What left-wing ideology has wrought
Nicholas Clairmont
We have now been living with, or arguably even under, the ideology called “social justice” or “wokeness” for a decade. Over the past few weeks, however, many decent people who previously downplayed the seriousness of the problem have noticed something others among us have worried about for a long time, namely that the woker the coalition that makes up the Left gets, the less it likes Jews.
For some, it might seem surprising that an ideology that bills itself as especially attuned to the furtherance of historically aggrieved minorities and organized against racial hatreds would fail so badly around antisemitism. New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman spoke for many on his side of the aisle when he memorably tweeted in 2019: “There are three things in life that are certain: death, taxes (unless you’re Donald Trump), and persistence of antisemitism. But only one brand of antisemitism scares me — and it’s not on the left.”
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During the decade of woke ascendancy, older, self-consciously “radical” ideas and lingo from members of the far Left — that is, the sorts of people who think of the word “liberal” as describing someone to their right — were broadly adopted by powerful and wealthy people in order to further their social status by posing as more dedicated and edgy than they really were. It was a societywide version of what had happened in a smaller form earlier in university departments, as Roger Kimball described in his classic Tenured Radicals, originally published in 1990, which showed how schools like Columbia University had dedicated much of their curricular energy to departments of the “theory disciplines.” Practitioners in these disciplines broke the rules of liberal discourse by refusing to set neutral standards of falsification for the claims they made, freeing them up to make claims that strained basic common sense and moral decency. Kimball warned that the ideologues were located precisely in the places that best positioned them to spread over the coming decades.
And he was right. It was not difficult to get from there to the founding of the Columbia University Center for Justice by Kathy Boudin. By 2020 Boudin’s son and ideological heir Chesa, who proved his chops working for the Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, was exercising prosecutorial discretion as the district attorney of San Francisco, America’s second-most economically important metropolis. After voters ousted Boudin for helping to make the city a crime magnet, Chesa landed on his feet as…the founding director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
The great awokening was societywide. The American Civil Liberties Union has moved away from a neutral defense of legal principles, by its own description. The theory disciplines and their nonsense are reflected in mainstream publishing houses and magazines. After Donald Trump’s election, America’s major newspapers’ staffs rebelled against any editorial standard but “moral clarity.” An entire industry of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucrats was invented and installed inside virtually all large organizations, staffed ubiquitously by people who believe in leftist ideas hostile to individual rights over group rights, as well as hostile to Jews.
Staffers of the State Department and White House as run by a centrist Democrat now object so strongly to executing American policy on Israel’s defense that some are resigning and others are complaining to journalists about their psychological turmoil. The Ford Foundation, led by Darren Walker, has most recently dedicated its attention to anti-Israel activism, funding recipient organizations that organize protests around the White House and Capitol complex to object to what they call Israeli “apartheid.” The selective universities themselves, meanwhile, have by now cultivated a culture in which it is professionally and socially impossible for any student or professor to suggest that rejecting applicants on the basis of their race is wrong. At the same time, students feel encouraged to project slogans like “glory to our martyrs” on the wall of a library in Washington, D.C., and a professor in California asked Jewish pupils to identify themselves and sit in a corner to atone for their people’s imagined sins.
Even as dense a litany of examples of previously unthinkable left-wing excesses as the above is unlikely to convince anyone of the problem, though. Since I withdrew my participation in the Left over the sheer stupidity and danger of “woke” ideas that were proliferating some years ago, I have never seen anyone persuaded until it becomes their problem. People deny the sweeping, dangerous changes have taken place until some particular example drives the point home that there is something deeply destructive and anti-intellectual and manipulative abroad in the culture, that it travels under the banner of the Left, and that it is usually able to convince decent people of indecent things by making it fashionable to use slogans and buzzwords and cliches to manipulate the public vocabulary such that it is impossibly frustrating or confusing or embarrassing for most people to argue for common sense. So it is more useful to step back and describe the actually functioning rules and to let people observe the world around them and see if reality matches up.
And the rules are, in practice, as follows:
There is no left-wing idea or person so apparently dangerous that it should not be assumed to be innocuous. There is no right-wing idea or person so apparently innocuous that it should not be assumed to be dangerous. The Left can never fail you; it can only be failed by you.
