Content area
Full text
The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America
By Richard J. Ellis. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999. 426 pages, $34.95 (cloth)
Reviewed by Andrew Hazlett
From the turbulent Sixties to today's campus thought monitors, there is ample evidence in living memory that the Right has no monopoly on political violence and dogmatism. The Left's excesses, however, are usually characterized as departures from an otherwise benevolent creed, while militia bombings are somehow less surprising. But what if there is a dark heart within American egalitarianism?
That's the question posed in Richard J. Ellis' The Dark Side of the Left. A professor at Willamette University and a long-time student of American political ideologies, Mr. Ellis has identified and dissected several egalitarian movements that have exhibited what he terms "illiberal" tendencies: unreasoning dogmatism, disdain for individual autonomy, demonization of opponents, apocalyptic millenialism, and violent rhetoric.
Mr. Ellis finds a common thread that runs through nineteenth-century utopian collectivists, 1960s campus rebels, today's radical feminists, and environmentalist misanthropes. Intrinsic to all these forms of egalitarianism is the rejection of the classical liberal understanding of equality before the law. Instead, radical egalitarians seek de facto equality of wealth, of status, of gender, among species, etc. These goals come into conflict with the existing rule of law in the United States (especially property rights) and the preferences of the vast majority of ordinary people. Mainstream American culture is essentially individualistic and focused on attaining private happiness and prosperity.
In contrast, radical egalitarians' objectives are social. In most cases, they choose not to withdraw into utopian communities and leave others alone. They feel compelled to change every aspect of the world they regard as so deeply corrupt. As their inevitable frustration with the task grows, these movements often eschew the gradual process of persuasion. They come to disdain people outside their movement as helpless victims of "false consciousness" whose choices have been conditioned by the "system." Their alienation is increased by a belief in an imminent apocalypse-whether religious, environmental, political, or social. The battle becomes so urgent and the odds so desperate that other moral concerns are cast aside-people must be "forced to be free."
Because egalitarians' actions are ultimately in the name of others, the last inhibitions against...