Lefties Have More Fun

“Left movements exude the zest of adolescence, which is why they can generate so much thrill and camaraderie and—when they occasionally succeed—such deflated confusion and hollowness.”

If you have also discovered that it is best to keep your diary double-sided; if you would not want to be denied the standard at a protest any sooner than you would leave the invitation to a black tie unanswered; if you take your Folgers instant and your Aperol spritzed; if you would like to have your cake and let them eat it, too—if, in short, you have fully come to terms with your contradictions—then you will have already gathered this much: the Left knows how to party.

This is a hypothesis. My sample is still modest. It includes several nights at anarcho-communist street festivals, at right-wing student rallies, at camps under the fervid Mediterranean moon organized by a member of the Socialist International. In the United States: at conferences of (not trying to be self-descriptive) free-marketeer eccentrics with unidentifiable accents next to bars where checks come separate by default; at workshops with old labour unionists in dusky jackets and, once, at a weekend sojourn with heavyweight Democrat donors, a Mandela biographer, and a former United States Secretary of State. It has almost always, so far, been a pleasure but, admittedly, more so in the leftward provinces. Ray Wolfinger called “data” the plural of “anecdote”—so long as I am not excommunicated from either sect I will keep up the fieldwork—but there might be an obvious theoretical explanation besides: Communitarians, as many leftists tend to be, think of themselves primarily as group members and then as individuals. The party comes first, if you catch my drift. For individualists—libertarians and many mainstream conservatives—it is the other way around.

Why does it matter if the liberal Right is so palpably less fun? Because it has had the right prescription for some time, and yet it remains out of power, out of the conversation, and out of fashion. One reason must be that Randianism—whether of the Ayn or Paul genus—does not quite feel like a party. (“I saw Kennedy onstage in a hotel ballroom,” at an eighties-themed banquet, Robert Draper describes the Fox Business host, formerly of MTV, “wearing purple spandex, gyrating to the soundtrack of ‘Flashdance’ and hollering into a microphone, ‘Are you hungry for more liberty?’”) Here is the best our species has come up with: individual freedom of speech, of enquiry, exchange, movement, association, and worship—or blasphemy. But the Enlightenment led us here from the wrong starting point. In his 2018 book The Great Delusion, international-relations theorist John Mearsheimer, briefly ventriloquised by Aristotle, discovers that as a matter of biology we are not self-contained individuals forced into a communal life. Instead, we are social creatures who must make some room for our individualities. Libertarianism is to political theory what the Tychonic system is to astronomy: You can use it to navigate practical problems with brilliance, even as its description of the world has the wrong thing in its center.