What is the difference between leftists and cannibals? Cannibals don't eat their friends.
~attributed to Lyndon Johnson
I am liberal to my core and like many liberals I've become increasingly disturbed by the escalation of totalitarian impulses on the Left. For the past six years I've been exploring the phenomenon and teasing out its underlying dynamics. While many writers and thinkers have been going head-to-head with extremists and confronting their ideological inconsistencies, the book I've found most helpful is Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Unlike other writers, Felski approaches the dynamic obliquely and her foundational point is more subtle.
How we feel is almost always the first signal we have about the nature of our surroundings. For example, all of us have had the experience of walking into restaurant with a friend; all of us engage in some form of the following when we do: We stop just inside, pause a moment, and get a feel for the place. And every one of us has, at one time or another, turned to our friend and said, "This place feels weird, let's leave." It is our sensate perception of what might be called the atmosphere of a place-or as Felski has it, its "mood" - that can, if attended to, reveal deeper aspects of it nature.
I suspect the discomfort many of us are experiencing with the Left begins, as it did for me, with a strong, pre-verbal aversion to the mood permeating its activism. As the writer Thomas Cook once remarked, "There are moral fault lines to whose subtle trembling we must remain alert." Our sensitivity to that trembling alerts us but it takes time and a great deal of contemplation to unlock just why it has occurred. Felksi is someone who has taken the time.
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