The main way you can see these principles in action is in the vocabulary that demarcates left-wing discourse around Israel. As mentioned, Israel is regularly referred to by this group as an “apartheid” state, imposing the Afrikaans word onto a country for rhetorical strategic reasons that misdescribe reality. Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis enjoy the same legal rights and protections, while people with different jurisdictions of origin have differing rights, much like in a Kentuckian, a New Yorker, a Canadian U.S. permanent resident, a Puerto Rican, and a Brazilian visiting on a tourist visa all have differing rights of work, travel, expression, etc., even as they walk past one another in Times Square.
Another common left-wing shibboleth is to call Gaza a “ghetto” or an “open-air prison.” I am not clear about what prisons are commonly imagined as “closed-air” ones, and I believe the phrase to have originated from an Israeli government spokesman who was a nonnative English speaker. So it is less a slander than simply a failed attempt at illustrative language. Still, Nazi ghettos were places that, notably and crucially, residents would have liked to be let out of, often to flee to Israel if they survived, not places over which they were offered full national sovereignty but rejected. The reasons for the things that make Gaza allegedly prisonlike are the very attempts to move toward a free, self-governed, and sovereign Gaza. Anyone who wishes for Gazan Palestinians to rule the territory they control as a sovereign country must hope for them to have national borders, and these cannot be the only people on Earth to be rightly described as imprisoned by the fact of a border, which citizens of any given country on Earth are only allowed to cross at the sovereign goodwill of their neighbors. Surely Luxembourgers are not in a particularly permissive “open-air prison” maintained by Belgium, France, and Germany. How porous versus how defended a neighboring country allows a national border to be depends, of course, on the situation. It is difficult to argue after Oct. 7 that fewer walls and less surveillance are necessary at the Israel-Gaza border and that it should be easier for the rulers of Gaza to receive shipments of large weaponry.
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The list of terms and usages that make less sense the more you think about them goes on. A pit stop on the road to accusing Israel of “genocide” for conducting anti-terrorism operations more carefully planned to minimize civilian casualties than those of any other country in the world is usually the phrase “collective punishment.” This term is based on imagining that Israeli strikes in Gaza are, as left-wing media often portray them, intentionally organized as a sort of tit-for-tat ethnic reprisal. In reality, as any decent person knows, Israel needs the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attack, still holding hundreds of prisoners from over 30 countries hidden among civilian infrastructure, to feel that perpetrating such an attack yields negative rather than positive consequences. Because of Hamas’s psychopathic tactics, accomplishing this nonnegotiable goal will entail getting both innocent Palestinians and Israelis killed. Yet as left-wing discourse imagines the military-strategic deliberations of the Jewish state in Israeli leaders’ own minds, it goes something like this: “You kill 1,500 when you are able, we kill 5,000 since we are always able, and right now we are angry.” This is a vile slander and factual misrepresentation of the strategic reasoning by which Israel’s decisions are made. But never mind the facts. The idea here is to claim that if a war plan by Israel involves any regrettable predictions of civilian death at all, then it is, uniquely in history and in the world today, absolutely unjustifiable that Israel might deem it necessary to undertake that plan. By this logic, of course, the D-Day landings would have been forbidden because they “collectively punished” Norman civilians.
There are many more: “settler-colonialism,” “occupation,” “resistance,” “post-colonial,” “deconstruction.” Each of them can be explained on its own terms and shown to imply some logical absurdity that demonstrates why it should never be adopted in the first place or shown to be selectively applied to Jews or just pulled apart for its sheer incoherence. In my opinion, though, it is time to do something a lot simpler than all that. We have all heard enough theory, abstraction, and jargon from the Left, even as the overall trend toward radicalism and antisemitism has become clearer and clearer. You do not have to be right-wing to be a friend of the Jews. But if you always agree with whatever is called left-wing, even as the ground shifts, you will eventually turn your sights on the Jews. At a certain point, it is time to develop an ear for terms like this from the Left’s radical and academic worlds, and when you hear them, hear only alarms.
Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.