Is Conservatism just NeoTraditionalism these days?

[Consul]

These terms ["left" & "right"] may be imprecise or vague, but they are not meaningless in the political context.
Recommended reading:
* Norberto Bobbio: Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

"If it is accepted that the different attitude to the ideal of equality is the criterion for distinguishing left and right, and that the different attitude to freedom is the relevant criterion for distinguishing the moderate wing from the extremist wing of both the left and the right, then one could summarize the political spectrum of doctrines and movements in the following four parts:

(a) On the extreme left, there are movements which are both egalitarian and authoritarian, and of these Jacobinism is the most important historical example, such that it has become an abstract category which can be, and indeed is, applied to different historical periods and situations.

(b) On the centre-left, there are doctrines and movements which are both egalitarian and libertarian, which we could now term 'liberal socialism', and cover all the social-democratic parties with their various political practices.

(c) On the centre-right, there are doctrines and movements which are both libertarian and inegalitarian, which include all the conservative parties. These differ from the reactionary right in that they remain loyal to the democratic method, but as far as the ideal of equality is concerned, they go only as far as equality before the law, which means that a judge must apply the law impartially.

(d) On the extreme right there are anti-liberal and anti-egalitarian doctrines and movements, for which it hardly seems necessary to point out the well-known historical examples of Fascism and Nazism.

Clearly, reality is more complex than this schema founded on just two criteria, but they are two fundamental criteria which, together, constitute a model that can rescue the much-challenged distinction between left and right. This model responds to simplistic objections that the distinction puts together dissimilar doctrines and movements, such as communism and democratic socialism on the left and fascism and conservatism on the right; it also explains why such movements, although dissimilar, can become potential allies in exceptional and critical circumstances."

(Bobbio, Norberto. Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Translated by Allan Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. pp. 78-9)

[Gary Childress]

They're not "meaningless" no. But all they mean is themselves or else someone who would have stood with either the king or else commoners during the French revolution. I don't think they're useful terms. If you want to say that someone is "extremely liberal" or "extremely conservative" or "extremely opposed to X, Y, or Z, then I suppose that's fair game. Otherwise to say someone is just "far right" or else "far left" is simply another word for "extreme." But "right" and "left" themselves do not denote anything.

Well, they do. Of course, if taken out of political context, they just stand for spatial directions; but here they stand for certain political directions.

"Left. The polar opposite of right. The term originated in the habit of the democratic and liberal side of the French assembly, and of other European legislatures in the nineteenth century, of sitting to the left of the president’s chair (a habit presaged in the French Estates General of 1789, in which the nobility sat on the King’s right, and the ‘third estate’ on his left).

Terms like ‘left’, ‘left of centre’, and ‘left wing’ now denote a variety of things, and most of all a certain flavour of politics. They are terms of journalese, without precise meaning, but used to suggest some combination of the following views (no one of which is necessary and each of which admits of degree):

(i) a hostility to private property, and belief in social ownership as the ideal alternative, with control by the state as a necessary means to that;
(ii) a hostility towards classes judged to be favoured by the political system;
(iii) a hostility towards establishment in all its forms, and towards offices, honours, and other symbolic expressions of the dignity of government;
(iv) desire for a classless society, without privilege, patronage or a hereditary principle;
(v) belief in democracy, or at least in popular participation in government; or government by consent;
(vi) belief in certain natural rights (or human rights), particularly those associated with the victims of existing social arrangements, be they workers, women, immigrants or whatever;
(vii) a belief in progress, to be furthered by revolution or reform;
(viii) egalitarian leanings, together with a desire for social justice;
(ix) anti-nationalist (although not necessarily internationalist) tendencies (although it should be noted that nationalists now constitute one of the largest classes on the left);
(x) belief in a welfare state, and in state control over education, medicine, and important resources.

Not all of (i) to (x) are compatible in practice, although it is possible to believe that they are. Many people on the left would describe themselves as socialists; the ‘revolutionary left’ is composed of those who wish to bring socialism into being by revolution, the rest being content with reform conducted through existing institutions.
Left-wing theory is the attempt to synthesize all or some of (i) to (x), eliminate inconsistencies, and provide an underlying justification in terms either of a theory of history or a theory of justice, or both.

