Why Moderates Don't Have Enough Faith in Ourselves
It's because the far-left gained the moral high ground, unjustifiably.
Last time, in my post about the implications of the shutting down of ‘heterodox liberal’ media outlets like The Liberal Patriot due to funding drying up, I concluded that a truly free-thinking liberal community can only exist if there are enough people who are passionate enough about our cause to work for free if necessary. Political movements simply can’t survive and also maintain integrity long-term if they depend on funding from donors for their existence, because political winds and incentives shift all the time. Instead, the torch can only be carried forward in the long run by passionate true believers who will be able to do the necessary work even without renumeration. The far-left definitely has plenty of people who are willing to do this. As for the heterodox ‘classical liberal’ community? I have my own serious doubts, to be honest.
I think one reason why the far-left (including both old-school class-first leftists and postmodern ‘woke left’ activists, and everything else in between) has such a large number of passionate true believers, is because they have a kind of moral confidence that we moderates simply don’t have. One reason for this is simply because those with more nuanced beliefs tend to be less confident of everything, while those with more black-or-white beliefs tend to have a misguided level of overconfidence. This applies not just to the far-left, but also to the ‘populist’ New Right too. On the other hand, the huge discrepancy in confidence and passion between the far-left and moderate liberals and reformists is not inevitable. It is the product of our recent political history.
The split between liberal reformists and the far-left originated partly from the split in the European left of the early 20th century, between those who favored reform and those who favored revolution. In the century since, liberal reformists have been able to get into government, and have been generally represented by one of the two major parties of government in most Western countries. Liberal reformism thus carries all the successes, but also all the failures and controversies, of the party and the administrations that supposedly represent the ideology. These failures and controversies include moments that most of us wouldn’t be proud of, like the Vietnam War happening under the Democrats in the 1960s, the Clinton crime bill and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s, Britain’s Tony Blair agreeing to join Dubya Bush’s War in Iraq, and Obama bailing out the big banks, for example. Making mistakes in judgement is part and parcel of being in power, and isn’t automatically reflective of the ideology being flawed. But all this does weigh on our confidence and credibility over time.
Meanwhile, the far-left were permanently shut out of government and formal power, but built a prominent presence in certain parts of academia, as well as in activist circles. There, they developed their own theories of how things work, and how change can be enacted. These theories basically revisited the aforementioned reform vs revolution divide, and often boiled down to demonizing reformism while upholding the supposed righteousness of the worldview of the revolutionary camp. While these theories were largely untested before the 2010s, the kind of self-justifying circular reasoning often employed in New Left theory meant that those who held that worldview were able to reify, at least within their own circles, their theoretically-justified superiority simply through repetition and reinforcement, paired with repeated demonization of alternative points of view. This worked because there was no empirical reality to challenge the theory, in turn because the far-left never had an opportunity to truly implement their worldview. I believe the 2010s ‘woke left’ was the first time some far-left ideas and theories, at least those pertaining to identity and speech, had a chance to be implemented in the real world, and the failures provide empirical evidence of the unsoundness of the far-left worldview. But this was a very recent development, and the moral confidence of the Western far-left was generally on the ascendancy for much of the previous 60 years.
Thus liberal reformism, the philosophy that made possible everything from women’s suffrage to civil rights to gay marriage, ultimately crashed in confidence and popularity, partly as a victim of its own success, while the far-left’s revolutionary philosophy was able to build up claims to the moral high ground, simply because they were denied real power and thus never had to contend with reality as a whole. What we need to remember is that all this was never based on empirical reality. The far-left has never delivered anything that actually made people’s lives better. All their protests, disruptions and drama has been for nothing at best, and the cause of harmful right-wing backlash at worst. For example, Black Lives Matter 2020 not only did not make things any better for the average black person, it is arguably at the center of the backlash that enabled the Trump administration to take away long-standing support structures for the black community in the name of anti-DEI. The LGBT rights movement was going fine under the leadership of reformist liberals, and even won difficult battles like gay marriage, until the radicals took over in the mid-to-late 2010s, which led to a major backlash that is harming actual LGBT people in real life right now. All this is to say, the moral high ground claims of the far-left is not justified by how reality has played out, and should be thoroughly challenged on this ground alone. The far-left really needs to be held accountable for their failures for once.
Now, let me digress a bit, and respond to ongoing criticisms of the way I use the word ‘woke’ by those aligned with the activist left. The reason why I use the word ‘woke’ the way most people use it nowadays is because this is conducive to effective communication. More specifically, we need a common language to be able to talk about the misguided ideas of a certain faction of the activist left. Just calling them ‘the left’ won’t do, because there are plenty of class-first leftists who don’t believe in this stuff, and they have protested whenever I used ‘the left’ or even ‘the far-left’ to describe woke ideology and activism, and in some cases actually suggesting that I should use the ‘woke’ terminology instead. The fact is, we need a common language, and indeed a simple term, to describe what is going on. My preferred term would actually be ‘critical anarchism’, but just like ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’, ‘identity socialism’, ‘the successor ideology’ and other proposals, it has not been widely adopted, and ‘woke’ is the word everyone uses nowadays. I actually think it’s unfortunate that the word originally came from black Americans meaning something very different, and I personally wouldn’t have chosen this word for this reason, but as I just said, it’s not up to me to choose what word to describe the phenomenon. What is important here, however, is that there is a word we can use to describe it (as Freddie DeBoer famously argued back in 2021), so we can hold it accountable for the harms that it has caused. From what I see, refusing to allow us to have a word to describe the ideology is just a slippery way to avoid accountability, and I think it’s of utmost importance that we don’t allow this to happen. This is why, all things considered, I still think the ongoing use of the word ‘woke’ to describe the postmodern-critical faction of the far-left, even if it is controversial and not ideal at all, is still the lesser evil.
Returning to my original theme, I really think it’s important that we begin upholding and celebrating the very real gains of liberal and moderate reformism (everything from women’s suffrage to civil rights to gay marriage, and also many other things), and also call out the very real harms far-left revolutionary ideology, especially the ‘woke’ version, has caused. Only by doing this would we be able to right the historical wrong of an unjustifiably claimed moral high ground, and stop the far-left from confusing another generation of youth that their way is the only valid way to bring about social justice. Only by doing this would we be able to rebuild the confidence around the liberal and moderate reformist project, including its necessary disagreements with the far-left. And only by doing this would we be able to build a community that is truly passionate about the liberal reformist project, driven by the belief that our way is actually the best way to improve lives and bring about justice. If we can achieve this, then we would have the foundations for a long-term political movement driven by values and the passion of volunteers, and we won’t be at the mercy of donors and think tanks anymore.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.