Three Theories

Three theories recommend themselves regarding the current weakness of the American Left.

The first theory: The Left has succumbed to Woody Allen’s Zelig syndrome, that is, it organismically responds to social expectations. Especially hostile expectations. It becomes what its expected to be.  And as the Right has become the active dominant political force, the Left finds itself cringingly changing to meet the Right’s expectation: it becomes weak, disloyal, neurotic, smarmy. This theory depends upon the idea that the left possesses an inherent super-sensitivity to its surroundings. It is something like a chameleon, but far more introspective and perplexed than the typical amphibian. If the Farcical right is impervious to others and shameless in its aggressive pursuit of self-interest, the Left is as permeable as a wet blanket, as resilient as a hummingbird, as constant as the shifting wind. This affliction is not a question of will or self-discipline. As in Mr. Allen’s film, it is the affliction of an essentially polymorphic body, a body lacking the memory for what it truly is.

The 2^nd theory:  the Left bears the full burden of guilt for all of America’s catastrophes while the Right remains curiously immune to remorse. The Left in particular bears the burden for the creation of modernity, for the great modern techno-state, for the perverse castration of the great American white patriarchy, in short for an entire list of real and imaginary crimes to which the Left pleads reflexively, guilty as charged. There is an odd displacement here. One might typically suspect that the Right, at least the religious Right, would be predisposed to the doctrine of original sin. And so would be susceptible equally to guilt, though the guilt of the Right would be by comparison more archaic, more mythopoetic, and more given to fatalism about the future. Curiously, Friedman’s capitalism does not begin with the confession: we will always be violent, we will always be venal, and we will never redeem ourselves by the freedom of our markets alone.

The 3^rd theory concerning the weakness of the left: the age of humanism is drawing to a close. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a schizoid future: humanity multiplies  beyond all limits in slavish adherence to the ideology of production, careening toward a future that is either tragic or absurd, or both. At the same time the networks of information flow, capital, artificial intelligence secretly construct their ziggurat. In this scenario the Left is little more than the canary in the mineshaft.