Betrayal on the Left

What evangelicals can expect if they placate radicals.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Dear evangelicals on the political left:

You have always had a place in the tense evangelical conversation about politics. I realize that many brothers and sisters on the political right question your faith when you speak your minds. The frequent insults and accusations are ungodly, as I will discuss at length in coming posts.

You also have a place in my heart. I know that your compassion for marginalized people is motivated by your desire to be like Christ. You are right to insist that the Church engage with such issues as poverty and racism. Your willingness to listen to others about personal matters of sexuality without rejecting them is wise and potentially redemptive.

Radicals are alluring because they seem to speak on these matters with clarity and strength. When our tense political debate tips into acrimony, as it has, radicals present their faction as your only option. But their clarity and strength are an illusion. Our political disagreements are profound. The crises of American society cannot be solved by one faction.

Please defend the discourse of liberal civil society. Stand up for the ethic of using straight words. Extend goodwill toward those who disagree with you. You will persuade many if you restrain yourselves from calling them privileged racists and bigots.

Bear with me as I make the case that the radicals teaching you their language will only betray you.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War ignited the compassion of people worldwide, drawing many to fight for the Republican government against the Fascists led by Francisco Franco. Among them was George Orwell, a man of the left fervently devoted to the liberation of Spanish workers.

As Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia,¹ revolutionary Barcelona was the only genuinely egalitarian society he ever saw. It captured his affection. He went to the front with a volunteer militia formed by the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification (abbreviated in Spanish as POUM), fighting alongside peasants, workers, and foreigners like himself. One was Georges Kopp, a Belgian engineer.

But while they fought, the revolution in Barcelona died.

Soviet agents began to dominate the leftist Republican coalition. Their sole objective was to defeat the USSR’s larger enemies, Hitler and Mussolini. Having promoted a workers’ revolution in their propaganda, the Soviets now worked to stop it. Their new line was that the enemy was not capitalism but Franco. They destroyed the other Spanish leftist parties one by one, accusing them of disloyalty to the new cause.

After being wounded at the front, Orwell returned to Barcelona to find that POUM soldiers like him were being rounded up by the communists and imprisoned, many of them shot—killed not by Fascists but by their own allies.

Georges Kopp was one of those imprisoned. Orwell and his wife visited Kopp for the last time where he was held in a stinking common cell. “There was nothing that we could do for him, absolutely nothing, except to say goodbye and leave money with Spanish friends who would take him food and cigarettes. A little while later, however, after we had left Barcelona, he was placed incommunicado and not even food could be sent to him.”² Hunted by communists, Orwell and his wife barely escaped Spain with their lives. When he published Homage in 1938, Orwell assumed that Kopp was dead in a secret prison.

In 1940, after the Nazi-Soviet pact, Orwell wrote,

Every time Stalin swaps partners, ‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape. This entails sudden and violent changes of ‘line,’ purges, denunciations, systematic destruction of party literature, etc., etc. Every communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on. This has happened at least three times during the last ten years.³

Radicalism is a not a program, a set of positions, or even a philosophy. It is a method.

Orwell’s Spanish experience illustrates the method of radicalism. Lure the masses with a cause. (Liberate the Spanish workers!) Change the objective secretly. (Defeat Hitler and Mussolini.) Lie about the change. (We just want to defeat Franco!) Destroy allies who don’t serve the new objective. (Imprison POUM traitors!) Consolidate power. Repeat.

The 20th century is the story of the consequences of these continuous betrayals.

In Orwell’s case, the communists enraged the wrong guy. To expose the radical method, Orwell wrote a satire of the Russian revolution told as if animals took over a farm.⁴ The famous story is worth studying closely as a record of the murderous betrayals of true-believing workers for the cause.

Orwell is best known for his dramatization of totalitarian language in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before radicals seize coercive power over societies, they create an alternate reality in their words. It was this dishonesty seeping into common usage that Orwell called people to resist. He wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,”

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. . . . Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.⁵

The communists betrayed their friends and deceived the masses for a reason: to undermine the bonds of civil society systematically.

Many other intellectuals were betrayed by the communists.

Malcolm Muggeridge went to Moscow as a socialist newspaper correspondent optimistic about the Soviets. He witnessed the “unspeakable horrors” of the Ukrainian famine.⁶ After returning to England, he described the real nature of the USSR in Winter in Moscow (1934), a fictionalized satire of his experiences. Most publications on the left denounced him as a liar, and he would have to wait for Khrushchev to confirm the truth in 1956.⁷

Deep inside communist spy networks in America, Whittaker Chambers saw fellow communists betrayed and murdered by their own leaders. He went underground to escape in 1937, earning a living by translating foreign novels with a dictionary at one hand and a revolver at the other.⁸ Lionel Trilling required only a brief period of service among communists to convince him they couldn’t be trusted.⁹ While Orwell never crossed over to the political right, other intellectuals like Chambers did, including philosophers James Burnham and Frank Meyer, and novelist John Dos Passos.

The radical method is not limited to communism.

It permeates other social movements on the left to this day, betraying more and more adherents with its double-talk and shifting goals.

