Identity Politics, Coleman Hughes, and the Left: A Reply to Samuel Kronen

“We should be aspiring to establish a far more egalitarian society in accordance with principles of fairness. But this cannot come at the expense of respecting alternative doctrines which have a right to political expression.”

Introduction

A short while ago, Samuel Kronen responded to my suggestion that he write a short piece summarizing several of his major complaints with left-wing thinking. This is because I have always found Samuel an intelligent and open-minded critic of progressivism, even if we disagree on several key issues. His latest article displayed many of the same virtues, and I am happy to write this brief response addressing some of his concerns. For the sake of clarity, these will be addressed one at a time.

1: The Left and Democracy

One of the more interesting comments Kronen made in his piece was on the question of line drawing. He points out that while it is often relatively easy to determine when right-leaning ideas have gone to an intolerable extreme, the opposite cannot be said of left-leaning ideas:

“…Although the line seems quite clear as to when right-wing ideas have gone too far (i.e. associating national identity with skin color, justifying societal inequalities with appeals to bootstraps, clinging to tradition to numb social change, free market fundamentalism etc.), the same clarity just isn’t there for when left-wing ideas go bad, short of invoking the Soviet Gulag or Maoist China (though I’m sure my interlocutors will bristle at this claim).”

I think part of the reason for this, as even Dennis Prager acknowledged, is that even ideas on the radical left owe at least something to liberal instincts about the moral equality of all human beings. While far-right dogmas insist that people are fundamentally unequal in virtually every respect, radical leftists such as communists and anarchists appeal to the liberal instinct that each person has an equal dignity, which puts them “beyond price” as Kant might say. This is why even critics of the far-left can occasionally opine, begrudgingly, that the ideas of, say, communism sound theoretically appealing. This is part of the reason why critics find some ideas on the far-left so dangerous.