The Fake Left

 By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

First it was farmers. Then coal miners and factory workers. And then minorities, first in this country and then abroad, who were the latest candidates for the oppressed of the year.

But beyond searching for victims to represent, the Left was really searching for authenticity.

The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left.

The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than being the ones who stand apart and make those theories.

The mimicry of working-class attire by leftists had been mocked as far back as Orwell. Radicals who didn’t work loved adopting the costumes and accents of the working class as if they were ideological method actors who could discover the authenticity they lacked by playing a part. (It is no coincidence that acting is a profession rife with leftist politics and that so many of those who play the embodiment of the ordinary man or woman on screen proved to be nothing of the sort. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the Left’s a stage and its activists mere players.)

Leftists search for the missing authenticity by trying to embed themselves into the lives of the authentic ‘working class’. In the 19th century, they rallied for farmers and tried to become them. Wealthy urbane intellectuals engaged in doomed efforts to run farms, growing apples and raising hens in New England with invariably disastrous results that left them bankrupt and in debt, without having learned a single thing from the experience.

Except to denounce ‘mercantilism’ and later capitalism for their failures.

19th century leftist intellectuals, individually or as part of the growing trend of Fourierist communes, lacked the discipline for the backbreaking work and painstaking planning involved in farming. Rather than leading them to question whether they could run entire societies when they could not even manage a farm, they decided that the problem was with farming, not with them.

And that is what the Left always does. Rather than acknowledge that their failures stem from hubris and a lack of discipline, they instead blame them on the general state of society.

By the 20th century, they had turned away from farmers, who had proven that they were not fertile ground for their ideology, to factory workers and miners who were more willing to form unions. The new working-class ideal was no longer Fourier’s massive agriculture communes, but massive industrialization that appeared to be made for socialist central planning. Unlike agriculture which was subject to the vicissitudes of the weather, every element of the industrial process from mining to the finished product appeared controllable and subject to their theories.

The Soviet Union purged farmers and built-up industrialization, as Communist China would do in more recent times, leading to massive famines in both dictatorships. Russia and China reviled farmers as reactionaries and their mismanagement of agriculture collectively killed millions. The USSR became dependent on American agricultural imports and China may dump its junk on Americans on an incredible scale, but still imports agricultural products from America.

In America, the factory workers and miners eventually proved disappointingly conservative. Both the international Marxist movements and American leftists moved on to minorities who were seen as truly authentic revolutionary bases who would not be seduced by capitalism. Third world terrorism, especially in Latin America and the Muslim world, became the new ideal.

Western leftists began admiring and trying to imitate Che and Arafat. Then Hugo Chavez and Hamas. They gave up on the white working class entirely, then on men and everyone else. The vast majority of Americans, like the farmers, the workers and the miners, were no longer seen as ‘authentic’ and lost their ideological central place in the grand schemes of socialism.

The Left’s pursuit of authenticity was a response to its own unreality. The more unreal it became, the more it became obsessed with finding the authenticity in others that it lacked. As a movement trying to escape from itself, it could never achieve its real goal of embodying its shifting fashionable notions of the ‘salt of the earth’ who had the gift of making things work.

The ‘authenticity vampires’ who live on laptops but sound like they are struggling in salt mines always talk about ‘fighting for the people’, not because they love the people, but because they want to become them. They attach themselves to what they deem to be the working class to drain them of that authenticity, and then, like vampires, kill them off and replace them.

The crisis of the radical intellectuals is that they reject what they are, they reject the world as it is and they build their lives around fantasies that have no connection to their real selves or to reality. If they had the love for labor that they claim to, they would recognize their own decadence, but instead they aspire to be a supreme ruling class, the ‘first citizens’ of a class they do not even belong to.

A true society of workers would have no place for the sorts of people who theorize about it. A society of workers would understand why the various theories of those who pretend to speak for the working class are actually unworkable. The Left is not a society of workers, but of theorizers, whose theories never work, but who collude to perpetrate a massive fantasy on the public.

The world’s greatest con job.

Leftists began by fooling themselves and then fooling everyone else. Like all liars, they are desperately hungry for some truths to hang over their vast infrastructure of deceits. That is the authenticity they seek. Some truth to make the lies that they tell to themselves and to us seem plausible. Leftists put on working-class outfits, shabby, ripped and worn clothes, use lower class accents, embrace their music and what they think is their culture to find the truth.

But eventually this fake authenticity wears thin and they have to exchange it for another one. And they tell themselves that time this it will work and radical Pinocchio will become a real boy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.