A Feast of Fools
When the political left eats its own
Yesterday I came across an Instagram video of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek criticizing the excesses of woke culture. Here’s what he said:
The old left was sexual freedom and jokes and so on, but the new left is more moralistic than the right ever was. That's why I'm super opposed to this wokeness and so on, not because I’m a right-winger but because, as Bernie Sanders, my god, the great American left Democrat, said, “The problem with this wokeness is that instead of uniting people, it calls for this sectarian, safe, accusing approach.” You know, it’s not, “Okay, we made this agreement, now we have to beat that—those taxes, those abortion prohibitions. Let’s stack together.” No! It’s like, you say something, then I say, “But didn’t you aware that you’re already sexist there?”
Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher who has been called the “Elvis of cultural theory.” At his best, he’s a Marxist finger in the eye of hegemony. At his worst, he’s a Pez dispenser of hot takes.
Zizek will admit the horrors of communism yet insists on calling himself a communist because “socialist” isn’t edgy enough, as he once told American economist Tyler Cowen:
Everybody is a socialist today. Bill Gates says he’s a socialist, and so on. It’s meaningless. Socialism basically means today you care for society. Hitler cared for society. I don’t care. I just want to signal that, as you nicely said now, something a little bit more radical will be needed.
He also said for years that if he were an American, he would have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Not because he supported Trump, but because he thought Trump would be awful and the backlash would strengthen the left:
If Trump wins it will give a new boost to the left, and it did strengthen. It almost split the Democratic Party, not only Bernie Sanders but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It created, for the first time in I don't know how many decades, a true American left.
Noam Chomsky later remarked, “it was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early 30s.”
Zizek is right about the left eating itself but fails to realize he’s a major player in the game. The endless cultural criticism in which he loves to traffic inevitably leads to petty criticism for its own sake. It becomes a sport. For those like Zizek, it’s a game of chess where the goal is to brilliantly deconstruct a classic opening even if you end with insufficient material for checkmate. For others, it’s a pure bloodsport.
This is not to say we should refrain from evaluating cultural norms, but we should do so discriminately, praising the good and the true. Zizek’s game is to target the good and the true more than anything else, because our beliefs about these things are the columns that hold up the structure he’s trying to tear down.
I was more blunt about Zizek’s remarks when writing on Twitter:
are you kidding me elvis
this is like trump complaining about incivility in american politics
freaking zizek, modern messiah of socialist sophistry and self-described communist, saying the left is “more moralistic than the right ever was” and wokeness is too divisive
is kutcher gonna hop out of a van and stick a mic in our face cause i swear we are being punked right now
bro who do you think popularized the clickbait leftistry that led to gotcha wokism, waddaya think was it maybe the dude they nicknamed the elvis of culture theory?
The political left has been eating its own for as long as there’s been a political left which, by the way, goes back to the French Revolution when the country’s legislative assembly was arranged with the supporters of the Old Regime on the right and the supporters of the Revolution on the left.
Skip ahead to the dawn of communism and there have been meaningful disputes within the movement since Day One. Vladimir Lenin was not the main voice of the movement at first. He was the guy who won and, as they say, the winners get to write the history books. But mainline communism back then was more moderate and the voices of the movement belonged to Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek, who opposed violence and the psychopathic path to revolution that Lenin favored.
The pettiness we see today came into play with communist purity tests, which can be traced back to Lenin and Stalin and their legacy of violent paranoia, purging their own people, sending them to gulags, editing insufficiently loyal supporters out of photographs and so on.
The great American writer Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, wrote an essay for The Atlantic in 1944 in which he described his brief flirtation with the Communist Party and why he decided to leave it. At first, he was impressed.
I lay on my bed and read the magazines and was amazed to find that there did exist in this world an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated […] It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. It seemed to me that here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role.
Wright believed here at last was a philosophy and a movement that fought for the oppressed and cared for the welfare of black people. He took an active interest in their affairs, became editor of their publication, then got his first taste of cancel culture.
At a meeting one night Young asked that his name be placed upon the agenda; when his time came to speak, he rose and launched into one of the most violent and bitter political attacks in the club’s history upon Swann, one of the best young artists. We were aghast. Young accused Swann of being a traitor to the worker, an opportunist, a collaborator with the police, and an adherent of Trotsky […] Swann refuted Young’s wild charges, but the majority of the club’s members were bewildered, did not know whether to believe him or not. We all liked Swann, did not believe him guilty of any misconduct; but we did not want to offend the party.
