ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a psychoanalytically informed political personal view of the vicissitudes of the left and of progressive opinion after the fall of Communism. It suggests that emotional factors were at work, that the wish was father to the thought, and that thinking on the issue had become concrete and fundamentalist. As a cultural correlate of these changes, postmodernist and social constructivist ideology privileged culture over nature, in a fantasy of endless Protean self-invention; multiple selves in a technologically utopian landscape, freed from human needs and wants, in an endless present split off from any historical context. The contrast between liberal progressiveness and post-truth populism ignores the inter-relationship of these phenomena and begs the question of the powerful subjectivist and relativistic trends amongst sections of radical and "progressive" opinion that have long sought to problematise the very notion of truth.
