Gee’s Reviews > The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium > Status Update

the working class lost its distinctive features in a largely postindustrial society and because of the relentless inroads of managerial democracy. The staffing of such government by a postliberal elite has accelerated the movement toward a new political culture. In this culture, administrators with the media and judiciary, have gone from providing social services into supportingpostbourgeois lifestyles and attitudes

Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, Italian Socialist senator and longtime political theorist Norberto Bobbio defends the continued use of left-right distinctions after the fall of the Soviet empire. According to Bobbio, such traditional nomenclature continues to have value, inasmuch as there are still rival partisans who stand behind the two opposing principles of equality and inequality.

An often amorphous guilt over past acts of intolerance and over material inequalities, an association of Third World cultures and religions with the “suffering just,” a reduction of quintessential Christianity to equality and universality, and an expectation of living in some multicultural end-time all fuel the Catholic campaign for inclusiveness.

*** Tolerance, understood as glorifying the foreign and the antiWestern, is different from courtesy to strangers. It is an expression of ancestral self-rejection, like the zeal of those Romans who upon joining the early church turned against their pagan heritage entirely.

A more homogenized humanity moving across open borders would be equally acceptable to both American neoconservatives and most European leftist intellectuals, however much they may disagree about the United States’ present Middle Eastern politics

The promise of the present age for the European Left is more or less the vision articulated by Fukuyama. “Liberal democracy,” as the breakdown of national borders and national consciousness, governments responsive to the people, international commerce, and human rights, Fukuyama proclaims, is the wave of the future, after the last antidemocratic ideology of the 20th c had made and lost its bid for world domination.

Left also reveals traces of a “Gnostic” myth, it may be necessary to ascertain its origin in an ancient Near Eastern civilization.Voegelin and the German-Jewish scholar Jakob Taubes have both focused critical attention on the relation between ancient Christian heresies and modern political cultures

by 1947 the United States was far less interested in prosecuting suspected Nazis and in applying Frankfurt School prescriptions to German family life than it was in fighting Communism at home and abroad.

revision is now a code word on the Post-Marxist left for being politically incorrect, which means expressing “fascist” ideas. It does not refer exclusively to those who challenge the established account of the Holocaust, but it has been extended to those who are transmitting a historical narrative that might weaken our resistance to “fascist” threats.