Why is the left so bad on the right?

Some years ago I tried to acquire the rights to a book on the intellectual ferment of the post-Cold War American right. Ultimately, i couldn’t get it through our editorial meetings, for reasons i will try to explain. But it’s not the book itself that I’ve been thinking about recently, even though it is both very good and has since sold extremely well (for obvious reason, i’m keeping all this semi-anonymous, although i’m sure you can guess what i’m on about).

It’s not the hard right we should be worried about, i was told in the meeting, but the radical centre. They are the real enemies; the resurgent right is merely an aberration, a grotesque symptom of the death throes of the neoliberal establishment. As such, they are soon to vanish. The isolationist right could even be preferable to the menacing liberals, who want to drop 2k pounders on as many brown people as they can get away with.

There’s obviously something to this. As Perry Anderson, one of the most striking and pungent exponents of this position, or a variant of it, wrote in 2000 when announcing the new look New Left Review, “The most devastating criticisms of the expansion of NATO and the war in the Balkans often came from the Right.” He went on:

The review should welcome interventions like these. By contrast, surplus to requirements are apologia for official policies from the Left, of which quite a few were to be heard as the B–52s took off for Kuwait or Kosovo. These are available any day in the establishment press. The value of polemical exchange here should be to lie clear of this chloroformed zone.

This is obviously correct, and has been proven so time and again in the years since, not least following the invasion of Ukraine (I was proud to be the in-house editor of a terrific collection that mixed interventions from left and right on the expansion of Nato as the background to the conflict). It also makes political sense. If your primary frame is the global order, then the isolationist right will almost always be preferable to the interventionist centre, whatever their domestic agenda.

As a child of the Blair years, i’m in obvious sympathy with this line of thinking. But one byproduct of it is a lack of curiosity, even active neglect, of what is happening on the right. In the Anderson piece, the thinkers of the right he mentions – “Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Huntington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman” – are all those of the realist right. Thinkers with the ear of the foreign policy world, producing expansive tomes on the global balance of forces. But in the current climate, they all seem rather passé, perhaps even anachronistic. Are the Trumpians reading Samuel P. Huntington? I doubt it.

And what of the contemporary right, that fits uneasily into this old friend/enemy distinction? These are the far right, the new thinkers of Euro-American reaction. Luttwak and Brzezinski were worthy allies against the liberal bomb squad. But intellectual pygmies like Curtis Yarvin? Not a bit.

This softening of the left to the right, at least compared to its position on the extreme centre, has i fear left a certain blindness to the new right.

There was of course another option available, at least when i was getting properly involved in the left in the mid-late 2000s, to explain the right. The right, for the exponents of it, were always a present danger. No, they were more than that: every moment was a potential 1932.

This was a position most often seen in a very particularly post-Trotskyist milieu. For them, the fascists were everywhere, hiding just beneath the glossy surface of liberal society, ready to strike. The workers, on the other hand, were always just waiting for the confidence (a word with almost metaphysical power, and one i used to bristle at every time i heard it) to rise up. Who would give the workers this confidence, and who would be the ones active enough to defeat the almost-present fascists? Well, that was obvious: the meeting will be at 6 o’clock tonight, comrade.

This has other, even worse, blindspots. Ultimately, it was a way of avoiding talking politics. If every enemy is a fascist, then what is the point of understanding the right on its own terms? If fascism is always on the march, then why bother paying attention to what is happening in the world? When the far right surges in the polls, then we have been confirmed in our fears. If it doesn’t, then our organising has been effective. Easy.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because i’ve been searching for good books by thinkers of the left on the right, both new and old. I’ve been remarkably unsuccessful. In Britain, there’s no end of excellent works on Labour. Many too on liberalism. On the Tories? Few and far between – almost non-existent. Two recent books that somewhat have halted that trend, by Phil Burton-Cartledge and Samuel Earle, merely show how up little has been written on them since the 1980s.

Others are doing good stuff. Obviously, Know Your Enemy is superb. And Sam Kriss has been doing plenty of good work on the more internet-addled end of this stuff – taking these thinkers as seriously as they deserve to be. But more, far more, needs to be done – in Britain, as well as Europe and the States.

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I’ve meant to write something on the sad loss of Fred Jameson, but won’t get around to it any time soon, what with an 8 month old scooting around the flat. But there has been some superb obituaries of him already. I particularly liked this one, from Terry Eagleton, who mentions the “mouth-filling rhetoric of his literary style”, which i thought was a great description of his heavy, reference-laden writing. I’ve often thought there was something wonderful about Jameson’s style: it was difficult, undoubtedly, sometimes too difficult, but it takes the intelligence of his readers seriously without reneging on style and without falling into jargony word salads so often seen in academic prose of the sort that thinks it is being rigorously intellectual.

This, by Owen Hatherley, was wonderful too. Likewise, Ben Kunkel.

It’s been years since i’ve properly engaged with Jameson – really, since i was an MA student obsessively reading Walter Benjamin. Jameson’s book on Brecht was a massive influence on me then, as was his collection Aesthetics and Politics. I’ve been going back over some of this in the past week, as well as some more recent works like his bravura Antinomies of Realism, in whatever snatched moments i now have to properly read; he really was a brilliant thinker – perhaps even, as Kunkel says, as much of a genius as any Marxist could allow. A great loss.