Many people on the right hate the left, and the feeling is entirely mutual. I believe, however, that more people on the right find the left simply inexplicable.
They cannot understand how people manage to wrap themselves into such ideological contortions on behalf of ideas that appear to be not just bizarre but utterly insane, such as that men and become women and vice-versa; that a tiny Jewish state somehow rules the world; that an ideology historically proven a failure can somehow work the next time around; that bad urban governance can be cured by more bad urban governance; that officials who have never worked a real job can somehow run vast industries better than those who have; that taking guns away from the law-abiding can prevent gun violence by the criminal; and so on.
The list is long.
The truth, however, is that the appeal of the left is not inexplicable. In fact, there is much about the left that is extremely seductive.
First, there is the left’s most fundamental belief: that the world can be improved. It’s clear to any thinking person that the world as it is cannot be seen as a particularly good place in many ways. It is often cruel, certainly corrupted and fallen and tends toward chaos, instability and war.
For the most part, people on the right and especially Burkean conservatives believe that there is nothing to be done about this. The world is as it is; it will not change; and the best we can do is attempt to ameliorate the worst of it.
The left rejects this with every fiber of its being. It does not believe in amelioration; it believes in redemption. At its most moderate, it holds that this redemption can be achieved by incremental human action. At its most extreme, it believes that redemption is inevitable whatever we do. This is expressed best by one of the left’s favorite slogans: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” To the rightist, this is absurd; to the leftist, it is an article of faith.
Herein lies the seduction, because this catechism offers, above all, hope. In a fallen world, hope is among humankind’s most precious commodities, and it has enormous motive force and power. It brings people together in a common purpose, creates community and solidarity with others, fosters a deep optimism and the commensurate sense of happiness and enlists people in a redemptive cause. The right’s puzzlement at the appeal of this is, it must be said, blinkered at best.
The conservatives who reject redemptive hope are a throwback to pagan Stoicism.
Moreover, the belief in redemptive hope is not new. In fact, it is almost a civilizational reflex. As atheist as the left can appear and as strongly as those on the right believe it is alien to Western civilization, this aspect of left-wing thinking is rooted deep in the Judeo-Christian tradition and monotheist civilization in general. Indeed, it exists almost nowhere else, with most civilizations believing or having believed in a cyclical or inert understanding of history and time. In many ways, it is the conservatives who reject redemptive hope who are the civilizational outliers—a throwback to pagan Stoicism.
The second great appeal of the left is its intense moralism. It is one of the right’s great mistakes to see the left as amoral, nihilistic or relativist. In fact, the left is a movement of absolute moral certainty. It sees its ethos of compassion, egalitarianism, altruism, empathy, generosity and the pursuit of justice for the wretched of the earth—again originating in the Judeo-Christian tradition—as the only moral approach to the world. As such, the left is always on the side of the angels, which is a place a great many human beings wish to be however absurd the self-image might appear to opponents.
Of course, this has its dark side. The moralist approach is always intensely Manichean. That is, it sees the world as divided between forces of light and darkness, morality and immorality, good and evil; hence the left’s tendency to see the right as not mistaken but monstrous.
The seductiveness of this should be obvious: It makes the leftist part of a great crusade, a revolt against the armies of the adversary. There is a thrilling righteousness to this, a sense of the intoxication of combat, the experience of the euphoria of war for those who shrink from physical confrontation. This may, in fact, be the reason behind the left’s attraction to terrorism and state violence. It allows leftists to experience the vicarious pleasures of justified carnage.
Among the most extreme leftists, however, this violence ceases to be vicarious, and this is where the left can collapse into the horrific. Savonarola-like, the left sometimes preaches that the forces of light are justified in doing anything to beat back the forces of darkness. Indeed, as one of the left’s favorite slogans openly states, they believe they are entitled to use “any means necessary” in service of the crusade or, if you prefer, jihad. It may be this shared belief in holy war that, along with antisemitism, has forged the left’s bizarre alliance with radical Islam.
In the face of all this, people on the right are going to have to face something very uncomfortable: The left is not just seductive; it is inevitable. It is as much a product of Western civilization as the right. Its ideology may be unrealistic and counterproductive, but it cannot be effaced, because it draws upon the theological and philosophical forces that have driven the West since the Roman emperor Constantine became a partisan of Christianity.
Great good has come of this civilization, and the left has, at times, done great good. To understand the left’s appeal, however, the right must accept that, even when the left does great evil, it is not alien to the West that conservatives so wish to preserve. If the West is to be preserved, the left, like it or not, will be preserved with it.
