The Fake Left
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 be...