The moral blindness of sub-Marxist ideologues
Hugo Gurdon
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) keeps demanding that Israel stop “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza. She’s referring to Israel cutting electricity, food, and water supplies, and she frames it that way so she can denounce it as a crime.
It needs to be drummed into her head — I’ve tried repeatedly — that Israel’s siege is not punishment, collective or otherwise; it’s war. The government of one territory attacked another, and now the victim of the attack is moving to defeat the aggressor. No law obliges Israel to supply an enemy who hit it with a murderous invasion.
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If Hamas wants to spare its subjugated people unnecessary suffering — what it actually wants for propaganda purposes is for many of them to die — its leaders and soldiers have the option of surrendering to the Israeli Defense Forces. Gazans might live happily ever after. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Hamas to choose that obvious way of saving the lives of the people it governs.
AOC’s cluelessness or mendacity could fill a column every week, but I don’t want to dwell on it here. My purpose is to note the piquant irony of her denouncing “collective punishment.” It is laughable because the sharpest reflex of the Left is to see guilt as a collective phenomenon, not as attaching to individuals who make immoral decisions or take criminal actions.
The Left routinely tries to collectivize people into favored or disfavored groups. AOC and other apologists for Palestinian terrorism see people not as individual and autonomous men and women capable of choosing how they behave but as motes of dust borne along willy-nilly by tides of economic and cultural history. It is orthodox Marxism.
To give that view its due in this case, it should be acknowledged that Gaza’s people share a portion of the blame for the enormities perpetrated by their government, for although they haven’t been allowed to choose their government democratically for 16 years, and may have changed their minds in the interim, they did vote Hamas into power in 2007 knowing it was a terrorist organization committed to eliminating Israel and murdering Jews.
Still, collective blame can be taken too far; Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians, and many of them would be as relieved as the rest of us if Israel succeeds in uprooting and incinerating the terrorist organization for good.
It is important to realize that collectivization of guilt is a bedrock idea for people on AOC’s side of the ideological spectrum. It explains the apparent madness of widespread left-wing rage against Israel. Theirs is the same view as that of the apocryphal defendant in a criminal trial who pleads, “I’m not guilty, your honor; society is to blame.”
The corrosive idea is that individuals do not have agency and cannot be blamed for what they do. They cannot help themselves. It is their background or caste that made them do it. Blaming the mass, the group, flows from the determination of post-Marxists, socialists, extreme egalitarians — call them what you will — to make excuses for wrongdoing and failure. A socially conscious version of the idea supports a progressive tax code and most transfer payments. But the rot egalitarian extremism engenders has spread far beyond the moral duty of a society to care for those who fail to cope for themselves. It now penetrates every nook and cranny of policy in the left-wing agenda.
There is a huge moral cost, not just a financial one. If you narrow the gap between the outcomes of failure and success, if you obscure the difference between doing things well and doing them badly, then you crush incentives and sap people and institutions of purpose. The more you subsidize failure and laziness, the more of it you get. The more you excoriate and denounce success — “millionaires and billionaires” — the less incentive there is to achieve it.
When you try to level society for egalitarian outcomes, you obscure the difference between high quality and low quality. You promote cynicism and indifference. It becomes harder for people to know what is right and what is wrong. Eventually, and we are seeing it now, you erode the distinction between good and evil.
That is why today, America’s college students have completed the perverse moral inversion that prompts them to shout approvingly of murder and genocide and angrily rip down posters of women and children kidnapped by terrorists. There are elements of radical egalitarianism, not just of tribal rage, in the hordes attacking U.S. embassies who believe they are acting on behalf not just of their co-religionists but of a guiltless and downtrodden people.
Hamas is valorized by the Left because, in its decadeslong campaign to eliminate the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, it has overshot, or turned our culture on its head. Thus, killers are sanctified as freedom fighters, and kidnapped women and children are not to engage our sympathies.