Because there is a clear spectrum of opinion identified by the two poles of ‘left’ and ‘right’ it is now normal to refer, e.g., to the left wing of right-wing parties, and the right wing of left-wing parties. Very roughly those who shift to the left see themselves as moving in the direction of Rousseau’s ‘compassionating zeal’ for the underprivileged, and away from respect for existing institutions, in particular those that confer power, property, privilege and social distinction. Those who shift to the right tend to regard compassionating zeal as a mask for ressentiment."

(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 384-5)
——————
"Right, the. Defined by contrast to (or perhaps more accurately, conflict with) the left, the term ‘right’ does not even have the respectability of a history. As now used it denotes several connected and also conflicting ideas. To be ‘on the right’ is to believe (or for the political realist, to affect to believe) some bundle of the following:

(i) conservative and perhaps authoritarian doctrines concerning the nature of civil society, with emphasis on custom, tradition, nationality and allegiance as social bonds;
(ii) theories of political obligation framed in terms of obedience, legitimacy and piety rather than contract, consent and justice;
(iii) reluctance to countenance too great a divorce between law and morality – i.e. between the enactments of the state, and the sentiments of society, hence a resistance to liberalizing reforms in the law;
(iv) cultural conservatism;
(v) respect for the hereditary principle and prescriptive rights;
(vi) belief in private property, not as a natural right, but as an indispensable part of the condition of society;
(vii) belief in elementary freedoms, and in the irreplaceable value of the individual as against the collective;
(viii) belief in free enterprise, free markets and a capitalist economy, as the only mode of production compatible with human freedom, and suited to the temporary nature of human aspirations;
(ix) varying degrees of belief in human imperfectibility and original sin.

Other items might be added to the list, and the above is suggested only as a cross-section of current significances. It should already be clear that not everything attributed to the ‘right’ is compatible with everything else, a fault that may lie either with the right itself or with those who so describe it. Thus the emphasis on freedom and the market may not be compatible with the belief in tradition and obedience, free-market relations being the great solvent of social allegiance based on custom and authority, rather than on the ‘legal-rational’ principles that [Max] Weber attributes to the world structured by contract. Nor is the belief in human rights underlying (vii), with its individualistic emphasis, obviously compatible with respect for prescriptive right and the hereditary principle. These ideological conflicts are to some extent internal to the conservative position, which, if founded in ‘intimations’ of social order (as [Michael] Oakeshott suggests), is bound to suffer conflicts in an age of social flux. To some extent they stem from the fact that the right is defined by opposition to the left, which, while it discerns contradictions in history, is adamant that it contains none within itself. Since the left sometimes opposes economic liberalism, sometimes individualism, and sometimes social conservatism, the term ‘right’ is applied indifferently to all of those outlooks, and also to fascism, despite its leftist origins, on the grounds that the great conflict of the twentieth century, which erupted in the Second World War, involved an alliance of progressive forces against fascism."

(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. p. 601)

Looking at those lists, I'm neither "left" nor "right". It's also interesting that Scruton (a conservative), characterizes the "left" with the word "hostility" instead of "belief". The right apparently "believes" things and the left is mostly full of "hostility" I guess. These are caricatures and give little depth to real thought, however, if you wish to use them to maybe describe only dysfunctional minds, then I suppose no one can stop you. I don't think you'll appreciate nuance a great deal but as the saying goes, you do you.

[Consul]

And I suggest that "Left" essentially means Socialist now, and "right" is now taken by the Left to mean everything not Socialist...or even not-sufficiently-Socialist, because even moderates and centrists like Classical Liberals and social conservatives are now called "right wing" by the Left. Marxists use terms like "reactionary" and "anti-revolutionary" to describe anybody who refuses to sign on to the whole package of Leftism. It's a cheap bully-tactic, designed to either shame, demonize or exclude from any serious attention anybody who doesn't join them.

This is what is so often noted today: the disappearance of the moderate middle into sharp "polarities" of right and left. But it's the Left's fault: they've eliminated the whole moderate middle, because it simply wasn't radical enough to support their agenda ambitions, which have kept getting more and more radical.

The "moderate middle" hasn't disappeared. There are still a moderate centre-left and a moderate centre-right.

Whether "Left" and "Socialist" are synonyms depends on what "Socialism" means, on how broadly it is defined.

