OPINION:
The curious attraction of socialism for intelligent and otherwise level-headed men and women has a certain abused logic. Injustice and inequality often seem to reign without challenge, and some men and women of fertile imagination and an activist view of the world seek a remedy for the trials, tribulations and injustices in this world rather than wait for perfection in the next, as religious faith promises. If you’re not a socialist at 20 you have no heart, a French maxim goes, and if you’re still a socialist at 40 you have no head.
Marxist theory works, after a fashion, only when it is enforced by the threat of the lash. The alliance between the West and the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler and won World War II came apart almost immediately in the postwar era when the Russians attempted to expand their winnings to forge a vast Soviet empire to include eastern and central Europe. The early devotees of the Soviet Union began to fall away, first to embrace anti-communism and then gradually, in most cases, to reject the tenets of the left altogether.
The latest of these conversions is described by Nick Cohen in the influential London opinion magazine The Spectator, “Why I’ve finally given up on the Left.” Mr. Cohen nevertheless clings to being a man of the left. “I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labor’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it, ” he writes. “But slowly, too slowly, I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.
“In the 1790s, George Canning described the typical English supporter of the French Revolution ’as a friend of every country but his own.’ Today’s Tories can, with justice, say the same about Jeremy Corbyn (the new leader of the Labor Party). George Orwell wrote of the “English intellectual [who] would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ’God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.” That came to mind on Tuesday when [Mr.] Corbyn declined to sing ’God Save the Queen’ at the Battle of Britain remembrance service.”
Mr. Cohen, writing in The Spectator, says he knows now, in effect, what happened: “There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people. I realize now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.”
All true, and all old stuff rendered as true. This sounds more than a little familiar on this side of the Atlantic, and if history is a guide, one day Mr. Cohen will announce, no doubt with rue and regret, that he has become an old-fashioned conservative. Better late than never.
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