Why the Left Needs to Think About Religion (And Other Big Questions)

“The political right has long been better at playing the Nietzschian game of values than the political left.”

Russell Kirk’s 1953 classic The Conservative Mind is widely praised for providing philosophical and historical support for American conservatism. More importantly, at the time, it helped rally conservative forces in the Anglo-American world that were caving to the demands of progressives. As Kirk observed in his weighty book, Keynesian-style welfare states were ascendant across the developed world. Even right-wing stalwarts such as Winston Churchill, the victor of the Second World War, could not resist the pressure to expand or at least retain the immense volume of welfare programs which were emerging. This tendency was so widespread that in 1965 Milton Friedman could attribute to Republican Richard Nixon the sentiment that “we are all Keynesians now.”

Things have changed quite markedly since then, with the rise first of neoliberalism in the 1980’s and now post-modern conservatism in the 21st century. In a sharp inversion, which might have pleased and disturbed Kirk in equal measure, progressive forces largely seem to be in retreat—or at best engaging in holding patterns. The relative downward movements have turned into a rapid slide over the past few years. While there have been some local successes—including the election of Andres Obrador in Mexico and the rise of Podemos in Spain—the news has almost uniformly been bad for progressives since at least 2015. What is worse is that many of the post-modern conservative movements currently ascendant have not limited themselves to the neoliberal ambition to simply curb or roll back the welfare state. They have either flirted or openly embraced the kind of xenophobic rhetoric and policies many hoped had died in Berlin in 1945. This is a profoundly worrying development that has rightly been the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis—including in many of the recent stories published by Merion West.

Much of this scrutiny has been directed at progressives and their failure to block or prevent these recent developments. This has been explained in many different ways. For some, progressives lost touch with their working-class constituents, who consequently turned to right-wing populists who seemed more in tune with their concerns. For others, the problems lie in an unwillingness on the part of progressives to engage in the kinds of low-ball tactics right-wing populists embrace. This runs the gamut from telling blatant lies, to engaging in immense gerrymandering efforts, voter suppression and so on. Finally, there are some who believe that the Left has become far too associated with politically correct culture and identity politics. This fractured the support for progressive parties, while leading to the negative impression of progressives as puritanical moralists. This made the rise of figures like Trump and Viktor Orban inevitable, since whatever the content of their statements, their willingness to say what they thought without concern for PC culture was refreshing. I believe there is something to each of these arguments, and they deserved to be looked at carefully.