"Socialism is a rich tradition of political thought and practice, the history of which contains a vast number of views and theories, often differing in many of their conceptual, empirical, and normative commitments. In his 1924 Dictionary of Socialism, Angelo Rappoport canvassed no fewer than forty definitions of socialism, telling his readers in the book’s preface that “there are many mansions in the House of Socialism”."

Socialism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/
——————
"The word socialism is the most widely shared term of identification among leftists. It unites the social democratic and democratic socialist left as well as communists of various sorts and to a great extent allows for cooperation with progressive liberals who acknowledge the Marxist critique of capitalism. The term socialism tends to be rejected by anarchists who see it as a politics of state power. Often enough, however, there is cooperation between anarchists and socialists. The anarchism of old has undergone a good deal of transformation due to the emergence in the postwar period of a neo-bohemian countercultural tendency. Some of these energies have been directed towards different incarnations of the New Left, from the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights and intellectual developments that fall under the rubric of postmodernism."

(Léger, Marc James. "Introduction: The Politics of Emancipatory Universality." In Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism, edited by Marc James Léger, 1-26. New York: Routledge, 2023. p. 1)
——————
"In the widest sense of the word, Socialism is any scheme of social relations which has in view a more equal distribution of wealth, or the preventing too great inequality, in whatever way this be effected, whether by State action, the voluntary efforts of individuals directed towards that end, Church action, philanthropy, or any other means; in which wide sense of the word Socialism embraces many social phenomena and movements, both in the present and in the past."

(Graham, William. Socialism New and Old. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1890. p. 2)
——————
"In my view, the most fundamental characteristic of socialism is its commitment to the creation of an egalitarian society. Socialists may not have agreed about the extent to which inequality can be eradicated or the means by which change can be effected, but no socialist would defend the current inequalities of wealth and power. In particular, socialists have maintained that, under capitalism, vast privileges and opportunities are derived from the hereditary ownership of capital and wealth at one end of the social scale, while a cycle of deprivation limits opportunities and influence at the other end. To varying extents, all socialists have therefore challenged the property relationships that are fundamental to capitalism, and have aspired to establish a society in which everyone has the possibility to seek fulfilment without facing barriers based on structural inequalities."

(Newman, Michael. Socialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. pp. 2-3)
——————
"I believe that the criterion most frequently used to distinguish between the left and the right is the attitude of real people in society to the ideal of equality. Together with liberty and peace, equality is one of the ultimate goals which people are willing to fight for."

(Bobbio, Norberto. Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Translated by Allan Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. p. 60)

[Consul]

Looking at those lists, I'm neither "left" nor "right". It's also interesting that Scruton (a conservative), characterizes the "left" with the word "hostility" instead of "belief". The right apparently "believes" things and the left is mostly full of "hostility" I guess. These are caricatures and give little depth to real thought, however, if you wish to use them to maybe describe only dysfunctional minds, then I suppose no one can stop you. I don't think you'll appreciate nuance a great deal but as the saying goes, you do you.

What makes you think I don't "appreciate nuance a great deal"? For example, my taxonomy of liberalisms is pretty nuanced: viewtopic.php?p=702839#p702839

Scruton's wording could be paraphrased. Anyway, Leftists believe things too (e.g. that the extreme economic inequality in the world is deeply unjust); and Rightists are hostile to things too (e.g. comprehensive economic redistribution).

[Consul]

…I don't think you'll appreciate nuance a great deal but as the saying goes, you do you.

The distinction between the Left and the Right is highly coarse-grained, but more fine-grained maps of the political landscape are available!

[Consul]

The "moderate middle" hasn't disappeared. There are still a moderate centre-left and a moderate centre-right.

There are different linear models with different degrees of differentiation:

1. LEFT | RIGHT
2. LEFT | CENTRE | RIGHT
3. LEFT || CENTRE-LEFT | CENTRE-RIGHT || RIGHT
4. FAR-LEFT | LEFT || CENTRE-LEFT | CENTRE-RIGHT || RIGHT | FAR-RIGHT

[Immanuel Can]

I'm sorry but here you are simply sbjecting the thing you like (the right) to a less difficult test than the thing you don't like (The Left).

For a very good reason: that both sides misunderstand each other when they imagine they're the same.

