A Wolf by the Ears: Or Why the Left Can't Moderate
Definitions up front: By “Left,” I mean today’s progressive coalition clustered around the Democratic Party and the administrative class. By “dominant culture,” I mean the historic high-status bloc that set a nation’s public norms (in the U.S., White Christian Historically Protestant America). And by “Bioleninism,” I mean Spandrell’s idea that regimes recruit marginal or low-status groups with promises of power and protection, using their resentment to upend the old hierarchy/status quo.
A coalition that survives by perpetual grievance must either mint new enemies or pay ever-rising rents to its clients. — the Patronage–Client Trap
The Left cannot tone down its rhetoric. It cannot moderate its positions. The Left is, by nature, a revolutionary force, and a revolutionary force needs an enemy.
Every nation has a high-status ethnic or religious group that sets the public norm. That group is the cultural bedrock of national identity. Alongside cultural defining diaspora, there are always lower-status groups. In multiethnic empires like the United States and Russia, there is a multitude of these groups. Where these groups fall in the cultural hierarchy is of little importance, what matters is they are not at the top and any group that is not at the top will have resentment for the status quo and will seek any opportunity to invert it.
The Left harnesses that discontent and points it at the dominant culture.
Spandrell called it Bioleninism: recruit the least invested in the old order, the marginal, the disaffected, the people with nothing to lose, and bind them to your party with recognition and the promise of power.1 Lenin understood this. Late-Tsarist Russia had a dominant culture, (ethnic Russians and Orthodox Christians) inside a vast empire full of minorities and malcontents. Lenin courted them. He held out the status they lacked and told them they would rule with him once the old world was gone. The promise of status and revenge helped win sympathy, or at least neutrality, among non-Russian nationalities during the Russian Civil War.2
The promise of status mattered more than the delivery. Under the Tsar these groups had no power, thus the promise itself was enough to mobilize them. That coalition of resentment helped Lenin and the Bolsheviks rise to power.
But Lenin also understood a hard truth: the coalition that breaks a country is not the coalition that can run one. The early Soviet korenizatsiia (indigenization) program elevated minority cadres; then the center reversed course in the late 1930s with the NKVD’s national “operations” during the Great Terror. These brutal purges were designed to keep the permanent revolutionary class (low-status groups) from devouring the regime.3 If you leave the shock troops inside the machine, you get an internal mob that must be fed forever. So, once power was secured, the regime cut them down.
Now look at the United States.
Like Russia, America is a multi-ethnic empire: many peoples under one federal roof. That makes it vulnerable to the same revolutionary forces. Foreign enemies have long understood this. During World War II, Japan ran targeted propaganda aimed at Black Americans; Satokata Takahashi and groups like the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World tried to aggravate intra-ethnic tensions during WWII, by pushing race propaganda and courting Black nationalism.4
After the WWII, communist fronts and fellow-travelers recognized the same weakness, and over time the Democratic Party learned to do at home what others tried to do from abroad: build a permanent coalition of the dissatisfied and point them at the historic American majority.
Unlike the Bolsheviks, the American Left did not purge its permanent revolutionaries. It institutionalized them. It put them in HR offices, DEI sinecures, grant-funded nonprofits, university bureaucracies, media desks, foundation boards, and government posts. It changed the hiring rules and the speech codes. It paid the coalition in legislation, titles, and entitlements. The Democrat party understood that this is how you convert street power into administrative power without firing a shot.
The Democrat coalition is not just ethnic and religious minorities. It is a stack of grievance constituencies, ideological blocs, sexual-politics blocs, immigration blocs, activist NGOs, and professional revolutionaries who live off the promise of tearing down the old order. There is very little that binds them together except a shared need for an enemy and a shared appetite for patronage. This is why the rhetoric can never soften. Take away the villain, the centralizing force, and the coalition fractures.
This produces the Patronage–Client Trap:
promise status and protection.
reward loyalty with government funds, sinecures, and deference.
watch as clients grow entrenched enough to act in their own interest… often against party discipline.
