolutionary fervor may speed up the pace of progress, but it willingly abandons the possibility of receiving meaningful feedback from the rest of the population and risks splitting a society in ways that can only be resolved through violence. When we have big, progressive generations like the millennials, we can and should use the opportunity to move things forward quite far. But the existence of the "classical liberals" is a reminder that we have to message toward those we leave behind as well.
The Right digs up its dead
OK, so far this blog has done a lot of naval gazing. But what about the equivalent phenonmenon on the Right? If we lose older progressives as the Overton Window moves left, what happens when the Overton Window moves right? I would argue that if the Left eats its children, then the Right raises its dead. As societies learn and grow, the reprehensible views, beliefs and behaviours they contained in the past seem dead and forgotten. They are not of course: the process of cultural evolution merely suppresses reprehensible practices, it does not eliminate them. They continue to exist at lower frequencies in the population, subject to punishment if expressed publicly but still capable of surving in forgotten cultural backwaters and re-invading the body politics if its defenses weaken.
So when the Overton Window shifts in a more conservative direction, as it sometimes does in response to social and economic crisis? Well, guess what? Fascism's back! Racism's back! Homophobia's back! Religious fundamentalism's back! When they win ground, conservatives goes looking for ideas in the past. Fortunately for us, the past is full of terrible ideas. Ideas that many generations of people alive today have been socialised into having an intense and visceral moral revulsion towards. That's the conservative brake, that's what stops conservatives from running away with a society or splitting it in two: when they start resurrecting zombie ideas, most people think they've gone too far and pick up their shotguns.
Yet there's a unique danger here. The most insidious tactic of the purveyors of bad ideas, the ones they have been forced to learn by becoming cultural rebels in order to survive is this: looking and appearing normal will lower the defenses of a society enough to let you infiltrate it. Look normal, speak normal, act normal. Appropriate the style and rhetoric of successful authority figures. Be polite, obey the laws and norms as best you can. Use the thin edge of the wedge of your ideas to appeal to diaffected 'centrists'. The far right have mastered these techniques because they had no other choice: without these techniques, their ideologies would have died our generations ago when they were abandoned by the mainstream. The far left are too new to have mastered the same tactics.
The exuberance of youth
In the end, perhaps this is the true point og difference between left and right in a cultural evolutionary framework. New far left ideas are often divorced, deliberately so, from cultural constructs. Their practitioners are young and enthusiastic, but unblooded in techniques for attaining cultural dominance. The far right, on the other hand, are wiley survivors, adept at masking their presence and swimming upstream in a culture that despises them. Neither advantage is likely decisive, and the success of a given idea is likely to be primarily determined by structural factors given by the extant distribution of power and production in society. In the long run, we must admit that the future belongs to the young.