That's a very common human error, called "projection." It means when one takes one's own motives, and attributes them to somebody else, as if one is that person, even though that person has very different motives. The Left projects onto the right its own ideological conformity, its authoritarian intentions, its monolythic political-engineering ambitions, it's lust for power, and so on. The conservatives, on their side, tend to attribute to the Left a potential for individual thought (rather than conformity to an ideology), a willingness to be convinced by things like reason and logic (rather than the Left's stark rejection of both), a willingness to respond to arguments (rather than the belief that all arguments are inauthentic and power-aiming anyway), and so on.

The result of this is that they end up talking past each other and attributing inaccurate intentions to each other all the time. The very first thing that both sides would need to realize, in order to see the other clearly, is that they are not the same.

I'm afraid you skipped my actual point there. I just noted that the way you analyse use of the term you intend to use as a broad brush is incongruent with the way that you explain how to use the tool that you prefer others not to use as such.

I don’t see that’s the case, but okay.

Again, the right and the left are different in this. While the right has no singular theorists, it’s very easy to find those that pertain to the Left. If one wants to make generalizations about what the Left thinks, one absolutely has to refer to Marx, and also to Hegel, from whom Marx stole so much, if in somewhat different form. One also has to talk about Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, and Freire, at the very least: and maybe others as well, like Halpern as well. But the key theorists are all available, and not really controversial to any knowledgeable Leftist.

But conservatism? Who represents that? Hobbes? Burke? Smith? Rand? Calvin? But none of these agree at all about what is to be “conserved,” or about how we should proceed from there. There really are no “key theorists” of conservatism that conform to any central theory like Dialectical Materialism. And for any voice you pick, you’re going to find that four out of the five go a very different way with their “conservatism.”

So while it’s quite possible, and very reasonable, to take the Left at the word of its most celebrated and acclaimed theorists, the same really can’t be done for conservatism. And that’s why generalizations are hard when it comes to conservatism, but very possible when it comes to Leftism.

I maintain that if we are in a position to use "the left" as a catch all term for all left-leaning things than we should be in a position to use "the right" and "the centre" as similarly broad terms, and that we can live with with the inevitable outcome that we cannot take something so wide to also be very deep.

I have to say, I think it’s not only possible but very easy to characterize “the Left,” but hard to do so when one is talking about “conservatism,” for the reasons above.

More to come.

[Consul]

The Left comprises social liberalism (left-liberalism), social democracy, socialism, and communism.

That's not really a problem. They share certain core ideological features, the only difference being the relative intensity with which they espouse them.

They're all basically economic nationalists, for example, they all put group or "social" rights ahead of individual rights, they all participate in Socialist utopianism, even if the utopias they envision are different, they share a naive and perfidious view of human perfectability, as well as an excessive faith in human government to produce progress. And they're all skeptical, to a greater or lesser degree, of core conservative values, such as individualism, competition, merit, reason, science, logic, family, rights, property, personal responsibility, and so on. The "family resemblance" there is so strong that I think the category holds well.

The Wittgensteinian notion of "family resemblance" is useful in the analysis and comparison of ideologies. For example, Leftists share an affinity for egalitarianism. (But they don't all share the same opinion regarding the kinds and degrees of egalitarianism.)

All Leftists believe in meliorism at least, i.e. that things can get better, that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort, that existential and moral progress is possible.
(Note that meliorism is not the same as "optimalism" or "perfectism", the view that the world can become the best world, that things can get perfect, that the ideal "utopia" can become real. Leftists needn't be naive optimists!)

The postmodernist Woke Left may be accused of disvaluing "reason, science, logic", but not the Left as a whole.

Left-liberals wouldn't be liberals if they discarded individualism and individual rights. (What they do reject is antisocial egoism.)

As for individual rights vs. collective rights (group rights), this is a complicated issue, especially in the contemporary context of identity politics and multiculturalism; but it isn't generally true that all Leftists "put group or "social" rights ahead of individual rights."

Anti-individualism/collectivism comes in different degrees, and we find it both on the left side and on the right side. For example, "You are nothing, your people is everything!" is a Nazi motto.
On the other hand, the radical New Left of the 1960s/70s valued and strove for the liberation of the individual from collectivist authoritarianism. So does the contemporary Woke Left, although it also endorses certain collective rights for minorities.

