The Left is dead
Over the last year I have come to realise something that few people seem to be talking about, which is the death of the Left. By this I do not mean that the Left is failing politically to win elections or that they have been decisively defeated by the Right. In fact the Right has had its own share of problems and major defeats over the last decade which are for another post. Rather, what I mean when I say that the Left is dead is that they have been slowly committing suicide. Much like an alcoholic or drug addict will self-medicate until they are an unrecognisable shell of themselves, older-generation political leftists have capitulated to a toxic mix of political correctness and identity politics which has hollowed out the moral core of what used to be a genuinely progressive broad-church movement.
There are multiple examples I could draw on to illustrate this, but I will use just a couple which I have seen over the last couple of weeks. Firstly, if one wants to see the clearest example of the Left’s capitulation to elite cultural and economic orthodoxy then look no further than the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week. Aside from Labour’s promise to stick within the ‘fiscal rules’ - first introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government to constrain its own decisions on taxation and spending - the party also vowed to make attacks motivated by hatred of the victim’s gender identity “aggravated offences” if they came to power. This would possibly result in people being given jail sentences for ‘misgendering’ someone. As well as moving right on the economy, Labour is also planning on enforcing compelled speech. If they enter government, people will be thrown in prison for refusing to say that 2 + 2 = 5. Orwell must be rolling in his grave.
The chain-smoking political writer would also be alarmed by Labour’s plan to incrementally prohibit smoking. As far a civil-liberties are concerned, this would make Britain a less free nation for dissident smokers than Russia and China, authoritarian countries where one can smoke to their heart’s content. If any of this sounds progressive, liberal, or Left-wing to you then you do not understand what these terms truly mean. The word ‘liberal’, for example, goes back to the Latin word liber, meaning “free”. Old-school liberals such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill argued for religious freedom, free-speech, and freedom of conscience. All things modern liberals have abandoned in favor of restrictive speech codes and hate crime legislation that criminalise traditional religious beliefs.
Yes, you could argue, there have been socialist authoritarian regimes. The Left has not always been liberal. But these evil regimes existed outside of the West, in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. During the Cold War, Labour Prime Ministers like Attlee and Wilson were firmly anti-communist and anti-authoritarian. Since then, however, the mainstream Left across the West has moved away from liberty and embraced paternalism, censorship, conformity and orthodoxy. The very opposite of what Locke, Mill, and Orwell believed in. This has led to a new generation of authoritarian liberals and cultural leftists who shun and wish to criminalise the ‘reactionary’ views of ordinary people.
This prejudice and intolerance towards supposedly backward and socially conservative views, however, does not seem to extent to ultra-conservative Islamists either at home or abroad. Indeed whatever you think of the Cultural Left’s approach to racism and hate crime, the same outrage and concern for minorities does not extend to racist violence against Jews, which is rationalised and excused by anti-Semites and Israelophobes eternally wedded to the idea that Jews are always privileged and Muslims are always oppressed.
This was demonstrated by the reaction of elite anti-Israel leftists to the Hamas pogrom which killed around 1,400 Israelis. Since the terrorist atrocity earlier this month, supposedly intelligent and academically gifted students from the West’s top universities blamed Israel - the victim - for the slaughter and abduction of its citizens, many of whom were children and babies. On the day of the pogrom, a letter from Harvard University, authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and signed by 33 student groups stated that students "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence".
Hear that? Entirely responsible.
Since then, student groups at Oxford University have issued a joint statement saying “Israeli-settler-colonial occupation and apartheid” is the root cause of the ongoing violence. The letter goes on to say: “This continuous harm is rooted in the tragedies of illegal occupation, human rights abuses and apartheid that have existed since the onset of the Nakba in 1948. We call for an immediate end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. The events of the past several days did not take place in a vacuum: rather they are the result of Palestinians’ long-brewing and well-founded anger in response to Israel forcing them to live in an open-air prison for decades. Every nation that has declared support for Israel is complicit in its genocidal campaign.”
No condemnation for the brutal and very intentional actions of Hamas death squads. No condemnation for Palestinian war crimes.
In addition to this, other elite academics and students at Cambridge University have demanded that their university “sever financial ties with Israel.” The open letter, which has amassed almost 1,500 signatures, is also demanding that the university change its public position on events in Israel and Gaza to acknowledge “the slaughter of innocent Palestinians”. Basically, the first reaction of students and academics at our most prestigious universities to a racist pogrom is to first blame the victim, before sympathizing with the perpetrators. These are the people who will become the future elite. This is the new generation of anti-Israel fanatics who will lead the future centre-left parties of the West.
That these Hamas terrorists belong to a genocidal death cult does not seem to bother this new generation. What better example illustrates the intellectual and moral decay of the Western cognitive elite that they would sympathize with Islamist Jihadists and assume that they are acting out of desperation rather than an insatiable hatred of Jewish people? Indeed, anyone who thinks that raping girls, burning families alive, and beheading babies is an understandable reaction to Israeli security policy is beyond the pale both morally and intellectually. Their racism is demonstrated not only by their sympathy for a racist organisation, but by their bigotry of low expectations towards Arab Muslims. Were such an attack carried out by a white Neo-Nazi group then there is no doubt that they would be held to a higher standard and immediately condemned as evil terrorists who should be brought to justice. Millions of Arab Muslims live in peace within Israel’s borders as Israeli citizens. Why can’t they do the same outside of Israel too? If we were truly universalist and anti-racist in our principles then we would hold Palestinians to the same standard as everyone else.
Additionally, despite the supposed intelligence and academic brilliance of these top academics and lefty students, they are unable to distinguish between the intentional killing of Jewish civilians by Hamas and the unintentional killing of civilians by Israel. While Hamas death squads were motivated by Jihadist zeal and hatred of the Jews, the Israeli state is motivated by self-preservation and a desire for peace and security. Hamas’ main objective is the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel’s objective is to prevent another Holocaust. This is not a sectarian conflict like that seen in Northern Ireland where both sides could be said to be equally bloodthirsty. The Israel-Hamas War is as morally clear cut as the Russo-Ukraine War. One side is the aggressor, the other is defending its right to exist. Nobody expects the Ukrainians to lay down arms, so why do woke leftists and liberals expect Israelis to allow themselves to be killed?
That the Cultural Left have such an unwillingness to confront Islamism, even when it rears its ugly head in Western Europe, is a chilling sign of how morally hollowed out the Left has become. They are full of opinions when it comes to politically incorrect speech, but are lacking in anger when Islamists and Jihadists attack our way of life. All they have left is narrow tribalism, which lends itself naturally to authoritarianism and the suppression of dissenting voices. For this reason, I have concluded that the broad-church Left is dead. What comes next is up to those of us that still believe in liberty, democracy, and universalism. If the Left won’t stand up for these values then who else will carry the torch?