Leftwing Conservatism

To say you are a “conservative” can mean many different things these days. We have been blogging about the different conservative ideologies out there. There is “National Conservatism,” Big Government Conservatism,” “Freedom Conservatism,” Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, cultural conservatism, economic conservatism, libertarian conservatism, Reaganite conservatism, Trumpian conservatism, and Christian conservatism, to name a few. I would now like to introduce you to Leftwing Conservatism.

The third most popular politician in Germany is Sahra Wagenknecht, a former Communist who got her start in the hard-core police state of East Germany. But while leading a far left political party and serving in Parliament, she is a harsh critic of environmentalism, transgenderism, immigration, and woke progressivism. In that, she often sounds like the German right, advocating policies much like those of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which some observers fear is flirting with neo-Nazism. But Wagenknecht criticizes all of these things for leftwing reasons.

She attacks the Green Party environmentalists for contributing to the deindustrialization of the country, insisting that renewable energy will not meet the country’s economic needs. She voted against a transgender-affirming law because it ” turns parents and children into guinea pigs for an ideology that only benefits the pharmaceutical lobby.”

She criticizes Germany’s allowing a flood of immigrants out of concern for the welfare state. “The stronger the welfare state, the more of a sense of belonging there must be,” she said. “Because if people have no connection to those who receive social benefits, then at some point they will refuse to pay for those benefits.”

Says Politico‘s James Angelos in an article about her entitled Is Germany’s rising superstar so far left she’s far right?

Listening to Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s hard-left icon, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the greatest threat to democracy is “lifestyle leftists” nursing lattes in reusable cups while shopping for organic kale at a Berlin farmers’ market.

Such well-off, eco-friendly urban bohemians hold what they deem to be “morally impeccable” views about everything from Ukraine to climate change, she says, and then impose those beliefs over regular people with draconian zeal.

Wagenknecht even wrote a book against the “lifestyle left,” entitled in English The Self-Righteous (only available currently in German). The Unherd‘s Thomas Fazi summarizes her argument:

“Left”, she argues, used to be synonymous with improving the lives of ordinary people forced to support themselves through their (often backbreaking) labour; however, today’s progressive movement has come to be dominated by what Wagenknecht calls the “lifestyle Left”, whose members “no longer place social and political-economic problems at the centre of Left-wing politics. In the place of such concerns, they promote questions regarding lifestyle, consumption habits, and moral attitudes.” She further notes that, far from being liberal, today’s Leftists tend to be viciously authoritarian.

That authoritarianism manifested itself in the COVID mandates, which Wagenknecht furiously opposed. She also favors policies that meet the need that ordinary people have for “traditions, stability and security.”

Wagenknecht is still very much a Leftist. She opposes NATO and the United States, favoring instead alignment with Russia. She very much opposes the Euro-American support of Ukraine. She favors socialist-style economic policies. And she remains a dialectical materialist atheist.

Wagenknecht’s conservative positions do not contradict her leftwing credentials. For an orthodox Marxist, the woke “lifestyle leftists” are heretics. Marxists are all about class struggle, and they champion the working classes. “Lifestyle leftists” are affluent members of the bourgeois ruling class who look down on the “deplorables” as their social inferiors. Instead of pursuing economic justice for the proletariat, the lifestyle leftists fixate instead on luxury beliefs such as environmentalism, transgenderism, and identity politics that divide rather than unite the working class. In the old East Germany, “lifestyle leftists” wouldn’t last a day before the Stasi would bring them in for ideological correction.

Not that Wagenknecht is a Stasi throwback. She reportedly became disillusioned with Communist authoritarianism. But she still champions the working class and “the little people.” Her political base is still east Germany, a region now afflicted with “Östalgie” (a mashup of “East” and “nostalgia”), a nostalgia for the way things used to be in East Germany, with its economic and social stability.

Today she leads her own leftwing party, named after herself, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). In upcoming state parliamentary elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenberg, the BSW is expected to do well. As is the right wing Afd. For all of their differences, both the left and the right are standing for some of the same things.

The phenomenon of Leftwing Conservatism is not confined, though, to Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany. Yesterday we posted about an article in the UK magazine Spiked arguing that Donald Trump is actually a moderate. Spiked got its start as Living Marxism, the magazine of England’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Now it attacks woke progressivism and publishes articles supportive of Donald Trump, all in the name of the working class.

Even in America, when conservatives speak in terms of a class struggle between the oppressed working class and the social and economic elite and when they condemn free market capitalism, they are articulating a leftwing conservatism.

That doesn’t make them wrong, necessarily. Conservatives of the world, unite! But one can advocate conservative policies for many different reasons, some of which can lead to eventual conflicts.

UPDATE: In Sunday’s election, the right wing AfD got 33.4% of the votes in Thuringia, with the left wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) getting 15.5%. In Saxony, the AfD won 31.4%, with the BSW winning 11.5%. Germany’s ruling center left Social Democrats, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, took less than 8% in both states. Other political parties took the rest.

This means that 49% of Thuringians and 43% of Saxons are in basic agreement, whether coming from the right or the left. With only 8 in 100 supporting the status quo.

Photo: Sahra Wagenknecht by © Superbass / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons