Talisker in hand, foolishly declaiming Robert Burns's To A Louse to a packed house of three on Thursday night, I blundered Englishly into the final lines: "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see ourselves as others see us! / It wad frae mony a blunder free us./ And foolish notion." Never was a wiser word written, I realised too late.
Yet those lines had already come to mind that day while reading What's Left?, Nick Cohen's roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the liberal tradition. It is already one of the most discussed current affairs books of the new year. At the very least it forces, or ought to force, anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world.
There's a nice passage in it, reminiscent of William Morris's News from Nowhere, in which Cohen imagines himself as a time traveller in conversation with a liberal intellectual of a century ago. Cohen reels off a description of the world in 2007 - the political rights, the material prosperity, the common welfare, the intellectual freedom. His audience is amazed. "We love the sound of the future," they cry. "it has everything we have always wanted." "So it has," Cohen replies, "which is why you will hate it."
If leftwing Britons of 2007 saw themselves more clearly than they do, they would notice two big things. First, they would see what the leftwing Britons of 1907 would have grasped - that much of what the left of a century ago yearned for has actually been achieved, imperfectly and incompletely to be sure, but unmistakably achieved all the same. As Cohen points out, the 20th century may have been largely governed by the party of the right, but it is the worldview of the party of the left that triumphed.
Second, they would have to acknowledge the paradox that, while its agenda has triumphed, the left itself has in most respects wholly collapsed. It is one of the weaknesses of Cohen's book that he never quite pins down what "the left" is. Discussions of the book risk reproducing the fault. But it is facile to deny that the problem exists. Neither socialism as a programme nor the parties that espoused it - and these are surely somewhere near the heart of any definition of the left - have survived into the modern age with credibility. Foul though they and their ideas are, the parties of the extreme right actually have more purchase on the politics of the early 21st century than the parties of the left.
That doesn't mean there is no one left on the left. Self-evidently there are lots of people, even if they are neither as numerous nor as influential as the rightwing press imagines. But they lack anything remotely resembling a programme, let alone a programme that all of them agree on. With nothing to say to the rest of the world, the left tradition has taken cover in single issue campaigns, in inertia, or in the gesture politics of so-called defiance. Socialism is dead. There remain only socialists.
Cohen is merciless about a left generation that has unmoored itself from political action. He chides those who have grown up believing that it is possible simply to "be" leftwing - as both he and I were brought up to be - without having to do anything practical about it. Part of this is well aimed. Yes, the left has increasingly retreated from the street to the sofa. Watching The Trial of Tony Blair qualifies in some quarters as proof of political commitment. The left has always been far too comfortable in the purity of its own ethos, a comfort which absolves it from the inconvenience of having to take responsibility for anything, and gives it the self-sustaining gratification of permanent betrayal. But he is also very unfair. Most people who think of themselves as leftwing are not hypocrites. They want to live an ethical life. The trouble is they are waiting for a call that shows little sign of ever coming.
But Cohen is far angrier than this. His charge can be summarised by saying that, driven by a post-cold war resurgence of anti-Americanism, the liberal-left has abandoned its anti-fascist roots, denied the terrorist threat embodied in 9/11 and thus become an apologist for radical Islamic totalitarianism.
Indignation about western military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, followed by the much wider outrage over Iraq, has swept liberals towards swallowing a guilt-ridden untruth about Muslim victimhood that increasingly betrays the enlightenment inheritance of secularism, equality and human rights at home and abroad. Bits of this are uncomfortably true, but not the whole package. To paraphrase Lincoln, all the left believes some of it all of the time, some of the left (though not many) believes all of it some of the time, but all the liberal left does not believe all of it all of the time. There are plenty of us who strongly supported intervention in Kosovo and then strongly opposed it in Iraq. There were even more who opposed Iraq without embracing the wider claims of Muslim victimhood.
Nor has a resolutely secular movement suddenly bowed the knee en masse to a mad version of religion. The reality is far more complex. The British left has strong religious roots and traditions. The secular left has often been brutally authoritarian too (some would argue that a mild version of this was on display this week in the clash between the rights of this country's gay minority and its Catholic one). Like it or not, religion, a human construction, survives the most determined efforts to crush it.
Again, one asks: who is this "left"? As the British Social Attitudes survey pointed out this week, political alignment is weakening and is a poor guide to the way people respond. Many of us, moreover, believe more than one thing at the same time. Very few people reading Cohen's book are likely to see themselves precisely reflected in it.
Moreover, those who think like him have explaining to do. This book would have been easier to write four years ago. Cohen saw the Iraq war as a drive to replace tyranny with something approaching justice. That was a reasonable thing to believe once, but it has turned out disastrously wrong - an all too familiar pattern on the left. Iraq does not necessarily invalidate the policies of humanitarian intervention or internationally sanctioned regime change - and it certainly does not negate the power of much of what Cohen writes. But Robert Burns would surely have seen Iraq as a classic foolish notion - or worse - and it sure as hell carries lessons to which the believers have not yet faced up.
