The Basic Weakness of the Left
How the Right Can Exploit the Nature of Its Enemy
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Last week we examined Richard Hanania’s accusation that the right is the home of conspiracy theories. We discovered that there’s something to this—we inherently see agency in the world. Far from being a weakness, this is the source of the right’s analytical and decisive power. The left, by contrast, sees the world—even humans—as devoid of agency, which produces a worldview that is fundamentally impersonal and mechanistic.
In this article, we will catalogue the weaknesses of the impersonalist worldview of the left, and hence why the agentic worldview of the right rules over it in an ultimate sense. We will further explain why this left worldview that Hanania clearly prefers cannot properly be sovereign. Finally, we will explain how only the agentic worldview can heal the obvious sickness plaguing societies across the world today.
For our purposes here we will take an instrumental view of the left-wing worldview which we shall term impersonalist as opposed to the right’s agentic worldview. By instrumental we mean that we will not inquire which of these is true, but how they function as tools, how they behave as strategies of power and survival. When we look at the impersonalist worldview in this way, a number of structural vulnerabilities emerge. These are weaknesses that follow from its very logic, not from factual error. Many of the cracks are already showing.
Weakness 1: Strategic Paralysis
The impersonalist worldview is paralyzed by diffusion of responsibility: it can only function by cynically abandoning its basic proposition, and no worldview can maintain that indefinitely. If causation lies in “systems,” not persons, then no one feels responsible to act. Reform becomes procedural—reports, committees, policies—but never decisive. This makes the regime incapable of decision in crises: when everything is a process, nothing can choose. Carl Schmitt’s dictum applies: sovereign is he who decides on the exception—and in an impersonal order, no one can. The effect is that this worldview that promises stability instead produces sclerosis. It can’t move except by inertia or panic.
Weakness 2: Apathy
This worldview struggles to maintain loyalty and meaning—it can only maintain these at elevated cost, producing a differential advantage for its rival. People will fight for persons and stories, not for systems. The left solved this by bioleninism—by deputizing the biologically inferior who remain loyal out of necessity—but this again depends on abandoning impersonalism. An abstract worldview offers no emotional reciprocity: it tells people they are cogs in a process. Over time, legitimacy decays because there is nothing to love—only procedures to obey. This is why highly bureaucratic states depend on constant moralizing or therapeutic rhetoric: they must supply, in language, the sense of belonging that their structure forbids.
Weakness 3: Blindness to Will
When you interpret all conflict as “structural,” you systematically underestimate intentional opposition. Rivals who still believe in agency—individuals, movements, or states—can outmanoeuvre you by acting decisively while you’re still modelling feedback loops. The managerial mind treats every enemy as a malfunction, not as a will; hence it can’t predict or deter one. This is why technocratic elites are often taken surprise by coups, populist surges, or insurgencies they had labelled “impossible.” The impersonalist worldview does not see persons or wills and must be on the lookout for this in other systems—this is highly inefficient, like reading a language by using a dictionary, and so it resorts to hypervigilance, which leads to exhaustion and ironically (given Hanania’s critique of conspiratorialism in the last article), paranoia.
Weakness 4: Reign of Quantity
Impersonalist systems depend on the legibility of the illegible. Systems thinking requires quantification and transparency: what cannot be measured cannot be managed. This biases policy toward what is legible to bureaucracy and away from what is real but opaque (culture, faith, loyalty). It breeds the illusion that metrics are reality, creating a feedback loop of self-deception. We covered this in depth in The Cultured Thug Handbook (ch. 20) when we talked about Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. When you base policy on quantitative measures, you invariably fudge the numbers to guide policy toward desired outcomes—this is a roundabout way of just being agentic in the first place.
Weakness 5: Susceptibility to Capture
A structure that insists it has no rulers is perfect camouflage for those who wish to rule unseen. Managerial impersonalism provides moral cover for private networks of real agents—financiers, media conglomerates, party operatives—who operate beneath the rhetoric of neutrality. The result is soft oligarchy, a kind of rule without responsibility. This is of course precisely what has happened in reality. The result has been the exile of men of good character from sovereign authority and their replacement with psychopaths.
Weakness 6: Cultural Fragility
An impersonalist worldview is abstract, and cannot transmit itself through myth or symbol; its abstractions don’t reproduce in the popular imagination. Because it does not appeal at the level of myth, it can only secure loyalty through what it can provide—it’s strong during the good times, weak during the bad. When belief in the process weakens, nothing stands in its place. Hence sudden ideological collapses: when the spell of faith in the system breaks, the whole edifice loses meaning overnight.
The left-wing, impersonalist worldview’s every strength is a liability in another mode. It gains stability through process, but it cannot act decisively. It offers equality through impersonality, but this drains it of loyalty and meaning. It offers rational management, but is blind to passion and will—the only people passionate for it are those with no other options. Its legitimacy stands upon its neutrality, but this enables it to be easily captured. It offers predictability but is brittle in crisis.
Why the Left Cannot Rule Effectively
Much of right-wing discourse centres around repeating lessons learned (or that should have been learned) centuries ago. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact, circling back to the foundations is healthy—this means you’re not drifting into novelty for novelty’s sake.
Machiavelli taught at the dawn of modernity that politics follows one of two spirit animals: either the lion or the fox. The lion symbolizes strength, force, and courage—the ability to frighten off wolves and defend the state by power and boldness. The fox symbolizes cunning, deception, and prudence—the ability to recognize traps and outwit enemies through craft and manipulation. At bottom, the lion is the true sovereign and founder, and the fox his administrator. The lion is the master over the fox, though eventually the fox will seize power. This is of course, the left, or impersonalist worldview seizing the throne from the right, or agentic worldview. The impersonalist worldview, while excellent at administering a settled order, is catastrophically bad at founding, defending, or renewing one. It can run a system; it cannot create or save a civilization. Thus, when the halls of power become choked with foxes, the society is not long for this world.