Left2Right &#8211; a critical appraisal
<p>I&#8217;ve been reading a new blog called<br />
<a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/'>Left2Right</a>, founded in<br />
mid-November 2004 as an attempt by a group of left-wing intellectuals to reach<br />
out to intelligent people on the right of the American political spectrum.<br />
It is indeed a thought-provoking read, but the thoughts they are provoking<br />
are not necessarily of the sort they intend.</p>
<p>This response is intended for the Left2Right authors, so I&#8217;ll<br />
rehearse what will be obvious to regular <cite>Armed and<br />
Dangerous</cite> readers; I&#8217;m not a conservative or right-winger<br />
myself, but a radical libertarian who finds both ends of the<br />
conventional spectrum <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200409#153'>about<br />
equally repugnant</a>. My tradition is the free-market classical liberalism of Locke and<br />
Hayek.  I utterly reject both the Marxist program and the reactionary<br />
cultural conservatism of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and (today) the<br />
Religious Right.  Conservatism is defined by a desire to preserve<br />
society&#8217;s existing power relationships; given a choice, I prefer<br />
subverting them to preserving them.</p>
<p>One advantage my libertarianism gives me is that while I disagree<br />
violently with a lot of right-wing thinking, I understand it much<br />
better than most leftists do.  The reverse is not quite as true; while<br />
I do believe I understand left-wing thinking pretty well, most<br />
right-wing intellectuals are not so ignorant of leftism that I have an<br />
unusual advantage there.  They can&#8217;t be, not after having passed<br />
through the PC indoctrination camps that most American universities<br />
have become.</p>
<p>A right-winger, noting the concentration of philosophy and<br />
humanities professors in the Left2Right bios and the number of them<br />
who list topics like &#8220;race and gender issues&#8221; as interest areas, would<br />
say that the contributors are typical members of the elite that runs<br />
those camps.  But one of the things that Left2Right suggests to this<br />
libertarian is that even these people are prisoners, locked in by<br />
their own group-think.  The toughest challenge they face in reaching<br />
out to right-wingers is not a problem with right-wingers &mdash; it is the<br />
unexamined premises and lacunae in their own reasoning.</p>
<p>The <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/liberators.html'>post</a><br />
that is at the top of the blog as I write is a subtle but perfect<br />
illustration of this point.  J. David Velleman, writing on Bush<br />
administration strategy about the liberation of Iraq, argues that they<br />
fell victim to a philosophical error, believing that giving the Iraqi<br />
people freedom would be sufficient to pacify the country.  He writes<br />
&#8220;These decisionmakers seem not to have considered the possibility that<br />
freedom alone may not induce people to do wonderful things if they<br />
lack a shared sense of confidence in the legitimacy of the social<br />
order&#8221;.</p>
<p>This is a refreshing change from the dimmer sort of left-wing<br />
narrative, in which Bush and Cheney head a sinister cabal who dream<br />
of an American empire that enslaves the Iraqis and steals their oil<br />
for Halliburton.  It&#8217;s an intelligent criticism; possibly even a<br />
correct one.</p>
<p>But&#8230;and this is a large &#8216;but&#8217;&#8230;the when Velleman goes on to<br />
imply that &#8220;shared confidence in the legitimacy of the social order&#8221;<br />
is one of the &#8220;values of the left&#8221; without which the &#8220;values of the<br />
Right are simply not viable&#8221;, he reveals himself to be inhabiting some<br />
sort of ahistorical cloud-Cuckoo land.  He is making an archetypally<br />
right-wing sort of argument here, one which would sound far more<br />
likely from Russell Kirk or an eighteenth-century clericalist than from<br />
anyone who purports to be part of the tradition of Karl Marx or<br />
Mikhael Bakunin or Emma Goldman.</p>
<p>Velleman&#8217;s blythe unawareness of the reactionary tenor of his own<br />
argument suggests more than just a ignorance of right-wing political<br />
thinking that is crippling for anyone engaged in Left2Right&#8217;s project;<br />
it suggests that Left thought has become so empty of any content of<br />
