What About the Left?
In his book, Live Not By Lies, named after an essay1 written by the author of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rod Dreher correctly identified a system of technocratic soft-totalitarianism that is spreading across the West, one that is analogous to the faceless, bureaucratic communism described in Czech play-write, Václav Havel’s, 1978 masterpiece of samizdat (underground dissident literature), The Power of the Powerless. Like Havel’s hypothetical “greengrocer”, we have become accustomed to perpetual self-censorship, living in a society increasingly unfriendly to disagreement with the conclusions of the last three centuries of humanist philosophy. Some conservative Christian commentators today see this left-wing threat as so immediate and existential that they argue right-wing extremism should be outright ignored by Christians, in order to present a unified front towards this adversary. This feeling has coalesced around a phrase, no enemies to the right, which may sound plausible until one thinks it through to the inevitable, common sense ends of exactly whom will make it into the coalition, under these parameters.
There is a real threat from the left, one that is certainly more immediate and ubiquitous than any from the right, but that is exactly why I am more concerned about the right-wing threat, and see this Christian political hyper-focus on left-wing excess as being born from an ignorance of history. Nearly every right-wing authoritarian-nationalist government in the 20th century came into power on the heels of excessive leftist action that caused a crisis of legitimacy in the government. In 1919, the Partito Socialista Italiano gained a significant stake in the parliament and immediately began forceful labor action, in an attempt to nationalize industry, that ultimately failed. Three years later, the Partito Nazionale Fascista swept into power, in no small part due to the popularity of its squadrist forces’ willingness to use violence to remove socialist activists from the public square.2 In Spain, over sixty years of fluctuation between left-wing republicanism and right-wing military dictatorship resulted in liberal democratic republicans allying themselves with communists and anarchists to form a coalition government in 1931. The rule of law was upended as a blind eye was increasingly turned towards leftist extremists, while the organs of the state were turned more fiercely on monarchists and fascists, leading to an ultimate crisis of legitimacy and civil war in 1936.3
The left in the United States is similarly overplaying its hand. The Democratic Party, after abandoning the middle-class during the Obama years, has maintained a false image of defender of the proletariat by allying itself with far-left elements, and has begun leveraging state power towards radical social and economic change that a monumental portion of Americans are not interested in adopting - not the least of which was the attempt in 2021 to use executive orders and regulatory agencies to make medical compliance a requirement for employment nationwide. After spending years promoting the notion that Donald Trump was put into office by Russians to be their secret asset, they now seem aghast that his supporters would play the same game by pushing the accusation that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected. Half of Americans believe there will soon be a civil war in the United States.4 Nearly half of those who voted for Biden and just over half who voted for Trump believe it is time to divide the country along political lines; over half from each group strongly believe that the opposition party is a “danger to American democracy”.5 A significant portion of conservative America has already outright rejected any and all left-wing politics and is looking for potential solutions, including authoritarian methods; millions of people, on both sides, are becoming increasingly belligerent towards those they deem existential threats. There has never been a more ripe time for right-wing authoritarian nationalism to sweep into power in the United States, and it is decidedly gaining ground within the conservative church, through writings like Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism; but he is not alone. Generalisimo Francisco Franco, assisted by Hitler and Mussolini, let his Moroccan troops literally rape and pillage their way through Spain6 and then reigned over that nation with an iron fist for almost forty years, including outlawing the promotion of any religion other than Catholicism.7 That did not stop Christian political commentator, self-styled “Maximum Leader”, and originator of “no enemies to the right”, Charles Haywood, from giving Franco’s legacy a “positively glowing” review.8 Like Wolfe, he couches philosophy and political theory that is plainly authoritarian-nationalist in Christian terms, though he, also like Wolfe, rarely uses his platform to promote the actual person or work of Jesus Christ.
I am witnessing this rapid shift towards the promotion of overreaction, first-hand, as people in my church family, layman and minister alike, are increasingly drawn to political pundits who speak in the same language of power-dynamics as their “woke” adversaries. The Apostle Paul unmistakably instructs us, “See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.” (1 Thessalonians 5:15). Yet, some of the most popular conservative Christian commentators say we should “fight fire with fire” as a response to those who “arrest their political opponents and throw them in jail”9, while few conservative Christians bat an eye. How can we Bible-believing Christians in the West lecture leftist secular humanists on the importance of the mortification of sin if we cannot control our own worldly urges for revenge and power?
Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism: 1919 - 1945, 1. publ, The Making of the 20th Century (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Pr, 1995), 3–59.
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York, NY: BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins, 1994), 69–119.
Garen J. Wintemute et al., “Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey” (medRxiv, July 19, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693.
UVA Center for Politics, “New Initiative Explores Deep, Persistent Divides Between Biden and Trump Voters – Sabato’s Crystal Ball,” September 30, 2021, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/.
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York, NY: BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins, 1994), 164, 166.
Giorgia Priorelli, Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism in Comparison: Constructing the Nation, Palgrave Studies in Political History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 149, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46056-3.
Charles Haywood, “On Francisco Franco • The Worthy House,” The Worthy House (blog), April 16, 2019, https://theworthyhouse.com/2019/04/16/on-francisco-franco/.
Catholic political commentator, Matt Walsh (retweeted by Protestant political commentator, Josh Daws):
