Customer Reviews

The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (American Political Thought)

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The remarkable capacity of mankind to hear what he wants to hear while disregarding the rest is as evident in the close mindedness of the Left as it is in the the religious zealotry of the Right. Ellis does a fine job of bringing this compartmentalized brain syndrome condition into focus as he covers all the bases while uncovering the corruption of the various Liberal bastions. Even the use of the word Liberal is corrupted in terms of its original definition. We need more intellectually honest social critics like Ellis to call the hand of the Tom Hayden's of the world. Anything to increase the speed of the pendulum as it continues its swing back toward the political middle. It can't happen soon enough.

When I first saw the title of this volume, I'd anticipated that the author might be a right-wing activist. And while I appreciate varying opinions, i.e., different from those of the lefty ideologues with whom I work who delude themselves into thinking that anyone outside of their clique has the least concern for their opinion, I've about had it with the Horowitzes and the like who've merely changed the names of their enemies but haven't grown beyond their santimony and Manicheanism. Ellis introduces himself by stating that he's always voted for Democrats, etc. In other words, he's not someone just slamming at "liberals" but examining persons with whom he might have something in common. As a leftist myself (with growing reservations about that status), I've found the left to dread self-criticism. So I welcomed that kind of examination.

The book is set up historically, from the 19th century egalitarians, like Walt Whitman, then onto the 60s, that era of (alleged) social experimentation, then onto the present left. I'd started the book about five times and got caught in the introduction which was already good. Then, on a few days off, I decided to read the whole thing, and I'm glad.

I agree with an earlier reviewer that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are the "stars" of the book. They felt they were such pioneers, changing the world by leaps and bounds. Yet they'd (1) romanticized the victim (Southern blacks, Vietnamese, Third World in general) and (2) demonized anyone who didn't think the same way they did. It was, in that era, the radical leftists, not the Limbaughs, who decried "liberals," who were ostensibly not changing the world fast enough. Only we dyed-in-the-wool radicals had the gumption to do that. And what happened? They had interminable meetings, membership who couldn't distinguish between leadership and despotism, whose leader therefore became unaccountable to ANYONE, and were eventually usurped by the Leninist vanguard who changed their practice from nonviolence to violence almost as an end in itself.

The only fact I wish Ellis had emphasized more here was that these radicals were quite affluent. They were largely under- and graduate students at some of the finest institutions in the U.S. While I don't begrudge them for that (as I too am a product of a fairly affluent background), it is a factor that needs to be stressed. Many of the organizers' mistakes were, I believe, based on their lack of touch with the people whom they though they were organizing. For instance, they thought that organizing the poor blacks in the South would be the same as organizing the northern urban poor. They failed miserably at the latter because their assumptions--based on their own relatively affluent experience--were lacking.

That would also help to explain the issues of ideological purity that came up--and still comes up--repeatedly in the ranks of the left.

The book's co-stars are probably the "radical feminists." I mean, that Catherine McKinnon is taken seriously by anyone is a sign of a real "movement" weakness. But Ellis's history indicates that she didn't start some of the more "radical feminist" foolishness. Rather, it started in the 60s in organizations whose members left calling their founders fascists! Thus even some traditional "left" journals that Ellis pointed out call McKinnon and anachronism. Anyway, Dr. Ellis is wise in examining that, while you and I might feel McKinnon and her ilk are of the intellectual substance of the World Wrestling Federation, there are "scholars," e.g., people in the "women's studies" programs, who take them seriously. And that's frightening.

Among the strengths of the book is that Ellis not only covers the history of those events and their characters, but he also examines WHY they were failures. (I relate with that too as I work for an organization that has done little studying of what's gone on with "egalitarianism" in the past. Its members think, therefore, that we're a collective pioneer. But I see the same things happening that the author described again and again--while he acknowledged that the same things had happened a million times before that. So the same mistakes keep happening).

