The Self-Professed Radical Academic Left is *really* Radical

In the last month or two, I've been learning to "twitter." The experience has brought one thing home to me: the academic left is truly, honestly radical. For years I've read articles that claimed to be radical, that championed being radical, but somehow never quite grasped how sincerely some writers have meant it. "Revolution" isn't just a metaphor here. 

For example, I'm currently reading Mitchum Huehl's After Critique: Twenty-first-century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (Oxford UP, 2016). Not a radical book in itself, but it's part of my recent interest in the topic of postcritique. And, in the book, I was struck by the following passage:

"This is why Latour suggests [in Irreductions ] that reformist politicians, always ready to compromise, negotiate, and reconfigure, as opposed to revolutionaries, armed with their righteous critiques and utopian dreams, embody the ideal form of politics, even of existence itself" (Huehls 21).

And my first thought was, "Wait, isn't this obvious already?"

Apparently not. The concern for purity -- for avoiding "complicity" at all costs -- has really made it normal to truly loathe compromise of any form. . . . and, in order to motivate the (quite sensible) opposite view, Huehls is forced to cite no less an authority than Bruno Latour himself. This reminds me quite strongly of a recent speech by former president Barack Obama, where he lamented "cancel culture" and the far-left elements in the Democratic Party. All this, I felt, was entirely reasonable; I love Obama. But response to this speech by academic twitter was pretty hardcore: "complicit," "neoliberal," "defender of the status quo," and the whole shebang.

Significantly, the Republican obstructionism of the Obama years was also driven by the felt need for ideological purity and resistance at all costs -- any Republican congressperson who even thought of working together with the Democrats was put in instant fear of being primary'ed in the next election.