The cultural Left, the paper Left

Although I have long held that professors in the humanities and social sciences are overwhelmingly Leftist because utopian visions mirror their idealized image of themselves, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom complicates things with a brilliant argument, which demands further reflection.

Goldstein points out that, in the modern academy, politics is identified with the politics of the modern Left. Since politics is conceived as a “system in which the State is guarantor of rights and ‘justice,’ ” and since the Right is anti-statist (vide Nabokov’s dystopian novel Bend Sinister, for example), the Right is therefore “outside politics.” “Being on the ‘right,’ ” Goldstein elaborates, “is not considered being ‘political’ at all—except in the pragmatic sense that those on the right somehow, maddeningly, are still allowed to vote, and so upset the inexorable path of ‘cultural evolution’ toward a progressive singularity.”

By the logic of the contemporary university, then, to be on the Left is to be political, Goldstein concludes, “and being political carries with it the heady suggestion of being a serious thinker” (his italics). Since “right wing” or “far right” views are not the product of serious thought—since, as Lionel Trilling famously said in the Preface to The Liberal Imagination, they are not ideas but “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”—they must be the product of something else, something base: racism, nativism, homophobia, xenophobia, what have you.

So far, so good. But what about non-university intellectuals and cultural types who are beyond the university’s logic? I have suggested before now that they belong to the “throng of fashion,” which is currently Leftist. And one of Goldstein’s commentators seems to confirm my suspicions. “Where are the conservative professors, filmmakers, comics, scientists, actors, artists?” she giggled. “[T]hey don’t exist.”

But I have another idea. In his cover story in the April 12th Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin says that Left and Right agree on the fundamental problem with health care in America: costs are rising too quickly, leaving many unable to afford health insurance. “The disagreement about just how to fix that problem has tended to break down along a familiar dispute between left and right,” Levin says: “whether economic efficiency is best achieved by the rational control of expert management or by the lawful chaos of open competition.”

Nothing perhaps divides Left and Right more exactly. The Left prefers coherent and comprehensive systems that can be worked out ahead of time in careful detail and then written down in black and white; the Right prefers the messy and ear-splitting reality of individual human choices, operating at cross purposes with one another, creating more human opportunity. Once upon a time novelists plunged into the human reality, but ever since literature has retreated into creative writing, our literary intellectuals have resembled professors. They too prefer theory, the elegance of an abstract design, the perfectly intact self-referential system, the paper whole. They drift to the Left, because that is the side of rational control, which is precisely what they seek to apply to their art. Their cultural desires mirror the Left’s political ambitions.