Utopia Is Here Again

IDEOLOGIES ARE EITHER unmade by the mercilessness of history or rearmed by generational impatience. The validation lies in the current trend of the endangered establishment: the Left is not good enough to be just Left any longer; the Right is very status quoist unless you add the adjective ‘ultra’ to it. The Left, in its most familiar self, is so elastic that it could include liberals, anti-capitalists, socialists and all of Marx’s orphans. Today may not be the Left’s best of times politically but, in the marketplace of arguments, it still retains considerable influence. The search for justice is a viable rhetorical vocation. The Right is a natural claimant to power now, and it is fast shedding all the accumulated shame of the past. Both the Left and the Right are fighting street-smart idealism.

The Right is paying the price for power, which is certainly true of the West. Britain’s Conservatives have lost the argument ever since the curse of Brexit. When the deficiency of political conviction cannot cope with popular will, the Right abandons its ideological responsibility, which is so central to the moral making of the conservatives, and moves to the centre—and becomes Left by other means. Conservatives as polite centrists look more Blairites than Thatcherites. They are now in an existential crisis. The subversives, promising reform and freedom, are harvesting the resentment on the Right.

Across the Atlantic, the Right has ceased to be an ideological project and become a personality cult, borrowing from the totalitarian heritage of the Left. The ‘greatness’ motif of Trumpism, despite the invasion of MAGA caps in Middle America, is subordinated to the impulses of a merchant king. The Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan has given way to the Grand Old Man’s Party of pettiness. It has minimal ideological content and plenty of imperial kitsch. The only consolation for the stifled conservatives is that the pathological presidency of the patriarch is in its autumn.

What is unfolding among the American Left is the true story of ideological extremism. Utopia has returned with a vengeance. Democratic Socialism, with the New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani as its mascot, has served notice that the Left establishment, for so long ambling along the liberal middle path, has passed its use-by date. It is time for the revolution. The Democratic Socialists’ success in the New York congressional primaries, where a Mamdani nod meant sure victory, has a resonance far beyond the limited American upheaval. It carries within it the larger story of how demography, ideology and the moral identity of geography have come to seize the mind. To be a socialist is cool again if, say, a Mamdani is cool. And the rewards of capitalism breed revolution. The Newest Left is kinetic progressivism in which a sense of justice can coexist with hatred for a community and country, and a sense of equality can exclude a class from social hierarchies. Once it was a Bernie Sanders arguing for the humanisation of the establishment Left. Today the radical wants to bring down the house that once indulged FDR and Obama—and restricts admission to the utopia.

What really happened? If one is looking for metaphors, two will suffice: Gaza and Musk. The first, for a generation, recast the idea of justice. History didn’t matter, and wherever it did, it was nothing more than a series of crimes against the wretched. The war on Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organisation that has institutionalised genocidal rage, has made the theatre of the war a picture-perfect source of conscience-baring slogans on the street and the campus. The struggle for justice has earned geographical legitimacy. Revolutions need such moments.

And the other metaphor, the techno king, in the updated socialist literature, is the ultimate manifestation of capitalism over-individualised. Once again, the individual against the collective is a mandatory revolutionary position. The tech brotherhood only illustrates how the means of production are controlled by a few while a majority of others in the metropolises can’t buy home, afford rent, or pay medical bills. Add the bad idea of Trump to the combined evil of wealthmaxxing and the death of compassion and what you generate is a cry for socialism. The big question is whether the old Left will resist the revolutionaries or join them.

China may have made Marx eat Big Mac, but it is noble to be Marxist in the promised land of capitalism. It is left to the far right to retrieve the nation, and we don’t know whether that is tragedy or farce.