The Left Will Be Statist Or Will Not Be At All

No better world is possible without technocrats.

I’ve been thinking for a while about articulating my defense of left statism, and

Sam Kahn

’s recent post, entitled “The Left Should Off Itself,” is as good an opportunity as any. I think I share the basic frustration behind Kahn’s piece—that the left can seem more concerned with moralism than with power and governing effectively—while also thinking his characterization of the left is too schematic and historically inaccurate to be very useful.

Kahn sets up a binary between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, or liberals and the left, where the former in each pair is in favor of pragmatic, efficient centralized power and the latter is attached to a romantic ideal of “perfect collectivity and egalitarianism.” The latter will always be a fantasy because it is simply impracticable: “The state ‘withering away’ really isn’t very high level political science.” According to Kahn, the contemporary left is not just the more-radical conscience of liberals, it is their opposite: a force that is simply against the constructive project of governing or exercising power.

Kahn seems to think that the entire left has always believed simplistically in the “withering away of the state,” while in reality that notion has been the source of over a century of bitter theoretical debates and nasty factional splits. It is not the case historically that the left was attached to some romantic, Rousseauist notion of the “general will” that will produce a perfectly unified, perfectly equal collectivity with some kind of benevolent bare-minimum state. To be sure, there have always been currents, (or roughly speaking one “side”) of the left tradition that believes something like this, which goes by varied names like anarchism, syndicalism, or libertarian socialism.¹ But the whole twentieth century was a struggle between this side of the left and what became its (much) more dominant side: statist or government socialism, exemplified first by European socialist parties, and then by the Soviet Union and European communist parties and communist-socialist electoral formations.²