How the Left Lost its Soul

One evening in 2019, while reading a New York Review of Books article called “Two Roads for the New French Right,” I had an aha moment.

The cultural critic Mark Lilla was surveying the European political landscape. And what he saw excited him. Something fresh was coming up between the old intellectual swamp gas of the Left and the poisonous xenophobic populism of the Far Right: a generation of intellectually daring young politicos who aren’t easily categorized.

They put out small magazines that punch way above their weight. (“The point of little magazines is to think big in them,” as Lilla put it.) These magazines are peppered with references to George Orwell, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the cultural conservative American historian Christopher Lasch . . . They argue about Heidegger, publish critiques of neoliberal economics and environmental policy as severe as anything you can find on the Left. They rail against unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, soulless modernism.

They say that the European Union has been centralizing all the power in Brussels, conducting a slow coup d’état in the name of economic efficiency.

Some of them believe in zero growth. They want Big Tech reigned in — calling for a dismantling of the Google-Facebook-Amazon troika that’s mindfucking us.

They’re passionate. Committed. They have a plan.

The catch? There is a strong strain of social conservatism about them. The Left wants nothing to do with these people because their plan comes from an ideology that’s grounded in tradition, and even faith.

That sounds radical to me. In the best way.

It speaks to a spiritual dimension that’s gone AWOL among progressives. A dimension I fell in love with in Japan. So many of the Shinto-based rites I explored in my documentaries are about cherishing your ancestors and acting in a way that reflects honor upon them. Living lives our loved ones would be proud of. That attachment to the past, to tradition, to legacy, gives us meaning. These are stories that started long ago and will continue long after we’re gone.

Lilla had somehow exposed the bigger picture that the Left, I feel, has turned its back on. Yes, this is about the ‘good fight’ for equality, human rights and justice, but it’s also part of an “organic continuity” that stretches back thousands of years. On this view, the fundamental task of society is to pass on a kind of moral code to future generations — to put people into the larger organic flow of things.

What the job of society definitely isn’t, is to become what Lilla calls a clubhouse for “autonomous individuals bearing rights.”

When I read that, I thought to myself, Fuck, this rejection of hyper-individuality is what I’ve deep-down believed in all my life.

For the last 20 years, I’ve increasingly felt that we on the Left are marooned in a dry place and don’t know how to make the flowers bloom. There was a piece of the puzzle of living a good life that the Left wasn’t giving me. And suddenly, I sensed it, felt it, unbelievably, coming from the Right.

One of those Lefty shibboleths — and I know I’m going to get into trouble here — is abortion.

Since Roe v Wade, a woman’s right to choose has become such a given that it is now a reflex. Somewhere the lofty principle of justice got uncoupled from the primal human response to the sacrifice itself. Because sitting with the triumph and the horror at the same time is just too hard.

To say that abortion makes you uncomfortable isn’t the same as saying you’re constitutionally against it. But I dare you to try it. The slightest hint of ambiguity around the issue strikes the Left as outright treason, and the blowback you get is calibrated to kill.

I find it strange that progressives can be “pro-life” in every context but this one. We fight tooth-and-nail against the death penalty, against war, against torture and state-sanctioned killings across the globe. Even meat is murder. Progressives are about the sanctity of life above all else except in this one domain.

And I get why this issue’s different. Don’t misunderstand, I’ve always felt that a woman has the final say about whether to go through with her pregnancy or not, and nobody should ever take that right away from her. All I’m saying is, if a life is taken, it should be taken with the same reverence as happens in every other context. Whatever a fetus is, it is not medical waste.

There’s a Japanese Zen ritual called mizuko-kuyo — literally the “water baby” — that has found its way to America. As practiced in the States it is surprisingly politically generous. This is not just something pro-choice families embrace. It is a sacred rite. We mourn lost life here no less than the descendants of soldiers mourn the dead at cenotaphs, or Argentinian mothers mourn those “disappeared” in that country’s Dirty War. An activist drugged and thrown from an airplane into the ocean; an unborn baby sectioned and vacuumed from a womb: if the thought of both of those doesn’t make you hang your head a little, paralyzed with emotions bigger than you can hold, honestly, I’m not sure where we go from there. If we can’t find a place to meet in things that are the very denominator of our species, what hope is there for us?

We Lefties have lost our way. We’ve become cold and egocentric. That’s why we’ve been thrashing around in the weeds for the last twenty years. Now the time has come to take a leap into the unknown and learn to play jazz again.

This time with a new sense of awe.