Metanoia from the Extreme

Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right. Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.

Perhaps not since the Cold War have public debates been conducted with such explicitly ideological terms and clear commitments. After the prevailing centrism of Western politics at the close of the Cold War and the immediate post-9/11 era, political discussion within the West is again concerned with questions regarding Marxism as a social and political theory. As is evident within the United States, these debates have grown increasingly polarized of late within segments of both the Democratic and Republican parties as to how forcefully to adopt or oppose various components or contributions of Marxist analysis. This resurgence of explicit ideology has also contributed to the increase of polarization and extremism. In this fraught moment of concern about political conflicts and polarization towards extreme political positions within both US political parties, it is helpful to remember that history provides examples of countervailing reactions and reconsiderations generated from within extreme ideologies where former partisans abandoned prior commitments and formulations and adjusted their positions as a concession to their lived experience of reality. Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers have provided just such a reminder in Walk Away: When the Political Right Turns Left and perhaps provided examples for future emulation.

This volume is not a general analysis of how various left-leaning ideologies as a whole changed over time, but of some twentieth-century examples of scholars from leftist traditions who changed their minds over the course of their academic or public careers. As the introduction explains, “The essays within this volume discuss a very diverse collection of political thinkers who, to varying degrees, undertook a walk away from the Left to the Right. Some of these figures made a partial transition rightward that did not lead them to jettison all of their leftist ideas. Others embraced a more dramatic transformation from extreme Left to extreme Right.”

Each chapter of the volume focuses on particular individuals or small-groups of aligned thinkers as demonstrations of a rightward movement in thinking. The volume’s chapters cover James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, neoconservatives as a group, George Grant and Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Benedict Ashley, Christopher Lasch, Jürgen Habermas, and Kai Nielson and G.A. Cohen. The audience for this book will mostly likely include readers attracted to the collection because of an interest in one of the particular chapters more than those interested in working through the book chapter by chapter. This is a characteristic weakness of almost all edited volumes of essays, but in this case the observation is only a minor critique because many of the thinkers and groups discussed here are widely known and have general appeal. Therefore, it is likely that many readers will find multiple chapters profitably worth their time and sufficient justification for adding the book to their personal library or institutional collections. Further, given that many of the covered thinkers abandoned or modified their Marxist beliefs, the volume as a whole may offer something of a broad background to the resurgent debates around neo-Marxist social theory and cultural Marxism that have been a result of the popular appeal of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 1619 Project.

Beyond their individual strengths and merits, the chapters on James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and neoconservatives will be readily appealing to those interested in the history of American conservativism and the present debates about the Republican parties’ fluctuating alignments on issues of nationalism, populism, and foreign policy. While Burnham and neoconservatives are acknowledged contributors towards the “fusionism” of movement conservatism in the twentieth century, Christopher H. Owen’s chapter “Pondering the People: Willmoore Kendall’s Intellectual Path from Progressive to Conservative Populism” provides an examination of right-wing populism that in the era of Donald Trump which – as Havers claims in the introduction – may make Kendall “the most prophetic figure on the post-World War II Right.”

The distinctly American situation of the early chapters is also well-balanced by the Canadian, English, and European contexts of other chapters and the array of international scholars shifts the broader focus of the volume from reactions to the American New Deal to the wider trajectory of Marxism and socialism in the last century. Ron Dart’s chapter on George Grant and Charles Taylor for instance is particularly helpful in refuting the notion that Canada “has produced no serious philosopher or political philosophers.” By considering the underlying commitments to Hegelian philosophy which first drew both Grant and Taylor – and many others besides – towards Marxism, Dart suggests how Hegel set them each on their paths before reconsiderations of Hegel shifted their positions.

The chapters on Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School and the analytical Marxism of Kai Nielson and G.A. Cohen are certainly prime examples of the imperative of the volume’s earlier caveat that some of the rightward movement discussed can only be considered partial. However, even if only partial, the rightward movement of these thinkers is an important aspect of contemporary intellectual history. In both chapters the aim is to point out how the most egregious abuses and failures of communism prompted at least some openness towards reconsideration of components of the Western tradition such as metaphysics, Christian theology, or the nation-state. Similarly, Alasdair MacIntyre’s journey to recover Aristotelian and Thomistic teleology must be qualified by remembering that his project was still motivated by his prior social and political commitments which were not wholly abandoned.

Viewed as a whole, I have only two minor related critiques of the volume focused on its framing and claim of relevance. First, while the introduction to the volume notes that for many twentieth century activists and scholars the transition towards abandonment or modification of their prior ideological commitments was almost a “religious conversion,” the introduction and individual chapters are not equally strong in developing how the initial leftist commitments of the surveyed scholars was itself a kind of religious faith. As Voegelin clearly understood, Marxism is an ersatz religion for its adherents and proponents. A better handling of this point for each of the thinkers addressed would complicate Havers’ observation in the introduction that “the ease with which these figures moved from Left to Right depended on how leftist they were in the first place.” Instead of thinking that ideologists of the “head” are more changeable then those of the “heart,” we might instead consider the implicit suggestions given by Plato and Dostoevsky that true metanoia is not under our own control and may be – not only more profound, but also – more likely within those most passionately committed in the opposite direction.

Second, in this light it is somewhat puzzling that Havers would conclude his introduction to the volume with a “prediction” that the “distinct versions of the walk away” provided by the various subjects examined in this work suggest that, “Those who are tempted to move from the Left to the Right today may well find it far less urgent or appealing to make this journey than those in the past who desired to dissociate themselves from Stalinism or Maoism.” While the history of oppression within the Soviet Union and China clearly contributed some urgency to various renunciations, our present position is not so guarded against the advance of authoritarianism and tyranny that today’s radicals may not themselves also come to passionately move away from their present religiously-held political commitments. Even without the disastrous results witnessed from the ideological revolts of the last century, we have no reason to think that humans have become less capable of acknowledging the experience of reality and turning away from wrong when it is recognized. Thus, despite Havers’ seeming slight of the volume’s relevance at the outset, the need will always remain for detailed examinations of thinkers who acknowledged changed beliefs and positions because history has not ended.

Please see “Mugged by Reality” and “Analytical Marxism and the Meaning of Historicism” in Walk Away (Lexington Books, 2019).

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