its own, so stuck in reflexive oppositionalism, that all that remains<br />
to it is to grab at any concept that can be used to oppose George W.<br />
Bush.</p>
<p>In fact, this model of a Left stuck in reflexive oppositionalism is<br />
exactly what conservative intellectuals believe about it.  Their<br />
narrative goes like this: once upon a time, Left thought was a genuine<br />
world-system, a coherent if tragically mistaken competitor to<br />
classical liberalism and capitalism.  The Soviet Union used this<br />
theory for evil purposes, to seduce the intelligentsia of the West and<br />
foment among them anti-American, anti-capitalist hatred.  When the<br />
Soviet Union collapsed, the Left&#8217;s world-system collapsed with it.<br />
All that remained was a catalogue of resentments clothed in the<br />
tattered remnants of Marxist theory, but the Left intelligentsia never<br />
let go of this.  As the theory crumbled, the resentments<br />
<em>became</em> the theory.  So we are left with a Left that is more<br />
hysterically anti-American than ever, and willing to suck up to<br />
monstrous dictators like Saddam Hussein, precisely because it no<br />
longer knows what to be <em>for</em>.</p>
<p>Now: reread the above paragraph, then ask yourself what Velleman&#8217;s<br />
rhetoric will inevitably sound like to a conservative intellectual.  You<br />
will know you have gotten it when your hair stands on end.</p>
<p>We continue with a <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/supporting_our_.html'>post</a><br />
by Jeff McMahan on &#8220;Support our Troops&#8221; bumper stickers.  McMahan<br />
appears to mean well, but when writes as though he thinks that the<br />
owners of SUVs and vans who bear these stickers are performing some<br />
kind of Machiavellian calculation about oil-shock risks he is merely<br />
proving that he is laughably out of touch with the thinking of<br />
ordinary Americans.</p>
<p>A gentle hint for Mr. McMahan: People who own vans and SUVs<br />
<em>live in the suburbs</em>.  People who live in the suburbs<br />
predominantly <em>vote Republican</em>; this is a cold demographic<br />
fact known to almost everybody whose horizons are wider than those of<br />
an average NPR radio-show host. The fact that you don&#8217;t know this, and<br />
instead chase after paranoid all-about-the-oil theories, makes you the<br />
sort of person conservatives laugh about and and point out as a<br />
paradigmatic example of left-liberal cluelessness.</p>
<p>The ahistorical J. David Velleman speaks some good sense in<br />
<a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/debunking_a_dea.html#more'><br />
debunking a dead horse</a>.  He may be dead-ignorant of right-wing thought<br />
but he clearly isn&#8217;t stupid.  Like all the contributors he radiates a<br />
sense that he is honestly trying.</p>
<p>David Estlund&#8217;s <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/the_first_data_.html'>The<br />
First Data Point on Anti-Terrorism</a> starts as fairly standard-issue<br />
Bush-bashing; he ignores the fact that, if the Bush administration was<br />
culpable, the Clinton administration was even more culpable on the<br />
same &#8220;knew or should have known&#8221; sort of argument.  The intelligence<br />
estimates that made al-Qaeda out to be imminently dangerous long<br />
predate the 2000 elections.</p>
<p>The more interesting part of his post is his repetition of the meme<br />
that Republicans won&#8217;t listen to arguments or evidence from<br />
intellectuals like him.  He is so full of self-congratulation about<br />
the Bushies&#8217; alleged inability to let the evidence lead them where it<br />
will (and by implication, his own superior ability to do so) that he<br />
completely misses the real reason conservative policy makers tune his<br />
kind out.</p>
<p>Mr. Estlund, how can I break this to you gently&#8230;the Bushies ignore<br />
advice from left-wing academics because they believe the source is poisoned.<br />
<em>They believe you hate America and want to destroy it.</em>  Given<br />
that belief, it would be their duty to listen to your advice only with<br />
the determination to do the exact opposite of anything you recommend.</p>
<p>Now, mind you, in pointing this out, I am not alleging that you<br />
actually <em>do</em> hate America and want to destroy it.  My claim is<br />
that from the point of view of most conservatives, that is the only<br />
model that plausibly explains your speech and behavior.  They do not<br />
merely pretend to believe your kind is evil as a matter of rhetoric or<br />
tactical positioning, they actually <em>do</em> believe it.  With the<br />
best will in the world to listen to critics and weigh evidence, they<br />
still wouldn&#8217;t take policy advice from you any more readily than you<br />
would accept it from a Nazi.</p>
<p>(Allow me to contrast this with the position I think more typical of<br />
libertarians, which is that left-wing academics are not evil per se<br />
but have been so canalized by Marxist-derived ideology that on most<br />
politico-economic issues they should be ignored on grounds of<br />
irremediable incompetence.)</p>
<p>So, if you want to be listened to in Washington, your problem (one<br />
which is general to left-wing intellectuals) is how to falsify<br />
conservatives&#8217; belief that you hate America and want to destroy it.<br />
This is not going to be possible at all as long as you express<br />
contempt for the values and reasoning ability of the majority of<br />
Americans that voted for George Bush.</p>
<p>But your problem runs deeper than that.  To be listened to, you<br />
will need to demonstrate that you share what present-day American<br />
conservatives think of as their core beliefs, including but not limited<br />
to:</p>
<ul>
<li>The practical <em>and moral</em> superiority of free-market capitalism<br />
over socialism and all other competing visions of political economics.</li>
<li>American exceptionalism &mdash; the belief that the U.S. is uniquely<br />
qualified by history and values to bring liberty to the oppressed of<br />
the world.</li>
<li>Islamic terrorism is an unqualified evil which cannot be explained<br />
or excused either by &#8220;root cause&#8221; analysis; further, that laying it<br />
to past failures in U.S. policy is a form of blaming the victim.</li>
</ul>
<p>(Note that I am not endorsing these beliefs, simply pointing out that<br />
<em>conservatives</em> generally hold them.)</p>
<p>As long as conservatives believe that you do not share these core<br />
beliefs with them, they will conclude that your policy &#8220;help&#8221; on Iraq<br />
or the War on Terror would be an active detriment.  And &mdash; here&#8217;s<br />
the hard part &mdash; they will be <em>justified</em> in that belief<br />
(which, as you doubtless know, is not the same as the assertion that<br />
the belief is confirmably true).</p>
<p>But you have yet another problem, which is not about the beliefs of<br />
conservative intellectuals or policymaking elites.  It is that in<br />
rejecting the core beliefs I have pointed at, you are not merely<br />
defining yourself out of the policy conversation conservatives are<br />
ready to have, you are also out of step with the majority of the<br />
American people.  The voters.  As long as that continues to be the<br />
case, the Left will continue to lose elections.</p>
<p>Estlund&#8217;s posting responds to the previous one, in which Gerald Dworkin<br />
says intelligent things about the Bush administration&#8217;s apparent success<br />
at preventing major terrorist acts in the U.S., and the electoral ramifications<br />
thereof.  Excellent; if the Left is prepared to face reality this squarely,<br />
there is hope for them yet.</p>
<p>J. David Velleman has more sensible things to say about the<br />
politics of homosexuality.  His distinction between the respect that<br />
we owe &#8220;gay rights&#8221; and the problematic status of &#8220;gay pride&#8221; is<br />
astute.  I think leftists also need to understand that many<br />
conservatives (and libertarians like myself) feel a deep and<br />
principled revulsion not just against &#8220;gay pride&#8221; but against all<br />
forms of manipulative identity politics, and are heartily fed up with<br />
having leftists construe that revulsion as bigotry.</p>
<p>Stephen Darwall&#8217;s <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/school_resegreg.html'>School<br />
Resegregation and the Exurbs</a>, on the other hand, feels like an<br />
attempt to force new wine into old wineskins.  The Left&#8217;s tendency to<br />
turn every policy argument into a diatribe about racism (too often,<br />
racism that existed nowhere but in the Left&#8217;s imagination) was always<br />
one of its least attractive traits.  We could do without a<br />
revival.</p>
<p>Again, I am not just discussing elite opinion here.  If you go to<br />
