From Inclusive Left To Excluding Right

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –April 28, 2016

Prof. Charles Sarvan

Lilies, if they fester, smell far worse than weeds ~ (From Shakespeare’s sonnet, No. 94)

The caption above is derived from, and relates to, a book by Daniel Oppenheimer titled Exit Right: the People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century. Oppenheimer studies the character and career of six apostates, individuals who left the visionary politics of the Left and moved to the extreme right. Where did they start off from, and where did they end? Why did they change belief, values and commitment? What were the consequences? To cite one case, David Horowitz, once in the New Left movement, son of members of the Communist Party, came to recognise and champion his Jewish identity. He’s now, among other things, director of a website that tracks individuals and organisations on the political left; opposes ‘political correctness’ and left-orientation in academia; is unsympathetic to the suffering of Africans under the slave trade, claiming that Africans and Arabs are as much complicit, and is fiercely anti-Islam. “There’s no zealot like a convert” applies as much in politics and public life as it does in religion.

Very often, discussion is at cross-purposes because crucial terms are not defined. Working towards a clarification of ‘socialism’, I suggest that though the concept has political and social implications, its foundation is a certain approach to economic organisation and control. The emphasis being on economic structure, socialists see society along the horizontal lines of class. While Moslems, Sinhalese and Tamils (alphabetical order) or Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Moslems can, and do, belong to the upper, middle and working classes, a vertical division would categorise individuals according to ‘race’, religion or skin-colour – irrespective of individual income – and place them in different, mutually-excluding, categories. (Caste can be said to have both the horizontal and vertical axes but is not relevant to the present exploration.) Thus, racism and socialism cannot co-exist; a ‘racist’ cannot be a socialist, though some fondly and determinedly make that claim: it’s remarkable how we human beings easily accommodate, and comfortably live with, contradiction. The Nazis labelled themselves National Socialists but had nothing to do with socialism. On the contrary, they exterminated the socialists they could get their hands on.

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