The portion of the book on radical environmentalists may have been redundant if not superfluous. They may be even more separatist than many of the other groups. And in their case, their romanticized victims are the Native Americans who, of course, can do no wrong. One of these groups' major peeves is consumerism. While I have sympathy with that peeve, I often find the left to be intensely hypocritical; many of their members complain of OTHERS' consumerism, while they carry their cell phones, their palm pilots, and they maintain their web pages all in the name of that abstract "organizing." While I don't have any strong feelings toward the environmentalists, i.e., I don't endorse what they do, though am not a proponent of logging companies, I suspect their overall influence is weaker than that of the "feminists" and other elements of the contemporary left.

The final portion of the book is, of course, the summary. And that too I feel is well done. Ellis ties loose ends together by asking many relevant questions. These questions need to be examined by honest members of the left wing, if they plan to be effective.

Were I permitted more words, I'd probably go into more detail about the book. I suggest you read it yourself, not to demonize anyone, nor to canonize them, but to see that the same mistakes are NOT made again, all in the name of "changing the world."

This is a terrific work of cultural history, literary criticism and political philosophy. Ellis declares early in his book his own liberal-left political sympathies, before proceeding to identify the inherent illiberalism of much that has passed for left-wing thought in American history. His range is wide, and his knowledge of American culture impressive. But what is most devastating about his descriptions and analysis of the romantic illusions he catalogues is his awareness of the ostensible justice of the claims underlying them.

The abolitionist movement against slavery was a great moral cause, yet it included a wing devoted to violent and messianic extremism. The early activists in Students for a Democratic Society at least were aware of the need to formulate their demands in the language of liberal rights, before veering into advocacy of Maoist terrorism. Ellis traces these developments not to any simplistic teleology of the collapse of radical ideals into totalitarianism, but to the implict illiberalism of believing that all good things are necessarily compatible with each other, and that mere preferences (environmental protection, for example) should be treated as moral axioms. The sharpest analysis of this phenomenon in the book is Ellis's devastating exegesis of Edward Bellamy's now-forgotten but once vastly-influential utopian novel Looking Backward. Because the scheme of social organisation depicted in the novel has no awareness of how to reconcile conflicting claims to scarce resources or incommensurable values, the vision that it propounds is one of unabashed totalitarianism. Illiberalism and even totalitarianism are integral parts of the American left now; Ellis demonstrates how and why that intellectual tradition developed.

In a well written work of medium (300 pages or so) length, Dr. Ellis does an excellent job of analyzing the manner in which certain leftist movements have traveled the road from liberalism to illiberalism. In particular, Dr. Ellis illustrates the dangers posed by the radical left to moderate American style democracy. Although his work was intended primarily as a critique of the radical left, some of the general conclusions that Dr. Ellis draws would apply with equal force to all radical political movements whether of the left or of the right. As such, his work is something of a cautionary tale in that it demonstrates that we should beware of those who would circumvent (or undermine) the democratic process to obtain some desired end.

This book is unbeatable. It covers numerous different attempts to found radical egalitarian communities, charting some very telling failures and stupidities that they ran into. It sports a devastating final chapter on the evil intent in the demand for more equality than it is reasonable to assume we could ever bring into being. The demand for ever more equality is a self-promotion, it is a vain strut, a moral pose that makes one important, ups your status. The radical moralizer is a wanna-be priest.

The remarkable capacity of mankind to hear what he wants to hear while disregarding the rest is as evident in the close mindedness of the Left as it is in the religious zealotry of the Right. Ellis does a fine job of bringing this compartmentalized brain syndrome condition into focus as he covers all the bases while uncovering the corruption of the various Liberal bastions. We need more intellectually honest social critics like Ellis to call the hand of the Tom Hayden's of the world. Anything to increase the speed of the pendulum as it continues its swing back toward the political middle. It can't happen soon enough

An interesting book to read as a companion piece to Ellis' book is "Damned Lies and Statistics" by Joel Best. In it he discloses the methods that institutional elite's, who would have their way with you, manipulate statistics to their gain and to your loss. H.G Wells predicted that the ability to think statistically would become as important, to citizens of a democracy, as the ability to read and write. In this statement he was, and is, correct.

