> > > Otherwise, I agree with what you say. However, what I found
interesting
> > > about it was that the guy used a Lacanian/Zizekian analysis to come to
> > > conclusions that most of the L/Z supporters among the Left wouldn't
> > > appreciate.
> >
> >Yeah, the smart right-wingers are good at that, twisting your wrist.
> >
> >Jacob C.
>
> wooooosh.
>
> kelley
Wooooosh is right. What I was thinking, and opaquely expressed, is that there's a kind of jujitsu rhetorical strategy that conservative intellectuals sometimes use, of appropriating ideas that originated on the left and turning them against the left. Perhaps one locus classicus of this was the whole "new class" argument, of which so much was made in the 70s and 80s. The notion of a "new class" orginated with Milovan Djilas's critique from the left of Tito's communist government, which called communist functionaries and their allies a dominant "new class" that had merely replaced the old ruling class and their functionaries. I don't remember much of Djilas's book, but as I recall it amounted to a version of the "state capitalism" argument, which we needn't rehearse.
Right wing "intellectuals"--high-brow publicists, really--imported the idea to the US and used it to attack the "academic left" and its putative allies in journalism, entertainment, the arts, and so on. What it did was lend a semblance of intellectual respectability to age-old populist resentment of "pointy-headed intellectuals."
Not for nothing did Irving Kristol begin his political life as a Trotskyist.
As for the guy who wrote the Policy Review piece, it's hard to say how much of his argument arises from genuine conviction, but my guess would be that to him, any stick will do to beat the left-wing dog.
Jacob Conrad