Reactionary Tendencies on the Left

Leftists divide the world into themselves and those further to the right, who they sometimes call reactionaries. Accordingly, they often use the term “the reactionary right.” This blog is dedicated to being leftist in a self-critical way, and I want to expose the reactionary tendencies on the left. For whatever reason (and I leave this to the psychologists), these tendencies are ones that somehow today’s leftists cannot see. Anyway, I want to expose their tendencies to coddle the privileged or the wealthy or the powerful against those who aren’t privileged or are poor or are powerless.

It may seem strange to leftists that this could be possible, but it is not only possible, but likely if one isn’t self-critical. I don’t intend to explore this topic in depth or to trace its history, though I should mention Kathleen M. Blee’s Women of the Klan, in particular, the following quote: “Some of the women I interviewed who participated fully and enthusiastically in the Klan, expressing few regrets, were active in progressive politics, favoring peace and women’s equality in the decades after the Klan collapsed” (p. 6). Meanwhile, here are several areas in which I’ve detected reactionary tendencies among today’s leftists.

1. Multiculturalism. The idea behind multiculturalism is that we ought to respect other cultures. The trouble with this is that some other cultures are reactionary or at least have reactionary practices, so it is rather strange for leftists to want people to respect reactionaries. Yet, that is what leftists today are demanding.

2. Islam. The left today, though not in any way forced to, insists upon allying itself with the most reactionary elements in Islam. (Obviously, this is connected with what I just said about multiculturalism.) These are the elements that promote sexist and homophobic policies, as well as having dangerous theocratic fantasies that are diametrically opposed to the secularism of today’s leftists. People on both the right (such as Daniel Pipes) and the left (such as Paul Berman) have pointed out that there are liberal Muslims with whom the left could ally itself and who find themselves frustrated by the lack of support from Western leftists. But this hasn’t made any dent in leftist policies. I’ve already explored the reasons for this curious behavior here and here.

3. Poor whites. With the advent of the Sixties, the left changed its focus from poor whites to blacks, women, homosexuals, and the environment. Poor whites were left behind. In 1960, a poor white male could consider himself the main focus of the left, but by 1980, he found that leftists considered him as privileged as any rich white male. Poor whites do not benefit from affirmative action the way that other groups do. It’s as though being poor and white simply doesn’t count in any way as being a disadvantage in the eyes of leftists.

4. The jobs crisis in academia. In the late 1980s, there were many articles in newspapers such as the New York Times claiming that there would be a professor shortage in the 1990s. Alas, that shortage of professors never materialized. Instead, there was a shortage of jobs. How to deal with this problem? To begin with, the basic reaction of nearly everyone in academia was to do nothing. Liberal and leftist professors who have denounced the harshness of the free market nevertheless chose, by their inaction, a free-market solution. But there was worse. One of the few who realized that there was a terrible crisis was Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, who wrote about his fellow leftists’ failures in a book entitled Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. The worst incident occurred at Yale in 1995, when grad students were so frustrated at their lack of job prospects that they formed a union. This union at one point decided, as a way to get the administration to do their bidding, to withhold grades. And how did their leftist professors respond to this?

“Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own courses, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the union's] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades.... Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given...." (page 143).

Nelson said that he would have preferred not to name names, but the action was so egregious that he felt he had to. Unfortunately, the left simply ignored this incident. Just as unfortunate is the fact that conservatives seem entirely unaware of it or of its significance.

5. Deadbeat dads who aren’t dads. Every now and then a case emerges of a man who owes child support even though he isn’t the biological father of the child in question. The mother has named him as the father, and that is all that seems to be required. Here is the latest such case. Obviously, for the government to demand money from a man under such circumstances is unjust and unfair. Leftists, who insist that they want fairness, should be screaming about this. Instead, they are unmoved and indifferent.

6. Environmentalism. Leftists want to push the price of gas up to five dollars per gallon, yet it ought to be perfectly obvious that if leftists push the price of gas up that high, then poor people are likely to be hurt. Even if they don’t own a car, they will be hurt by the resulting rise in the prices of just about everything else. Yet, most leftists do not even think about this possibility. Apparently, they think that if a policy is good for the environment, it doesn’t count as hurting the poor. Or they think that that money will be used in a way that will somehow help the poor. But that the poor will be hurt is a certainty, while that they will be helped is at best a probability and at worst an unlikely possibility.

There are all kinds of other ways that environmentalists hurt the poor. Sometimes their policies can destroy jobs. Nicholas D. Kristof, in a rare instance when a liberal actually figured things out, wrote a column (Nov. 4, 2004) in which he pointed out that in his hometown in rural Oregon, the locals looked with disdain on Democrats because they “empathize with spotted owls rather than loggers.” Worrying about spotted owls will impose costs on the logging industry, and that ultimately means either lower wages for loggers or less jobs.

More often, however, environmental policies impose needless costs on the poor in their everyday lives away from work. The other day I mentioned an incident when my wife and I were poor and we had to pay to get our car “fixed” because it failed to pass a vehicle-emissions test. This is the sort of environmental demand that hurts the poor more than the rich, because rich people are likely to have the newest cars that will always pass such tests. Plus, fixing it doesn’t cost them very much in terms of the percentage of their income. Why hurt the poor this way?

