The Sacralization of Politics [i]The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium[/i] by Paul Edward Gottfried

The Strange Death of Marxism: The
European Left in the New Millennium
by Paul Edward Gottfried (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2005).
154 pp.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU teaches English literature at SUNY, Oswego.

Paul Gottfried’s previous book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002), examined the emergence of “secular theocracy” in North America, as the latest phase of the reigning “managerial state.” Gottfried argued there the thesis that contemporary American liberalism has increasingly assumed a religious, indeed a millenarian, tenor, taking as its mission the therapeutic reconstruction— and thereby the spiritual redemption— of the benighted mass. The therapeutic regime proceeds according to the notion of “tolerance” and under the scheme of “multiculturalism.” Contemporary liberalism habitually sees the average person as condemned to preterition, helplessly enthralled by his reactionary “middle class” ideology, and as embodying an insufferable scandal to his sanctified other. The typical other, according to this vision, is a thirdworld immigrant, a member of some ethnic minority, a put-upon woman, or someone whose sexual practices are non-normative. The entwined motifs of proselyte activism and of the salvaging of the heathens derive, in the context of North American liberalism, from two related sources: Nineteenth Century Protestant revivalism, whence the crusading character of the phenomenon, and a mélange of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, whence its philosophical justifications and theosophical vocabulary.

In The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium, Gottfried, while changing his focus from North America to the mother continent, insists on drawing an equally stark picture of the looming “soft totalitarianism.” The element of Gottfried’s case that has attracted the most critical attention has two parts. The first part is Gottfried’s assertion that Europe is not the donor but rather the recipient of a type of apocalyptic radicalism whose origin lies on the Yankee side of the Atlantic. The second part is that this apocalyptic radicalism is not Marxist, even while it remains pronouncedly collectivistic.

As to the first part, in Gottfried’s own words, “contrary to the opinion that ideological fevers only move across the Atlantic in a westerly direction, the opposite may be closer to the truth.” He cites the brute facts, among others, of the American military occupation of Germany after World War II and of American insistence during the formation of the Bundesrepublik that its constitution should contain clauses (rightly or wrongly) excepting certain ideas from the realm of guaranteed free expression. He cites also the acknowledged supremacy of American popular culture in the world market: if Europe resisted American music and movies not at all, why would it be impermeable to American notions, political and social? The first part of this assertion deprives well-meaning patriots of their instinctively satisfying foreign- contamination theory; the second part suggests that even were it the case that pernicious European doctrines had infiltrated and corrupted American institutions, the identification of these doctrines as Marxist phylum is quite wrong.

In fact, Gottfried writes, one finds “nothing intrinsically Marxist” in the current doctrines and obsessions of the European Left. The cadre of this dominant Brusselsgovernment dispensation no longer invests intellectually in the dialectical materialist view of history, nor does it any longer scheme to abolish capitalism in order to make way for the workers’ paradise. The welltailored avatars of human perfection aim rather at “hate-speech laws directed primarily against the European Christian majority populations… criminalization of published or televised communications deemed to deny or deny Nazi acts of genocide…the sponsoring of multicultural programs…and the raising of subsidies for asylum-seekers.” Gottfried finds in the resemblance between the European radical agenda and the program of the American Left in its own prior post-Marxist efflorescence evidence for his thesis. Moreover, his thoughtful reversal of the usual assessment has considerable plausibility; indeed it explains, via a kind of Oedipal resentment, the stridency of European anti- Americanism.

European radicals do what belated imitators always do in order to feign priority— they isolate and exaggerate certain components of the borrowed Gestalt and describe their mere variant as a whole-cloth innovation. Thus the multicultural celebration of diverse others in the United States becomes the elite jihad against the long-standing national cultures within Europe; condemnation of so-called ethnocentric discourse in America becomes the prosecution of Oriana Fallaci in a Roman court on the charge that her books defending the Italianate character of Italy have defamed Islam. These heightened forms of an originally North American fervor can return to their point of origin to be embraced anew by those who always eagerly await the latest finely honed mode of antinomian resentment.

Gottfried’s analysis of a specifically America-indebted European vanguard in no wise prohibits this from being so, a point perhaps not fully appreciated by his critics. Political radicalism, in essence quite reactionary, is also pronouncedly mimetic or metastatic— as are all phenomena belonging to the lower degrees of the sacred or of religiosity. The sacred, like the molecules of the air, is always in motion; if it ever stopped, it would cease to exist. Thus the chanting of epithets quickly assimilates the uncritical into the mystique of participation, fueling the frenzy; the mob then seeks the victims through whose immolation it can feel its solidarity. The feeling of righteousness, which cannot exist without an identifiable devilish opposition, forms the substratum of all modern propaganda and agitation. This observation about the religiosity, in the primitive sense, of propaganda-mediated mass movements brings us to the less-annotated strand of Gottfried’s discussion in The Strange Death, his insistence namely that “the post-Marxist Left represents…a distinctive political religion.”

