A friend of one of my paternal uncles once fancied himself as a Marxist and was a huge admirer of former premier Z.A. Bhutto. He then got embroiled in the 1972 labour movement in Karachi. He was arrested for rioting. His romance with Bhutto’s ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) began to erode. Then, in 1973, he was picked up by the police from Peshawar. Apparently, he was on his way to join an armed peasants uprising in Hashtnagar.

He was released in 1976. He then became a worker of National Democratic Party (NDP), a party formed by members of the left-wing National Awami Party that was banned. NDP became part of the anti-Bhutto Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).

My uncle’s friend participated in the PNA movement that exploded in April 1977. PNA’s main components were three Islamist parties.

In May 1977, he was arrested for setting a bus on fire. He was released when Gen Zia toppled the Bhutto regime.

It seems that most ideological switching in the 20th and 21st centuries has been from the left to the right. And former leftists’ greatest issue is often with liberalism

In 1980, the friend surprised my uncle when he told him that the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) had agreed to support him in that year’s local bodies elections in Karachi. Thereafter, he became a staunch JI supporter.

In the 1990s, he joined his father’s business, got married and joined the apolitical Islamist evangelical organisation the Tableeghi Jamaat (TJ). When I last met him in 2013, he was in his early sixties. He had a long beard and was running the family business. He was still a member of the TJ. I tried to get him to talk about his leftist past, but he became uncomfortable and quickly changed the topic. But not before quipping that it was Marxism that ‘betrayed’ him.

The former US President Ronald Reagan (1981-88) was once a left-leaning supporter of the Democratic Party, before becoming a dedicated right-wing member of the Republican Party. He once claimed, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.”

According to the American journalist George Packer, it was like blaming your spouse for your own unfaithfulness. In the February 14, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Packer writes, “political conversions are painful affairs, as hard to face up to as falling out of love or losing your religion.”

It seems that most ideological switching in the 20th and 21st centuries has been from the left to the right. At least, much of the literature in this context has been about leftists moving to the right. And there’s another thing. Leftists that move to the right are often at odds with liberalism.

Giving the example of former American communist and Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, Packer writes that, after failing to reconcile with the principles of liberalism, Chambers joined the Communist Party and then became a Soviet spy. He remained a committed communist between 1924 and 1937, but then began to feel disillusioned by the policies of the Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin.

But Chambers’ move away from communism did not see him running into the arms of American liberalism. He still detested it. After divorcing communism, he began to explore a new ideological identity. To him, communism had eroded his spirituality, which he wanted to reclaim by rediscovering the Christian faith.

In 1957, he became a senior editor of The National Review, a magazine that played a pivotal role in redefining American conservatism. It fused social conservatism with right-wing libertarianism that advocates a radical implementation of capitalism. The fusion was anti-liberal. It viewed liberalism as an idea that had weakened the US and was swaying the American polity away from fulfilling its moral, economic and global obligations.

In the March 2016 issue of The Atlantic, the American historian Sam Tanenhaus writes, “modern conservatism was the brainchild of ex-Communists.” This is not an exaggeration. The celebrated documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, in his 2004 documentary series The Power of Nightmares, brilliantly explores the manner in which disillusioned left-leaning liberals and socialists broke away from the left to not only reinvent themselves, but also the whole idea of conservatism.

They ‘discovered’ a spirituality and even God’s mandate in man’s quest for economic profit, political power and domination. To them, this was democracy, and not the one that dished out free lunches through welfare programmes, or indulged in soft-power diplomacy. The result was the rise of ‘neoconservatism’, manifested through leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their favourite client-dictators.

But neoconservatism soon mutated when left-leaning democrats began to fuse social democratic ideas with softer neo-conservative ideals. The consequence of this was the implosion of neoconservatism. What emerged from the implosion was a more populist right-wing variant in the 21st century.

Then there is also the case of leftists targeting mainstream liberal or left-liberal outfits for failing to serve the people. The criticism is soon followed by a softening of approach towards right-wing politics. The former Marxist and anti-Thatcher author Christopher Hitchens launched a series of tirades against liberal leaders such as Bill Clinton, until he (Hitchens) was applauding George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

Between 1975 and 1976, many leftists dumped the ‘socialist’ Pakistani PM Bhutto and joined a right-wing alliance against him. They thought they were being ‘honest’. Just as the Iranian leftists thought they were when they allied themselves with the clerics to topple the Shah in 1979. The results in both cases were disastrous. A semi-theocratic dictatorship in Pakistan and a total theocracy in Iran.

Leftists have become self-centred and invested in micro causes, which they then proudly exhibit on social media. Their first line of attack remains ‘failing’ liberal or left-liberal politics. Unconsciously, they refuse to fully buy into the idea of liberal democracy. Some eventually plunge towards the right — as the JI leader late Munawar Hasan did when, from being a Marxist youth, he became a Maududi fan. Or they uncannily create space for the right to barge in.

It’s a form of romantic stupidity that justifies itself as honesty. Unfortunately, honesty has nothing to do with the complex dynamics of mainstream politics. In his book Leaving The Left Behind, the late Jamal Naqvi wrote that most of his long years as a communist were spent ‘underground’. By the time he came out in full view, communism was dead.

Another long-time communist, the late Jam Saqi realised this. In the early 1990s, he joined the left-liberal PPP. He was lambasted by his former comrades for joining a ‘bourgeois’ party. I know at least two critics of Saqi’s decision who are now huge admirers of Imran Khan’s right-wing, populist Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI).

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 24th, 2022