Oct 29, 2023 09:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 29, 2023 10:30 PM by C C.)
The schism on the left is not just about the Middle East
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/...orism.html
EXCERPT: ... Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.
A variety of left-wing alternatives respond that liberalism ignores power differentials by class, race, or gender [Antonio Gramsci intellectual legacy]. The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.
“Decolonization” is one of those strands of illiberal leftism. It has a model of the world in which conflicts are analyzed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans, who are evil, against native/indigenous/BIPOC people. Like other illiberal leftist theories, the decolonization model does not leave room to judge the morality of any methods.
The liberal response to these alternative ideas is not to deny that power differentials exist, but that discarding liberalism in the name of social justice invites repression. To permit any political faction to use tactics they would never accept if used against them is to grant them a license for tyranny that will never be revoked.
To many progressives, this whole debate has seemed abstract, trivial, and counterproductive. Even progressives who are not supporters of the illiberal left have been reluctant to criticize it. They see the left’s foibles as a distraction from the larger fight with the radical right — a fight that, to be sure, I also see (and have always seen) as the paramount struggle in American politics.
It is easy to understand why a progressive could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. The illiberal left has little ability to use state power — it is a miniscule faction within the Democratic Party, and the United States government is bound by robust First Amendment protections. (For this reason, state censorship is still mostly carried out by the Republican Party, whose illiberal wing is vastly larger). The stakes of this ideology have therefore been confined to the private sphere. Left-wing illiberalism can get dissenters fired from a job, but not sent to a Gulag.
One observation I’ve shared with many analysts well to my left is that the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder.
There have been conscious echoes of this old divide in the current dispute over Hamas. The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution... (MORE - missing detials)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/...orism.html
EXCERPT: ... Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.
A variety of left-wing alternatives respond that liberalism ignores power differentials by class, race, or gender [Antonio Gramsci intellectual legacy]. The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.
“Decolonization” is one of those strands of illiberal leftism. It has a model of the world in which conflicts are analyzed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans, who are evil, against native/indigenous/BIPOC people. Like other illiberal leftist theories, the decolonization model does not leave room to judge the morality of any methods.
The liberal response to these alternative ideas is not to deny that power differentials exist, but that discarding liberalism in the name of social justice invites repression. To permit any political faction to use tactics they would never accept if used against them is to grant them a license for tyranny that will never be revoked.
To many progressives, this whole debate has seemed abstract, trivial, and counterproductive. Even progressives who are not supporters of the illiberal left have been reluctant to criticize it. They see the left’s foibles as a distraction from the larger fight with the radical right — a fight that, to be sure, I also see (and have always seen) as the paramount struggle in American politics.
It is easy to understand why a progressive could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. The illiberal left has little ability to use state power — it is a miniscule faction within the Democratic Party, and the United States government is bound by robust First Amendment protections. (For this reason, state censorship is still mostly carried out by the Republican Party, whose illiberal wing is vastly larger). The stakes of this ideology have therefore been confined to the private sphere. Left-wing illiberalism can get dissenters fired from a job, but not sent to a Gulag.
One observation I’ve shared with many analysts well to my left is that the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder.
There have been conscious echoes of this old divide in the current dispute over Hamas. The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution... (MORE - missing detials)