Wright at least had the integrity to speak up and said, “But Swann isn’t a traitor.”
“We must have a purge,” was the response. It is an ominous moment in the essay and, as a reader, you already know good things are not in store for a reasonable person like Wright. Later on, of course, the woke mob comes for him too, labeling him an intellectual because he is a writer.
“Intellectuals don’t fit well into the party, Wright.”
“But I’m not an intellectual. I sweep the streets for a living.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
Wright tries to reason with his fellow communists, but is told that some folks eventually find the party just isn’t for them and they leave. When Wright says he has no plans of leaving, he is told that folks can also be expelled.
“For what?”
“General opposition to the party’s policies.”
“But I’m not opposing anything in the party.”
“You’ll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty.”
“How?”
“The party has a way of testing people.”
“Well, talk. What is this?”
“How do you react to police?”
“I don’t react to them. I’ve never been bothered by them.”
“Do you know Evans?” he asked, referring to a local militant Negro Communist.
“Yes. I’ve seen him; I’ve met him.”
“Did you notice that he was injured?”
“Yes. His head was bandaged.”
“He got that wound from the police in a demonstration. That’s proof of revolutionary loyalty.”
“Do you mean that I must get whacked over the head by cops to prove that I’m sincere?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m explaining.”
Finally comes the moment in Wright’s account when when these noble communists decide he has failed their purity test and they throw him out—literally.
Hands lifted me bodily from the sidewalk; I felt myself being pitched headlong through the air. I saved myself from landing on my head by clutching a curbstone with my hands. Slowly I rose and stood. Perry and his assistant were glaring at me. The rows of white and black Communists were looking at me with cold eyes of non-recognition. I could not quite believe what had happened, even though my hands were smarting and bleeding. I had suffered a public, physical assault by two white Communists with black Communists looking on.
What haunts him, he explains, is the way the movement presents itself as caring more than anything else about the oppressed, the struggles of black people, but in the end treats people as if their lives are nothing but a means to an end. Wright ends back where he began, more bitter now than before, but still clinging to the hope that despite all this, the rest of us can “keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”
Zizek is in a similar position, awakening to the danger only after the teeth are in his skin. The thing about far-left cancel culture is that their right-wing targets have long ago circled the wagons so campaigns against people such as Trump often result in those targets amassing even more support because they are able to frame themselves and their supporters as persecuted.
As a result, often the most effective cancellation campaigns are the ones that the far-left launches against the moderate left, since classic liberals play by many of the same rules and their audience is more likely to be offended by certain accusations. But there is little that moderate liberals can effectively throw back at the far-left, which means that over time, the beating heart of American liberalism is imploding.
But there’s hope. It may take a decade or more and things will probably get much worse before they get better, but as more moderates feel what Wright felt, and as as more radicals see what Zizek sees, the bladed pendulum will peak and swing the other way.
Sorry no intent to offend. Remember that I subscribed to you. If you are going to educate the population to the danger of communism, then just so. There is no form of socialism or communism that can or does work. It is an ideology that is the antithesis of freedom and prosperity, and leads to economic doom and incredible human suffering. I dont find that message coming through in your writing... rather it seems almost apologetic to left wing ideology which continues to search for the correct form of Marx's craziness that will eventually work. The "chained to your past" comment was meant to illustrate what i see as a collective longing the left has embraced at losing Valahala; that the ridiculous way of organizing society (communism/socialism) just doesn't work. What the population needs to hear is wholesale rejection of the fantasy of "from each according to ability and to each according to need", and recognize the great advances that have been made in just 200 years by organizing under democratic capitalism.
Hi and thanks for replying. I read your article about being shunned by the lefties, and that is why I subscribed. You have talent, and are capable of great good in exposing the lie and deception of the poltical left where "things are free and life is better". However, you remain chained to your past. Break free and embrace the reality that people are better off without the chains of socialism/communism. Write intlstead about how the human race has been freed from literal slavery by capitalism, and how socialism/communism threatens to return us all to that miserable state.