One of today’s most over-reported political topics is “the fractured right.” Policy factions, a lack of leaders, minority status–the storyline changes, but the subject does not. The media cannot pretend to hide its enthusiasm. However, if the media could sublimate its exterior cheerleader and unleash its inner reporter, it would find the fractures on the political spectrum’s other end are wider, older, and more threatening.
The left hit its high-water mark in November 2008. Still, the National Election Pool’s national exit polling (surveying 17,771 voters on 11/5/08) found that just 22 percent of respondents identified themselves as “liberal.” Thirty-four percent said they were “conservative” and 44 percent called themselves “moderate.”
If anything, such a poll probably over-represented the left’s weight in the population simply because, by all indications, conservatives stayed home. Yet even with this boost, liberals were less than a quarter of the population and the smallest of the three ideological groups. And the smallest by significant amounts–they were over 50 percent smaller than conservatives and just half of the moderates’ percentage.
Yet 2008 granted the left a respite from its fundamental decline. Only by uniting against the right, does the left obtain any, albeit temporary, cohesion within their own ranks.
Daniel Flynn in his 2008 book, A Conservative History of the American Left, lays out the left’s disjointed past in this country.
“But even the Vietnam War, the issue that more than any other united the ‘movement,’ demonstrated the degree to which the movement was not a movement at all, just a series of tribes. Occasionally the tribes’ interests intersected. Occasionally they clashed. They had a common enemy, ‘the system,’ a vague concept nearly as amorphous as ‘the movement.’ But they did not have a common ideology.” Written about a period almost a half-century removed, the description still applies today.
The reason is as clear as the separation between theory and practice. As Flynn shows, the left has never been able to fashion viable working alternatives to the American society they oppose. When it has been able to put its principles into practice, it has failed spectacularly.
Only in periods and places so cataclysmic as to prompt middle America temporarily to call into question fundamental tenets of conservatism has America’s left been able to unite. The cathartic caldron of the first half of the 20th century presented just such a period. From it sprang Marxism, socialism and communism.
As flawed as the Marxist ideology was and is, it is still far and away the most encompassing one the left ever embraced. By succeeding in wresting control of several nations with it, the Left was finally able to practice its intentions on a large enough scale–and with the crucial benefit of coercive force–to shield it from its usual immediate failure.
Communism offered America’s left for the first time cohesion and a functioning example of its vision. But even control of a state apparatus could only paper over the left’s contradictions for at most three generations.
With the collapse of communism, America’s left found itself without a unifying ideology or even a remotely appealing example of its promise. The only states still pursuing the communist rant–North Korea, Cuba, China–are ones only the most hardened ideologues would support, while these countries’ own citizens would do anything to escape.
Before the Marxist-communist ascendancy within it, America’s left was utopian. It sought to put into practice its imagined paradises. It failed resoundingly and repeatedly because its core contradiction remains: its redistributive policies progressively reduce the very wealth it seeks to reallocate. Utopia means “nowhere.” That remains the only place the left’s policies actually work. And still the destination to which they lead.
American society’s cornerstones–religion, individual liberty, and free market economies–also give the right its coherence and cohesion. They give the right a foundation from which to unify itself. The left’s rejection of these produces the very opposite. The left remains without anchors and so drifts. Such an existence is inherently atomizing with each sub-group pulling in its own direction–and inevitably apart.
As a shadow distorts the height of the object casting it, so certain periods have served to cast the Left’s shadow well beyond the limit of its actual presence in America. The last election was such a time–with wars abroad and recession at home, the left found fertile ground. However, this should not be allowed to mask the fact that the left’s unity only came, as it has always come, when it has something to strongly oppose. Regardless of the high degree of opposition, it still does not leave them with anything to unite behind. In the end, it remains news when the right is seemingly split, simply because it is even greater news when America’s left is not.
J.T. Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and was a Congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000.