#Speaking as a former leftist

[still-searching-for-something]

I can't understand how people say with a straight face that 'antizionism' isn't antisemitism in 99% of cases. Seriously. I can only think of two circumstances in which it isn't antisemitic.

You're an anarchist calling for the dissolution of all nation-states, including Israel and Palestine. That's not antisemitic. Extreme, and naive and stupid, yeah, but not antisemitic.

You're a frum Jew like Satmar, who believes Israel is religiously premature but not something which should be destroyed immediately. This position wouldn't even really be antizionism, though, more non-Zionism.

If neither of the above applies to you, and you advocate for the destruction of the Jewish state, you're an antisemite, full stop. Seriously. If you disagree with Israel's actions, that's one thing. I certainly don't agree with everything in Israel's past or present.

But it's obscene to argue it's somehow so evil, such a blight on the world, that nothing short of its complete and immediate dissolution is justified. Especially because antizionists never argue in favor of the dissolution of other states with even worse human rights records--how could Israel seriously warrant destruction but not North Korea? Eritrea? Russia? Palestine, for that matter?

The fact is, Israel is the only modern-nation state with a whole-ass transnational movement dedicated to it's complete and wholesale destruction. Even in the case of other nation-states which have their right to exist questioned or denied, like Taiwan, Ukraine, Kosovo, or Somaliland, to call for the destruction of these states is generally viewed as racist and beyond the pale.

Well, maybe not for Somaliland. 'Anti colonialist' leftists who so passionately fight for Palestine miraculously don't care when the political issue in question is outside of the West, or doesn't involve Jews.

But I digress. The point of this post is, when they hold up 'Antizionism is not antisemitism!' as a shield to automatically absolve themselves of any antisemitism accusations before repeating blood libel, it's just not true. Antizionism IS antisemitism. Calling for the destruction of Poland is anti-Polish. The destruction of Mexico, anti-Mexican.

But calling for the destruction of Israel? Cute, trendy and not antisemitic at all, you Zionist pig! :D

[sparklesthefatcat]

election take that I'm putting here b/c I've officially sworn off twitter: I totally understand the impulse to be irritated frustrated furious w/ liberals right now. I am too! but I have to ask: has condescending to liberals or democrats ever convinced them on anything?

the left has established that we shouldn't condescend towards working class trump voters, and indeed liberals repeatedly doing this is why they can never win working class trump voters over. so why on earth do we think that condescending to liberals is somehow a winning strategy? that they're not also worthy of respect, listening to, compromise and collaboration as we try to build more support for our vision of the world?

especially given how much of the liberal understanding of the world and reaction to the election is shaped by identity politics (which again, I think we can and should critique!) it's also really hard for me to not see our dismissiveness of liberal concerns as coming from some amount of racism and misogyny! like actually it's worth validating that some people find a lot of meaning in representation! that's not dumb! & also, how can we move folks beyond representation politics towards a vision for liberation?

frankly, if nonwhite & queer leftists can hold space and empathy for working class trump voters who choose racism and queerphobia in response to economic pain, then I think it's outrageous that we can't hold space and empathy for women and POC harris supporters who chose moderate liberal policy in response to racism and queerphobia! it sucks that that dichotomy is the option we have, but we didn't blame trump voters for their shitty choice in the shitty dichotomy back in 2016, so why on earth are we blaming harris supporters for their choice now?

we don't/shouldn't call trump voters 'stupid' for voting for trump, because that won't convince them to vote differently. we CANNOT keep calling liberals 'stupid' for voting for democrats because that's not going to convince them to change their party either.

[nietp]

Thinking about how the past year of intense sionist discourse has profoundly transformed/revealed the political landscape in France to the point where it is clearly one of the causes of the rise of the far right and fascistic party and one of the reasons we might have a fascistic gouvernement in only a couple of weeks.

Thanks to right-wing+liberal+centrist+centre left parties spending months attacking the pro-palestine leftist party, calling them terrorists, islamist fundamentalists, and antisemites, while congratulating+patting on the back the fascistic far right party funded by former Nazis for going to a pro-Israel march "against antisemitism", and presenting them as the reasonable option against the pro-palestine left, we are now looking at the possibility of said far right party winning the next election, having a majority of seats in the national assembly when they used to have literally ZERO seats only 2 years ago. Obviously sionism is not the only reason but it polarised the political space in a matter of days. Because islamophobia is so prevalent in this country and sionism propaganda is doing its job so very well, we're literally looking at Holocaust survivors asking people to vote for the far-right party. I know extremely sionist Jewish french people who are about to vote far right because they're convinced that if the pro-palestine left wins in 2 weeks, they will get bombed in their Parisian apartments on election night for being Jewish. Meanwhile the far right party has already announced it wants to ban kosher meat and wearing kippas in public spaces. Meanwhile Palestinians are actually getting massacred and bombed as we speak. This is all so insane. This year has taught this country more than ever before that sionism is an excellent introduction to fascism.

[edenfenixblogs]

I recently received the following message from a (former?) friend of mine:

okay I am being so genuine right now: since you seem to have educated yourself on what is bothering jewish people about the pro-palestine movement, /what/ is it. I genuinely cannot see and have not interacted with any pro-palestine activists that have actively advocated for the murder of jewish people. I have seen Israelis who have justified the breaking of the truce to bomb Palestinians returning to north gaza. Note I said Israelis and not Jews.

