What Has the Radical Left Become?

I have often had occasion to quote novelist Lionel Shriver. Her take on the passing scene is well worth a short essay. Writing for the Spectator Shriver offers a grim assessment of what the political left has become. Or, dare we say, its transmogrification.

The political left has long been the repository of idealistic yearnings about the advent of a new and more heavenly city. It has been selling a gospel of love and compassion, now called empathy, as a claim to moral superiority. It has railed against the injustices perpetrated by capitalism and promised that once the big, bad capitalists were divested of their power, all would be well in the best of all possible worlds.

Besides, leftist politics was for thinkers, for real and aspiring intellectuals. Young leftists tortured their growing minds with pseudo-sophisticated analysis of the political, economic and cultural complexity of society. 

It might be a mass of barely intelligible gobbledygook, but leftist thinking has always pretended to provide access to the world of the philosopher kings, the big minds who understand the big ideas and who are happy to impose them on the unlettered masses.

Of course, this was before our great nation decided that merit-based hiring and promotion was bigotry. That is, before we turned our meritocracy into an idiotocracy.

Fair enough, the more you dumb down the discourse and the more you dumb down the population the easier it will be to manipulate people-- by their emotions. You might be incapable of thinking your way out of a paper bag, at least you will be suffused with deep feelings. So, follow your feelings; follow your bliss; and stop thinking.

If you embrace the new idiotocratic principles, you will not burden yourself with the quest for consistency, or even coherence. And then, whatever noble pacifistic sentiments you had heretofore espoused, you will replace them an adoration of unrestrained sadism, especially committed against women and children.

Shriver writes:

After all the identitarian left’s defense of peoples historically wronged, all their horror of the “violence” in silence or biologically correct pronouns, all their advancement of “diversity and inclusion” — which you would suppose would encompass all religions and all minorities, especially the persecuted ones — ghoulish celebrations of Hamas’s throat-slitting melee in southern Israel last month among some western “progressives” were incomprehensible at first. But on reflection, the BLM brigade joining the ghastly Muslim chant of “Glory to our martyrs” makes perfect sense.

So, the left has morphed into a Hamas support brigade, willing to rationalize any atrocity, as long as it was committed against Jewish capitalists. 

They do not promise a better world, a world of compassionate empathy. You cannot decapitate children, rape women and throw babies into ovens while also claiming the moral high ground. You will be reduced to proclaiming yourself to be godlike, having surpassed such ordinary humane sentiments as compassion.

Shriver considers that it's all about emotion:

What emotions emanate from Hamas’s “useful idiots?” Does this clamorous crowd seem happy? Are they enraptured by visions of a better world? Given that the hard left’s rhetoric gestures (if condescendingly) towards the uplifting of the downtrodden, do its activists exude kindness, tenderness and compassion? Are they visibly bursting with love for their fellow man? Do we see the gleam of a radiant future glinting in their puppy-wide eyes?

What are the favorite emotions of today’s new left? Shriver makes a list. 

Take, for instance, hate. Intrepid warriors against hate speech are more than happy to promote hateful actions, as long as they manifest themselves in a massacre against colonialist settlers.

Beware folks who ceaselessly decry “hate” while as ceaselessly spewing antipathy themselves, whether despising “white supremacists,” another name for “white people,” or “Israeli colonizers” another name for “Jews.”

And resentment comes up high on the list of the new emotions. Keep in mind a point I have been making. The Palestinian cause is motivated by shame, because Israel’s great success has shamed peoples who once occupied the same territory but who proved incapable of producing prosperity for their people. 

Shriver suggests that the resentment felt toward Israelis feels like the resentment felt by young Americans, especially those who believe that they will never have it as good as their parents did.

Resentment. Younger generations are bludgeoned with doom. They will never own property. They will be replaced by AI. The Earth will erupt into a giant fireball within their lifetimes. They will be poorer than their parents. Besides, people of all ages are often tortured by the suspicion that others out there are leading more satisfying lives than theirs. But resentment just sits there. It doesn’t improve matters. It’s a befouling, inert sensation, akin to the experience of lying in your own excrement and never changing the sheets.

Today’s left has overcome its utopian yearnings, having replaced them with apocalyptic visions of the end of the world, even the end of history. 

Traditionally, the left was naively utopian. This left is apocalyptic. No sunlit uplands await, once we’re all anti-racists who accept there are 3,042 “genders” and counting. Rather, modern progressivism needs racism to have purpose, so will invent prejudice where none exists if need be; “systemic racism” is gloriously ineradicable. Even climate fanatics don’t believe net zero will succeed. They’re in thrall to a pending holocaust of humanity, which they seem to be looking forward to.

One feels obliged to add a coda here, in the form of some comments by Danial Ben-Ami in Spiked!

Ben-Ami is astonished to see Western progressives embrace Hamas as another progressive movement:

How did we reach a point where so many Western leftists see Hamas as a ‘progressive’ movement? Its terrorist slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and others on 7 October is already being downplayed or forgotten entirely. Meanwhile, few mention Hamas’s intolerance towards political opposition, its curtailment of women’s rights, its criminalisation of homosexuality or its persecution of Christians. Human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was even barred from the anti-Israel march in London on Armistice Day for a placard that criticised Hamas.

Then there’s the fact that genocidal anti-Semitism is a core part of Hamas’s doctrine. Islamists, including Hamas, see themselves as locked in a cosmic struggle against ‘Jewish evil’. This is a key theme in Hamas’s 1988 covenant – a document it has never rescinded. The 7 October pogrom, and Hamas’s promise to repeat the massacre again and again, is entirely consistent with this anti-Semitic outlook.

One continues to be surprised that any of this is still debatable.

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