Forgot to add these comments in my previous replies:

The reason I brought up this sort of childish name-calling--“counter-revolutionary petit-bourgie scum”--was to point out the silliness of it all. When I was involved in the activist scene it would have really bummed me out if someone had identified me in this fashion. Today I could care less what these people think about me. People are going to think what they are going to think. Look at how people labeled you in the recent Ron Paul post. A "Zionist" of all things. Surprised they didn't call you a "neo-con," or maybe they did but I missed it.

One liberating aspect of “leaving the left” is realizing how self-isolated people in radical left politics truly are (talk about esoteric!). Using disparaging appellations like "counter-revolutionary" is just one symptom. More telling is the content (or lack thereof) of radical politics. In other words, why does an individual affiliate with marginal political ideologies and organizations? I contend a large part of it is psychological rather than political. Lee Harris does a better job of explicating this than myself in his analysis of “fantasy ideologies.”

Please excuse the long excerpt:

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http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3459646.html

A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war…My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability.

Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.
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Over the years I’ve grown to realize the vast majority of people involved in radical politics are doing these activities for how it makes them feel rather than attaining any actual concrete political goal. After all, no thinking anarchist honestly believes they are going to “smash the state” but by participating in a largely meaningless protest or running a pirate radio station or infoshop they can validate their political identity and feel good at the same time. For those on the outside, we can see how pointless the behavior is. But when you’re in the mix, it really seems like marching with cool puppets or running a zine library is making a big difference in the struggle for social change.

I still hold a great deal of affinity for the classical anarchists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement had relevance back then because it was rooted in working-class communities and spoke to their specific needs and aspirations.

These days anarchism—-and radical politics in general-—is largely the domain of college students and the middle-class. Most of the activism in working-class and poor communities is derided as “reformist” and not “revolutionary” but it is precisely this sort of activism that is making a difference in folks daily lives.

I'm sure you've wrestled with the question why radical groups—and by extension, radical ideologies—have such little support in the United States. It isn’t because American workers are duped, or dumb, or that we lack “political consciousness”. It’s because we know a dead end when we see it and that dead end is found on the radical lefitst road not the capitalist road. American workers by and large *did* learn the lessons of Russia and Spain and Cuba. The first victims of Communism are the trade-unionists and an honest of workers lives will find that the lives of workers are better under liberal democratic capitalist regimes than Communist ones. And let's be frank, in the vast majority of cases where the radical left has prevailed, state-socialism or some other form of single party state has been the rule rather than the exception.

Even in an "ideal" theoretical case, the closer a society moves towards a politically enforced uniformity of social classes the closer you move towards a uniformity of culture, of taste, of belief. In fact, I would go so far as to contend that an elimination of individual property rights is a major foundation of despotism. Without an individual right to property (in the classical sense), individual liberty (in the classical sense) is impossible. As Hayek argued, "The recognition of property is clearly the first step in the delimitation of the private sphere which protects us against coercion.”

Is centrism the answer? Maybe, maybe not. The centrist position has opened me up to political pluralism, to many opportunities and perspectives that were closed when I walked through the world with more rigid ideological filters. I considered myself a pluralist when I was an anarchist but I was pluralist in my openness to other forms of anarchism: individualist, mutualist, collectivist, syndicalist, communist, etc. This ideological filter provided a great deal of clarity and order and made the analysis of events fairly simple (capitalism and imperialism are to blame!).

But filtering information in according to this lens inevitably meant a lot of important information was getting filtered out. I sincerely try to understand opposing points of view even when I wholeheartedly disagree with them. Not simply their framework of analysis but understanding the emotional and psychological attraction for specific constituencies. In short, I can begin to understand their appeal, maybe not for me, but for others with different thoughts, interests and goals. For the ideologue, this is an incredibly difficult if not impossible task. For the pluralist, it is part and parcel of what makes us human.

Thanks for discussing these issues with me and feel free to visit and post comments at The New Centrist any time.