What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

скачать книгу бесплатно


I use the Left as a generalization. It is not an exact term because it is very hard to say what it means, but you know the Left when you see it, and there were times when it felt like the right word. Overall, however, I try to be specific. The far left refers to the few remaining Leninists who still believe, or pretend to believe, that they can seize power and introduce a totalitarian state. If they stood alone, they wouldn’t be worth bothering with, but they have merged into a much wider and more incoherent alliance which has little to offer beyond a rootless rage. Academics, students, readers of and writers for most leftish newspapers and all but the bravest Muslim and poor world intellectuals share this group’s defining unwillingness to condemn crimes that can’t be blamed on the West. Occasionally I call them Chomskyans, after Noam Chomsky, the American linguist whose flighty behaviour I look at in Chapter 6 (#ud0d1a9f4-b627-55e9-b261-7420b2395c3d). At other times, I call them nihilists because of their wilful refusal to put an agenda before the public. Because they don’t have a positive programme, it is difficult to think of a better label, although I accept that one is needed because they are the dominant left-wing force today.

A difference as large as the gulf between the democratic and totalitarian left is that between the working-class left, which generally fights for better pay and conditions, and the middle-class left which tends to be more interested in social and sexual liberalism. I call the trade unions and their supporters in the labour and social democratic parties the old left. For all the condescension directed at them, they are often the people who behave best in a crisis, as we shall see in Chapter 10 (#u83b44012-e880-5812-acce-610eb74e89ae). I call the middle-class left the liberals, not in the derogatory manner of American conservatives, but so I can talk about progressive middle-class opinion as a whole, and include Liberal Democrats in Britain, liberal-minded Christian Democrats and Gaullists in Europe and Democrats in the United States, as well as middle-class supporters of the labour and social democratic parties.

The one movement that I found very hard to classify is New Labour, which is probably why it won so many elections.

I use the liberal-left as a cover-all term for every shade of left opinion.

I accept that there are dozens of other tribes and traditions on the Left, but if I acknowledged them all I would lose you in a forest of footnotes. You can’t write clearly without generalizations, and these are mine.

PART ONE Morbid Symptoms (#ulink_96fc675e-1151-58e3-9149-7111301896e6)

Yet it is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility.

Norman Cohn, 1996