How the Left abandoned freedom
In the new age of anxiety, Neo-Progressives have committed philosophical suicide, jettisoning the hippie dream of freedom for a centralised vision of power
There is something different about today’s Left: it no longer believes in freedom. Put simply, modern progressive socialism has abandoned the cause of individual liberty in favour of a zealous pursuit of equity and control. The New Left of the 1960s was maniacally obsessed with individual freedom and distrustful of centralised power. Today’s socialists regard both freedom and individual fulfilment as neither achievable nor desirable.
In some ways, today’s Left — which in this essay I term the Neo-Progressives, for reasons of clarity — have more in common with Soviet communists than they do their baby boomer counterparts. Activists have reverted back to the tenets of traditional Marxist collectivism. They have become consumed, once again, with the mission of accessing rather than tearing down central power. Unlike their hippie predecessors, who feared that capitalism was unassailable, they are imbued with a Leninist confidence that capitalism is definitely doomed. And yet Neo-Progressives are nonetheless an entirely new entity, contending with 21st-century anxieties. Throwaway lines about the ‘same old Left’ do not quite help us to understand what is going on. It is imperative that we endeavour to understand the Left-wing turn on a deeper level.
This first in a series of long-reads, lends some historical perspective to the nature of that transformation, with a particular focus on the New Left and hippie movements.
Now more than ever, it is worth breaking down precisely how and why the Left has changed. After all, following several decades in the wilderness, the radical Left looks set to break from the margins into the mainstream of Western politics. In countries like Spain and France, the radical Left has been disrupting party politics and shifting the dial on economic policy for a number of years.
But now we see how even in the more conservative Anglo-sphere, the worm is finally starting to turn. Britain is reeling from the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to launch a new socialist movement — one that could well blow a hole in domestic politics. Washington is rife with speculation that the next leader of the US Democrats is more likely to cast from the mould of Bernie Sanders than Hilary Clinton, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a die-hard socialist and founding member of “the Squad” of progressives in the House of Representatives, touted as a favourite.
In order to fully get a hold on the Neo-Progressives, it’s vital to understand what came before — which is the primary focus of this first essay in the series. The predecessors of today’s radicals — the New Left that flourished from the 1960s — was libertarian in essence, preoccupied above all with the maximisation of human liberty. There are surreal parallels between the theological impulses of the 1960s hippies and neoliberalism. The Hayekians insisted that civilisation was driven not by human design or arrogant centralised planning, but a spontaneous order of extended human cooperation, otherwise known as capitalism.
Similarly, if there was a core philosophical commitment underlying all that hazy hippie talk of “acting totally out front” and entering new “doorways of experience” through acid, then it was the faith in the possibility of an alternative spontaneous order to the technocratic rationalist status quo. Behind all the zen-based psychotherapy and apocalyptic body mysticism was a core yearning to conceive a new free and naturally self-harmonising universe. One based, not on capitalist competition and ‘repression’, but radical self-expression, authentic interpersonal relations and oneness with the environment.
The hippie vision of freedom
Not too long ago, I paid a visit to The Farm in Lewis County, Tennessee, where former Sixties rebels manufacture their own solar panels and grow oregano and lemon balm in their gardens. The Farm is one of the last of the American hippie communes, formed in 1971 after a group of disillusioned hippies from Haight-Ashbury led a caravan into the wilderness amid the collapse of San Francisco’s experiments in communal living. I found that their bucolic haven did not so much radiate an ‘egalitarian’ ethos so much a ‘great refusal’ to be totally sucked into the advanced technocratic civilisation beyond its borders. For resident Douglas Stevenson, the New Left movement was "a rejection above all of the homogenised, very square, regimented pattern of corporate and suburban life”.
Indeed, if one sentiment, of both visceral and spiritual register, defined the New Left, it was a deep revulsion towards technocracy. The hippies recoiled at the scientification of all forms of human knowledge and existence and the view that there is a technical solution to every human problem. They were chilled by society’s relentless pursuit of efficiency, beguiled by the drab conformism that paradoxically characterises mass consumer society and dismayed what they saw as the cramped uniformity of respectable middle-class life. They were desperate to conceive a world in which man constitutes more than a cog in the machine or swirling atom in the capitalist body.
