The Labels Are Like Coffins

Levy is more open to fresh breezes than any of the breed, but even he demonstrates an old maidenly concern to tidy up the decrepit categorical furniture of French politics. Sarkozy, the pleading candidate, belongs to the Gaullist party, and is thus a man of the right. Levy is a man of the left: it is, he says, his "family." He cannot vote for Sarkozy -- but neither can he deny that the labels are like coffins, full of dead people and irretrievable moments. The first section of Left in Dark Times consists of a rambling, longwinded plea for some meaning or distinction to elevate, above the complexities of today's world, the man of the left.

Right and left became political geography by an accident of seating in the French revolutionary Assembly. Those on the right favored a constitutional monarchy; those on the left wanted to wipe the slate clean in the blood of the nobility. The labels continued to signal recognizable political philosophies through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. During the Cold War, the left fought for socialism and was unable to resist seduction by the Soviet system, while the right, in France at least, promoted national glory and looked kindly on property and religion.

The fall of the Soviet empire and consequent death of socialism as a viable ideal shattered the left-right divide, probably forever. Unfortunately for men of the left, it was the leftist philosophy that stood refuted by events. They no longer owned the future. They embodied no positive program of action. Ever since, the men of the left have leaped, like Little Liza on the ice floes, from one anti- position to the next: anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-globalism, anti-war, anti-U.S. But anger and self-loathing don't add up to a philosophy, and sporadic cultural vandalism is a feeble replacement for the barricades.

-Vulgar Morality