The Intellectual Nullity of Today's Left

A tradition that began with Robespierre has ended with brain death.

For my master’s degree in philosophy, I read all the great political philosophers, starting with Plato. Of all writers about the concept of PROGRESS, I found Hegel to be in many respects the most interesting, even though his prose is often fantastically dense and difficult to read. Hegel posited that, for all of its bloodiness and strife, human history is moving inexorably towards a universal rule of reason and law.

Marx famously borrowed Hegel’s concept of history—a progressive development of the spirit (thought and understanding)—and he used it to formulate a theory of history progressing by means of successive class struggles for the means of material production.

Marx’s ambitious theories of history and political economy are such gross oversimplifications of complex reality that they have never had any explanatory or predictive utility. However, because his theory of “class struggle” is rooted in the archetypal narrative of conflict between overlords and underdogs, it taps into the widespread and fervent passions of resentment and envy.

For the most part, Marx was a ridiculous adolescent who spent the better part of his life sponging off of his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, and his friend, Friedrich Engels. However, as much as we may fairly criticize Marx’s ideas, at least he had ideas that we can talk about and debate.

Likewise, when I was in college thirty years ago, I encountered many professors who had retained a sentimental attachment to Marx’s ideas, but at least I could have a conversation with them. Not so anymore. Nowadays the leftist intelligentsia has nothing to offer but childish slogans and obsessions.

Recently I was reminded of this while reading the purported “scholarship” of Harvard President, Claudine Gay. Perusing her publishing resume reveals an all-consuming obsession with race—an obsession that yields no insight, practical ideas for improvement, or hope. Every paragraph I scanned was tendentious and excruciatingly boring.

To be sure, boring prose has long been the standard for academics who have held to the Marxist tradition. Whenever I was suffering from insomnia in graduate school, just three sentences of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action would send me into a deep narcosis.

With allegations (and solid evidence) of President Gay committing multiple acts of plagiarism, the American institutional Left may now be regarded as a complete write-off. There is simply nothing left of the Left. Its intellectual tradition has flatlined into brain death.