Bonfire of the Vanities

Why the Left needs ideas.

In the summer of 1789 Louis XVI called the États generaux or Estates General, an old, pseudo-parliament, that had not been assembled in over a 150 years. The Third Estate, representing the majority of the population, took the occasion on 17th of June to differentiate themselves as a self standing National Assembly, and then, in the Tennis Court Oath, emphasized their intention to establish a national constitution. Those initial actions set the stage for sharp divisions to emerge across the summer within the Assembly regarding which reforms were needed, and what, if any, role the monarchy should continue to play in French governance. 

Our terms “right” and “left” date to this period. After the Assembly relocated to Paris—and after the storming of the Bastille—different factions gradually developed the habit of standing in different locations relative to the speaker during Assembly debates based on their views regarding how radical the reforms were that were needed.

The spreading of the terms “right” and “left” as broader political categories didn’t happen particularly quickly. Even in France, the words ended up being applied fairly inconsistently into the nineteenth century, and didn’t seem to migrate across the Atlantic in any serious way until the twentieth. 

Our now almost universal use of these terms is, however, a testament to the way that the French Revolution — perhaps even more than the American — has come to be the archetypal event of modern politics. A distinction originating in a turbulent domestic conflict in late eighteenth-century France has become a quasi-eternal line — floating alongside Plato’s Forms — onto which essentially all political arguments, ideologies, parties, institutions, countries, governance systems, and people can and should be judged.

***

There have been three significant brush fires in the last week regarding how American media relates to ideals.¹

First, Vanity Fair published a long exposé entitled “Why is a Progressive Mega-Donor Funding Right-Wing Ideas?” In the piece, Andrew Fedorov describes how Open Society Foundations have decided to fund a whole variety of small and medium-sized publications including primarily left-leaning outlets like Dissent and The Baffler, but also including Sohrab Ahmari’s Compact. The article criticizes OSF on the basis that Compact “has consistently amplified perspectives that would seem to undermine the foundation’s liberal project.”

Secondly, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate this cycle, causing deep antagonisms to surface, particularly at the Post. In a major editorial published in the wake of the conflict, Jeff Bezos himself justified his decision: 

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom … Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working …

I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?

In a third incident, CNN, which has been working to involve genuine clash of views in their offerings — had a very heated encounter between two of their guests on NewsNight. As Mehdi Hasan emphasized his support for the Palestinians, conservative writer Ryan Girdusky said “I’ve never called you an anti-Semite … I just hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” referring to the Israeli attack on members of Hezbollah earlier this autumn. CNN issued on air and written apologies for the incident:

We aim to foster thoughtful conversations and debate including between people who profoundly disagree with each other in order to explore important issues and promote mutual understanding. But we will not allow guests to be demeaned or for the line of civility to be crossed. Ryan Girdusky will not be welcomed back at our network.

***

The question of the role ideas should play in society is acute for the Left in a way that is not true for the Right, and it has been from the beginning.

The Right, as it developed in Europe in the wake of the Revolution, could always fall back on arguments for stasis, that is, for the slowing down the pace of change. When making a case against the Revolution, the Right did not need to argue that it violated any great ideal of Justice or Natural Law, but simply that it upset prior stability. Order is hard enough to achieve — don’t mess it up.

But the Left has a harder case to make. Its vision of politics is not accidentally, or even occasionally, idealistic. It is idealistic by design. The Left exists to push toward a vision of society that could be. This orientation means not only that the Left sees a role for societal upheaval, but also that it is constantly in need of metaphysical renewal. 

This forward-looking orientation implies a constant desire for Justice, which creates a whole series of problems. For one thing, there is a temporal issue. Is a single revolution enough? Perhaps one successful uprising is sufficient to overthrow injustice and need not be repeated? But if Justice is as big as claimed, doesn’t one need to keep looking for it over and over again? And if so, how often is revolution needed? Perpetually?

Secondly there is an infrastructure problem. If the original cause of the French Revolution was the experience of being trapped in structures that are fixed, static, and exploitative — what of the new structures that are created after “progress” or revolution? Are they also destined with each decade and generation to become newly static and exploitative? Or is it the case that that since they were created in a moment of straining toward justice, that they are somehow elevated above those problems? Even if one does take something of the latter, rosier view, does that then mean that the new protectors of society are justified in using violence to protect those achievements as the new status quo?

A key thing to emphasize is that these tensions play out entirely within the pro-revolution factions. So much of the turbulence of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France arose from conflicting views about what it meant to do a revolution properly. How do we achieve a moral insight worth fighting for? Have we already achieved it such that the only problem remaining is implementation? And if we have achieved implementation, who can protect those gains without retrenching back into the old patterns of hierarchy and exploitation?

Here’s where the problems begin to feel all too familiar. Our media debates have been ensnared for almost a decade in a familiar mess of conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, there is the view of media as a neutral, vaguely empty convener, just setting the stage, allowing things to go where they will (until they “violate civility”). On the other, media is seen as a gatekeeper, vetting good opinions, maybe even endorsing specific political ideals, parties, and politicians, and certainly keeping out “bad” ones. 

Both of these views misdiagnose our situation. Our current problems do not come from a breakdown in civility, nor from a lack of institutional protection for democracy, nor even from a need for a more neutral media.

As I’ve argued before, the tendency for liberal parties to adapt polite technocratic management as their default idiom, is a sign of the profoundest ill-health. Societies which began with the highest moral aspirations have somewhere along the way fallen back to a sense that moral vision is easy. We already know the right answer, everything else is just a lack of implementation. Comforting as these dispositions may be, they serve to mask the degree to which we have slipped into an age of intellectual mediocrity.

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Vanity Fair article, I made it clear that I think OSF, and Lenny Benardo who is specifically criticized in the essay, have exactly the right theory about how the left should navigate this period. I take the point of stimulating an entire ecosystem of small publications — of every stripe from Dissent to Liberties to Wisdom of Crowds and yes, to Compact — is nothing so aggrandizing as thinking that any one of these places is going to come up with “the right” answers, but rather to recognize the absolutely logically rigorous point that the Left needs ideas. 

Overstating our moral certainty won’t cut it for this period. Nor will smug dismissals of suspect ideas. Nor will claims to objectivity or neutrality that haven’t earned it.

The greatest need at the moment is to escape our intellectual stupor, and for this, we are in desperate need of contestation. Vigorous contexts in which the Left can begin to think metaphysically again. In which we are forced to contend with the full complexity of life. In which we learn again just how hard — and essential — it is to make first principle arguments about the nature of the world, and of human beings. And we need to set aside the petty sense that ideals are easy, and instead get back to the serious business of straining toward reality, of trying to grasp what really is the case.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

1. I almost decided to write on a different topic for this week, since two of the parties involved in these debates relate in some way to our funding. We receive direct support from Open Society for Wisdom of Crowds. Aspen Institute for whom I work (though not the Philosophy & Society Initiative which I direct) just received a large gift from the Bezos Family Foundation. In the end, these issues feel significant enough that it’s important to weigh in.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!