There are certain words from the left’s political lexicon that have disappeared from the landscape. people is one of them. class is another. Ditto workers. And even poverty and misery. Where are these concepts?
Not on the awakened left, more interested in identity dramas, structural racism and gender issues.
Ironically, the people exist only in the rhetoric of the populist right. No wonder many former leftwing voters are flocking to these waters, at least in the US and Europe.
Perhaps that is why Susan Neiman, a respected leftist philosopher, felt it necessary to write the essay Left Is Not Woke (Polity, 160 pages).
The title is misleading, I warn you. Susan Neiman concedes that the awakened left shares the same sentiments as the traditional left. The empathy with the marginalized, the outrage at the oppressors, the will to correct historical injustice all of that is there.
The problem is that in order to achieve these goals, the awakened left commits two deadly sins. The first is to abandon the traditional ideas of the left. The second is to adopt the traditional ideas of the right. These two betrayals are deeply intertwined.
The first great task is to reject universalism and defend tribalism. If we look back over the last 250 years, it was the right that marched against universalism and defended a particularist moral and political conception.
As Joseph de Maistre, that invaluable reactionary, used to say, there are French, Italians, Russians and, thanks to Montesquieu, even Persians. But the notion that there is “the man,” an abstract figure, is nothing more than an absurdity.
One of the great achievements of the left was the defense of an image of humanity that transcended tradition or privilege. If we are all human, it means that we all participate equally in the web of rights and responsibilities set out in law.
The awakened left breaks this universalist claim and tribalizes political discussions and struggles.
But the abandonment continues with the substitution of power for justice. Here the influence of Michel Foucault is immense: when everything is determined by the balance of power in society, talking about justice is nothing more than vain and even perverse rhetoric designed to perpetuate oppression.
Politics is a form of war. And as in war, the fundamental distinction is between “friends” and “foes.” Popularized by Carl Schmitt, the famous jurist of the Third Reich, this idea reduces politics to a deadly struggle for power, neglecting the role of reason in finding feasible solutions and necessary reforms to social problems.
The awakened left was caught up in this strange marriage between Foucault and Schmitt, abandoning the rationalism that had defined it since the Enlightenment in favor of a form of nihilism reserved exclusively for the more radical right.
Finally, the awakened left has also given up the idea of progress. This is explained by an anthropological pessimism, which in turn is shaped by the right.
If history is just a list of barbarities that continues into the present, the awakened left seems blind to the real, tangible progress that the awakened left has failed to make, after all.
Example: As problematic as racism is in today’s societies, it was just as bad a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, or 300 years ago.
The inability to think incrementally, either in terms of the past or in terms of the future, locks the awakened in a permanent nightmare from which it is impossible to get out.
Fact: I disagree with some of Susan Neiman’s arguments. First of all, I find her portrayal of the right caricatured and terribly ahistorical.
For every reactionary she puts forward against the ideas of universalism, justice, or progress (Maistre, Schmitt, etc.), I can counter several rightwing thinkers (Disraeli, Churchill, etc.) who would have no problem defending any of these principles.
Furthermore, Neiman’s ambition to present a single unawakened left seems to ignore the various lefts who, as heirs to the Enlightenment, ultimately had different goals from MarxismLeninism to social democracy. Not all are recommended.
Be that as it may, your essay is a remarkable contribution for the contemporary left to do a little selfanalysis and avoid bad company.