Leaving Marx out of the Left
According to many Republicans, any political notions even slightly to the left of their contemporary brand of nationalist theocracy combined with capitalism for the rich is communism, a word that they will exchange for Nazism, cultural Marxism, and wokeism for the appearance of variety, but which all come down to meaning whatever they do not like at present, be it clean water, a lack of obligatory Protestant prayer in schools, the renaming of a military base—their lists go on and on.
Having become politically aware in the 1980s, I can remember the days when the party enjoyed such intellectuals as William F. Buckley, Jr. and George Will, conservatives with whom I disagreed even at my tender age but who at least showed evidence of reading books and wrestling with their contents. And then came Pat Buchanan’s speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992 in which he declared in that America was in the midst of a “religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” He was by no means the first fascist in the party, and the excessive influence therein of right-wing Christianity had been made clear to me already, but I understood his speech to be a declaration of existential struggle, not the ordinarily ferocious brawling that has always been the country’s politics, but a total war in which no compromises would be possible.
As a child of the last third of the Cold War, the idea of binary conflicts feels familiar, but I have since had to learn that conflicts need not be simple oppositions, two sides that with mutual exclusivity demand that we choose one as the good, the other automatically being assigned the role of evil. Republicans would have us believe, like their fascist brethren in 1920s Germany, that we today have only their nationalist ideology or globalist communism as options, as if such entities as Eisenhower Republicans or the center-right party that is this country’s Democrats are nothing but phantasms and all other political points of view can be ignored.
Said Republicans will be outraged at my claim that the Democratic Party is center-right, but I regard any notion that Joe Biden and the rest of the leadership are communists as something beneath contempt. There was a time—between, say, Al Smith and Lyndon Johnson—when the party could reasonably identify themselves as moderate social democrats, and there have been voices within from Henry Wallace to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have called for a move leftward, but the progressive spirit stagnated under Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton sold the party for temporary personal and organizational gains, leaving a third to a half of the political spectrum abandoned by any major representation, depending on the day and the issue under debate.
This may make the binary of the first half of the twentieth century—communism or fascism—look inevitable, and that is how the ideologues of each authoritarian political philosophy want us to see things, but I am here to advocate for a liberal approach.
Despite what many leftists claim, liberalism and socialism are not necessarily opposed. Socialism, as its name indicates, is concerned with collective action, and Marx and his followers certainly have taken on board the idea that one’s identity, value, and rights are derived from the class to which one belongs, but this is not the only solution. One core error of group-based ideologies is their susceptibility to treating members of a group as identical copies, one as good, worthy, or useful as all others and thereby available for sacrifice or promotion as is most convenient to the persons making such decisions.
What I see as the desirable political system is a liberal socialism in which we all participate as willing contributors and deserving beneficiaries, rather than as so many atoms in a crystal structure. Marx would have us believe that we are particles in the stream of time, pushed along by the forces of history, and while that might be how the universe works, I see insufficient evidence to make this interpretation necessary. For the sake of human flourishing, I hope very much that he was in error, the years since his time having shown that centering value and rights on groups prepares the ground for atrocities.
A liberal approach, by contrast, respects the moral agency of each person. “Liberal” says nothing about which economic model we are to adopt, other than to exclude systems that benefit the few and enslave the many. One can be a liberal capitalist or a liberal socialist, for example, without hypocrisy or contradiction. As a leftist, I favor the latter, seeing cooperative effort that we consciously and freely choose as the best on the argument that participants who know what they are doing and believe in doing it are most likely to reach their goals and that a system that is grounded on individual rights structures itself against horrors for the sake of convenience.
Thus, though I have no hope that Republicans will acknowledge the fact, I am not a Marxist. I wish that their party would permit diversity in their ranks. In the short term, their monolithic ideology has the advantage of coherence, but as Will Rogers ought to have said, I am a member of no organized party. I am a leftist. And individual molecules of water have a talent for working their ways into the spaces of rigid edifices.