What's Left? Nick Cohen on how the Liberals lost their way

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The political nomenclature ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ arose from the French Revolution. Those in the Estate General who sat on the left were the faction opposing the monarchy and in favour of the revolution and the creation of a republic whereas those sitting on the right were those wanting to maintain the status quo of the royal regime. Since then, the meaning of the term has fluctuated. Socialism, communism, anarchism were engirdled by the term; more recently, movements such as that for civil rights and environment have also come under the umbrella of the Left. But what has always permeated the Left and made it a noble tradition has been, it seems to me, a notion of radicalism, a principled if sometimes naïve idealism and a fiery, youthful willingness to rebel in the face of tyranny and injustice in the demand of liberalism and egalitarianism. In recent decades, however, the idea of the Left has begun to erode. Many of the laudable traditions have begun to mutate into something unrecognisable and sinister. So, why is this and what’s left of the old Left?

What’s Left by Nick Cohen is a devastating critique of what’s wrong with modern day ‘Left’ and liberal factions. I first came across Nick Cohen through an appearance that he made with Christopher Hitchens (Who praised this book as ‘exceptional and necessary.’ How right he is and how sad that it has become necessary). The two talked in turns about the so called Left of today; Hitchens famously ‘turned away’ from the Left. But what is clear to me, through listening to their presentations and reading their books and essays is this: it is the modern Left that has deserted men like them, and abandoned the traditions of the Left that made it great.

The masochistic element of modern day liberalism and multi-culturalism is highlighted by the apologists of Islamic fundamentalists. Whilst making mandatory noises in sympathy with victims in general, the real vim and vigour of these people arise when they start sinking their fangs into Bush and Blair and let loose their vitriolic vituperative. Two quotes caught me especially from Nick Cohen’s book. One is Bertrand Russel’s ‘the superior morality of the oppressed’, and the other, ‘the herd of individual minds’. These two sentences alone can almost encapsulate and explain this strange, beguiling and pervasive phenomenon.

Nick Cohen’s tone is of a passionate yet frustrated, disillusioned and almost resigned man who finds himself stranded as his former comrades deserted what made the Left a noble position. The killer blow came when the Leftists began to become apologists to fascistic governments, the ultra-right, coming in an almost comical full circle, inevitably reminding one of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the ‘Midnight of the Century’ as Victor Serge so eloquently and hauntingly phrased it. Cohen traced through history to dissect the causes of this dramatic change in ideology and when the seed of mutation was sown, leading to the birth of such a cancerous deformity. The genesis of the book can perhaps be briefly summed up in the following questions: why are the Leftist the ones who apologise for militant Islamists who stand for everything that liberal Left should hate and despise? Why do the Left make excuses for the exploitation of women in traditional cultures? Why did the Left deny the existence of Serb concentration camps during the Bosnian war when the US and Britain engaged Slobodan Milosevic? Why after 9/11 and 7/7 it is in the Left newspapers and magazines that you would find excuses for the suicide bombers who were inspired by an ultra-right psychopathic ideology?

In short, the Left has lost its soul. It has become satisfied to lower itself to mere masochistic finger-pointing and sneering at their own governments but turning a blind eye on their comrades in, for example, the middle-east, who are trying, at the very real threat to their lives, to bring democracy and liberty, something those leftists enjoy as a matter or course, to their countries. Instead of siding with these brave men and women, they say ‘oh we mustn’t intervene; it would be imperialistic of us. And anyway, who are we to impose our ideas of liberty on another culture?’ This kind of thinking I really hate.

The Iraq war highlighted for me this type of mindset; a mixture of white-guilt at their imperial past and a solipsistic parochialism inclination to always be determined to find fault in our own governments and cast others as victims. This Chomskyite mentality can be summed up as: whatever the West did, it’s wrong. It seems to have been lost on those busy venting their vitriol that the fact that they can even make a living by openly attacking and criticizing their government and leaders, often times with underserved venom and callousness, is a privilege those in Iraq would risk their very lives in doing; even though their cause for doing so is a thousand fold more justified.

Cohen gives a plethora of examples and cases throughout modern British history of how the left mutated post 1968 and even earlier. To absorb it all with all of its nuances and historical context is impossible after only one reading. The diagnosis by Cohen, however, can be summarised thus: communism has failed even before the Berlin Wall fell. The Left, unable and unwilling to leave its ideas behind, mutated into an anti-government, and therefore myopic and parochial force, ready at the drop of a hat to find fault with the West. Therefore, as by the old dotage: an enemy of my enemy is my friend, any force opposing the West is not to be dismissed. The cost of this mentality is practically all the values that made the Left Left. To go so far as to support a fascistic regime such as a Saddam Hussein Iraq is too frustrating and stupefying even to be funny. Insouciant to the real suffering and level of ethnic cleansing not seen since the Holocaust, the Left is happy to waddle in the warm pool of self approval as it claims the moral high-ground, without noticing that it has in fact lost all moral seriousness, let alone moral authority. 

Whilst always ready to criticise, the Left has no solid commitments. This allows them to dilly dally around any concrete moral issues arising with making actual allegiances and at the same time, when push comes to shove, always gives them room to wriggle their way out of unpopular positions as if they've never been a partisan. To achieve this they shroud themselves in jargon and bad writing posed as deep intellectual prose, such as the obscurantist and obfuscating post-modern theorists. Cohen gives some brilliant examples of horrible writing whose meaning can be anything, and therefore any accusation can be parried or denied. It is quite unbelievable that the kind of gabble can be published in journals and by serious publishing houses.

What’s Left is a great read that’s heart felt and personal to the author and all those who are frustrated with the modern lack of the Left. What’s left of us when we become the worst enemies of the most valuable things we have – liberty, freedom of expression, democracy and equality? More people such as Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Murray, David Aaronovitch, Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are needed; people with stoical moral fibre and eloquence to defend the essence of the old Left against any herd of individual minds.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.