Let Me Tell You Why I Suck

What a liberal can learn from the far left

I often wonder: Where are the reformist liberals in the second act of Les Mis? Think of the characters. There’s a band of cosplaying-as-poor college students led by Marius, who talks a big game about “the people” even though he’s on the fast track to a middle-class normie life with Cosette. Éponine is fighting for liberté, egalité, fraternité, and that beefy slab of man meat Marius, not necessarily in that order. Finally, there’s Gavroche, an emerging crime boss building a network of thievery and extortion, and whose support for the revolution seems to be borne of a Joker-esque thirst for chaos that can only benefit a criminal mastermind like himself.

Everyone's a rebel; they’re all rakish, cockade-wearing leftists manning the barricades with perfectly-mussed Harry Styles hair. Where are the liberals? Where are the lawyers kvetching over the conservative turn of the Orléanist monarchy? Where are the academics wringing their hands about a return to The Terror? Where’s the song titled: “The PROCESS Through Which Reforms Are Achieved is a Vital Aspect of Conferring Legitimacy”? This is liberal erasure -- j’accuse, Victor Hugo! The nearest approximation of a liberal is Jean Valjean, who’s a charitable wet blanket -- so, close! -- but he’s not really political. 

Perhaps I’m over-sensitive (I’m definitely over-sensitive). The thing is: 1) I’m a liberal, and 2) I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the awkward coalition between liberals and leftists. It’s a shotgun marriage that’s lasted for centuries, and its friction points feel as raw as ever. The far left is having a moment; elite institutions are increasingly woke, and half of young adults have a positive view of socialism. Liberals, as always, are hand-wringing; we’re worried about the erosion of liberal principles and about handing power to conservatives. My sympathies, as usual, are with the liberals. But the more I think about the history of this perpetually-awkward alliance, the more I think that there might be things the far left can teach me about my more annoying liberal tendencies. 

Liberals and leftists come from different traditions. Liberals come from the tradition of giving up the absolute minimum amount required to assuage one’s guilt about being a privileged little fancy lad (according to leftists). Leftists come from the tradition of acting out one's daddy issues in the public square while claiming to speak for “the people”, even though “the people” would kind of like to see them crushed by a boulder (according to liberals). That’s about as far as I’m going to go trying to define the terms. A detailed attempt to define “liberal” and “leftist” would probably end up like an attempt to differentiate steampunk from cyberpunk, in that it’s unlikely to produce anything except a lot of yelling in the comments section.

Liberals and leftists both want change. The political spectrum might be thought of as a bipolar scale measuring how much a person wants change -- “everything’s nifty” would be right in the middle. On the far left of the scale you’d find Karl Marx, who saw the status quo as irredeemably corrupt and sought to radically reshape society into an anarcho-hippie Manson-family-without-the-murders-type thing. To Marx’s right are the liberals, who want change, especially types of change that most people find boring and unsatisfying. On the right side of the scale you’ll find conservatives, who think things were good until liberals and leftists put society on the slippery slope to hell, and the far right, who long to return to a simpler time before the Mexicans/Normans/Cro-Magnons/Vertebrates showed up and ruined everything.

Proximity forces liberals and leftists into a coalition. We’re ideologically different -- see the insulting-but-accurate descriptions I offered two paragraphs up -- but separate processes lead us to similar spots. Neither group is big enough to do much on its own, but together, we can make a difference. Like a brother and sister who hate each other but join forces to nag their parents to get a dog, it’s a coalition borne of necessity.  

The dynamics of that coalition are featured in the second act of Les Mis (along with plenty of singing from Wolverine & friends). The rebellion depicted in Les Mis was a continuation of events that started with the July Revolution of 1830. France’s loss in the Napoleonic Wars had put the Bourbons back on the throne, and by 1830 France was led by King Charles X (that’s “Charles the Tenth”, not “Charles X” -- he was about as not like Malcolm X as a person can possibly be). Liberals and leftists both hated Charles X, who favored the nobility, dissolved parliament, and even instituted the death penalty for defaming Catholic relics. And if you’re looking for a definition of “arch conservative”, then “a guy who sends someone to the guillotine for taking a whiz in the holy water” might do pretty well.

Resentment of Charles X finally boiled over during the “Three Glorious Days” of 1830. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a series of edicts restricting the vote and cracking down on the press. Liberals were incensed, and they sprang into action: They held a meeting. The meeting gave way to an assembly. The assembly was unanimous: A conference was needed. The conference was divided over the need for a huddle versus a confab, and ultimately settled on a powwow by way of compromise.

