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THREAD. Why is it that the left has such a rich history of sectarianism compared to the right? Why does intra-right-wing squabbling have a far less distinguished history than left-wing infighting? This is something I've been thinking a lot about. My hypothesis follows... #USIH
It has a lot to do with the vastly different premises that have given rise to the right and the left. The right is mostly okay with things that have long persisted in human history, like inequality, and thus does not feel compelled to imagine alternative worlds into being.
Conservatives rarely think about Heaven on Earth (the afterlife is another matter). In contrast, the left’s raison dêtre is to make the world a more equal place for all humans.
In this, the left aims for a world that has never really existed, at least not since humans began accumulating agricultural surpluses some 10,000 or more years ago.
The project of dreaming up a more equal world, Marx's objective, has engendered intense disagreement on the left about both means and ends. What will this brave new world look like? How do we get there? These are highly speculative questions.
And yet, leftists have rarely shied away from offering up answers, often with a degree of certainty that speaks more to the merits of their cause than to any realistic sense of being able to achieve it.
When convictions about something as important as the path to Utopia differ, discord is the result. Cue shit-talking. (Which, by the way, is the topic of a panel that I am on at the upcoming @Ideas_History conference: the history of Marxist rhetorical abuse, or shit-talking.)
@Ideas_History Important point of clarification: the left does not equal liberalism.
@Ideas_History Getting appropriate push back on this. Obviously recognize the right has had its share of sectarianism, especially in form of religious sectarianism. I would also argue, however, that right-wing sectarianism became less paramount across 20C US History. Anticommunism crucial here.
@Ideas_History Example of right-wing sectarian sh*t talk: Paleoconservative Stephen Tonsor's ferocious analogy for the larger conservative movement taking its cues from neoconservatives...
@Ideas_History “It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.”
