Chronicle of a Decline Foretold

I’d turned firmly against socialism and communism by the time of graduation, and dramatically lowered my expectations for what sweeping government action and entrenched bureaucracy could sustainably achieve. Part of it was that I’d majored in public policy and learned how fiendishly complicated and paradoxical the art of policy really is, that it’s almost always a matter of trade-offs, and of picking the lesser evil, and grinding incremental progress, rather than grand pronouncements of vaunted “policy solutions” or any kind of Glorious Revolution. Things are never, ever that simple.

Reading up on public policy explained much of my drift away from the left, but a good deal of it was also troubling behavioral tendencies I’d often noticed among many of the socialists and communists in my activist circles: namely, a frequent predilection for purity spirals in which radicals would reflexively compete to one-up each other as to who could be most extravagantly pious in their ideological fealty and devotion to the sacred Cause. Somebody could start out with a reasonable point that sometimes people steal because they’re hungry and that’s morally different from other theft, and a few minutes later the person who finally “won” the interaction would be fervently preaching that every single shoplifter is a Jean Valjean dispensing breadcrusts to orphans. It seemed like there was no corrective mechanism—almost a kind of intellectual immunodeficiency—to keep the spiraling bluster even remotely tethered to history, human psychology, or empirical evidence. In that unhinged context, sociopathic bullies tended to rise to the top.