[Consul]

Well, sometimes conservatives don't seem to be as interested in "individualism, reason, science and logic".

Yes, there is a counter-enlightenment or romanticist tradition of conservatism. (To be precise, romanticism is anti-rationalistic and anti-scientistic, but it isn't anti-individualistic.)

By the way, fascism & national socialism are both characterized by irrationalism and collectivism.

[Consul]

Individualism, certainly. Leftists are group-thinkers, by definition.

No, leftism doesn't entail anti-individualism/collectivism by definition. It deeply values interpersonal community and cooperation, but not necessarily in such a way that there is no room for individual freedom. Liberal socialism & social liberalism are part of leftism, and they both reject collectivist communism!

As for science, reason and logic, I can only take them at their word: the Left has vigorous criticisms of all of them, as well as history, as inherently "white," "supremacist," "racist" and "privileged."

This is true of the (postmodernist & postcolonialist) Woke Left, but not of the Left as a whole!

[Consul]

I didn't say "liberal," Gary: I said "Leftist," which was what you asked about

Again, there are liberal leftists aka centre-leftists, whose views are different from those of far-leftists.

[Immanuel Can]

I thought it was worth looking at this supposed commitment that Conservatives have to checks and balances. But if we cannot get past some confusion about the word "institution" then that would be a pipe dream.

Maybe it is. What is your thinking on that?

[Immanuel Can]

Leftists share an affinity for egalitarianism. (But they don't all share the same opinion regarding the kinds and degrees of egalitarianism.)

That's nominal, though. In practice, they don't believe in equality, but in inequality (as in "equity") and in elitism (as in the elite Marxists get to dictate to everybody else). That, too, is characteristic of all Socialisms.

All Leftists believe in meliorism at least, i.e. that things can get better, that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort, that existential and moral progress is possible.

Yes, they do. And they tend not to believe in any importance to the fallibility of human nature, either. They see it as remediable by way of social structures. And they never stop to explain how it happens in the first place, except to blame it, rather vaguely, on "social forces" of some kind. But "social forces" are human actions. So they're just deflecting, in that case, and not really answering the question of how such social evils can ever come about among socially-'meliorable' human beings.

The postmodernist Woke Left may be accused of disvaluing "reason, science, logic", but not the Left as a whole.

Which "Left" is ardently supportive of any of the three?

Left-liberals wouldn't be liberals if they discarded individualism and individual rights. (What they do reject is antisocial egoism.)

They're NOT liberals. They're "liberals" by self-proclamation only. In practice, instead of in propaganda, they all subordinate or reject the individual in favour of the collective. That's definitional in Socialism.

...but it isn't generally true that all Leftists "put group or "social" rights ahead of individual rights."

If they don't, they're not Socialists.

Anti-individualism/collectivism comes in different degrees, and we find it both on the left side and on the right side. For example, "You are nothing, your people is everything!" is a Nazi motto.

Nazis are not on the "right." They're "National Socialists." That means they subordinate the individual to the national collective, such as the Aryan "nation." Communists, by contrast, are "international socialists." But the family resemblance is strong in regards to their mutual contempt for the individual and their preference for groupthink.

On the other hand, the radical New Left of the 1960s/70s valued and strove for the liberation of the individual from collectivist authoritarianism.

That's how they talked. But in practice, they were also heavily influenced by things like the Frankfurt School, and quickly generated all sorts of Socialist "solutions," from the famed Port Huron Manifesto to the communes, the Black Panthers, and so on. The sixties were individualist only in regard to private morality; in regard to politics, they aimed at collectivist solutions, in many cases.

So does the contemporary Woke Left, although it also endorses certain collective rights for minorities.

The Woke left has no more than a nominal interest in individuals at all. Everything it advocates seems framed in terms of the social, from "systems of oppression" and "systemic racism" to "social engineering" and "social justice." Other than sharing the 60s radicals loose view of personal morality, they have almost no interest in the individual or his rights.

[Consul]

Leftists share an affinity for egalitarianism. (But they don't all share the same opinion regarding the kinds and degrees of egalitarianism.)

That's nominal, though. In practice, they don't believe in equality, but in inequality (as in "equity") and in elitism (as in the elite Marxists get to dictate to everybody else). That, too, is characteristic of all Socialisms.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
(So say the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm.)

