Why Do Intellectuals Favour the Left?

We just had a very good piece by Sallust on the psychological frailty of our brothers and sisters on the political Left: of all those people who shouted at you during COVID-19, and of all those people who send you emails asking you how you could be so irresponsible as to ignore the climatocalypse.

That article was about psychology. This one is made of sterner stuff. It is for the boys. It is about logic.

It is about the logic of the Left.

Why do intellectuals favour the Left? Or, let me historicise, why have they favoured them since the 1930s, possibly the 1880s, hell’s bells, possibly the 1820s – and why has this Mill / Shaw / Tawney / Hobsbawm / Žižek Leftism become wholly accepted and even dominant in the universities since the 1960s?

Well. 

It is for exactly the same reason that the Left is wrong. ‘Why is the Left wrong?’ is the same question as ‘Why do intellectuals favour the Left’?

But before I answer that question, you may well ask, do intellectuals and academics favour the Left? Yes. Next question. Evidence? Any study of academic voting preferences since the 1980s. Ask Matt Goodwin for details. I was at university as an undergraduate and graduate in the 1990s, and noticed that there was a gentle, good-natured consensus which meant that liberal-Leftism was silently favoured. I disliked it, but barely understood it, especially in my contemporaries. Only very slowly did I discover that all these charming cynical-idealistic people did not share my sort of cynicism-idealism: they all cheered, together as one, surprisingly to me, not surprisingly to anyone else, when Blair was elected, and Clinton. I was in the room on both occasions, looking round, seeing no one disagreeing. I was so perplexed that I voted for Hague’s Tories – the only time I have voted – simply out of silent protest against what I considered the terrible enthusiasm for Blair in ’97.

Now the answer to the question, or two questions.

Why is the Left wrong?

Why do intellectuals favour the Left?

The answer is ‘Synecdoche’.

Synecdoche is, simply, a rhetorical term which refers to any term in which a part stands for a whole. 

Left politics, equally simply, is any politics in which a part stands for a whole.

And where the part is a bright idea, or a marvellous possibility, an appealing suggestion.

Left politics is ‘What if?’ politics. 

Left politics is ‘Don’t trouble about the consequences’ politics. 

Left politics is ‘Ignore every other consideration’ politics.

It is Blue Sky politics. Blue Hair politics. Bull Shit politics. One Policy to Save the World politics. Miliband politics. Stay Home Save Lives politics. Supreme Court politics. Tax and Spend politics. Boo-Hoo Politics. Hate Politics. Don’t Worry about Defence or Energy or Law and Order politics.

It takes miniature ideas, framed a few inches by a few inches, and imposes them on our thousand-mile reality.

It sees the world, shouts ‘Equality!’, dismisses all ‘deniers’ with the word ‘Inequality!’, equates ‘Equality’ with this or that brilliant suggestion and harvests the world.

It sees a graph, perhaps based on dubious evidence, shouts ‘Net Zero!’ and insists on a complete evisceration of our energy supply. 

It sees someone rich, shouts ‘Capitalism!’ or ‘Neoliberalism!’ and engages in an intensive politics of envy.

It enables cynicism to corral and regiment a phalanx of idealists and opportunists into a neat extractive class-system of expropriation.

I am interested here in why it appeals to the idealists.

A Left politics is, on the face of it, a politics of bright ideas: or, more likely, at any one time it is a politics of one bright idea. This is why it is wrong, and so successful. It is an impatient politics, which prates of ‘progress’ or, more likely nowadays, of ‘being progressive’: and which judges everything by an arbitrary criterion. And it is because it is a politics of bright ideas, and ideas need argument, explanation, justification, that academics and intellectuals like it: or perhaps I should say pseudo-academics and pseudo-intellectuals like it. Since they can pose as having ideas. (Or, at least, one idea.)

It is a mistake often made by intellectuals to think that their ideas are a map of the world, or a red thread running through the cosmos or the key to the universe as well as the key to all mythologies. Intellectuals overrate intellect. Even I overrate intellect, and the only thing that limits intellect is having enough intellect to be able to recognise the need for a limit to intellect.

Those on the Left use their magnificent intellects to attempt to form a representation in their mind, or on paper, of all reality. Then they deny that this is an abstraction, by arguing that to abstract from reality is to take out one part of it, and they ostentatiously declare that this is not what they are doing. They think they are looking at everything: and perhaps they are, but from a vertiginous moral angle: and through the ice shard from the Snow Queen’s heart. 

It is all based on a very simple mistake. The mistake is to think that once one has brought reality into one’s mind, carefully, without excising anything – in so far as this can be done – that one has got reality in one’s mind and can act on that reality, critically or otherwise, in a responsible manner. One cannot. Talk of totality as much as you like, you are still engaging in abstraction: for even the rendering of a supposed totality of reality into a mental construction is still a construction, an abstraction, a part standing for the whole. And so what we have here is the delusion of those who think that the part they possess, the abstraction they contemplate, is a totality that is also reality: and so they are in a position to tell us what to do, what is right, what is just, what is ordered, what is inevitable.

The Right, by contrast, is unappealing to intellectuals and academics. Why? Because it operates with a self-denying ordinance. What is a self-denying ordinance? It is a restriction one imposes on oneself. Here, the self-denying ordinance is that one will never ever speak of reality in such a way as to suggest that one is an authority about it. Theory is one thing; practice another. Anything one thinks is theoretical. Anything one does is practical. And then there is the further question of what one is (which is, dare I say, a Right sort of question). Quiller Couch paraphrased a Robert Browning poem to suggest that we are concerned with What one does, What one knows and What one is, and that the third is more important than the second, the second more important than the first. Zizek, Hobsbawm, Badiou, Negri, Deleuze or someone would have dismissed this as part of an empty imperial and aristocratic manufacture of codes enabling the downtrodden to be intimidated by a tone of voice all over the world by an incomprehensible imperial class. They have a point. But they also do not have a point: because even though one always can explain something in low or instrumental terms, as ideology, one must respect the intrinsic nature of a thing, its high explanation.

The Left knows no self-denying ordinance. It knows irony, but only irony against others, not irony against self.

The indirection of the Left is tangled up in its view of time, and its insistence on progress. The Left attempts to take reality and turn it into a totality. It wants to see it as a whole: it has the encyclopaedic impetus. But it wants to do this in order to make time part of this totality, so that what we see, when reality becomes totality, is tendency. Now, this simply does not work, cannot work, until we have the idea of progress. Structurally, the Left takes totality, incorporates an awareness of time into it and so postulates progress. But then it recognises, empirically rather than hypothetically, the interruptions of progress, the countermovements to progress, the failure of progress: and so it complicates, through intensification, the study of reality-totality-history. This is magnificent. It is wild. It is Herculean. But it is angst-ridden. The Left has a purpose. It wants to add a shoulder to the axle of world history. In fact, it ends up throwing a spear in the spokes of world history: the sharp spear of some brazen and brash and bright idea.

Spanners in the machine; butterflies on the wheel: cause and consequence of Left politics.

It will take an almighty civilisational change for us to see through this absolute rubbish: especially now the Left is entrenched, Western and Nice. Oh, and Dim. For the moment, the Gramscian / Guardian establishment of a vast convinced and hypocritical Left at the centre of the establishment intellectuality of the world is so total that it is hard to see how to overturn it.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.