the voters with the argument that wanting to live in exurbs is<br />
evidence of racism, they will stiff-arm you.  Actually, I think it is<br />
only the hothouse atmosphere of the academy that has kept racism alive<br />
as a topic in American thought for the last fifteen years or so.</p>
<p>In <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/being_forthrigh.html'>Being<br />
Forthright</a>, Seanna Shiffrin says nothing at all that has any<br />
chance of increasing understanding between Left and Right, and does so<br />
at some length.  Her screed reads, to any conservative (and even to a<br />
libertarian like me) as extended self-congratulation about how Left<br />
convictions are so obviously correct that if leftists trumpet them<br />
loudly enough the people will come.</p>
<p>This is a perfect example of the wages of groupthink.  In fact, if the<br />
six election cycles since 1980 demonstrate anything, it is that being<br />
more &#8220;forthright&#8221; about left-wing positions is a recipe for electoral<br />
disaster.</p>
<p>Kwame Appiah <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt.html'>takes<br />
the opposite tack</a>: &#8220;In these circumstances I think it would be<br />
better to show up first with an offer to listen than with an offer to<br />
talk.&#8221;  A commenter correctly observes that this may be the most<br />
useful thing we have heard a Democrat say since the elections.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the rest of the posting is yet another narrative about<br />
left-wing superiority, though Mr. Appiah gives it the novel twist of<br />
ascribing this belief to right-wingers!  For this he is quite properly<br />
taken to the woodshed buy some conservative commenters.</p>
<p>Speaking as an observer who is (once again) <em>not</em> a<br />
conservative, I salute the commenter who said &#8220;I think you go<br />
profoundly astray in this understanding of why conservatives rail<br />
against the liberal media. It isn&#8217;t about being liked. It is about<br />
believing that the liberal media distorts the truth and manipulates<br />
beliefs by using such distortions. They rail against the political and<br />
social power which they believe is being corruptly used.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll go further than that.  I resent the way that the Left uses its<br />
effective control of the mainstream media to manipulate belief even<br />
when the manipulation advances causes I <em>agree</em> with &mdash;<br />
for example, abortion rights.  I don&#8217;t like &#8220;pro-lifers&#8221; and I don&#8217;t<br />
agree with them &mdash; but that doesn&#8217;t stop me from noticing that<br />
they get stigmatized as all being yahoos and routinely associated with<br />
clinic-bombers by the same media that is very painstaking in<br />
separating the Left&#8217;s violent crazies from allegedly more<br />
&#8220;respectable&#8221; organizations like Greenpeace or PETA.</p>
<p>It is wise of Joshua Cohen to have <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/the_moral_value.html'>noticed</a><br />
that gay-marriage initiatives probably actually hurt Bush rather than<br />
winning him the election. If the Left continues to comfort itself by<br />
believing its only real problem is with Christian evangelicals, it will<br />
slide further into denial and irrelevancy.</p>
<p>The American rejection of what Cohen calls &#8220;progressive values&#8221; is<br />
much, much broader based than that.  As an agnostic Wiccan who thinks<br />
the War on Drugs was a huge toxic blunder, I am not personally<br />
thrilled about this development, but I recognize it as fact<br />
nevertheless.  Mr. Cohen is to be commended for urging this unwelcome<br />
news on the Left.</p>
<p>On the other hand, J. David Velleman&#8217;s <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/the_academic_re.html'>post</a><br />
on the Academic Bill of Rights does not go nearly far enough.  His is<br />
a more sophisticated form of defensive crouch than the outright denial<br />
we usually see, but merely admitting that &#8220;large regions of the<br />
humanities and social sciences have become increasingly ideological,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t<br />
even come close to addressing the actual magnitude of the problem.</p>
<p>I am, in an important sense, an applied humanist/sociologist.  My<br />
<a href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/'>analysis</a><br />
