{"id":2134,"date":"2022-04-02T13:22:26","date_gmt":"2022-04-02T13:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/04\/02\/ex-leftist-tells-all\/"},"modified":"2022-04-02T13:22:26","modified_gmt":"2022-04-02T13:22:26","slug":"ex-leftist-tells-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/04\/02\/ex-leftist-tells-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Leftist Tells All"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have mentioned Michael Rectenwald (yes, that is how he spells his name) here<\/a> and here<\/a>. Tom Woods today<\/a> tells the story of Rectenwald's move from Marx to Mises. I thank Tony Flood<\/a> for the link. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Michael Rectenwald, formerly a professor at New York University, spent his life as a leftist \u2014 a self-described Marxist, in fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

When on Twitter he began to turn against the tactics and behavior we see routinely on the left, particularly on college campuses with their win-by-intimidation tactics, you know what happened: his leftist colleagues took it as an opportunity to examine that behavior carefully and open a dialogue with people of different views.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just kidding.<\/span><\/p>\n

You know that\u2019s not what happened. That\u2019s never what happens.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, they completely isolated him on campus. Out of one hundred colleagues, perhaps two would say hello to him. People would not even get in the elevator with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

They exiled him to the Russian department \u2014 where, he told me, people were told he was a bad person who was not to be spoken to.<\/span><\/p>\n

But would he necessarily abandon leftism, just because of bad treatment by leftists? After all, even under the Soviet Union there were plenty of cases of communists condemned to death by the Party who nevertheless continued to believe. \u201cThe Party is always right,\u201d they said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rectenwald is different.<\/span><\/p>\n

He spent his career writing in left-wing journals about left-wing ideas. He knows everything there is to know about postmodernism, deconstruction, and all the rest of it. He knows these folks and their ideas inside and out.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what happened to him at NYU caused him to reexamine all of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s since been reading Ludwig von Mises and describes himself as a libertarian.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThree years ago I was writing critiques about the terminal decadence of capitalism,\u201d he told me in one of his appearances on the Tom Woods Show, \u201cand now I\u2019m talking about the terminal decadence of Marxism from a libertarian perspective.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In response to the Marxist slogan \u201cfrom each according to his ability, to each according to his need,\u201d Recentwald observes: \u201cWe know what that means: if you need a bullet in the head, you\u2019ll get that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have mentioned Michael Rectenwald (yes, that is how he spells his name) here and here. Tom Woods today tells the story of Rectenwald's move from Marx to Mises. I thank Tony Flood for the link.  Michael Rectenwald, formerly a professor at New York University, spent his life as a leftist \u2014 a self-described Marxist, … Continue reading “Ex-Leftist Tells All”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,260,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-conversions","category-leftism-and-political-correctness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}