works at cross-purposes, since the women whose abortions they wish to forbid are often already opposed to abortion themselves. They just want to make their own choice. The legal intervention of government into their personal zone of privacy naturally repels them and has, if anything, the opposite effect from what is desired by those same social conservatives.
Further, libertarianism, particularly in its more extreme forms, can be fertile ground for moral narcissism. That government is best that governs least morphs into that government is best which governs barely or not at all. This becomes a posture dizzyingly close to anarchism. Yet few really want no government at all—especially given its results—but a fair number like to say they do or pretend as much to themselves or others. Thus the libertarian can find himself inadvertently in the camp of an Occupy Wall Street protestor, dancing around in that Guy Fawkes mask and burning down what he might otherwise respect and support, an odd contradiction indeed. The advice about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is a cliché for a reason. Like those on the left, often people on the right seek a form of purity impossible in human affairs. For those people, moral narcissism is their friend.
Who Was the King of All Moral Narcissists?
Jeopardy question: “bearded writers.” He wrote his most famous works in the library of the British Museum.
While moral narcissism is frequently an ally of the Right, it is quite often the Left’s best friend. Big government of the socialist or democratic socialist sort adores moral narcissism, for it is, in a sense, the creator of big government. Karl Marx himself was one of history’s great moral narcissists—a man who definitely knew best, sitting by himself in the library of the British Museum, dictating to the human race at some length how it should order itself. “The ends justify the means” is almost the perfect catchphrase for all moral narcissism. If you have what you think are the correct ideas, you can do anything. In retrospect, it should be no surprise that the results of Marx’s then untested ideas were catastrophic. The number of corpses traceable to them in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere is finally uncountable, although low estimates for Stalin—twenty million deaths—and Mao—forty million—should be sufficient to make the case even for diehards of the Left. Obviously, it didn’t and doesn’t.
To find myriad examples of Marxism’s dismal outcomes being obfuscated by moral narcissism, look no further than Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The self-described democratic socialist Vermont senator touts the economic success and social justice of Scandinavian countries to adoring crowds even as those same nations abandon socialism for capitalism for their own survival or, in the case of Sweden, to avoid fiscal collapse.1 Margaret Thatcher encapsulated the logical inconsistency of Sanders’s ideology with her oft-quoted statement: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” But the evident accuracy of her statement is easily overridden by the emotional needs of a group, as Sanders’s eager audiences have shown. As Sophocles put it nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, “What people believe prevails over the truth.”
The current fashionable attraction to multiculturalism and its quasi-fascist forebear cultural relativism is also supported directly by this same morally narcissistic impulse. Indeed, liberalism and progressivism themselves, as presently constituted in our society, would not exist without moral narcissism. They are all about the self as viewed by the self. Without self-approval, liberalism would disintegrate. It holds it together.
That’s where the influence of the Least Great Generation comes in. We members of the LGG obviously did not originate moral narcissism, which is undoubtedly as old as our species. Some version of early man thumped his chest and brayed about how he, and only he, had solved once and for all the problem of the saber-toothed tiger and should be rewarded accordingly. History is in part a tale of individuals and groups adhering to maximalist ideas and ideologies, occasionally for the better but far more often with disastrous ends. Communism, measured by those exponential mortality rates as well as by the emotional suffering and poverty of vast populations under its rule, was the worst of them. Immediately post-World War II, despite the revolt against McCarthyism and pleas for the supposedly innocent Rosenbergs, people were gradually beginning to understand the horrors of scientific socialism and Stalinism. Tales of the Gulag and the purge trials, the mass starvation of the Ukrainians, had filtered through, leaving the then young Least Great Generation bereft of its first inspiration, the Soviet Union.
Many chose Maoism instead. I can remember attending performances by the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the early seventies in which the audience was led in a doo-wop style community sing, chanting “Papa Mao M-Mao Mao . . . Papa Mao Tse Tung.” As we clapped to the beat and sashayed in a conga line, we felt oh-so-modern and oh-so-hip. What did we know? China was so far away and exotic. The slogans of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were unexamined idealistic rallying cries for causes we had only barely heard of. Who didn’t want a good harvest? And fighting Lin Biao (whoever he was) and Confucius (he was so old-fashioned) seemed like the intelligent and politically correct (before we had even heard the term) thing to do. Few of us had any idea of what it all meant or what was actually happening in China. And by the time we did, when the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were made manifest to the world and the Tiananmen tanks were on our television screens, most of us had moved on anyway. It didn’t matter. Our moral narcissism was focused elsewhere—climate change or the campus rape epidemic, whatever the latest imaginary outrage might have been. Moral narcissism, like the proverbial finger, having writ, moves on. It’s not the subject. It’s the feeling.
This doesn’t mean that old traditions were not reinvented as needed. The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society—written in 1962 by Tom Hayden and arguably the founding document of the Least Great Generation—attempts to restart socialism by painting Stalin as an unfortunate aberration. There were better ways to utopia and we knew how to find them. We wouldn’t make the mistake of Stalinist excesses (although years later moral narcissist in extremis Oliver Stone did his best to erase those Stalinist excesses from the record altogether with his television series Untold History of the United States).
Others followed in Hayden’s footsteps or ran parallel with him, attempting to reconstitute leftism, to give it a new “humanistic” life in the face of its detractors. Writers like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, heroes to us at the time, are exemplars of this type of distraction cum rehabilitation, adopting Freud, Gramsci, and other psychological and sociological thinkers to breathe life into moribund nineteenth-century Marxism. The Frankfurt School as well was a united front of moral narcissists dedicated to that end—deliberate obfuscation through art, literature, and obscurantist philosophy aimed at creating “socialism with a human face” or a face that was hidden altogether.
This approach had the desired impact. The Gulag and similar atrocities were largely forgotten and a new generation of leftists was born through the offices of the Least Great Generation. The culture and political theory were mixed together in a confusing stew, sometimes deliberately. Marcuse’s most notable concept “repressive tolerance”—the theory that free expression as practiced in Western liberal democratic societies like the United States is actually a form of oppression, hence essentially intolerant—was a masterpiece of doublespeak, negating almost every possible act of criticism or distinction. This paved the way for the ironically gay French philosopher Michel Foucault’s impassioned defense—under the equalizing banner of cultural relativism—of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran; the “ironically gay” description earned by the well-known repeated hangings of homosexuals from telephone poles under the ayatollah’s rule. But still, all cultures were equal. Marcuse’s essay on “repressive tolerance” appeared in 1965 and created a sensation in intellectual circles. Not long thereafter (1968)
