There is a paradox deep in the heart of leftism: What becomes of the revolutionary once he wins his revolution? (Of course, the right suffers from its own version of this paradox: Every tradition involves defending a revolution or two?)
A revolutionary government must, eventually, develop its own conservative mindset, esp. after its enemies have largely disappeared. The Bolsheviks eventually had to become institutionalists: And within the confines of the Soviet Union, right-wing thought became the hallmark of the revolutionary. Similarly, sometime in the last forty to fifty years, pro-CCP attitudes have become the hallmark of conservativism within China. Whenever the left wins a revolution, a political reorientation occurs: And this political reorientation confuses the relationship between personality and political orientation that normally prevails.
Jordan Peterson discusses at length the relationship between personality and political opinion: The conservative is concerned with conscientiousness while the leftist is high on trait openness. However, as a revolution ossifies into a permanent establishment, where should the conservative and the leftist naturally end up? An unusual admixture of the temperamentally conservative and the temperamentally liberal inside the two political camps is exactly what is to be expected. And, in fact, this is exactly what we are witnessing now.
So, the questions we have to ask ourselves are:
1) When exactly did the “new left” win its revolution?
2) When did the new left begin to ossify into a new set of institutions?
To be continued…