Apropos of nothing in particular (really!), it occurred to me to write down what I think is the most benign definition of the political left, broadly conceived, and what is wrong with its views. My own sympathies lie elsewhere, and I have made no bones about it, but I hope there is some value in the exercise at a time when bad faith political labelling is routine, and clarity of thinking is in short supply.
Indeed, it was a wise man (I forget which wise man) who said that one should be able to summarise a position one disagrees with well enough for those who do agree with it to say that it was so well put they could have done no better. I don’t suppose I can manage that, but I do mean for this to be, if not a sympathetic, then at least a fair account, at least towards important parts of the left. ( I find it difficult to find sympathy towards some strands, as may be evident below, and certainly individual leftists or leftist parties or movements can and often do have thoroughly unsympathetic motivations.) But if left-leaning readers find that I have missed, misunderstood, or misrepresented something important, I would welcome correction or argument.
As I understand it, the core of the left’s worldview is that, if people are left to their own devices, their relationships with one another will be characterized by pervasive exploitation of the weak by the strong, and that, accordingly, the state needs to intervene in these relationships in order to prevent or counter this exploitation. Moreover, apart from issues of exploitation, people on their own simply won’t generate enough of the stuff they need to lead truly fulfilling lives ― things like learning, the arts, or a clean environment. Again, state intervention is necessary to produce these things. In this way, and only in this way, human beings can develop their personality and faculties and flourish. This is deliberately somewhat vague, because different strands of the left will disagree about what precisely the different components of this definition mean or entail, but I think most if not all could agree on it at this level of abstraction.
Among the disagreements, an obvious one concerns what in my definition is meant by the terms “weak” and “strong”: that is, who is the exploiter, and who is the exploited? Marxists defined this in terms of the ownership of the means of production. The less doctrinaire or more modern left tended to think simply in terms of wealth, which was not necessarily synonymous with class defined in Marxist terms. And still more recent versions of leftism, which I’ll refer to as “woke” for lack of a better word, have focused on what they regard as power dynamics associated with race, sex, and other personal characteristics, which they see as no less, and often more, important to marking individuals or groups as exploiters or exploited than money.
Leftists also disagree, of course, about the precise forms of state intervention that are needed to counter exploitation. Must the state seize the means of production, as Marxists held, or otherwise “smash capitalism”, whatever precisely that means, as the more intense versions of woke leftism demand? Or is some combinaton of high taxes, redistribution, and regulation (including, prominently, anti-discrimination laws and perhaps other forms of “horizontal” fundamental rights) enough?
More fundamentally, leftists disagree about what state intervention can and should achieve. Marxists started out with a millenarian belief that, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state could somehow end exploitation once and for all, and happily whither away, having been left with nothing to do. As actually existing self-proclaimed dictatorships of the proletariat showed no signs of achieving anything of the sort, the more sensible left adopted an essentially managerial posture: it would keep fine-tuning state interventon, without expectating to change the world altogether, but in the hope of making things go well enough, and progressively better over time. The woke left, for its part, seems torn between wishing for an equality of outcomes that more conventional leftists do not aspire to and, at least at the harder edges, nihilistic despair: there is no real hope for even ameliorating things and, at best, longstanding hierarchies can be torn down and replaced with other, more acceptable ones.
Before getting into what is wrong with this picture, let me try to find a measure of sympathy with it. Leftists are right insofar as their ultimate concern is with human flourishing, which I think is true for many of them, though I am skeptical of it being true for some forms of the woke left. It certainly wasn’t true of some, if not all, ostensibly leftist dictatorships in the 20th century and beyond, which, if they cared about anything other than self-perpetuation in power, were fundamentally preoccupied with national greatness rather than individuals. It is surely no coincidence that the left in democratic polities is fundamentally sounder than its cousins in non-democratic ones. (The same goes for the right, but that’s a story for another post, maybe.)
Leftists who care about human flourishing are also right to point to exploitation of the weak by the strong as an impediment to it. They may well be right that there is a role for the state in countering it, though I am more sympathetic to anarchism than I once was. Be that is it may, I am content to acknowledge this point, at this level of abstraction, before I go on to explain how they mess it up.
Lastly, I will say that of the different strands of the left, those that are content to work with the crooked timber of humanity while also not resigning hope, and seek to make room for individual freedom within the regulatory frameworks they believe in are, obviously, rather more sympathetic than those that do not, such as the Marxists and the woke, or least the more intense among the woke. Liberals/libertarians can do business with the former. There is little, if anything, to agree on with the latter.
Despite, as I have just explained, some degree of sympathy for the motivations and aspirations of some forms of the left, I do think all are fundamentally misguided. Exploitation isn’t nearly as pervasive as even the more sensible leftists think. State intervention is both less effective and more dangerous than they acknowledge. More insiduously, it can itself be an obstacle to human flourishing.
