SECTS ARE ALWAYS in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You're either with us or with the evildoers.
This is nowhere more true than on the left. I've been rediscovering this cardinal principle since publishing a book a couple of months ago in which I argued what seemed to me to be the not-soterribly-controversial point that it was possible to be liberal and patriotic at the same time. A slightly iconoclastic idea, maybe, but for many of my longtime colleagues on the left, that was all it took. The night of the long knives had begun.
Why is the left so determined to eat its own? Sometimes it can be explained as the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities. These keepers of the true flame are convinced that they have the people's interest at heart -- and harbor the suspicion that the people are being misled by wolves masquerading as shepherds. The misleaders must therefore be thrashed.
Thus, in 1903, Lenin's Bolsheviks, advocating a Communist Party made up strictly of professional revolutionaries, broke from the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats, who, they said, had sold out true Marxism in favor of "bourgeois democracy." (Eventually, the Bolsheviks banned the Mensheviks.)
So too in 1969, the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground) determined that Students for a Democratic Society was being misled by the Stalinists of the Progressive Labor faction and by "movement creeps" like, well, myself. The urge to purge caused the collapse of a large, broad-based organization.
Sometimes the fervor that causes these schisms is the fervor of winners. In the French, Bolshevik, Nazi and Cuban revolutions, the victors wondered why, having seized power, they still confronted impediments to the swift completion of their appointed agendas.
Again, the pure blamed the impure. The purgers, such as France's Georges Danton, were purged in turn. Before the seizure of power, coalitions of factions had masked conflicts of interest and ambition, and then when the masks came off, the factions went for each others' throats. Power was thrilling, but there wasn't enough to go around. Out came the guillotine, the firing squad, the gulag, the show trials, the hysterical accusations and desperate confessions.
