Utopianism in the Left and the Right

General Mung Beans · Jan 3, 2013

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/01/the_right_wing_dreams_of_demented_utopias/

Two decades have passed since I began my gradual and reluctant break with the conservative movement, in which I had been a protégé of the late William F. Buckley Jr. and an employee of the late Irving Kristol, as executive editor of The National Interest. Since then, I have been followed by, among others, Andrew Sullivan, Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukuyama, David Frum and Bruce Bartlett, all of whom, for different reasons and at different times, have become estranged from the American right. Of the British Labour politician Tony Benn, a young conservative who moved leftward over time, Harold Wilson sneered, “He immatures with age.” Others may judge whether I have immatured with age. In thinking about my career, first on the right and then (to quote FDR) “slightly left of center,” I think I have been consistent in opposing utopianism in politics, something once characteristic of part of the left and now the defining quality of the contemporary American right.

In the age of Barack Obama, who would have been considered a moderate conservative a generation ago, it is easily forgotten that there was a radical left that was really radical — and not in a good way. As late as the 1980s, a classmate of mine at Yale insisted that Lenin was a noble fellow who was betrayed by Stalin (we now know that Lenin invented the Soviet system of secret police, torture and judicial murder). Another classmate told me that a Yale professor had denounced Poland’s General Jaruzelski, who imposed martial law on communist Poland in 1981, as a bourgeois deviationist who was insufficiently Stalinist. In those days Marxists were not limited to friendly, decent “democratic socialists” who were indistinguishable from welfare-state liberals; there was a dwindling minority of hardcore leftists who saw the Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba as a flawed model of the future socialist order that would soon emerge from the breakdown of Western capitalism. As it happened, Western capitalism did break down partly in 2008, but by that time nobody any longer thought that models could be found in communism, which had finally been discredited two decades earlier.
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Oldtimer · Jan 3, 2013

Full title of the article:

Right-wing dreams of demented utopias
It used to be liberals who wanted to remake society according to a theory. Now that's the looney dream of the right

Conclusion:

For my part, I am in no hurry to see any new misguided projects to force reality to fit theory, whether carried out by militants of the left, right or center. I had the privilege of knowing the late Richard Rorty, who followed Irving Howe in distinguishing “movements” from “campaigns” in his book “Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America.” Rorty wrote: “We should not let speculation about a totally changed system … replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.”

Single-issue lobbies are a deplorable feature of American politics, but single-goal campaigns have given us everything from the abolition of slavery and segregation to the rights of women and, more recently, of gays and lesbians. Unlike utopian movements, campaigns against specific evils — the sale of assault weapons or the death penalty, for example — are attempts to eliminate specific, limited evils, not efforts to remake society as a whole according to this or that supernatural or secular scripture. A sane society can never have too few utopian movements or too many reformist campaigns.
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Revmitchell · Jan 3, 2013

Obama would never have been considered a moderate conservative at any time. For one that is an oxymoron and second Marxists are about as extreme as they come. And Obama is a Marxist true and through.

Bro. Curtis · Jan 3, 2013

The cause(s) of the 2008 fiscal crisis had nothing to do with capitalism. Western or otherwise.

Revmitchell · Jan 3, 2013

Bro. Curtis said: ↑

The cause(s) of the 2008 fiscal crisis had nothing to do with capitalism. Western or otherwise.
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And only a Marxist would believe it did.

Utopianism in the Left and the Right

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