Yep. Once again, the Left has gone rogue. No, murdering millions of Ukrainians in the 1932–1933 Great Famine known as the Holodomor wasn’t the first time, nor will it be last. As I am writing this, we have Wokeness, and the Great Reset, and the Chinese Communist Social Credit System. What will be next?
As long as the Left exists, it is going to go rogue. This is a fascinating phenomenon of history. How does it happen, and can we ask why does the Left always go rogue? Here’s my attempt at answering these questions.
It makes sense to begin by defining the Left. That term is thrown around a lot these days, both in a positive and a negative sense, but it has become little more than an epithet or an encomium depending on whether one is for it or against it. I have my own definition of the Left, and here it is:
Politically speaking, there was no such thing as “Left” and “Right” before the French Revolution. The Left came into existence because the revolutionaries in France got tired of having the average human being, the working stiff, the folks who grew the food and got things running, were being bullied by two particular classes of elites, the religious establishment and the royal aristocracy. That was made clear in writing, with the centuries-long establishment of a simplified caste system called the Estates-General. Due to a money crunch, the King had revived the recurrently dormant Estates-General in 1789, and in the spirit of the time, the working stiffs openly began a rebellion against the Crown and the Church.
At a newly established kind of parliament, a National Convention in 1789, the same year that the US Constitution was ratified, representatives of the three Estates came together and debated. The president of the Convention sat in the center in front of the delegates, and to the left side of the chamber sat all the delegates who opposed the Crown and the established Church in favor of the downtrodden Third Estate, the commoners who produced the goods and services that made France possible.
To the right of the assembled group sat the supporters of the Crown and the Church.
And that was it.
If you supported the productive class, you were Left. If you supported the ruling class, you were on the Right.
But today things are muddled. The “Right” these days usually means anybody who opposes the Left, and it is also used a slur when phrased right-wing, far-right, or right-wing extremist. That is very convenient for today’s Rogue Left, the Woke folk, who use it as an excuse to equate their critics as equivalent to the Italian Fascist Party under Mussolini, or, of course, Hitler’s Nazis.
One of the reasons that the terms are muddled is that there was an attempt at the time of the French Revolution to allow the supporters of the Crown and the Church to have a political voice without crushing the Third Estate, the productive workers. That movement usually involved a constitutional monarchy and an established church, but which some kind of guarantee of freedom of religion. The best working example of that approach, these days, was and is the British Commonwealth, with a (supposedly) non-political king who is also the head of the Church of England.
In the American Revolution, however, there was to be no king, only a president, and the establishment of religion was banned in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The revolutionary French Left, beginning in 1789, resisted the trend towards a constitutional monarchy. In fact, on January 21, 1793, they chopped off the King’s head with a guillotine. The king’s head was not the only one to roll in that revolution because the Left, for the first time, but certainly not the last, had gone rogue.
What had begun as a movement to support the productive workers of France and the French colonies, had turned into a Reign of Terror.