More On The Left's Two-Spiritedness

I wasn't surprised when Time chose Zelensky as its "person" of the year -- in fact, several days ago, I assumed the choice had already been published, and I just hadn't seen it, Says a lot about Time these days. What struck me most was the kitschiness of the portrait, the Kennedyesque visionary stare into the distance that in fact would have worked 60 years ago, but of course, we're in 2022. The other thing that hit me a moment later was remembering last year's choice for woman of the year, Admiral Levine. President Zelensky is a person; Admiral Levine is a woman, which of course she is not. In fact, Elon Musk just withdrew the Babylon Bee's suspension from Twitter for maintaining just this.

I was briefly tempted to call Time's successive choices inconsistent, but on a moment's reflection, I realized it wasn't inconsistent, it was just two-spirited. Recall that the Old Left saw the Soviet Union as the authoritative manifestation of world socialism, and this lasted at least until Sen Sanders spent his honeymoon there in 1988. (The New Left, of course, was always of a piece with the New Nixon, a remarketing of the same old product).

Around the time of the Soviet Union's fall a few years after Sen Sanders's visit, the leftist mainstream quietly revised its orthodoxy to explain the fall as a result of Soviet betrayal of real socialism, that in fact, authentic socialism had never actually been tried. Thus it's been possible in the most recent development, the Russian invasion of Ukraine complete with the hammer-and-sickle red banner on the tanks, for leftists actually to oppose a foreign and military policy planned and executed by the once authoritative mainifestation of world socialism.

Thus the received doctrine of the now-gentrified left fully embraces both the foreign and domestic policies of the current Democrat administration, an anti-Russian-but-not-Soviet proxy war plus a pansexualist home agenda. Recall that an effectively anti-Soviet proxy war in Viet Nam plus a highly uncertain relationship with the Lumpenproletariat reflected in the 1960s urban riots were what brought down Lyndon Johnson from the Left. Pansexualism wasn't really on the horizon at the time.

The removal of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism as the authoritative model for the Left has had an intriguing result. It's now OK to wage a proxy war against Russia; the old New Left would never have permitted it. But with the disppearance of Soviet Russia as the Leftist model, the threat of world proletarian revolution seems also to have disappeared, justlikethat. Isn't that peculiar?

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's position vis-a-vis urban riots in places like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago was uncertain; he was forced by Michigan Republican Gov George Romney to send federal troops to quell the Detroit riot in 1967, although New Left demonstrations against the Viet Nam war would soon make him decline to seek reelection.

In 2022, the conflict with urban rioters in the Lumpenproletariat has been resolved via an uneasy alliance with the defund-the-police gentry, while the US armed forces, occupied with supervising the Ukraine war from a distance, are also tasked with LGBTQ diversity training.

Isn't this peculiar? It's as though ruthless Marxism-Leninism has been purged from the Left, and working-class revolution is off the table. This in turn has taken leftism back to the bourgeois parlor pursuit it had been before Lenin and resulting in a whole new set of agendas completely unknown to Marx: an alliance of the upper bourgeoisie with the Lumpenproletariat, pansexualist anti-feminism, and neo-Malthusianism replacing popultation growth with climate stability.

And Time almost seems to want to make Zelensky the champion of this gentrified new world. Just wait until the EU tries to limit Ukrainian agriculture in the name of climate. I don't think this is a stable arrangement.