It is a pessimism both exaggerated and understated. It is exaggerated because Clark finds the roots of the left’s defeat in human nature, in “the human propensity to violence” and an inevitable “hankering after evil” woven into our very being. He finds it also in modernity itself, which has created such atomised, unthinking, obedient individuals that they are “no longer material for a society”, a phrase borrowed from Nietzsche. These are not new ideas; but to root the left’s demise in human nature and the nature of modernity is to deny the possibility of any resurrection.
Indeed, Clark urges the left to abandon utopian ideas and embrace in its stead a “tragic sense of life”. The tragic vision, which sustains a conservative view of the world, sees in the flawed and limited character of humans a warning against grand social change, insisting that faith, tradition and hierarchy are necessary guardrails against barbarism, a way of acknowledging, in the words of Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish Marxist turned Christian philosopher, “life as inevitable defeat”.
Yet, for all this, Clark’s despair is also understated, because today’s political malaise is more profound than he envisions – or is commonly acknowledged. It is not just the left that has imploded. Liberal and conservative traditions, too, have become drained of much of their life-force.
What we call liberal norms – democracy, equality, freedom of speech and association, the right of nations to self-determination and so on – became social realities largely through the efforts of radical movements and working-class organisations, and often in the face of ferocious opposition from liberal elites that sought to limit the scope of these norms, denying the majority of society, indeed the majority of the world, basic democratic rights.
It was through the struggles of the dispossessed – of slaves to emancipate themselves, of colonial subjects confronting imperial rule, of the working class organising to improve their lives, of women claiming the right to vote – that liberal norms were made universal rather than remaining the exclusive property of a privileged few.
The erosion of that radical universalist tradition has befuddled the left, detaching it from liberal traditions, and from class politics, and leaving the remnants more authoritarian and identitarian. It has also discombobulated liberalism.
Without the buttress of radicalism, liberals themselves have become more illiberal, whether on free speech or democracy, and less willing to address issues of social inequality or working-class needs.
Conservatism emerged initially as voicing hostility to modernity, and yet adapted to the new world so efficiently that it become a dominant governing force in a world painted largely in liberal tones. Over time, not liberalism but working-class and socialist movements became conservatism’s principal enemy, an antagonistic relationship that helped define what conservatives wished to conserve.
The erosion of the radical tradition has brought confusion to conservatism, too. Conservatives today seem to understand how to rip up the existing order, but have little conception about what should replace it, or what they wish to conserve. And so, we arrive in an age in which it is not just that the left has lost but that the main political traditions of modernity have all become exhausted.