To start with the issue of exploitation: the common mistake leftists make is to assume that it is not merely real or even frequent, but omnipresent. For them, all employment relationships, for instance, are at least highly suspect: employers are typically better off than their employees, who need the jobs to put food on the table, so evidently they are at high risk of exploitation. Hence the need for extensive employment law that regulates what employees must be paid, how much leave they must be entitled to, how much they work, and any number of other things ― or, better yet, cartelizing employees in labour unions that are supposed to protect them against employers. The same story can be told about tenants vis-à-vis landlords, consumers vis-à-vis providers of goods and services, and so on.
But there is a great deal of dogmatism about this, and in particular, a dogmatic refusal to believe that market competion, if allowed to operate, will provide the ostensibly weaker party sufficient exit opportunities for the supposedly stronger one not to have much reason to exploit them, at least over the medium and long term. Relatively few employees make the minimum wage for instance. Employers don’t pay them more out of the goodness of their hearts, of course; the market forces them to. But even if they accept the market’s verdict in the vast majority of cases, leftists remain persuaded that for the minority that is paid less than they deem acceptable the reason must be sinister, and not the fact that, regrettably, these particular employees don’t generate enough value to be paid more. Again, similar stories can be told about other markets, though, to be sure, there are various complications: perhaps most importantly, the state intervention in various elements of the housing markets makes tenants much more vulnerable to exploitation to the extent that an artificially created scarcity of housing prevents them from moving. (In fairness, this is something more and more people on the left are recognizing).
This brings me to the second problem with the left: its belief in state intervention as solution to problems. It is one thing to say that some aspect of society is flawed or even exploitative; it is a different matter to conclude that the state must intervene, let alone intervene in any particular way. Even state intervention that is certainly justified in principle, such as that in response to unquestionable exploitation like crimes against the person or property, can easily go wrong. This might be because of the incompetence of those charged with carrying it out, their prejudices, or the usual public choice problems ― the authorities being more concerned about their own good (broadly understood, including leisure, political support, and ― but by no means only ― financial gain) than their ostensible mission. Intervention in the market suffers from all these issues too, as well as the knowledge problem: the authorities don’t have access to information distributed among individuals and other market participants and communicated through prices, including, perhaps most importantly, information about people’s true preferences.
In particular, intervention in the market is liable to produce unintended consequences, which are arguably a combination of incompetence and the knowledge problem. The housing scarcity, and resulting unaffordability, created by the heady combination of outright bans on building and disincentives arising out of rent control laws, requirements about things like the minimum size of new dwellings, the number of those that must be available for a price below what the market would bear, etc, as well as environmental and historical preservation laws, is an obvious example. Each of these requirements responds to leftist impulses like protecting prospective tenants against landlords who would crowd them in tiny flats and overcharge those least able to afford a roof over their heads, as well as ensuring that the world has enough beauty in it, which the heartless market would destroy. But the result is that people have nowhere to live, nowhere to start families or businesses, nowhere to flourish. This is not what (good faith) leftists want, but it is the sort of thing they all too frequently get because they refuse to take incentives and market behaviour into account. (In fairness again, the anti-housing outcomes aren’t the left’s work alone; it gets plenty of help from the right. But that too is a story for another time, maybe.)
Last but not least, the left is mistaken about human nature when it assumes that the good and the beautiful cannot exist without the state’s assistance, and, not coincidentally, that nothing is lost when the state intervenes in field after field. People are capable of a good deal of initiative and self-reliance ― including in association with others, and whether for selfish or unselfish ends. People can create schools and universities, parks and hospitals, without the state telling them to do it or doing it in their place. State intervention disincentivizes or even stifles these efforts. At the extreme, it produces the results Hayek describes in The Road to Serfdom: the destruction of individual morality and truth-seeking, as only the state can take initiative, and all that is left for its subjects is to endorse and implement its choices. But even when it is not pushed so far, state intrusion into people’s relations with one another limits if it does not suppress their creativity, and channels their efforts into the more or less confined spaces that the state can understand and control. This may sometimes be necessary and sometimes inevitable, but something is lost in the process, and the starting point in how one thinks about politics should be considerable skepticism.
In short, even insofar as I agree with the leftists’ aspirations stated at high level of abstraction, I think their misunderstanding of how human relationships work generally, and those involving the government in particular, mean they will not realize these aspiration when they hold power. They are more likely to set their own cause back. They ― and I don’t just mean the totalitarians ― have done plenty of that already.
Nonetheless, I want to conclude with an appeal to some mutual grace and dialogue. I have to admit that I do not always find those virtues easy to summon, so I cannot give anyone lessons on this. But disagreement should not mean enmity. I hope this post, at least, will be taken in this spirit, in which it is meant.