> There are two assumptions absolutely fundamental to left politics, and
> if those assumptions are false, then leftists deserve every stray
> epithet that anyone has ever applied to them.
>
> The people of nation X are intelligent.
>
> The people of nation X are well-intentioned.
>
> End of argument. We go on from there.
Do you mean all "people"?
In the case of "well-intentioned," there's an old tradition that to understand all is to forgive all i.e. no one intentionally acts badly. Is this what you mean? I would say it's Marx's view; it's the reason capitalists are appropriately described as self-estranged. I thought, however, that you had rejected this view in so far as it was interpreted to mean that individuals acting as capitalists would be happier if they were acting "authentically."
In the case of "intelligent," there's an equally old tradition that the capacity for rational judgment is a potential that requires particular developmental conditions for its actualization. So, even if we assume that all people have a roughly equal potential, the extent to which it's actualized in particular individuals depends on the particular conditions in which they develop and live. In particular, it depends, according to Marx (and others - e.g. Whitehead), on the extent to which their relations are based on persuasion rather than force.
If individual conditions are such as seriously to impede the development of a capacity for rational judgment, there will be significant resistance to direct methods of rational persuasion. The psychoanalytic explanation of this is that the beliefs and behaviour that resist change through such direct methods are the product of defenses against anxiety e.g. a mistaken dogmatic identification of reason with syllogistic reasoning might be the outcome of an obsessional defense against anxiety provoked by one's own hateful destructive aggressiveness (obsessional logocentric reasoning binds this aggressiveness and provides it with a less anxiety provoking outlet).
If true, this account of rationality and irrationality has important implications for a "left politics." It's inconsistent with any and all moralistic judgments. It's also inconsistent with authoritarian practices. It conceives ideal human relations as wholly relations of rational persuasion and its method of resolving resistance to direct methods of rational persuasion is itself wholly a method of rational persuasion (i.e. the idea of coercing individuals into a relation of mutual recognition or into a psychoanalytic relation is self-contradictory). A certain kind of mind, however, does tend to see coercive intent everywhere and will be resistant to logical arguments of this kind. Paradoxically, this kind of mind also tends to be logocentric.
Ted