But the forces unleashed in Israel last week, and the response from progressivisms more strident and literal-minded pupils, cant simply be written out of the story of what the far left stands for, or what it might become. Here is Levitz, for instance, trying to read terrorisms apologists out of True Leftism:
What we actually witnessed was not the Palestinians mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamass project is antithetical to the lefts foundational values of secularism, universalism and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamass atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the lefts project in Palestine but a disaster.
I endorse the moral sentiments but not the ideological analysis. Who is to say, definitively, that a fully realized left vision for Palestine necessarily involves Israelis and Palestinians living in harmony in a single multiethnic state? If Israel is really a society of settler-colonialist villains inhabiting stolen land, why shouldnt the left side with those Palestinian activists who dont think Jews deserve any place in the glorious future achieved through the revolutionary struggle of the dispossessed? Why must Palestinians be expected to share the postcolonial utopia, the land justly reclaimed, with the children of the imperialist oppressors? And if the struggle to be free of those oppressors is being led, for the time being, by religious nationalists rather than secular egalitarian universalists well, the leftist rationale might be, sometimes you cant make an anti-imperialist omelet without a few religious extremists to break the eggs.
My point is not that these are the sentiments of most progressives; they are not. But they are impeccably left-wing sentiments, commonplace in the not-so-distant past, with a long pedigree in the Marxist-Leninist and anticolonial visions that exerted so much sway (and killed so many people) across the 20th century. Indeed, as Shullenberger notes, some of these visions even anticipated the therapeutic style in which they are presented to us nowadays but they did so while insisting, as in the work of Frantz Fanon, that revolutionary violence itself was therapeutic, a means by which the colonized can achieve self-assertion, dignity and wholeness.
Of late there has been a lot of attention paid (including in this newsletter) to the infiltration of far-right ideas and influences into mainstream conservatism the return, under populist auspices, of Nietzschean and vitalist ideas once buried in the rubble of 20th-century fascism. This attention is reasonable; the decay of Western liberalism has revived a variety of right-wing impulses, and the sleep of American Christianity may breed post-Christian monsters.
But with the left, where similar temptations are at work, it doesnt make sense to talk in terms of Donald Trump-enabled infiltrations or seduction by pseudonymous internet philosophers. The revival of the ideological perspective that once romanticized Lenin and Stalin, and later Mao and the Khmer Rouge and a host of lesser-known dictators, has happened in plain sight, across many of our finest academic institutions and prominent foundations. Its just been accompanied by a huge asterisk, a promise that all the rhetoric is therapeutic and psychological, that when we talk about stolen land and ending whiteness and decolonizing everything, we are, of course, merely speaking culturally, symbolically, metaphorically.
However comforting you may have found that asterisk, it should feel less comfortable now.
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Opinion | When 'Decolonization' Isn't Just Academic Rhetoric - The New York Times