There is a heretical parallel between the works of the New Left’s most celebrated prophet, Herbert Marcuse, and the political philosophy of Right-wing post-war libertarians. Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which denounces the “smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” that prevailed in advanced industrial society, contains the same shuddering rejection of technocratic rationalism as the works of his neoliberal intellectual adversary, Friedrich Hayek.
A modern conservative might well feel a sense of relation when reading the New Left American novelist Theodore Roszak’s frustrated awe at the circular argument that undergirds the cult of technocrats in 1969:
“The technocracy is legitimized because it enjoys the approval of experts; the experts are legitimized because there could be no technocracy without them.”
As Doug Rossinow, professor of history at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of numerous works on the history of the Left, including Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, told me":
“In a way there were points of contact between the New Left and the New Right, because they were both somewhat hostile to the state as an oppressive force, and they both believed that there was this centrist establishment that they were rebelling against. They both believed in civil society as the site of freedom.”
The New Left’s distinctive character was forged in a direct revolt against the Old Left — or there was a "symbolic killing of the father" as Rossinow put it to me. The hippies were chilled by Soviet communism, which they regarded as excessively bureaucratic, authoritarian and lacking in joy. They thought that the Old Left was “all about the Soviet Union, and to the extent they became enthusiastic about socialist regimes, it was China and Cuba”.
In Britain, New Left figures like E.P. Thompson denounced Stalinism as a form of false consciousness that belittled conscious individual agency in the making of history and was responsible for “vile crimes’” against humanity. Instead he championed a new "socialist humanism", characterised by a return to compassion, an emphasis on ordinary agency and rejection of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’s bureaucratic dogmatism.
The New Left’s often paralysing fixation with participatory democracy — which reached its final zenith with the failed Occupy movement — was also in direct rebellion against the sacrificial depredations of Soviet communism. They saw how the centralisation of power — even within the hands of those who purported to be of the Left — carried deadly risks. True, in Britain unions have consistently remained integral to Labour politics. Still the British New Left, disillusioned by their experiences of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s suffocating machinery, also rejected the "rigidity of a political party", preferring to build an open, structureless movement.
All this is not to deny the vehement differences between Left and Right of an earlier time. The New Left channelled their will to freedom in a radically different direction to their conservative counterparts. Whereas the Right’s conception of capitalist freedom endorsed an idea of natural hierarchy, the New Left was virulently opposed to this. Instead they tended to the idea that those at the bottom of the received hierarchy are those with the most wisdom and virtue and should therefore be honoured. Of course, it is precisely this hippie superstition that continues to profoundly shape Western discourse on social justice and redistributive welfare.
A radically collectivist individualism: the Sartrean turn
The New Left’s radical individualism also led it to paradoxically embrace radical collectivism in a way that was both baffling and unacceptable to conservatives. This curious logical leap was ultimately driven by the New Left’s desire to prove that the unbridled unleashment of each person’s unrepressed inner essence — far from giving rise to depravity and chaos — could usher in a new harmonious society, in which each expressed their individual liberty through a voluntary devotion to the collective and one’s fellow man.
The philosophical scaffolding to this sticky paradox can be found in the New Left’s canonical existentialist texts, written by one of the movement’s key disciples, Jean-Paul Sartre. The great unifying obsession of Sartre’s life — a mission which spanned his extended works — was his desire to reconcile his existentialist metaphysics which centres around a self-creating individual consciousness and his communitarian sympathies. He aimed to do this by proving that freedom, when authentically pursued, complements rather than conflicts with the wellbeing of others.
In order to achieve this, Sartre looked to his hero Hegel, and in particular the latter’s idea that "self-consciousness exists in and for itself" – that is to say, that the self cannot exist on its own but requires an ‘other’ to function as its mirror, recognising and validating its existence and selfhood by reflecting it back; but for this recognition from the other to be of any real value us, we have to in turn recognise those who function as our reflective mirrors as fully-formed self-conscious beings in their own right too.