The communists created their own privileged nobility.
People often don't practice what they preach, but it is not true that all socialists (including social democrats) are just pseudo-egalitarians who actually practice the opposite of what they preach.

(Note that "the label 'egalitarian' does not necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people's condition be made the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as equally morally considerable." – SEP: Egalitarianism)

Generally speaking…

"Equity is another name for just dealing, and must not be confused with equality. While it is tautologous to say that treating people equitably is just, it is certainly not tautologous, although some think it true, to say that it is just to treat them equally."

(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 219-20)

However, there are different kinds of equality; and equity qua social justice or fairness is socialistically associated with equality of outcome/result, the realization of which often requires an inegalitarian "positive discrimination" aka "affirmative action" (as affirmed by the Woke Left's DEI ideology).

"equity: The proportional distribution of desirable outcomes across groups. Sometimes confused with equality, equity refers to outcomes while equality connotes equal treatment. More directly, equity is when an individual’s race, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, etc. do not determine their educational, economic, social, or political opportunities."
—"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Glossary." University of Pittsburgh, Office for Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion: https://www.diversity.pitt.edu/educatio ... n-glossary

"equity: the situation in which all people or groups are given access to the correct number and types of resources for them so as to achieve equal results; differs from equality, which focuses on the equal distribution of resources rather than equal results"
—ABC’s of Social Justice: A Glossary of Working Language for Socially Conscious Conversation." Department of Inclusion & Multicultural Engagement, Lewis & Clark College: https://college.lclark.edu/live/files/1 ... al-justice [PDF]

All Leftists believe in meliorism at least, i.e. that things can get better, that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort, that existential and moral progress is possible.

Yes, they do. And they tend not to believe in any importance to the fallibility of human nature, either. They see it as remediable by way of social structures. And they never stop to explain how it happens in the first place, except to blame it, rather vaguely, on "social forces" of some kind. But "social forces" are human actions. So they're just deflecting, in that case, and not really answering the question of how such social evils can ever come about among socially-'meliorable' human beings.

Realistic leftists/socialists don't confuse improvability with perfectibility. They are aware that homo sapiens is not by nature a species of angels or saints; but they also know that we are not by nature a hopeless species of devils either. The progressive belief that the conditio humana can be improved a lot through changes of socioeconomic circumstances is not a delusion!

Yes…

"Socialists regard humans as essentially social creatures, their capacities and behaviour being shaped more by nurture than by nature, and particularly by creative labour. Their propensity for cooperation, sociability and rationality means that the prospects for personal growth and social development are considerable."

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 56)

Richard Rorty even declared that…

"[T]here is no such thing as human nature, for human beings make themselves up as they go along. They create themselves, as poets create poems. There is no such thing as the nature of the state or the nature of society to be understood—there is only a historical sequence of relatively successful and relatively unsuccessful attempts to achieve some combination of order and justice."

(Rorty, Richard. "Democracy and Philosophy." 2007. Reprinted in What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics, edited by W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil, 34-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. p. 44)

The postmodernist Woke Left may be accused of disvaluing "reason, science, logic", but not the Left as a whole.

Which "Left" is ardently supportive of any of the three?

Counterquestion: Which (non-/pre-postmodern) Left is ardently unsupportive of any of the three?
Socialism isn't inherently irrationalistic. Was Marx or is Marxism part of the Counter-Enlightenment?

Left-liberals wouldn't be liberals if they discarded individualism and individual rights. (What they do reject is antisocial egoism.)

They're NOT liberals. They're "liberals" by self-proclamation only. In practice, instead of in propaganda, they all subordinate or reject the individual in favour of the collective. That's definitional in Socialism.

In communism, but not in the liberal, moderate socialism called social democracy (let alone in social liberalism).

Nazis are not on the "right." They're "National Socialists." That means they subordinate the individual to the national collective, such as the Aryan "nation." Communists, by contrast, are "international socialists." But the family resemblance is strong in regards to their mutual contempt for the individual and their preference for groupthink.

The horseshoe model of political ideologies comes to mind, where the two extremes—the far-left and the far-right—are close to one another. However, its name notwithstanding, national socialism is doubtless right-extremism.

