The new totalitarian left

The imbecilic ramblings of someone called David Edgar have elicited this tour de force from Melanie Phillips:

I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh -- and me.

This list is in itself absurd. As Andrew Anthony has pointed out, in renouncing seventh century Islamism, Ed Husain has moved (insofar as these terms still have any meaning) from right to left. As for several of the others, they have merely understood that one cannot be a true progressive and at the same time support the continuation of certain tyrannical regimes that enslave and murder their populations, even if they do belong to the sainted third world. They have shown considerable courage in taking this otherwise obvious position, since it has exposed them to the truly venomous onslaught from their erstwhile comrades. But to say they have therefore moved to the right is absurd. They are all still recognisably men of the left over a whole range of issues; and there are still countries -- notably Israel -- to which some of them still fail to apply the principles they apply to Iraq, America and Islamist tyranny and apply instead the standard knee-jerk left-wing default denunciation.

The reason the article has caused the upset that it has, however, is surely this. For the left, to accuse someone of ‘moving to the right’ is akin to claiming they have put themselves totally beyond the moral pale. Anyone tarred with this dread brush instantly becomes an unperson, to be exiled from civilised society altogether and treated as a pariah. So others on the left who harbour similar feelings of support for overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein or horror at Islamist extremism (which in their innocence they imagine are progressive positions) and who read Edgar’s diatribe wouldn’t think ‘What a berk!’ They would think with a shudder of dread: ‘So would I also be denounced if I were discovered to be thinking this’.

The single most important thing for left-wingers -- what defines them in their own eyes as people of moral worth -- is the fact that they are not ‘right-wing’. For ‘the right’ is a place of unmitigated evil. Only the left is good. So this is how it goes in the left-wing mind...

The reflex reaction of a left-winger, when presented with a set of facts which challenge his or her assumptions about the world, is not to ask ‘Is this true?’ but ‘Will adopting this position make me right-wing?’ It’s not just that to adopt such a heresy would risk social ostracism and worse amongst friends and colleagues. More profoundly, the left-winger really does believe that to be left is good and to be ‘right’ is evil. So adopting even one position which contradicts left-wing thinking (Saddam was a worse tyrant than George W Bush; Israel is the victim not the villain in the Middle East; Islamism is a denial of human rights) risks the total collapse of that left-winger’s entire moral universe. Since that world-view can brook no challenge whatever, the left-winger has to kill off any such challenge stone dead. Which is done by demonising and smearing the challenger. And the bigger the lie that is challenged and the more murderous its consequences, the more savage are the smears and ostracism.

This, of course, is by no stretch of the imagination a progressive attitude. It is instead a totalitarian mindset. As in Edgar’s article, the left claim they are the ‘progressives’ in society -- but the truth is the precise opposite. Nothing new here: the idea that the left were always the heroic opponents of tyranny is merely a self-serving myth invented by the left. From the French Revolution onwards, the left have in fact generally sided with tyrants and oppressors; ever since that time the most ‘progressive’ intellectuals have been fascinated by violence; socialism and national socialism were after all brothers in blood, descending from the same counter-Enlightenment strain of thinking.

All of which is of course, true. And while much of Edgar's article is couched in tortured and tortuous Guardianese, this extract at least is illuminating:

Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.

The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't want a theocratic empire after all'".

This is precisely false. People are suggesting that the socialist Workers Party (but not just the Socialist Workers Party) are adopting an anti-feminist, homophobic, theocratic agenda - because it's the reality. It's not that the SWP et al. are being duped by islamofascists - it's that the totalitarian agenda of theocratic fascism is inherently attractive to the totalitarian mindset of some sections of the left. The old SWP slogan "Left and Right, unite and fight!" has a rather different flavour these days than it did in the 1980s. It is from this species of totalitarian leftism that progressive liberals are increasingly detaching themselves. The scope for a new progressive coalition against the traditional fascism of the right and the less familiar fascism of the totalitarian left is broadening.