Author of
Woke fiction - How ideology changes our films and series
(Cherche midi, 2023).
Have you noticed the proliferation, in public debate, of intellectuals who deeply criticize the left, while proclaiming that they are left-wing?
The left has capitulated on secularism, they deplore.
It is too often clientelist, they assert.
She embraced multiculturalism and communitarianism, they regret.
She abandoned universalism and freedom of expression.
She pours into hatred of the police.
It cultivates anti-Western resentment.
It is influenced by an anti-Zionism that is as obsessive as it is suspicious.
She denied the Enlightenment.
She adhered to an anti-modern and dogmatic environmentalism.
She abandoned working classes (to which she would prefer non-binary students wishing to have access to gender-neutral toilets).
It does not fight Islamist obscurantism.
And yet, these intellectuals repeat over and over again, we remain left-wing.
Moreover, they write, if the error of the left is worrying, it is not because it could lead our country and our civilization into a wall, but because it risks playing into the hands of the right.
However, it is the conservative media that regularly open their columns to them, while the progressive press hounds them.
Two questions arise: how far should the left (its contemporary political representatives, its thinkers, its media, etc.) go so that these intellectuals stop proclaiming themselves left-wing?
And how should the right behave so that they stop feeling the need to constantly remind people that they are not
right
-wing, implying that it would be shameful to be so?
Everything happens as if the fact of being on the left was a genetic given, or a title of merit, rather than a belonging that one could renew or not with regard to what "the left" does, with regard to the reality of public debate and the evolution of political life.
Also read: Samuel Fitoussi: “The imaginary speech of Gabriel Attal”
As is often the case, reading Jean-François Revel is enlightening.
In his
Memoirs
, he describes the left as incapable “
of imagining “being” on the left other than as a fixed substance, which we carry within ourselves or which we throw away
”.
He says: “
When I look through my writings from before 1968, I realize that they are dotted with road signs which (…) have the sole purpose of shouting to passers-by “Hello!
I'm left-wing!
I’m left-wing!”
(…) This means that we are acclaimed (or that we acclaim ourselves, which is safer) as a left-wing subjectivity and as a member of a moral family
.”
Nothing has changed, as evidenced for example by the recent works against wokism (supported elsewhere) by Yascha Mounk or Chloé Morin, well stocked with this type of signage.
As Pierre Valentin notes in his essay, the intersectional left accuses the Republican left of being right-wing, while the Republican left accuses the intersectional left of having betrayed the true left.
“
The possibility that one could be both left-wing and wrong does not seem to cross their minds
,” quips Valentin.
These irreconcilable lefts seem to agree on the definition of the word “left”: not this or that ideology, but the sole repository of moral and intellectual legitimacy in public debate.
(Naive definition - since every activist, by definition, believes that they are working in favor of the common good - and dangerous: the certainty of having morality on one's side inoculates against critical thinking).
It’s practical: being on the left, you can’t go wrong.
If the left destroys the country, this is a regrettable drift (“it is not the real left”) which in no way invalidates the original support for the project;
if the right expresses correct ideas, it is a bit by luck.
Samuel Fitoussi
Today, many people seem to consider that the ideological rout of the left is a distortion of its real nature (which would justify remaining attached to it at all costs) while the often correct positions of the right are a dissimulation of hers (which would categorically prohibit joining her).
The left is essentialized: whatever it does, it will remain that of Jean Jaurès;
the right too: whatever it does, it will remain that of Maurras.
The past erases the present.
Political geography eclipses the reality of actions, speeches and ideas, with at root a rather childish idea: the left is good, the right is bad.
A few months ago, LFI was criticized for not going to the march against anti-Semitism (its place, basically, was there), while reproaching the RN for going there (its place was not there). was not).
It’s practical: being on the left, you can’t go wrong.
If the left destroys the country, this is a regrettable drift (“it is not the real left”) which in no way invalidates the original support for the project;
if the right expresses correct ideas, it is a bit by luck.
By essentializing the left and the right, we protect our opinions from being refuted by the facts.
This irrational, almost superstitious attitude undoubtedly harms the substantive debate.
Revel recounts that in the 1970s, the non-communist left poorly received the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago
, and was incapable of understanding its importance and learning from it.
For what ?
“
The deepest motive was that Solzhenitsyn diagnosed the concentration camp system not as a disease but as the very essence of communism.
In other words, he refused to place the debate within socialism, to present the indictment against the gulag from the perspective of improving the system.
» History repeats itself: today, certain intellectuals seem incapable of beginning to speak without recalling that they are placing the debate within the left, incapable of denouncing a drift of the left without presenting the indictment in the perspective of improving the system (the reconstruction of the
true
left).