The Death of the Left

Michael Ledeen at NRO argues convincingly that the Left -- or at least its twentieth century incarnation -- is dead. The irony, according to Ledeen, is that some of the ideas associated with radical leftism (such as exportation -- in some respects, by force -- of democracy and freedom) have increasingly become conservative principles.

Ledeen also nails the Left's failure to understand America or to come to terms with some American historical anomalies:

Thus the ideology of the Left became anachronistic, even in western Europe, its birthplace and the source of its historical model. But the biggest change was the emergence of the United States as the most powerful, productive, and creative country in the world. It was always very hard for the Left to understand America, whose history, ideology, and sociology never fit the Left's schemas. Even those who argued that there were class divisions in America had to admit that the "American proletariat" had no class consciousness. The political corollary was that there was never a Marxist mass movement in the United States. Every European country had big socialist parties and some had substantial Communist parties; the United States had neither. Indeed, most American trade unions were anti-Communist. As Seymour Martin Lipset and others have demonstrated, the central ideals of European socialism, which inspired many American leftist intellectuals, were contained in and moderated by the American Dream. America had very little of the class hatred that dominated Europe for so long; American workers wanted to get rich, and believed they could. Leftist Europeans, and the bulk of the American intellectual elites, believed that only state control by a radical party could set their societies on the road to equality.

The success of America was thus a devastating blow to the Left. It wasn't supposed to happen. And American success was particularly galling because it came at the expense of Europe itself, and of the embodiment of the Left's most utopian dream: the Soviet Union. Even those Leftists who had been outspokenly critical of Stalin's "excesses" could not forgive America for bringing down the Soviet Empire, and becoming the world's hyperpower. As Marx and Hegel would have understood, the first signs of hysterical anti-Americanism on the Left accompanied the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The resurgence of American economic power and the defeat of the Soviets exposed the failure of the Left to keep pace with the transformation of the world. The New York intellectual who proclaimed her astonishment at Reagan's election by saying, "I don't know a single person who voted for him," well described the dialectical process by which an entire set of ideas was passing into history.

Read the whole thing.