Leftism

Until now, we have cleared up a great deal of semantic rubble in the vocabulary commonly used in the Western World (though sometimes not in the United States). But we have now come to a very necessary, not universally accepted definition, the definition of the terms “right” and “left.”

If a workable definition existed, our task would be superfluous. This would also be the case if we could dispense altogether with these two magic words. They can, however, be put to very good use and often—as handy labels—truly simplify matters.

The misplacing of the Nazis in the Reichstag has thus hardened a confusion in semantics and logical thinking that had started some time earlier. The Communists, the Socialists, and the Anarchists were identified with the left, and the Fascists and the National Socialists with the right. At the same time one discovered a number of similarities between the Nazis on the one side and the Communists on the other. Thus the famous and perfectly idiotic formula arose: “We are opposed to all extremism, be it from the left or the right. And, anyhow, Red and Brown are practically the same: extremes always meet.”

All this is the result of very sloppy thinking, because extremes never meet. Extreme cold and extreme heat, extreme distance and extreme nearness, extreme strength and extreme weakness, extreme speed and extreme slowness, none of them ever “meet.” They do not become identical or even alike. The moment one counterattacks and inquires from the good man who just pontificated about the meeting of extremes what precisely he understands by right and left, he proves unable to give any coherent analysis of these terms. Lamely he will hint that on the extreme are the reactionaries—the Fascists, for instance. Asked whether Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana was a reactionary or a leftist establishment, he will again mumble something about those paradoxical extremes. Certainly the left is collectivist and progressive; the Communists are “extreme progressivists.” If he sticks to this piece of nonsense, one should point out to him that certain primitive African societies with a tribal collectivism are not really so “extremely progressive.” This is usually the moment when the conversation expires.

The first fault with this loose reasoning lies in the aforementioned belief that “extremes meet”; the second in the almost total absence of clear definitions of left and right. In other words, there is a deficiency of logic as well as an absence of semantic clarity. Logic stands independent of our whims, but we can provide clear definitions.

Let us then agree that right is what is truly right for man, above all his freedom. Because man has a personality, because he is a riddle, a “puzzle,” a piece of a puzzle which never completely fits into any preestablished social or political picture, he needs “elbowroom.” He needs a certain Lebensraum in which he can develop, expand, in which he has a tiny personal kingdom. L’ enfer, c’ est les autres. “Hell, that’s the others,” has been said by Sartre, a pagan existentialist, towards the end of his play Huis Clos. The Great Menace is all around us. It is vertical because it comes from above, but it is also horizontal because it attacks us from all sides. In a state-insured, government-prescribed, and—to make matters worse—socially endorsed collectivism, our liberty, our “Western” personality, our spiritual growth, our true happiness is at stake. And all the great dynamic isms of the last 200 years have been mass movements attacking—even when they had the word “freedom” on their lips—the liberty, the independence of the person. Programmatically this was done in the name of all sorts of high-and even low-sounding ideals: Nationality, race, better living standards, “social justice,” “security,” ideological conviction, restoration of ancient rights, struggle for a happier world for us all. But in reality the driving motor of these movements was always the mad ambition of oratorically or at least literarily gifted intellectuals and the successful mobilization of masses filled with envy and a thirst for “revenge.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting also on the uniqueness of human beings who cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers; but the left is the advocate of the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, a paradise in which everybody should be the “same,” where envy is dead, where the “enemy” either no longer exists, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviation, stratifications. Any hierarchy it accepts is only “functional.” The term “one” is the keynote: There should be only one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one religion, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms and one centralized world state.

Left and right tendencies can be observed not only in the political domain but in many areas of human interest and endeavor. Let us take the structure of the state, for instance. The leftists believe in strong centralization. The rightists are “federalists” (in the European sense), “states’ righters” since they believe in local rights and privileges, they stand for the principle of subsidiarity. Decisions, in other words, should be made and carried out on the lowest level—by the person, the family, the village, the borough, the city, the county, the federated state, and only finally at the top, by the government in the nation’s capital. The breakup of the glorious old French provinces with their local parlements and their replacement with small départements, named after some geographic feature and totally dependent upon the Paris government, was a typically leftist “reform.” Or let us look at education. The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts.

Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

The antireligious bias of leftism rests, however, not solely on anticlericalism, antiecclesiasticism, and the antagonism against the existence of another body, another organization within the boundaries of the State: It gets its impetus not only from jealousy but, above all, from the rejection of the idea of a supernatural, a spiritual order. Leftism is basically materialistic.

The Provident State, Hilaire Belloc’s Servile State, is obviously a creation of the leftist mentality. We will not call it the Welfare State because every state exists for the welfare of its citizens; here a good name has been misused for a bad thing. In the final prophecy of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America the possibility, nay, the probability of the democratic state’s totalitarian evolution toward the Provident State has been foretold with great accuracy. Here again two wishes of the leftist find their fulfillment, the extension of government and the dependence of the person upon the state which controls his destiny from the cradle to the grave. Every movement of the citizen, his birth and his death, his marriage and his income, his illness and his education, his military training and his transportation, his real estate and his travels abroad—everything is to be a matter of knowledge to the state.

One could continue this list ad nauseam. Naturally, we must add that in the practical order of things there are exceptions to the rule because leftism is a disease that does not necessarily spread as a coherent, systematic ideology. Here and there an isolated manifestation can appear in the “opposite camp.” Sometimes, to quote an example, the stamp of rightism has been applied to Spain’s present government. Yet it is obvious that certain features of the Franco government have a leftist character as, for instance, the strong centralizing tendencies, the restrictions placed on languages other than Castilian, the censorship, the monopoly of the state-directed syndicates. As for the first two failings—leftist tendencies are failings—one has to remember the effects of the immediate historic past.

Nationalism (in the European sense) is leftism; and Catalonian, Basque, and Gallegan (Galician) nationalism naturally assumed a radically leftist character opposing “Castilian” centralization. Hence, in Madrid, almost all movements promoting local rights and privileges, be they political or ethnic, are suspect as leftist, as automatically opposed to the present regime as well as to the unity of Spain. (Spain is “Una, Grande, Libre”!) Oddly enough—but understandable to anybody with a real knowledge of Spanish history—the extreme right in Spain, represented, naturally, by the Carlists and not at all by the Falangists, is federalistic (“localistic,” anticentralistic) in the European sense. The Carlists are opposed to the centralizing tendencies of Madrid and when late in 1964 the central government made an effort to cancel the privileges of Navarra, the fueros, the Carlists of Navarra, nearly issued a call to rebellion—at which point the government quickly declared its own preparatory steps as a “mistake” and backed down.

All conservative movements in Europe are federalistic and opposed to centralization. Thus we encounter in Catalonia, for instance, a desire for autonomy and the cultivation of the Catalan language among the supporters of the extreme right as well as the left. The notorious Catalonian Anarchists always have been supporters of autonomy, but formal anarchism has always been a curious mixtum compositum. Its ultimate vistas were leftist, socialistic in essence, but its temper was rightist. Much of present-day “communism” in Italy and Spain is merely “popularly misunderstood anarchism.” But, on the other hand, it is also significant that in 1937 open war broke out in Barcelona between the Communists and the Anarchists. And it was the Anarchists who resisted the Communists in Russia longer than any other group, until in 1924 they were literally exterminated in all Soviet jails and camps. Hope of “taming” them had been abandoned.

Or let us take the Metternich regime in Central Europe. Basically it had a rightist character, but having been born in conscious opposition to the French Revolution it had—as so often tragically happens—learned too much from the enemy. True, it never became totalitarian, but it assumed authoritarian features and aspects which must be called leftist, as for instance the elaborate police system based on espionage, informers, censorship, and controls in every direction.

If we then identify, in a rough way, the right with freedom, personality, and variety, and the left with slavery, collectivism, and uniformity, we are employing semantics that make sense. Then the stupid explanation that communism and Nazism are alike because “extremes always meet” need not trouble us any longer. In the same camp with socialism, fascism, and that particularly vague leftism which in the United States is known perversely enough as liberalism, there is a phenomenon to be explained in Chapter XIV. This, however, is not the case with European liberalism. It is significant that the Italian Liberal party (The PLI) is seated to the right of the Democristiani, next to the monarchists. Right and left will always be used in this book in the sense we have outlined here, and we are convinced that this distinction in semantics is indeed a vital one in discussing the political scene of our age.