Sartre built on this by pointing out that by logical extension, the individual cannot fully grasp itself as a free being-for-itself unless it is surrounded by other free-beings-for-themselves who can reflect our liberated status back to us. He deduced then that in order to authentically realise one’s own freedom, one must recognise the freedom of all; that in “willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own”. That acknowledging the subjectivity and liberty of the other is actually essential to the individual’s project of self-making and “I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim”.
Professor Jonathan Judaken at the Washington University in Saint Louis, a leading scholar of Sartre, described the latter’s philosophy as a “hyperbolic freedom” that demands a “hyperbolic individual responsibility”. Judaken told me:
“For Sartre, what defines you as a human being is your freedom in ontological terms, not your freedom in liberal terms. What that means is you are responsible for everything about you. You are responsible even for the parts of you that you have no choice over — the body that you were born into, the family that you came from. You have a responsibility to make meaning out of all this in such a way that it enhances what it means to be a human being in a world shared by others.”
The New Left was also fixated with the notion of authenticity, though not in the modern sense of merely being non-fake. Authenticity was a mystical fusion of the actual self with one’s potential self, a kind of state of internal reconciliation, whereby one’s own personal contradiction and alienation is transcended. Herbert Marcuse, for example, conceived true freedom as requiring the “liberation of Eros”, a kind of full flowering of human life, driven by non-repressive sensuality and creativity.
Marcuse even called for the new utopia to be driven by an alternative kind of intense individualism, known as primary narcissism, in contrast with what the New Left denounced as the atomistic selfishness of advanced technocratic society. Primary narcissism, for Marcuse, denoted the self’s engulfment in the environment, an “integrate[ion of] the narcissistic ego with the objective world.” This, it was said, would enable humans to reach what Freud described as an oceanic feeling of “limitless extension of oneness with the universe.”
The failed freedom of the hippies
It’s hard to get a sense of what such lofty ideas about an alternative hippie libertarian utopia actually boiled down to, beyond Marcusean clichés about a blurring between work and play, and an aesthetic transformation of daily life towards sensory pleasure. The big downfall of the hippies was their inability to envisage what this alternative libertarian utopia would concretely look like. For want of clarity, they succumbed to mysticism.
I got a sense of this groping nebulousness at The Farm. For example when we spoke of the hippie quest towards a new utopia, Douglas Stevenson told me": “For me it’s a great mystery. No one really knows but you can feel it, inside. And it’s like knowing not knowing you’re just on the edge of what the closer you get to it, the more you feel it.”
And also, when we turned to the topic of “vibrations”, and the hippie belief in the energetic interconnection of the universe: “You realise it all ties into magic right? It’s like this invisible thing that can send your voice thousands of miles. So you can send your thoughts thousands of miles too. And whether it’s the vibration of sound or light or thoughts or the heart connection, it’s all about the vibes.”
One senses that same vacant yearning in a passage of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test where the author speculates on the power of LSD to enable those who consume it to access an alternative reality:
“Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man’s potential experience without his even knowing it. We’re shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months - until ‘normal’ training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, Huxley had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright.”
The Neo-Progressive Shift
The New Left, for all its vibrancy and failings, is of course gone with the wind. In many ways, the Neo-Progressives of today – fired with rage yet spiritually anaemic – have grown in the shadow of the hippie movement’s failures. True, they have inherited many of the attributes and hang-ups of their parents. The Israel-Palestine conflict functions as a rack for socialists to hang their proud opposition to imperialism and white Western guilt, just as the Vietnam War once did.
Today’s progressive Left also remains as alienated from the working class as the New Left. It was the baby boomers who, amid the collapse of global communism, first began to doubt that the working classes could ever serve as agents of historical change, and instead put its faith in student activism, ethnic minorities and a ‘long march’ through the intellectual and cultural institutions. Arguably today’s Neo-Progressives have gone even further, and regard the working classes not only as inadequate drivers of change who have been neutered by the stultifying comforts of the capitalist system, but retrograde forces afflicted in particular by the diseases of insularity, bigotry and racism.