of the anthropology and sociology of open-source software development<br />
has a significant reputation in academia; it has been cited with the<br />
coveted adjective &#8220;seminal&#8221; and spawned quite a number of master&#8217;s and<br />
doctoral theses.  My work has required that I enter the conceptual<br />
world of modern &#8220;humanities and social sciences&#8221; &mdash; not merely to<br />
theorize about these disciplines, but to <em>use</em> them in ways<br />
that have helped trigger transformative changes in the software<br />
industry.</p>
<p>I have immodestly set forth these qualifications here because my<br />
experience requires an even stronger indictment than David Horowitz&#8217;s,<br />
let alone the mild one that Mr. Velleman will admit.  I have<br />
encountered entire academic fields that have been effectively<br />
<em>destroyed</em> by Left politics, in the sense that they can no<br />
longer talk about anything other than power relations.  Postmodern<br />
literary criticism is only the most obvious example; for that matter,<br />
postmodernist <em>anything</em> is reliably a nihilist swamp obsessed<br />
with &#8216;agendas&#8217; and &#8216;power relations&#8217; to the exclusion of its<br />
ostensible subject matter.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s one that affects me particularly: the damage done to<br />
cultural anthropology has been horrific, with the perverse effect of<br />
making my amateur and tentative essays in it look far stronger than<br />
they would have if the field were actually healthy.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t have a fix for this problem.  But I do know that more than any<br />
mere housecleaning is needed.  Some of these dwellings are so rotted out<br />
that they will have to be razed and rebuilt before they are habitable<br />
by anything but political animals.</p>
<p>Don Herzog is right to ask, in <a hreg='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/religion_and_po.html'><br />
Religion and politics</a>, exactly what conservatives want when they say<br />
Americans should agree that we a &#8220;Christian nation&#8221;.  This is exactly the<br />
sort of question that the Left, if its continued existence is to mean<br />
anything useful, <em>should</em> be pushing.</p>
<p>J. David Velleman makes the surprising <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/let_roe_go.html'>concession</a><br />
that Roe V. Wade was bad politics and bad law.  As a pro-choicer who<br />
nevertheless agrees with conservatives on this point (and largely for<br />
the reasons Velleman states), I have been wondering when the Left<br />
would begin to wake up on this point.</p>
<p>Groupthink shows up again in Gerald Dworkin&#8217;s <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt_m.html'>Less<br />
contempt; more mutual ground</a>.  I&#8217;m thinking in particular of his claim<br />
that &#8220;Both those who advocate gun-control and those who oppose it can<br />
agree that trigger-locks and other safety devices are desirable.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is evident here that Mr. Dworkin has no idea what pro-firearms<br />
activists like myself actually believe.  It seems likely he has never<br />
actually spoken with one; otherwise he would know that we regard<br />
trigger locks as bad things, because they reduce the utility of<br />
firearms for one of their principal purposes &mdash; self-defense.  If<br />
your friendly neighborhood junkie breaks into your home and menaces<br />
your family with a knife (or, as in one recent case, a branding iron)<br />
you need to be able to get the weapon into play <em>fast</em>.<br />
Trigger locks and soi-disant &#8220;safety devices&#8221; primarily benefit<br />
criminals by reducing their risks.</p>
<p>In fact, we regard the push for trigger locks as an underhanded<br />
attempt to make self-defense impractical so that popular support for<br />
firearms rights will lose a major prop.  If Mr. Dworkin had ever discussed<br />
this issue outside a UC Davis faculty meeting, he would probably know<br />
this.</p>
<p>In <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/not_too_bright.html'>Not<br />
Too Bright</a>, J. David Velleman misses a central point about<br />
American hostility to the &#8220;intelligentsia&#8221; because he falls back into<br />
the comforting Left groupthink about the Christian evangelicals and<br />