The foundations of postmodern critical theory were laid by Theodor Adorno, a German Jewish Marxist who fled the Nazis before World War II. Adorno applied Marxist ideas to culture, arguing that language, music, art, and film all oppressed people by distracting them from the capitalist power structure. New cultural expressions were needed that excluded the middle class. Adorno crafted a style of writing so tangled in contradictions and paradoxes that only the initiated could understand it.¹⁰

By 1968, however, Adorno’s lectures in Germany were persistently disrupted by student activists storming the lectern and calling him “Teddy the Classicist.” He wasn’t radical enough for them. He died in 1969. Cancelled. The Nazis failed to snuff out Adorno, but his own allies on the left succeeded.¹¹

The extremes of the counterculture in the late 1960s were too much for many intellectuals of the left. In reaction, Nathan Podhoretz, Midge Dector, and Irving Kristol, among others, started a new strain of political conservatism. Where earlier defectors from the left were Anglo-Saxon and literary, these were grounded in the social sciences and predominantly Jewish.

The causes of the left have radicalized again.

John McWhorter, the black linguist and New York Times columnist, argues that the enforcers of the new anti-racist nostrums have created a religion that betrays black people.¹² He analyzes the nonsensical language that “the elect” use to bully others into submission, sometimes calling them out for shameless dishonesty.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff argue that “safety culture” has profoundly harmed not only freedom in academia but the mental health of an entire generation. The new paranoid social justice warriors destroy reputations and careers with bizarre protests and social media mobs.¹³

There was no more celebrated cultural icon of the gay rights movement than J. K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series was received as a redemptive narrative for outsiders of all kinds. But sexual radicals shifted their goals to securing rights for transgender people, overthrowing previous orthodoxies about the rights of women. Rowling didn’t go along with them and is now vilified just as passionately as she was praised in a case study of how virtual mobs wreck violence.

At the New York Times in the last few years, two editors were driven from their jobs by their colleagues for crimes against social justice. Bari Weiss left the opinion page and founded The Free Press, now a flourishing news organization. The Times opinion editor, James Bennet, was run out because he dared to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. Bennet now writes for The Economist, where he published a lengthy account of how his leftist colleagues betrayed not only him but the values of a legacy institution.

Neither one of these writers was a political conservative. They were progressive. They were betrayed.

The most consistently progressive ethnic group in America has been Jews. They have been at the forefront of the left’s causes for a century. But they have been betrayed too. After Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the radical left blamed Israel as a colonizing power and unleashed a violent wave of anti-Semitic protests and harassment that is ongoing: following and chasing Jews, ripping down posters of kidnapped victims in Israel, posting in academic chat rooms that Jews should be killed, and chanting the genocidal line, “From the river to the sea . . . .”

There is legitimate controversy about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But these vile outbursts started immediately after October 7th, before Israel made a single move to attack Hamas. For decades, Jews were permitted to think they were a key part of the progressive coalition, even though a case against them was being prosecuted in academic conferences on critical theory. But the dissembling is over. Jews are white oppressors now. They deserve to be liquidated. Not even university presidents testifying before Congress will defend them.

Last week, a textbook example of the radical method of betrayal appeared in New York Magazine. Judith Butler, the originator of the critical gender theory behind contemporary LGBT activism, received the black spot from Andrea Long Chu in an article entitled, “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies.”

Chu argues that the entire LGBT argument for “gender affirming” care is wrong. The issue is not gender dysmorphia, as if being trans is a mental disorder. Nor is gender as a social construct the issue. The issue is biological sex as a function of the economy. Butler’s theory, according to Chu, leaves the economic exploitation of a person’s biological sex intact. Butler is not radical enough. Children should be free to change their sex because their sexual autonomy will destroy capitalism.

Lure the masses to the cause of helping young people oppressed by their assigned gender. Change the goal secretly to destroying the social structure of capitalism. Lie about the change by insisting that we still care about young people. Destroy allies like Butler who serve the previous cause, not the new goal. Consolidate power. Repeat.

Chu writes as someone who has power. We’ll see how successful Chu is in turning gender theory, yesterday’s unquestionable dogma, into today’s damnable heresy.

Please, evangelicals on the left, do not imagine that you can stay one step ahead of radicals. Their theories are lies. You cannot use their twisted language without debasing yourselves. Orwell is staring at you across the decades and shaking his head.

1. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, (Boston: Mariner Books, 2015).

2. Ibid., pp 188-189.

3. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in A Collection of Essays, (New York: Harvest, 1981), p 235.

4. George Orwell, Animal Farm, (New York: Plume, 1996).

5. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays, (New York: Harvest, 1981), p 162.

6. Malcolm Muggeridge, “Many Winters Ago in Moscow,” in The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp 22-23.

7. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1973), p 291.

8. The gripping story is well-told by Sam Tanenhaus in his biography, Whittaker Chambers, (New York: Random House, 1997), pp 123-149.

9. For this and many other stories about this period, consult Louis Menand’s sweeping history, The Free World (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021).

10. For an example of his Marxist analysis an inpenetrable style, see his Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum, 2003).

11. For more of this story see Lorenz Jager, Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. by Stewart Spencer, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

12. McWhorter makes his argument in detail in Woke Racism (New York: Portfolio, 2021).

13. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, (New York: Penguin, 2018).