Still, there is one whopping difference between the Left of present and the socialism of past: namely, its collapsed faith in freedom. One of the most striking tells, of course, is that the Left never talks about freedom anymore, though it endlessly chatters about ‘equity’ and ‘equality’.
Another is its covetous attitude towards centralised power.
As Doug Rossinow tells me: “The New Left shunned the state and wanted to hem it in; but today’s Left wants state power so that they can pursue their agenda for either exercising power or creating equity.”
At best, Neo-Progressives regard freedom as a luxurious ideal that cannot be realised until society is equalised. At worst they view it as an intrinsically destructive value, associated with toxic conservative impulses to selfishness and domination over others.
The Left commits philosophical suicide
In this, today’s Left has committed philosophical suicide. In its insistence that the will to freedom should be subordinated to the quest for equality — based on the view that the former can never be realised without the latter — today’s Left have completely forgotten Sartre’s vital distinction between practical freedom — that is our ability to satisfy our basic needs and pursue desired ends — and our ontological freedom — that is our ability to choose what mental attitude to adopt in a given situation.
The hippies, for all their flaws, understood this, sometimes intellectually, often intuitively. Today’s Left have lost all of its predecessor’s sense of radical personal responsibility, and rugged commitment to actively shaping one’s own life.
All this is reflected in tenets of the radical Leftist philosophers of the day.
Sartre has been written out of the progressive cannon by minority rights activists, in favour of Frantz Fanon. Marcuse’s Freudian-Marxist critical theory of liberation is no longer in vogue. Today, with the ascendancy of sociology, it is the crudest forms of structuralism – which insist that we are mere lumps of clay shaped by a fallen culture and society – that captivates minds in the mainstream.
Neo-Progressives have also become trapped in the postmodern maze, bereft of a vision of a cohesive, purposive self. The great Leftist philosopher of the day is Slavoj Žižek, who paints an impoverished and anti-humanist picture of the individual, rejecting the idea of a deep self or a cohesive human essence waiting to be liberated, instead insisting that the self is fundamentally split between the conscious ego and the unconscious and is driven by desire for the missing object. For Žižek, if there is freedom to be had, it is paradoxically through the recognition of our unfreedom, accepting the “lack” at the core of our existence.
Neo-Progressives no longer believe in a spontaneous libertarian order, in which everyone is able to express their true selves and rub along. With the rise of conservative populism — which Neo-Progressives interpret as a new breed of fascism — socialists are now eager to seize control of state and legislative power in order to constrain the capacity of their opponents to express their views and pursue their agendas. A new double standard has arisen, whereby the Left are keen to ensure that radical socialists are free to protest and disseminate disruptive ideas, but aim to curtail Right-wing speech and action, through a number of tools, including anti-hate legislation and clampdowns on disinformation.
The modern Left’s commitment to a cosmopolitan progressive society, and its intense faith that social harmony and cultural enrichment can emerge naturally from the celebration of difference, has paradoxically given rise to an intense intolerance of those who threaten the metropolitan equilibrium. Frustrated by the social tensions that arise when each seeks to express their own unrepressed identity, the Left has fallen into the trap of seeking to impose harmony through the crushing of dissent. We see this in the trans lobby’s refusal to acknowledge that the affirmation of trans freedoms might conflict with fundamental women’s rights.
Ultimately, the Neo-Progressive Left’s utopia is not so much based on an idea of spontaneous order but rather a demand for recognition. Today’s Left has found that the big problem with the hippie vision of freedom, is that it is no good respecting one’s fellow man as a free, unique agent unless he will respect you in precisely these terms in turn.
