Is the Left Right?

            People who lack a scrupulous attitude toward history are prone to trivialize it with faulty analogies, a tendency especially prominent in the cavalier ease with which they invoke the name of Adolf Hitler, a leader in whom unspeakable evil joined with the arbitrary control of tremendous power in a fashion with few parallels in modern times.  Those parallels do not come close to applying to any American president, including the current one; and I have resisted the rise of Hitler-trivializing disguised as Trump-bashing.  Rapidly developing events of the last week, however, certainly have me thinking about Germany in the early ‘Thirties.

            I refer to street brawls in Kenosha and Portland in which Americans animated by political passion have gunned down compatriots.  Some years ago, quite by accident, I had to become an expert on a book called Out of the Night by Richard Krebs, pseudonym Jan Valtin.  You may well never have heard of it, but it was the best-selling book in this country in 1941.  It purports to be the autobiography of a German merchant sailor and Communist agitator active in the German, Scandinavian, and Belgian seaports beginning in the late ‘Twenties.  Its vivid, blood-curdling accounts of the murderous street fighting between Brown  thugs and Red thugs are undoubtedly founded in the direct reporting of actual experience.  And chilling experience it was.  “Valtin” reports the instructions received from  his Party boss, Heinz Neumann, as he sent his warriors into the streets:  “I want to see bodies!”  The command was obeyed in melees of red flags and swastika banners.  Well, we seem pretty far advanced in importing the model to the streets of American cities, with, no doubt, some pretty terrible people on both sides.

           

            But what are the “sides,” and are there only two of them?  I don’t know the name of the architect who determined the layout of the building in which the French National Assembly gathered in the late eighteenth century, but that person’s possibly unconscious contribution to modern political history was enormous.  For it was essentially the furniture arrangements in that auditorium that established the durable paradigm of the political “left” and the political “right”—a paradigm that despite its manifest inadequacy continues to hold sway over the minds of our politicians, journalists, and opinion-makers, who habitually use the terms with an undeserved confidence in the certainty of their meaning.  In general “left” refers to what is new and experimental, what is progressive in terms of its tendency towards explicit leftist goals believed to be desirable, and what maximizes the perceived needs and desires of social groups and classes deemed to have been unfairly retarded by other groups and classes unfairly possessing unshared resources and political power.  Leftists feel little constraint from historical precedents—at least from the ones of which they disapprove, which means most of them—and some would like to abolish history altogether.  (One of the lines of the Socialist “Internationale” goes “Let us make a blank slate of the past.”)  Conservatives, on the other hand, reverence what they take to be the tried and true, custom, tradition, inherited social and religious institutions of very long duration.  They are not blind to historical sins and  injustices of the past, but as they rarely espouse notions of human perfectibility they tend to avoid, when speaking of their ancestors, the historical opprobrium they would not wish for themselves.  “In seeking to add to the treasury of truths which comprise the capital acquired by the human race, we are the successors of our pious ancestors, who loved the good and the true in the form received in their time”.   So wrote Ernst Renan, one of the great radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century.  And he continued: “ The most distressing error is to believe that one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who founded it.  All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the same book.  The true progressives are those who begin with a profound respect for the past.”

            But how useful is the left/right paradigm?  I have come to the conclusion: not all that useful.  From the historical point of view the traditional oppressors of freedom of action, speech and thought would seem definitely to have been from the right: arbitrary rulers (Caligula), bigoted and obscurantist religious authorities (Torquemada), tyrannical bureaucracies (the Star Camber), and so forth.  These people were forever telling you what you couldn’t do, wear, make, write, say and of course, drink.  I am so old that I grew up in a dry county where the Baptists and the bootleggers joined in silent collusion to augment the social piety of the former and the bank accounts of the latter at the expense of some poor farmer who liked a beer now and then. But already among the French revolutionaries we get the tyrants from the left and the puritan Jacobins of the Committee on Public Safety.  Tyranny frequently comes under the promise of protection.  Lenin’s Cheka was “an organ of social protection.”  Both the Antifa extremists in Portland and the teen-aged gunman in Kenosha were in place—uninvited and unauthorized, of course—ostensibly in order to protect the public from the alleged dangers presented by rampaging racists on the one hand or vandals and looters on the other.  The mention of Lenin can remind us that the champion criminals of the twentieth century were brutal Marxist ideologues in Russia, China, and Cambodia whose accomplishment in human destruction, laid out in the statistics of The Black Book of Communism, make the achievements of the Third Reich in that department seem comparatively modest.  The most shocking display of the myopia of the intellectuals of the 1930s was the belief, still alive and well in today’s academic world, that there was a huge chasm separating Socialism under Stalin from National Socialism under Hitler.  Left?  Or right?

            Lord Falkland, a sort of hyper-Tory of the seventeenth century, uttered the following memorable principle: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”  Whatever you might think of the doctrine, it at least invites the application of mental discrimination in the adjudication of ideas.  There are in our country things urgently in need of change, several of which are gathered within the slogan of “Black lives matter”.  There are suggested changes it would be lunacy to implement, such as “Abolish the police.”  It does absolutely no good either to conflate the two or to assign them to pigeonholes of left or right.

            We ought to be able to agree on some shared good ideas without violent controversy about ideas on which we do not agree.  Here the rediscovery of the Center is much to be desired.  Democratic government should aim to give everyone a voice but nobody a veto.  The good and the true as seen by the founders of our nation and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence seem good and true to me still today.  The fact that we have as yet failed to implement good and true ideas fully is a moral rebuke to us, not an exposure of the debility of the ideas themselves.  The situation actually presents an exhilarating challenge.  For if government of the people, by the people, and for the people should vanish from the earth, the tragedy would be much greater than it would have been at the time of Gettysburg.  For there are now three hundred more million Americans to be betrayed than there were then, and untold millions of others anxiously watching from beyond our shores.