&#8220;moral values&#8221;.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m an intellectual myself, not a Christian, not a conservative.<br />
Yet I understand the emotion Mr. Dworkin reads as<br />
&#8220;anti-intellectualism&#8221;; I even sympathize with it to some extent.  It<br />
is a folk reaction to what Julian Benda called <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200211'>le trahison<br />
des clercs</a>.  The West&#8217;s intelligentsia &mdash; not all of it, but<br />
enough of it to tar all of us &mdash; was a willing accomplice in the<br />
terrible totalitarian crimes of the 20th century.  Today, the same<br />
segments of the intelligentsia that cooperated with Stalinism are<br />
issuing apologetics for al-Qaeda. (This is not just metaphorically but<br />
<em>literally</em> the case, as the pedigree of A.N.S.W.E.R. and the<br />
&#8220;Not In Our Name&#8221; organizers shows.)</p>
<p>Until the academic Left faces up to the evil at the center of its<br />
own history, it will completely fail to understand why<br />
&#8220;anti-intellectualism&#8221; is common even anong people who find Christian<br />
&#8220;moral values&#8221; argument as off-putting as I do.</p>
<p>We could ask for no better illustration of the blindness induced by<br />
comforting groupthink than Elizabeth Anderson&#8217;s <a href='http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/what_hume_can_t.html'><br />
What Hume can teach us about our partisan divisions</a>.</p>
<p>She writes &#8220;If interests were all that divided us, the Democratic<br />
Party (what there is of the Left that has institutional power) would<br />
enjoy an overwhelming majority, since it represents the interests of<br />
the bulk of the population, while Republican policies favor mainly the<br />
rich.  Most people understand this, and the Left can offer sound<br />
arguments and evidence to persuade those who disagree.&#8221;</p>
<p>I am not a Republican.  I have never been a Republican.  But claims<br />
like this, presented as though they are unassailable fact, utterly<br />
infuriate me.  And if they infuriate <em>me</em>, imagine how they<br />
would affect an actual conservative!</p>
<p>As a matter of political economics, I believe that the high-tax,<br />
high-spending policies of the Democrats benefit <em>nobody</em> except<br />
a small class of elite parasites and a slightly larger one of welfare<br />
clients; the &#8220;bulk of the population&#8221; gets shafted, forced to pay the<br />
bill for redistributive programs that wind up doing net damage to<br />
society.  Nor is there any reason, given that the Democrats now rely<br />
more on wealthy contributors than the Republicans, to credit the<br />
worn-out canard that Republicans are tools of the rich.</p>
<p>It is not, however, the factual falsity of Ms. Anderson&#8217;s claim<br />
that is most infuriating, but its smugness, its blind arrogance,<br />
its casual assumption that no reasonable person could possibly<br />
disagree with the premises.  Anyone who decides to reject Julian<br />
Benda&#8217;s analysis need look no further for an explanation of<br />
American anti-intellectualism than this. After reading it, I&#8217;m<br />
almost ready to torch the nearest ivory tower myself.</p>
<p>It is a good thing that the skein finishes (actually, begins) with<br />
David J. Velleman&#8217;s honest puzzlement about conservative notions of &#8220;absolute<br />
evil&#8221;; otherwise, with the taste of Ms, Anderson&#8217;s purblind parochialism<br />
in my mouth, I might have to conclude that Left2Right&#8217;s project is<br />
unsalvageable.</p>
<p>What can we conclude from Left2Right&#8217;s first three weeks of<br />
postings?  My own evaluation begins with praise: comparing with what I<br />
read elsewhere, I think these writers truly do represent the best of<br />
the modern Left.  I see more willingness than I might have expected<br />
to honestly question some of the Left&#8217;s sacred cows.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the news is far from all good.  Too many smug<br />
shibboleths are also being repeated here.  There is too much talk and<br />
not enough listening &ndash; not enough attempt to engage the Right&#8217;s<br />
beliefs (as opposed to a comforting left-wing parody of those beliefs).</p>
<p>Kwame Appiah is right.  If you really want to build a healthy<br />
dialogue with the right-wing majority in America, you need to approach<br />
them not to teach but to <em>learn</em>.</p></p>