Thomas Jefferson, (while referencing Suetonius) had the right image: “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”5 The Democratic Party has been holding the wolf by both ears for far too long, and they’re only hope is to keep his attention trained on something more appetizing than themselves.
As a side note: This need to placate their collation explains why our current government feels incompetent compared to previous iterations. Selection for competence has been replaced by selection for race, gender, sexual orientation, anything to keep the coalition appeased.
You can run a bureaucracy that way for a time, if you drown it in money. You cannot run a country that way forever. Michels’s iron law of oligarchy explains how large organizations entrench self-protective cadres6. Olson’s Logic of Collective Action shows why small, motivated interests beat large, diffuse majorities.7 Combine the two and you get a sprawling apparatus that’s hard to reform and that must continually manufacture enemies to hold together.
The Left has a single glue that keeps all these factions from knifing each other…the foil. In America, the foil is White, Christian America, the historic dominant cultural bloc. Whether or not that bloc still rules is irrelevant. It must be treated as the perpetual threat so the coalition can keep marching in lockstep. If they admit that the old order has already been dethroned, the clients will turn on one another for the spoils.
You can see the delicate nature of this coalition in the response to the Israel–Palestine conflict which has threatened the unity of the part. Democrat leadership wants a friendly relationship with Jewish Americans, which has been a hectically reliable Democratic constituency. But the activist base is fueled by anti-colonial ideology, and they view Israel as a neo colonial power. There is no stable compromise there. You pick one side and the other side remembers. This is what happens when your politics is a rent-seeking truce between factions that share nothing but a common enemy.
Some will argue that the Democrats moderated in the Clinton years. Rhetorically, yes. Administratively, the patronage logic kept expanding. Michels would remind us that organizations oligarchize. Concentrated interests beat diffuse publics. The Patronage–Client Trap kept tightening even if campaign rhetoric drifted to the “center.”
Thus, the Left cannot moderate, because for the Left moderation is suicide. Again, the Left is a revolutionary coalition built on grievance, held together by a permanent enemy. If it tones down the rhetoric, it loses power. If it purges its clients, it loses its votes. If it tries to split the difference, it gets torn apart by the very activists it relies on. That is the cost of choosing permanent revolution over a shared national culture. It’s why Stalin had Trotsky ice picked.
If the Left is incapable of moderating what is to be done? You don’t bargain your way to peace with a coalition that requires conflict to stay solvent. Any durable gain for the Right threatens the glue that holds the Left together.
There are no grantees, but the most peaceful path is a restoration of freedom of association and a revived federalism: let communities draw lines for themselves—schools, clubs, churches, municipalities, without federal micromanagement. Let people form the communities they want. Let churches, schools, clubs, and towns draw their own lines and enforce their own standards. Let different ways of life have space. That is what federalism is for. A continent-sized country cannot be managed as a single unified entity. If that is not allowed, if every association must be nationalized and every standard must be dictated from Washington, then the only remaining path is escalation.
The Left chose a coalition that requires an enemy. It must maintain that enemy or die. That is why the rhetoric will not soften, this is why the Left will never moderate. If we fail to restore freedom of association, we will get what Spain got in the 1930s: a country that finally decides to settle its differences in the street, and no one sane wants that.
-TJS
Spandrell, “Biological Leninism,” original blog series (2017). Bloody Shovel 4.
Britannica, “Vladimir Lenin — Leadership in the Russian Revolution” (on self-determination winning sympathy/neutrality among non-Russian nationalities). Leadership in the Russian Revolution.
Ernest Allen Jr., “Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24:1 (1994). Taylor & Francis.
Thomas Jefferson, “wolf by the ear(s),” letter to John Holmes (Apr. 22, 1820). Monticello & Library of Congress. www.monticello.org
Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911/1915). Canonical statement of the iron law of oligarchy. Britannica
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965). On why concentrated interests beat diffuse publics. The Logic of Collective Action
Source: The Old South Repository
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