There are other ways ambivalently structured loss can take shape as melancholic, including the straightforward possibility of idealizing a lost object as it was never idealized when alive. Straightforward, perhaps, but not simple, for this affect also involves remorse for a past of not loving the object well enough and self-reproach for ever having wished for its death or replacement. As idealization fueled by guilt, this affect also entails heightened aggression toward challenges or challengers to the idealization. (Consider the seemingly interminable intra-Left condemnation of those progressives who did not vote for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.) In this guilt, anxiety and defensiveness over the loss of liberal democracy, we would feel compelled to defend basic principles of liberalism or defend liberalism tout court in a liberal way, that is, we would give up being critical of liberalism and in doing so, give up being left. Freud identifies this surrender of identity upon the death of an ambivalent object as the suicidal wish in melancholia, a wish abetted in our case by a more general disorientation about what the Left is or stands for today.17 Evidence for such a surrender in the present extends from our strikingly unnuanced defenses of free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties, to the staging of anti-war protests as "patriotic" through the iconography of the American flag. Often accounted as what the Left must do when public discourse moves rightward, such accounts presume a single political continuum, ranged from extreme Left to extreme Right, in which liberals and conservatives are nothing more than the moderate versions of the extremes (communists and fascists). Not only does the model of the continuum reduce the variety of political possibility in modernity to matters of degree rather than kind, it erases the distinctiveness of a Left critique and vision. Just as today's neo-liberals bear little in common with traditional conservatives, the Left has traditionally stood for a set of values and possibilities qualitatively different from those of welfare state liberals. Of course, there are times of alliance and spheres of overlap, but a continuum does not capture the nature of these convergences and tactical linkages any better than it captures the differences between, for example, a liberal commitment to rights-based equality and a Left commitment to emancipating the realm of production, or between a liberal enthusiasm for the welfare state and a Left critique of its ideological and regulatory dimensions. So the idea that Leftists must automatically defend liberal political values when they are on the ropes, while sensible from a liberal perspective, does not facilitate a Left challenge to neo-liberalism if the Left still aims at something other than liberal democracy in a capitalist socio-economic order.