Meanwhile, leftists were out on the streets kicking ass. Historically, this is a service they provide, which was awfully handy in those days, because liberals don’t really do street fighting. Of course, democracy has made street fighting counterproductive; these days, nothing butters the right’s biscuit more than footage of anarchist morons trying to foment revolution by smashing the windows of a Jiffy Lube. But in 1830s France, avenues for political expression were extremely limited, so one way to have your voice heard was to tear a few soldiers limb from limb and then take things from there. 

The liberal/left coalition overthrew Charles X. Both members of the team were needed: The liberals to suggest reforms, the leftists to suggest painful ways for the king to die if the reforms weren't accepted. The ending was controversial: Liberals maneuvered to place the thought-to-be-more-liberal Louis Philippe on the throne, which is kind of like tunneling out of Alcatraz and straight into San Quentin. Of course, it would have been hard to consent to the far left's demand to declare a republic, since France’s one experiment with leftist-led democracy had produced The Terror. That’s a problem -- their era of government got a formal, capital-letter name, and it's “The Terror”. The far left’s reputation made it hard for them to form a government in the same way John Wayne Gacy’s reputation made it hard for him to get work as a birthday clown; sometimes, people really get hung up on your track record.

The Les Mis revolution of 1832 (as it is not called) was an attempt to push out Louis Philippe. The preceding two years had made the masses of Paris even more teeming than usual; they suffered through food shortages and a cholera epidemic. A leftist group called the Society of the Rights of Man -- which closely resembles Marius’ coterie of boy-band rejects -- did, indeed, plan an uprising centered on the funeral of General Lamarque. That part of the play is pretty accurate, except for the singing (I assume -- I guess it would be more precise to say “there are no contemporaneous accounts of show-stopping musical numbers”). What the play gets right is that the protest was ignited by a man waving a red flag, and a street battle ensued. What the play leaves out is the part where the people of Paris respond with a rousing: “What the hell are you doing?” The Society thought the people would rally to their cause en masse; they didn’t. They thought the liberals were on board; they weren’t. They thought the king would be overthrown; he was cheered. There are actually reports of the rebels being told “no, you may not use my table for your barricade, now get out of my house.” Which is a pretty vivid illustration of how leftists often assume they speak for the people when they actually don’t. 

What I take from Les Mis -- aside from the fact that you should never sell your teeth in a buyer’s market -- is that when liberals and leftists unite, they can force change. But when they splinter, the party’s over. It seems to me that this pattern repeats itself throughout history; I see it in the Revolutions of 1848, and in Reconstruction, and the 1960s. The first conclusion that I draw from history about liberals and leftists is that progress usually only happens when the two groups unite. We might not like each other -- we definitely don’t like each other -- but the slow march of progress only trudges forward when each side looks at the other and thinks: “Good enough”.

My second conclusion is that the liberal tendency towards pragmatism can border on pathology. It’s good to be pragmatic, especially when your coalition partners are a bunch of pie-eyed maniacs. But liberals are sometimes a bit too willing to accept half a loaf. A good example is voting rights in Europe; across the continent, the franchise expanded at a painfully slow rate. For all the things the leftist First Republic got wrong -- and your era doesn’t get called “The Terror” unless you got more than a few things wrong -- they were the first in the world to implement universal manhood suffrage. Almost all men could vote -- they let Huguenots vote, for Christ’s sake! HUGENOTS!!! Liberals often have legitimate concerns about playing the hand we’re dealt and taking one thing at a time, but the fact remains that leftists have the better historical record when it comes to expanding suffrage. And on slavery, too.

My last lesson is that I think liberals do best when we aggressively address the economic needs of the poor. There’s a coherent explanation here: By implementing effective economic policies, we remove the need for leftists to step in with their terrible, terrible ideas. And boy-oh-boy do they have terrible ideas! A smorgasbord of simplistic garbage (in my humble opinion). But it’s no accident that The Communist Manifesto came at the end of a decade known as “The Hungry Forties”. 19th century liberals did an awful job of blunting the harsh effects of industrialization; 20th century liberals did much better to develop broadly-successful programs with a decidedly-lefty tinge like Social Security and Medicare. The leftist impetus to address economic problems is enviable; the left succeeds when liberals co-opt that energy and translate it into something that actually works. 

The last liberal-leftist joint venture in this country was successful: We got rid of Trump. The current joint venture -- the Build Back Better bill, which seems likely to pass Congress -- is one where enough liberals seemed to have recognized that smart, proactive anti-poverty measures usually work out well for us. Like most things liberals advocate, this bill probably won’t lead to a big, Broadway musical; our projects just don’t have the verve required for a rousing second-act ensemble number. But, by learning from history, liberals can make the things we do more boringly effective. And -- though we might not like it -- "boringly effective" is ultimately who we are.