How the Theory Left Drove People to the Reactionary Right
Today, I’m going to talk about a controversial topic: how the political landscape of the English-speaking Western world came to be polarized between a theory-obsessed Left and a reactionary Right, and how we can start to change this, and build a practical progressivism that transcends Left and Right.
Having read plenty of political history, and having reflected on the topic for some time, I have come to the conclusion that it all began in the late 1960s, when a faction of the Left turned away from the workers and towards intellectuals for their support. This became the critical theory-based New Left, which presented endless theory-based critiques of the existing society. Over time, the cultural changes arising from this theory-based Left led to a cascade of social effects, which steadily drove a substantial number of people towards hardline reactionary conservatism. This process might even have accelerated in recent years, with a new wave of the Theory Left having come and gone in the past decade. The result is, there is now a lot of resistance to social justice reforms of all kinds.
The problem with the Theory Left is that they are rooted in theoretical philosophy, rather than the practical facts of the real world. This means they produce the wrong diagnoses of social problems, and provide the wrong solutions. Most problematically, they also have a strong bias against long-standing social institutions like marriage, family and other pillars of traditional communities, due to the critical theory worldview seeing them as upholding an ‘oppressive’ system.
A major effect of Theory Left’s ideas and practices, especially their attempts to deconstruct and ‘liberate’ everything, is that they have served to weaken the social fabric significantly over the past five decades. This, in turn, has deprived what many people need most, strong and stable family-based support networks, and a strong sense of community, as well as the sense of security this provides. These people are naturally going to be attracted to reactionary conservatism, which promises to stem the decline, and restore society to its former state. Even though in practice they have not been successful in doing this, the very promise, the very idea, has been attractive for many people, who have nowhere else to turn.
In the past decade, there was another wave of Theory Left activism that drove even more people to the Right in another way, through their unreasonable insistence that their ideas be accepted without debate. This attitude is rooted in the theory that knowledge and discourse is rooted in power and oppression, which totally goes against both practical common sense and the ideals of the Enlightenment. But more importantly, this attitude just isn’t going to be acceptable to most people. During the past decade, I have read many stories about formerly moderately progressive people being turned to the hard Right after they encountered the unreasonable attitude of the Theory Left. Some like to deny this reality, but I believe it’s something that actually happened to a significant extent.
So how can we begin to heal this mess, so we can get reformist progress back on the agenda?
We need to put an end to the dominant influence of the Theory Left on our politics. Particularly, as long as the critical theory Left’s zero-sum, deconstructive, essentially anti-society worldview even so much as lingers in our conscience, we can’t really start to rebuild a strong social fabric. Without a stronger and healthier social fabric, there really isn’t going to be the will to take on the reforms that are required to solve our problems. And so, every new issue and every new development just turn into more fuel for the culture wars, which just goes to benefit both the Theory Left and the reactionary Right, thus continuing the vicious cycle. There’s no room, no appetite, to actually take an unbiased look at things like automation, racial equality, civil rights, the climate and so on. Hence, going forward, I will talk even more about how we can remove the influence of five decades of critical theory in our thoughts and our culture. This is something we need to work together on, because it has affected almost all of us, to differing degrees.
The other important thing to do would be to bring back those who have already fallen into reactionary hardline conservatism, because they see that as the only way to bring back a healthy society. We have to build a better alternative: a way back to a healthy society, but one that is forward looking rather than backward looking. And then we need to convince these people that our way will work, and we can fix the mess created by the Theory Left in a way that the reactionary ideology simply can’t. Where reactionary ideology can only keep people nostalgic about a better past, we can give them something to actually hope for: an even better future. It is a long road ahead, so I think we should start getting to work as soon as possible.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who recently published her autobiography The TaraElla Story, in which she described the events that inspired her writing.
She is also the author of the Moral Libertarian Horizon books, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for Western democracies in the 21st century.
