Anti-Climacus

WELL:

"If you are of the left, and accept all the same premises as those on the left, yet disagree with them, then either their logic is bad, and they are just stupid, or you are just failing to accept the brutal logic of those premises."

Well, I don't mean to speak for Norm Geras, the Harry's Place people, Socialism in an Age of Waiting, Oliver Kamm, and other people in the same sort of boat as I am, but...

It seems like part of the argument is about what the relevant principles are. Unless one conceives of an ideology as monolithic and ahistorical, there are always going to be fights about what it means to be a conservative, liberal, libertarian, etc. Further, one might believe that spirited fights about first principles keep ideology from becoming staid. Now, obviously, we've been on the losing side of leftist debates since 1968 or so, so maybe we should look to our neoconservative bretheren as a model, and, indeed, some of us are (just ask me sometime who I'm voting for for president), at least to some extent.

Some of us would probably also agree to the premise that at least some of our fellow leftists are stupid, but I don't know if that's different than it is for any other political orientation.

As to the last, it's precisely because we do see where brutal logic takes some leftists that we feel the need to oppose them from the left. It's one thing, for example, to deny Stalinism validity when arguing from the persepctive of the capitalist; it's quite another when one argues against it from post-exile Trotskyist positions. The rejection is more fundamental--it's the difference between saying "even if you accept the premises, the conclusion doesn't follow' and saying 'one has no reasons to accept the premises to begin with.'