The late Jean-François Revel, writing 25 years ago, pegged exactly the self-defeating attitude of America’s liberal Republicans and Democrats: we are at fault when our enemies attack us; foreign enemies are simply a distraction from bestowing ever more welfare-state entitlements without heed to their future cost.
Revel was that exceedingly rare person: a French intellectual who didn’t despise the United States, an intellectual who understood the cancerous prognosis of liberal-progressivism.
Revel’s 1983 How Democracies Perish described liberal-progressivism’s debilitating effect on confronting the threat of domination by the Soviet Union. His observations apply equally today in our long-term struggle against Islamic jihad.
In that regard, read Bret Stephens’s review of the first English translation of Last Exit to Utopia, one of Revel’s last books.
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Nor could this same intelligentsia acknowledge that the collapse of communism was the supreme vindication for Cold War anticommunists such as Revel, long reviled as a political paranoid and closet fascist. Instead, the left’s new refrain was that, whatever the excesses of communism, they were as nothing next to those of “liberal totalitarianism” and “savage capitalism.” Communism, in this view, more than redeemed itself through its aspirations for social justice. And to the extent that actual Communist regimes—namely, all of them—fell short of that ideal, it merely proved that they hadn’t been Communist to begin with!
Of this mental fortress, Revel acidly writes: “Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.” Thus the political collapse of communism offered members of the hard left an avenue of ideological resurrection, since they could return to their favorite pastime of lambasting globalization and other American conspiracies to enslave the world without having to suffer any unpalatable reminders of some of the alternatives—the Berlin Wall, for instance…
Revel’s analysis helps to make sense of the latest version of the totalitarian temptation, this time the temptation of radical Islam (though “Last Exit to Utopia” does not explicitly broach the subject). Strange as it may seem, today’s Western “progressives,” whose domestic political fixations include gay marriage and abortion rights, nonetheless frequently find themselves making common cause with Muslim fanatics for whom such things are anathema.
This seemingly strange affiliation has partly to do with a shared loathing, among radical leftists and radical Islamists, of the U.S. and Israel. But as Revel astutely notes, the deeper bond is what he calls the “excommunication of modernity,” a mark of the left going back to the primitivist and anti-civilizational musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Islamists understand this commonality as well: Among the doctrinal sources cited by Osama bin Laden, one finds not only the Quran but also the works of Noam Chomsky.
Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin’s mausoleum would do well to read this book, a fitting literary capstone in the career of one of France’s true immortals.
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