Another example is that of endangered species, which has given rise to a saying, one that is seldom heard by the environmentalists, but is common in conservative circles: If you find a rare mineral on your property, you will become rich, but if you find a rare species, you will become poor. The reason is that if you find a rare species, suddenly the feds will swoop in and demand that all kinds of actions be taken to protect that species, actions that will cost you money.

A few years ago, some conservative legislators tried to address this issue by demanding that the government offer compensation to property owners. Predictably, the environmentalists were angry. One of them, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, said that the effort sets a “dangerous precedent that private individuals must be paid to comply with an environmental law. What’s next? Paying citizens to wear seat belts?” (Columbus Dispatch, 9/30/05, A8) This must be one of the few times in history when the right has been more generous with the government’s money than the left. I suppose that leftists will maintain that all property owners are rich, and so don’t need any government handouts. This is just plain naive, but anyway, the obvious liberal solution would be to give a handout that is inversely proportional to the property owner’s wealth.

Another example appeared in a column in The Washington Post that was written after the 2004 election (1/16/05, p. W12). The author, David Von Drehle, wanted to find out what people outside the Beltway were thinking that made them vote for Bush when it clearly wasn’t in their own self-interest to do so. He recounts the story of a town in Nebraska where, during the Clinton administration, the Environmental Protection Agency demanded that the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water be lowered from 50 parts-per-billion to 10. As one resident put it, “Now all over Nebraska, villages are having to build new water treatment plants to remove a naturally occurring element.” This costs a lot of money, money that residents believe is wasted, since arsenic had always been in their water. Plus they now have to worry about how to dispose of it since it is considered hazardous waste. The federal government will loan them money to pay for all this, but it would make more sense just to refrain from doing it.

Finally, we come to global warming. Almost certainly, whatever the environmentalists propose to do about this nonexistent problem will wreak havoc on the economy, and this will help the poor not at all. Another leftist who agrees with me is Alexander Cockburn, who points out that the new car in India (the Tata Nano), which is the cheapest car in the world, is great for poor people, but predictably environmentalists are against it because it will simply add greatly to carbon emissions.

However, instead of discussing all the dirty details of how any given policy is likely to hurt the poor, I want to talk instead about the foundation of belief in global warming: peer review. Whenever we skeptics raise our voices against global warming, we are told that global warming must be happening, because the science is backed by peer review. As a victim of peer review, I’m the last person in the world to accept such nonsense. Peer review is rich people stomping on poor people, those with the majority view stomping on those with a minority view, the people in a subfield that has the most numbers stomping on those in subfields with fewer numbers, and the well-connected stomping on the poorly-connected. At one time it was anti-Semites stomping on Jews, sexists stomping on feminists, and probably whites stomping on blacks. Basically, peer review is the powerful stomping on the powerless. As such, it is reactionary to support it in its current form.

Not only this, but believing that peer review is reliable means listening to those at the top only and not also to those at the bottom, which is a practice that leftists claim ought to be done. It also goes directly against the skepticism that leftists have about the criminal-justice system. Leftists are suspicious of our criminal-justice system, despite many checks and balances such as a judge, an independent jury, defense attorneys, carefully defined procedures, and an appeals system. Yet, they implicitly trust peer review, which has no checks and balances at all. Why?

Finally, those of us who complain about peer review face a Catch-22 situation, namely that those who think peer review is reliable will listen only to those who have been treated well in the peer-review system, but such people have no reason to complain, so they don’t. The rest of us do have reason to complain, but we are thought of as not very bright, because if we were bright, we would have gotten our articles published (and so would have been treated well in this system). And since we aren’t very bright, our criticisms can be dismissed because they aren’t supported by those who are bright. This mentality cries out for leftists to go on the attack, but instead they praise it. It seems that the only other leftist who is skeptical about peer review (and global warming) is Alexander Cockburn, who has sneered at peer review as follows: “Peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle.”

These, then, are some of the reactionary tendencies that one can find these days on the left. They are by no means all of them, but the fact that there are any at all will be shocking to most leftists.

Comments

[Michael Valle]

Excellent post!

[Irish Cicero]

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[TL]

Excellent.

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[Ymarsakar]

This was how the Left began. People are only seeing it now because the curtains have been removed from those pulling the strings.

It was always like this. People just didn't notice in the past.

[Thomas McDonald]

Very well stated criticism which shows where the left defeats itself. I consider myself left of center, however, for all the reasons you've stated here, I feel alien from most these days who wear 'leftist' on their sleeves.

[John Pepple]

Thomas McDonald: Me too. I think of myself as an egalitarian, but I don't trust the other egalitarians very much, and so I end up siding with the libertarians. Maybe some day the left will reform itself, and I can trust them again.

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Great post, and it's important to focus attention on these tradeoffs rather than having each side just cheer for their own applause lines. Environmentalism and helping the poor, for example, are both great applause lines on their own. But folks are often too busy fighting against the villains on the right who oppose both to stop and notice the inherent contradictions between the two.