Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left
has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in
our day?
There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and
have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.
But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more
distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the
twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the
Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists
accomplished on a good afternoon.
The French
Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation
of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions
around the world more than a century later.
As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with
its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation
of society.
In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France
with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries
introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the
warmth of an insane asylum.
Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of
saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the
rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious
feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month,
divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining
five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of
labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.
Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as
severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death
for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure
the priesthood.
We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the
revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the
Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.
Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of
society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the
resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and
patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of
mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into
submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem
impossible.
Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In
place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the
substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific,
the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and
artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers
the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board
president over the head of household.
Thus the
creation of the departments, totally subordinate to
Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the
totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s
allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined
their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.
The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the
great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free,
organically grown forms of life.”
The right
stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to
preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of
the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the
uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere
numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is
the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is
stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy
is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly
humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications…. The word
“one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual,
one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one
centralized world state.
Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all,
who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s
version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No
one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of
course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of
viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes
and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional
representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all
of America exactly the same.
Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation.
First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was
supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open
marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important
questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.
That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of
government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious.
Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the
superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among
others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.
Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity
played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education
who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public
elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”
As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:
Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal
tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold.
Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and
equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated
and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type
of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable
them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.
As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to
pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why
conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far
from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to
strict moral codes.
For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the
new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals
do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some
people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral
relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.
And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent
cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until
a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society
without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has
decided.
Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the
tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry
can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the
younger left, is intolerant?
In fact,
we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April
Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has
researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing
findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he
disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very
poorly.
Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim
groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s
no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they
treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social
media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.
Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by
libertarians on a college campus?
Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can
bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.
On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological
opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the
1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the
case of anti-progressive movements:
Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing
the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the
virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred
liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there
are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic
sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes
possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for
inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive
political philosophy.
Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by
leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine
Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of
military force to spread human rights around the world?
Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession,
nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on
MSNBC.
Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said:
whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot
overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in
Nazi Germany.
But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’
Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a
liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against
reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges
and all alien influences.”
When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’
Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s
party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all
honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party
and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical,
aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above
all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in
all domains of public life….
It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited
by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich….
It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states
and provinces….
It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over
business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic
administration.
This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of
leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the
destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was
against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all
leftist ideologies.”
The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the
state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs
— pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity,
every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.
The
left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the
service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and
endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into
civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely
exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be
involved in everything, at all times.
Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at
what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.
Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of
a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.
And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.
To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left
nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are
equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and
destructive nonsense.
Originally
published on July 5, 2016.
Llewellyn H.
Rockwell, Jr. [send
him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and
congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute,
executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com.
He is the author of Against the State: an Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto.
Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.