On the other hand, the radical New Left of the 1960s/70s valued and strove for the liberation of the individual from collectivist authoritarianism.

That's how they talked. But in practice, they were also heavily influenced by things like the Frankfurt School, and quickly generated all sorts of Socialist "solutions," from the famed Port Huron Manifesto to the communes, the Black Panthers, and so on. The sixties were individualist only in regard to private morality; in regard to politics, they aimed at collectivist solutions, in many cases.

("The private is political!" is a New Left slogan.)

There have always been both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian/libertarian tendencies in the Left; and there were many Stalin, Mao, or Castro fans in the Sixties Left. But the Frankfurt School, particularly its first generation (most of whose members were Jewish), rejects both communist and fascist authoritarianism (totalitarianism). Generally…

"[N]eo-Marxists were usually at odds with, and sometimes profoundly repelled by, the Bolshevik model of orthodox communism."

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 93)

The Woke left has no more than a nominal interest in individuals at all. Everything it advocates seems framed in terms of the social, from "systems of oppression" and "systemic racism" to "social engineering" and "social justice." Other than sharing the 60s radicals loose view of personal morality, they have almost no interest in the individual or his rights.

Isn't their fight for the right to gender self-determination (through self-identification) a fight for an individual right?
On the other hand, it is true that the Woke (Identitarian/Minoritarian) Left's social ontology is group-centered.

"Social groups are not entities that exist apart from individuals, but neither are they merely arbitrary classifications of individuals according to attributes which are external to or accidental to their identities. Admitting the reality of social groups does not commit one to reifying collectivities, as some might argue. Group meanings partially constitute people's identities in terms of the cultural forms, social situation, and history that group members know as theirs, because these meanings have been either forced upon them or forged by them or both (…). Groups are real not as substances, but as forms of social relations (…).

Moral theorists and political philosophers tend to elide social groups more often with associations than with aggregates (…). By an association I mean a formally organized institution, such as a club, corporation, political party, church, college, or union. Unlike the aggregate model of groups, the association model recognizes that groups are defined by specific practices and forms of association. Nevertheless it shares a problem with the aggregate model. The aggregate model conceives the individual as prior to the collective, because it reduces the social group to a mere set of attributes attached to individuals. The association model also implicitly conceives the individual as ontologically prior to the collective, as making up, or constituting, groups.

A contract model of social relations is appropriate for conceiving associations, but not groups. Individuals constitute associations, they come together as already formed persons and set them up, establishing rules, positions, and offices. The relationship of persons to associations is usually voluntary, and even when it is not, the person has nevertheless usually entered the association. The person is prior to the association also in that the person's identity and sense of self are usually regarded as prior to and relatively independent of association membership.

Groups, on the other hand, constitute individuals. A person's particular sense of history, affinity, and separateness, even the person's mode of reasoning, evaluating, and expressing feeling, are constituted partly by her or his group affinities. This does not mean that persons have no individual styles, or are unable to transcend or reject a group identity. Nor does it preclude persons from having many aspects that are independent of these group identities.

The social ontology underlying many contemporary theories of justice, I pointed out in the last chapter, is methodologically individualist or atomist. It presumes that the individual is ontologically prior to the social. This individualist social ontology usually goes together with a normative conception of the self as independent. The authentic self is autonomous, unified, free, and self-made, standing apart from history and affiliations, choosing its life plan entirely for itself.

One of the main contributions of poststructuralist philosophy has been to expose as illusory this metaphysic of a unified self-making subjectivity, which posits the subject as an autonomous origin or an underlying substance to which attributes of gender, nationality, family role, intellectual disposition, and so on might attach. Conceiving the subject in this fashion implies conceiving consciousness as outside of and prior to language and the context of social interaction, which the subject enters. Several currents of recent philosophy challenge this deeply held Cartesian assumption. Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example, and the social and philosophical theory influenced by it, conceive the self as an achievement of linguistic positioning that is always contextualized in concrete relations with other persons, with their mixed identities (…). The self is a product of social processes, not their origin."

(Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. pp. 44-5)

[Iwannaplato]

No, you don't understand. It's binary. Because that's easier to think about. There are the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys are all the same. See how streamlined that is. No need to deal with nasty nuance.
Easy to do the cognitive work.
Easy to know when to hate.
That's easy for the whole brain.