This is an important book, not because it "exposes" the "hypocracy of the left". Such right-wing polemics are common, and usually worthless. In fact, it is by no means anti-left.

Unlike right-wing polemicists, who lose no opportunity to show their disgust of ideas such as black liberations, women's rights, or seperation of church and state, Ellis supports these ideas. His point is not that the IDEAS are "bad"--but that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Ellis argues that it is precisely BECAUSE the nominal goal of many leftist movements is so appealing that such organizations, in practive, become, first, beurocratic and inefficient, and finally tyrannical and cultic. Utopianism leads to extremism: if your goal is "make money", it's unlikely that you will kill millions to achieve it--it's not worth the trouble. But if your goal is "world peace forever", you just might: after all, what are the lives of a few people compared to this magnificent goal?

An excellent example, given by Ellis, is Bellamy's "Looking Backwards"--a look back, from the year 2000, which lives in utopian socialism, at all the capitalistic injustices of 1900. The "tiny" problem is that, in order to achieve this utopia, most of Bellamy's adherents were quite willing to commit murder and arson in order to get rid of the "evil capitalists". The DID succeed in doing that in Russia--but, of course, Bellamy's utopia never materialized.

This book is important because of the asymmetry between right and left extremism. The difference is not that the left extremists are essentially worse than the right extremists (Ellis notes, rightly, that it is Utopianism that is the problem--whether a "left-wing" or "right-wing utopia doesn't matter); it is that people are already aware that nazism and fascism weren't such hot ideas, and not too many are aware that the soft-spoken "liberal" professor in your local college town is working along the same lines....

The one problem with this book is that it takes the left too seriously. Unlike Russia before the revolution, the left in the US is, essentially, confined to college campuses and a few "enclaves" such as Greenwich Village and Berkeley. The risk of "totaliatarian thought control" by extremist academics is a problem for the tiny minority working in the humanities; not nice, but not exactly the same as life under Stalin or Hitler. Everybody else--from academics in business or science to the "average Joe"--can free themselves from these supposedly "powerful" organizations by simply ignoring them (which, incidentally, they do.)

Ellis, who IS part of this minority, naturally sees the threat very seriously; but becoming hysterical about the "evils of the politically correct university" can lead to the same extreme actions--only from the right--against anybody suspected of being a "radical leftist"; the same kind of witch-hunt that Ellis, rightly, abhors whether it is from the right or the left.

Ellis is a lefty, but at least he's able to look a bit realistically at the data. I think the blurb (above) misses Ellis' point. The "Dark Side" of the left is that force is ALWAYS needed to obtain its goals. It's not an accident or leaving the principles to become violent, it is a natural and logical extension of those principles.

While those on the left talk incessantly about how "compassionate" they are, the Dark Side of the Left is that there MUST be force to make a left system work.

This is a great book, and one well worth having.

This book was written by a person of the Left as a warning of how the Left can turn to its "dark side." The author details Leftist movements in our history, from antebellus abolutionists to environmentalists of today and shows how they lost control and became extremists. The commonalities of these apparent disparate movements are clearly described.

Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell had these monsters pretty well pegged:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.

Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.

What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods,but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.

They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture.

The object of power is power".

-George Orwell, 1984

This is what most people miss. Even Richard Ellis never quite gets around to this central fact in his book. It is the desire, the intoxication of absolute power exercised without moral restraint or conscience of any kind that has led to recent history's worst mass murder, atrocity and enslavement of humankind.

Guess what, folks - the same ideas that have animated recent history's practitioners of slaughter and slavery now have a happy home in the White house.

We have plenty of cautionary tales. And it's not a Democrat/Republican issue. They're all either drunk with the tantalizing premise of absolute power or are in fear of it. None of them - none - are fit to live in a free society.

We now have but two choices: submit to those behind that Marxist meat puppet who currently occupies the White House and in so doing become slaves and cattle - OR stand up, resist, and take it back from them. And never let them near anything that even hints of power again. Whatever that takes.

You're not going to get another chance. History is my witness.