The Neo-Progressives’ chilling answer to this is to compel those who are uncooperative — particularly in terms of seeing people how they wish to be seen — to play ball, whether that is through legislative means or a vigilante cancel culture that keeps order. If there is a core philosophical belief underlying everything from the trans movement to BLM it is Frantz Fanon’s twisting of the Hegelian vision:
“Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognised by him…. His human worth and reality depend on this other and his recognition of the other.”
Divested of an ideology of freedom, Neo-Progressives have exhumed the corpse of equality. The modern Left is characterised by a preoccupation with social inequality and pulsates with a resentment of the wealthy that was also largely absent from the 1960s. Amid the post-war boom, Leftists of an earlier generation regarded the capitalist system with a resentful awe. Particularly in prosperous America, they acknowledged that capitalism had been resoundingly successful in bringing an end to mass deprivation and lifting people wholesale to a state of basic comfort, even if the gains, to their mind, came at an unacceptable spiritual, environmental and moral cost.
Indeed, the teachings of the New Left Frankfurt school and its acolytes like Marcuse worked from the assumption that the endurance of advanced industrial capitalism had blown up the Marxist theory that the system was condemned to fatally collapse under its own contradictions. It was precisely this unprecedented affluence that stirred among the younger generation a new greed for unfettered personal fulfilment and liberation. Unprecedented affluence created a drive towards release from all social strictures. Even in Western countries less prosperous than America, post-war affluence saw revisionist Labour thinkers, such as Britain’s Anthony Crosland, advocate for managing capitalism rather than outright replacing it, through a mixed economy.
Indeed in Britain, New Left thinkers such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams saw Thatcherism’s supremacy as the ultimate proof of capitalism's deep-seated "stickiness," demonstrating its ability to fracture traditional class loyalties and forge new cross-class alliances through ideological appeal. Williams famously conceded in his book The Long Revolution that overthrowing the capitalist technocratic system, if even possible, would require an ongoing, pervasive transformation of culture, institutions, and consciousness rather than a single decisive revolt.
In contrast today, as inequality intensifies, amid an intersection of chronic wage stagnation with an explosion in the value of asset-based wealth, the Left is once again becoming captivated with the traditional Marxist view that the capitalist system is certainly doomed and fundamentally flawed. Works outlining the epic failures — and even apocalyptic dangers — of the capitalist system and blueprints for degrowth communism, such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Kohei Saito’s Capital and the Anthropocene, now colourfully pepper the display islands of indie bookshops.
It would be too simplistic, however, to suggest today's Left has merely reverted to a pre-hippie form of socialism. Contemporary progressives often conspicuously lack both the radical optimism and the class solidarity of traditional Marxists.
In a strange twist, Neo-Progressives have adopted a much more constrained view of the individual acting in the world than the materialist Karl Marx. While Marx argued that capitalist economic structures profoundly shaped and could even deform human nature, preventing personal flourishing, today’s Left has significantly broadened this analytical lens. They assert that culture, ideology, discourse, and complex power relations — extending far beyond the purely economic realm — now play a dominant role in shaping individuals and perpetuating systems of oppression. This has left the individual trapped in a snare of dense, often regressive web of structural forces.
The striking, if unintended, consequence has been the evolution of a more fatalistic Leftist worldview — one that appears more deterministic than even the most structuralist readings of Marx himself. Orthodox Marxists had a much clearer conception of individual agency than today. Despite his emphasis on the determinism of dialectical materialism, Marx believed that it was possible for human beings to act, to change their circumstances, and to make history. He also had a distinct vision of freedom — not just a liberation from alienation but a personal flourishing and state of species-being, where humans express their essence through conscious, purposeful, and social activity that shapes the world around them.
The Neo-Progressives of our time, in contrast, lack both a crisp idea of the role of individual agency in the grand sweep of history and a utopian vision of personal liberation.
It is clear then that the Left has taken a distinct turn. In its enthusiasm for state power it is more naive. But, emptied of its libertarian zest, it is also more despairing. The individual has been swallowed by a swarm of structures. Activism is imbued with a surreal fatalism. Where precisely this will take us, it is hard to say. We are in uncharted territory now.