On the most immediate level, of course, the poem is about Wordsworth. It is devoted to condemning him, in plain enough words, for having deserted the political left. Browning was deploring the great Romantic poet of the earlier generation for having become -- in later life -- an arch conservative and pillar of the Establishment, despite having been, as Shelley wrote in a poem on the same theme, the one-time prophet of English radicalism -- the unacknowledged legislator who had "weave[d]/ Songs consecrate to truth and liberty[.]"
But reading Browning's lyric as a teenage leftist in the midst of the Bush years, I also felt he was talking about Christopher Hitchens - the most lost of lost leaders to me in that particular historical hour - and all the other erstwhile leftists who had jumped ship and become quasi-neoconservatives, in order to write in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was talking about every great intellectual reaction in history that had followed upon a spasm of "youthful idealism" (as they tend to do).
He was talking not just about Wordsworth, then, but about Robert Southey and the others of his generation who had been bought "just for a handful of silver" - Southey eventually gaining the title of poet laureate, as a reward for his wholesale conversion to cross and crown (leaving Hazlitt to reflect that, once again, those who embraced the most one-dimensional versions of radicalism in youth always somersault over into the deepest-dyed rightism in their middle age).
Browning was talking - without knowing it - about all those former Stalinists who would reinvent themselves as Thomists. And Trostkysists who would end up writing for Commentary.
We are of course in another moment of a resurgent interest among my generation in left-wing politics. And I have no doubt that the same pattern of reaction will eventually set in, once this phase has passed. It is not possible to have so much simplistic and poorly thought-out leftism running around without an equally slipshod conservatism eventually following in its wake (as Hazlitt knew).
I wonder, however, if there are any elements of this future reaction already discernible on the horizon. If we can perhaps already see some leaders who are on the brink of losing themselves. And whether they are about to peel off any lost followers with them as well.
The answer is yes. Wordsworth's successor is not hard to spot. He doesn't write verse, true, or even particularly poetic prose. He doesn't write hardly anything these days, in fact, at least not about U.S. politics (in fairness, he more than has his hands full with all that's going on in Brazil). But he should be writing, one would think. He should be living at this hour, for we have need of him.
He's a man who made his name fighting for civil liberties and against the abuses of the so-called War on Terror, after all. He has been a champion of the rights of religious minorities in the United States, whom the national security state has stigmatized and treated with presumptive suspicion.
One would think he'd have something to say, in that case, about Donald Trump -- a person whose short and ignominious career in office so far has been devoted to "banning" Muslims, who has stepped up the number of unlawful drone strikes beyond even the obscene levels at which they routinely occurred under the Obama administration, and who has dismantled some of the few requirements mandating that U.S. armed forces at least report on the civilian casualties caused by their use of these weapons.
But no. Instead, he has been silent on all these things. One can forgive him for devoting his attention to the Lava Jato investigation, in which he broke some history-making revelations. But his activities in South America, where he lives, apparently haven't been so strenuous and absorbing that they prevent him from finding the time to pen various pieces dismissing the Mueller investigation as akin to the hunt for the missing "WMDs," or otherwise confirming the Trump administration's favored narratives.
Nor did these activities keep him from writing a long piece, when the Mueller report was finally released, in which he claimed that the report's findings effectively torpedoed the whole "Russia story," when in reality it confirmed all its major elements -- the deliberate state-ordered Russian interference, the Trump campaign's willingness to benefit from it, and finally their criminal efforts to prevent federal investigators from uncovering evidence of these acts.
There was a time when all of this made me sad. I mourned the loss of the leader Greenwald. There came a point, however, when it stopped bothering me. When the things he was writing became disappointing and odious enough that I no longer would have particularly wanted to share his side if I could.
There are only so many times -- and that number is not many, come to think of it -- that a person can go out of their way to back up the Trump administration's propaganda -- without ever devoting serious time and effort to in any other way criticizing their actions... there are only so many times that someone can allow themselves to be quoted with approval by Russian state-owned media without whispering a word of criticism against Putin in response... there are only so many times a person can do these things, I say, before they have forfeited entirely one's trust.
Arthur Koestler once described his disillusionment with Stalin as occurring in two stages. First, there was his period of mourning for the lost cause. This was the time when he still regretted his choice to leave the party -- the time when he wavered in his decision. Then, there was the time that followed the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. "That was the end," he wrote in his memoirs. "[F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary."
I believe I have entered the second stage of Koestler's disillusionment. I do not care what a friend of Putin thinks of me, or if an apologist for Trump questions my leftist credentials. A person who spreads Trump's and Putin's falsehoods for them, without ever vocally criticizing either man or the far-right regimes they are constructing, is no leader or example to me.
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, [...]
Best fight on well, [...]
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!
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