The political left’s relationship to defeat is one of my abiding fixations; those of you who’ve followed my work will have noticed this. In a bitter mood, I once wrote:
To be a leftist in America is to be a connoisseur of defeat. We are intimately familiar with all its textures and flavors. We know just how to cut its bitterness with a splash of vindication, to elevate a stale portion of hope with a hearty side of sanctimony, recrimination, or rancor. Conditioned to expect defeat, we have learned to take perverse comfort in its arrival. For the left, the taste of failure is a home-cooked meal. We’d prefer something else, but we never feel more like ourselves than when we’re losing.
And in another:
There is comfort in this sense of fated doom. [Perhaps,] we lost not because we did something wrong, but because we did something right in a world that’s wrong. When we acknowledge the awesome might and baleful intentions of our enemies, when we point our fingers at the traitors in our midst, what we seek is not a clear-eyed reckoning of the battlefield, but freedom from guilt for failing to win. Lurking behind our dour pessimism is, at times, a desire to evade accountability for our own mistakes.
Harsh, I know. But thankfully, I had a chance, last month, to engage with these dispositional tendencies in a less glib and self-loathing manner — in a review for The Nation magazine of Hannah Proctor’s fascinating new book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. Proctor’s book challenged me to get closer to the bone, to wonder about the psychic life of political radicalism per se, and how it is that leftists have managed to care for each other’s mental health while continuing the struggle to heal the world. (As you might guess, I also relied more heavily on psychoanalytic concepts this time around.) I even conclude on a hopeful(ish) note:
[Proctor] recommends “patient urgency.” That is, she thinks we can imbue our urgency for change with patience for each other, our toughness with tenderness, our militancy with an obligation to care and be cared for. I certainly hope so. We aren’t poor children, but we once were, and all we’ve managed to become since then is flawed and fragile adults. We will keep on wounding each other and ourselves, and it’s probably best to be square on that. We may not win before it’s too late. But a left that pretends otherwise, which inflates itself with false certainty and bravado, will only be more lost when the air comes out. Perhaps by facing our feebleness, we can become strong. Perhaps by ceasing to disavow our grief, we can become whole.
Anyway, I hope you’ll give it a read! And I hope you’re doing well. As well as can be expected.
Sam
P.S. My podcast cohost Matt Sitman and I guest edited a special section of the most recent issue of Dissent on “the global right.” You can find that here. It includes an interview I conducted with the authors of World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and the Global Order, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in (or terrified of) the global reactionary movement — or, as it has been called, “the nationalist international.”