While Marxism itself is as dead as its main Twentieth Century sponsor-state, the spirit of rebuke that animated it has suffered no diminution in its demand for a cause but has indeed found new foci around which to articulate its zeal. Gottfried’s Introduction and again his last chapter address this discovery, which arises from its author’s interest in the work of Eric Voegelin. As Voegelin writes in The Political Religions (1938), “when God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods”; this will be so even when “the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific” rather than emotive or theosophical. “The current [European] Left,” Gottfried writes, “engages in a transposition of Christian themes, which it weaves into a post-Christian political tapestry.” European activism thus takes some of its luster (insofar as it has any) from its insistent “sacralization of the political,” proposing its scheme of egalitarian and multicultural perfection “as a would-be successor to a traditional beliefsystem… parasitic on Judeo-Christian symbols but equipped with its own transformational myths and end-of-history vision.”

Gnosticism emerged in Late Antiquity, a this-worldly derailment of spirituality, which would reappear in the form of Albigensian Puritanism in the Thirteenth Century; Gottfried makes one or two passing references to the Cathars. The short-lived puritanical regime of the Münster Anabaptists in early Sixteenth-Century Westphalia provides yet another example, apposite to Gottfried’s case (although it does not enter his argument) because it aimed at consummation of its vision in the earthly realm and exercised coercive violence in that direction. The European Union’s political correctness, as Gottfried convincingly describes it, looks like the Münster Anabaptist polity writ large, lacking only in the availability of shock troops to enforce its decisions. The Luxembourg judiciary of the Union has arbitrarily forbidden the innocuous Aaland Islanders, for example, from selling a type of chewing tobacco of traditional local manufacture and it has successfully pressured Belgium to outlaw the Vlams Blok because of that party’s principled opposition to unrestricted thirdworld immigration.

The incoherent sum of such dictates suggests a deep irrationality of taboos and obsessions trying to imprint its weirdness in the inherited stuff of an etiolated Christian civilization no longer capable of unified defensive action on its own behalf. In The Political Religions, Voegelin has noted how “the end realm” of the metastatic agitations always resides in some “earthly condition of perfected humanity” taking the form of a “repression- free” community governed by “suitable rulers.” In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin elaborates his earlier remarks by contrasting “de-divinization” with “redivinization.” The first, a “fateful result” of the Late Antique victory of Christianity, unfolds as “the process by which polytheism died from experiential atrophy”; the second, which accelerates if it does not begin with the Enlightenment, “has its origins in Christianity itself, deriving from the components that were suppressed as heretical by the universal church.”

Gottfried places at the heart of the new, re-divinizing politics of Europe a self-inflating “purity of intention, which must be demonstrated through ceaseless combat against the impure.” The saints conceive of impurity in demonic terms as omnipresent and as eternally extending its Mephistophelean inducements, not so much to others of the impure class, but to “in-between types” who constitute the likeliest candidates for missionary redemption. “Those waiting to be saved,” writes Gottfried, “are neither the fascist reprobates nor on the level of those already saved, the phosphorai and katharismenoi“; they are rather the recruits to society, like immigrants, who can replace the recalcitrant and unclean who refuse to conform to the rule of tolerance or who outrage propriety by criticizing the program of multiculturalism. In The Political Religions, Voegelin had asserted that “within the course of European history, each of the [novel political] revelations also created its own group of symbols for Satan.” In The Strange Death, Gottfried catalogues some of the contemporary Satan-symbols: showing cognizance of Stalinist crimes and insisting on the mention of them; explicitly arguing for homegrown European culture over imported thirdworld culture associated with immigrants; defending or practicing Christianity; challenging or questioning any item in the egalitarian program of leveling all social differences, such as those that differentiate men from women, heterosexuals from homosexuals, or the competent and educated from the incompetent and uneducated. Gottfried perceives in the business of the European Left the nihilistic urge to “leap into chaos.”

This chaos-urge has already been terrifically destructive of everything that the name Europe traditionally denotes. The determination of the Left not to notice the rubble that it leaves in its path necessitates that Gottfried borrow one more motif from Voegelin, which Voegelin himself borrowed from the German novelist Heimito von Doderer or from Doderer’s Austrian counterpart, Robert Musil: the concept of “the second reality.” “The adherence to an inner-worldly religiosity is so strong,” as Voegelin argues, “that its revelations do not break apart under the attack of scientific [or simply of factual] criticism.” The light-bearers blithely ignore contrary data. Just this mechanism prolonged the life of Marxism and just this mechanism is at work in the post-Marxist dispensation as well. When European courts attack free expression or insist on the reformation of traditional local preferences or practices, they are obeying the first imperative of “the second reality,” which is that “any teaching that disrupts the unity and peace of the commonwealth cannot be true.” As Gottfried notes in The Strange Death: “The Post-Marxist Left… in emphatically rejecting the Western cultural and historical heritage…has exerted journalistic, judicial, and bureaucratic force to destroy any self-affirming Western consciousness and European national identity. Although politically less violent than other Lefts, it is culturally and socially more radical.” A fearful commitment to the pure intention makes its bearers all the more determined to ignore any aspect of the real reality that conflicts with their vision. Conservatives should put Gottfried’s book in the first place on their urgent reading-list; they should study it, along with its author’s previous book, and they should do their best to come to terms with it.