Out of ideas

It's an old criticism of the Left: for all their self-congratulation about how smart and tolerant they are, they aren't really all that interested in ideas. But now the Left is listening, and Democrat Matt Bai is writing a book about precisely this lack of ideas.

That link goes to Blue Crab Boulevard, who hits on one of the reasons there are correct positions on the Left instead of debate on ideas:

Without those big ideas, politics becomes a mechanical process - which is exactly what Bai is saying the Democrats are focusing on now - the machinery of politics. [Nick] Gillespie points out that the Republicans are not exactly overflowing with big ideas at this point, either. But they have a real opportunity to get back to those big ideas. Especially with the other side's fixation on how the little gears and levers work.

Yeah, exactly: for a lot of the left--and for the center as well, like the smug twerps at The Economist, social science has replaced debate over political philosophy. The Left, (and I realize I am painting very broadly here), also prides itself on being materialist. Paradoxically, the Left's most ideological adherents are Marxists, and therefore radical materialist ideologues. If everything political is understood scientifically, you don't really need ideas: they're epiphenomenal, arising from the mechanistic processes of politics like heat from mechanical friction. They're just another variable to be managed, and can be troublesome to the correct top-down planning and implementation of a utopian, ahem, a "just" society.

There is also a strong anti-rationalist strain on the Left, reaching back to Rousseau's love of primitivism but flourishing today among the post-moderns who flourish in ethnic and women's studies departments around the academy. Deconstructing sexist discourse and highlighting privileged power structures may be an intellectually rewarding task for some academics, but it takes the existence of these things as a settled question. There's a leap of faith there as well, and commensurate contempt and disdain for the unbeliever.

Another explanation hinted at above is that they do have ideas, but they're ashamed of them. Hegelian progressivism, the precursor of Marxism though originally a conservative* doctrine, requires a leap of faith in the inevitable direction of history. Likewise, believing in Marxism requires a belief that certain economic upheavals and reorganizations are inevitable. Socialists of all stripes--even far right National Socialists--have in common this transformative faith about politics, and in the inevitable directions it must go. It is a mechanistic process and you're either on the correct side of things or you're wrong--and evil to boot, an enemy of the just order. It's a harsh creed, if you really believe this stuff.

Now, obviously, few on the Left in America actually are Communists. Most left-leaning people I know are well-intended and just want to save trees and whales and change societal mores they see as oppressive, and fight racism, and don't consider themselves Marxists or even socialists or really believe that history chugs along like a train down a track toward a utopian conclusion. But many of the policy positions these well-intended liberals hold dearly are derived from thinkers far more radical than they might consider themselves to be. There's no great incentive to look too closely at the intellectual roots of these nice-sounding policies, and more importantly there is no great incentive (in fact the opposite) to teach them in colleges.

One of the best examples of this--and a lowlight of American Progressivism**--is Margaret Sanger. Many women who are pro-choice today think they are fighting for women's equality by agitating for abortion rights. And yet, Planned Parenthood's celebrated founder was a radical Progressive who advocated birth control because of some strongly-held ideas about minorities--ideas that most of these same women would (I hope) find repellent, but which are still alive today.

The antirationalist bunch, the priests of authenticity, have their own flameouts to contend with:

One Yale professor who must have followed the Sokolov episode with some interest was Paul de Man, the leading guru of deconstructionism, the dominant school of cultural criticism in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. De Man, who had fled his native Belgium after World War II, had his own history of Nazi collaboration. ...Yale was stunned in 1983, when de Man died at 64. Two months after his death, the New York Times ran a piece headlined "Yale Still Feeling Loss of Revered Professor." But the university was even more stunned in the fall of 1987, when a Belgian graduate student uncovered evidence that de Man had written nearly 200 articles for Nazi-controlled newspapers between 1940 and 1942.

To those who believe words do have meaning, these articles had a very clear one. John Brenkman, a professor of English as Northwestern University, concluded they showed de Man to be "a fascist, an anti-Semite and an active collaborator with the Nazis." In one article, de Man proclaimed that "the future of Europe can be envisioned only within the framework of the possibilities and needs of the German spirit."

I don't intend this ramble to be some massive ad hominem attack on the entire Left. Nor do I suggest that conservative ideas haven't been distorted and used for shameful, barbaric, or merely dumb ends at various points through history. But Bai's book suggests that this lack of ideas isn't just a right-wing talking point. So these are my--admittedly biased and offhand--attempts to sketch some reasons for that vacuum. I look forward to seeing some thoughtful alternative explanations from the Left for the same phenomenon.

Hopefully, their explanations will be deeper than "It's Bush's fault!"

*In the elitist European sense. American conservatism doesn't really have much in common with Hegel.
**I always chuckle when I hear "liberals" wanting to rebrand themselves as "progressives". American Progressives did a few good things back in the day, but like Sanger, most were an insufferable bunch of elitist nanny-state bluenoses. If the shoe fits, though...