If the Right's characteristic failure mode is turning a structural need for enemies into a permanent political program, the Left has its own recurring way of sabotaging the same universalist project it claims to be building, and McGowan spends real effort tracing exactly how.

The first failure mode is the turn toward superegoic moralism, a form of self-criticism that stops being about achieving emancipation and starts being about proving one's own moral purity. Freud's account of the superego in Moses and Monotheism is useful here: the superego keeps the ego in permanent dependence by making its approval feel like liberation and its disapproval feel like an unbearable verdict, while never actually specifying an amount of obedience sufficient to satisfy it. Lacan pushes this further, describing the superego not as a restriction on enjoyment but as an imperative to enjoy: "Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego," he writes in his twentieth seminar; "the superego is the imperative of jouissance." A political movement that turns its energy inward toward eliminating every impure thought or lingering prejudice among its own members is chasing a standard no one can actually meet, since the demand only intensifies the more thoroughly it gets obeyed. What looks like the most radical possible self-scrutiny ends up trapping the movement on the terrain of belonging, sorting people into the pure and the impure — exactly the terrain right-wing enjoyment already knows how to occupy far more comfortably.

The second failure mode is mistaking an adversary for an enemy. Emancipation, on McGowan's account, will always have genuine opponents — people invested in particular hierarchies who resist universal claims — but the moment those opponents get treated as enemies to be eliminated rather than adversaries who might still be converted, the movement has already become structurally indistinguishable from the Right it opposes. Stalin's Soviet Union supplies the starkest case: a revolution that began as a genuine attempt at emancipation turned rightward the instant it needed Leon Trotsky, and later entire categories of peasants labeled kulaks, to explain away its own internal economic failures. The historian Stephen Kotkin notes that Soviet secret police operatives had a direct professional incentive to "unmask" ever more enemies, since doing so brought raises and promotions; Robert Conquest observes that the Terror's deepest effect was to destroy solidarity between ordinary citizens and replace it with personal loyalty to Stalin himself. A revolution that requires an enemy to hold itself together has already stopped being a revolution in Hegel's sense and become a conservative regime wearing revolutionary language.

The third failure mode is confusing transgression with transcendence. Breaking a rule can feel radical, and Romanticism spent two centuries elevating the criminal or the villain into a kind of political hero; Milton's Satan is the founding case, and William Blake's famous remark that Milton was secretly "of the Devil's party without knowing it" captures how completely the tradition fell for this substitution. But Satan's revolt depends entirely on God's continued existence as an opponent; take God away and Satan's entire structure of meaning collapses along with him, which is precisely why his rebellion counts, on Hegel's terms, as conservative rather than radical: it is opposition rather than contradiction, an identity constituted through what it fights rather than what it becomes. The same pattern runs through the modern celebration of outlaws and antiheroes, all of whom remain fully inside the social order's own coordinates even while breaking its rules; the shoplifter who steals is still obeying capitalism's underlying demand to accumulate without limit, only through a slightly different channel than the law technically permits. Genuine transcendence looks different: it occupies a position the social order cannot even conceptualize as a possibility in the first place, which is why storming the Bastille, or Galileo's proof of heliocentrism against a geocentric system with no internal room to accommodate it, register as something categorically different from mere rule-breaking.

The fourth failure mode is confusing inclusivism with emancipation, and it is the subtlest of the four because it looks like the more generous and more obviously correct position. Inclusivism treats nonbelonging as an accident, a contingent injustice to be corrected by bringing the excluded steadily inside the circle of belonging. But no social order can ever complete this project, because a boundary that includes absolutely everyone stops functioning as a boundary at all. There is an old joke about a golfer who owns a golf ball that cannot possibly be lost, which turns out, on inspection, to have been found rather than bought, since even the perfect object had to start out missing. Inclusivism runs into the identical structural limit and, unable to admit that the limit is permanent rather than a temporary failure of effort, has nowhere to put the blame except on whoever still refuses to be included, at which point yesterday's inclusivist project starts manufacturing its own enemies exactly like the Right it set out to replace. The ending of the film Heathers offers McGowan's preferred contrast: rather than trying to fold the ostracized character Martha Dunnstock into an existing structure of popularity, Veronica dismantles the structure of belonging itself and organizes her new position around the fact of nonbelonging directly. That is the harder, less satisfying, genuinely emancipatory move: refusing to convert the excluded into the included, and orienting the whole social arrangement around the recognition that exclusion is a permanent structural feature rather than a temporary oversight correctable by sufficient effort.