I responded by essentially saying that there's a lot there and I'll need some time to compile and articulate.

I mention this in order to ask if you (or any of your followers/any Jewish tumblr users reading this) have anything specific you'd like to point me toward (search keywords/starting points, links, thoughts, interpret however) that's not already on the list of what i'm planning to discuss (included after this paragraph), anything you specifically want me to read, suggestions of where to place emphasis, or any stories or thoughts you'd like me to pass on to him directly.

current tentative list i'm planning on going over with him, in no particular order:

clarification of scope of conversation (specific to non-jewish western left rather than on the ground or from affected groups)

dual loyalty accusations and harrassment of random jews that have nothing to do with medinat israel

taking discussion of antisemitism in bad faith by default

opportunistic use of the issue by more active antisemites, broad failure to to recognize when that's occuring

uncritical sharing of dogwhistles, conspiratorial thinking

outsiders and newcomers attempting to speak on the matter with authority we don't have

neglect of fact-checking and widespread mis- and disinformation

tokenization of antizionist jews and "jews" - jvp in particular i need to look into more

glorification of hamas and disregard for israeli civilians

misuse, misunderstanding, and demonization of zionism

application of western frameworks of colonization when not applicable

binary good guys/bad guys framing, contrarianism, taking "sides"

might talk about bds e.g. the whole boston map thing but not yet confident on this one, need to do a lot more digging

denial of jewish history - focus on denial of eretz israel as the jewish homeland, holocaust inversion, treating absolutely anything but especially those as trivial or "so long ago"

treating or discussing jews and/or israelis as monolithic

double standards and singling out of israel, holding it as inherently more suspect or less legitimate than any other state

@faggotry-enjoyer Oh man! This is such a good ask!!!! I was going to wait until after work to answer, but your list is so good and so thorough that it relieves a lot of the work I’d have to do.

Some stuff I linked overlaps with your list but I wanted to provide links to these points when possible.

Another thing that bothers me in particular about the western leftist movements’ approach to pro-Palestine conversations (and more: I am critiquing their approach to supporting Palestine not their support itself):

The absolute inability for Jews anywhere to even discuss provocation from Hamas, the history of bombs coming into Israel out of Palestine, or any other act of aggression from Hamas. Anytime we try to discuss anything even remotely nuanced or historical we are told “there’s no excuse for genocide” or “I guess you just love killing Palestinian babies” when that’s not what we are saying at all. Or, more often, the assumption that we are flat out lying about Hamas’ tactics and use of human shields and Palestinian civilian suppression and their view of the disposability of Palestinian lives.

The blanket condemnation of Zionism without understanding that it is a complex philosophy with several movements and differing goals.

The complete lack of media literacy.

The specific dismissal of From the River to the Sea as a term stolen from a Palestinian civilians who desire to express hope in a fully free and equal future but people who use it explicitly to call for the death of Jews. And the weaponization of the phrase to make it a death threat to any Jew who points this out.

The lack of specificity in terms line “Free Palestine.” Yes, Palestinians deserve full and equal freedoms and representation in government. This is a wonderful thing that I support with my whole heart. But that doesn’t change the fact that many bad actors and antisemites are hiding within the Free Palestine movement who are specifically manipulating the phrase to imply free Palestine FROM JEWS—both in terms of their presence in the levant at all (which would entail yet another anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing) or simply the murder of the 7 million Jews who exist in Israel. So asking a Jew why they won’t shout “free Palestine!” At the top of their lungs is taken as a sign that western Jews don’t want Palestinian freedom. When actually it’s a refusal to call for their own deaths.

The assumption that western protest tactics are inherently useful in this conflict and the refusal to look to interfaith and intercultural organizations on the ground in I/P who have been doing this longer, better, and more effectively than western groups.

The focus of western efforts on naming one side a victor in this conflict rather than peace for all.

Not understanding how few Jews there are in the world. And relatedly, the dismissal of the fact that the destruction of the modern state of Israel with no solid plan for a shared Palestinian/Israeli solution would mean the loss of sovereignty for half the global Jewish population, which would indeed affect Jews worldwide.

Dismissal of Israeli leftist efforts to oust the Likud and Netanyahu, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of all Israeli Jews being evil.

The sharing of graphic content of 10/7 attacks, dead and injured Palestinian and Israeli children, and calling any victims martyrs without appropriate trigger warning and as a political tactic.

Mocking Jews (yes, even celebrities) who express feeling fearful for their personal safety as antisemitism rises worldwide.

The expulsion of Jews from their non-Jewish communities and friend groups.

Not understanding the magnitude of the Jewish diaspora and its affect on Jewish culture and voice during this conflict.

Other friends and Allies please add on with your own experiences and concerns!

[hero-israel]

Let me tell you being a former Christian this shit goes so much deeper than a lot of born Jews realize. The Christian worldview (specifically Calvinist/Puritan) seeping into and pervading all of modern leftism is honestly frightening. But also it's very funny.

They believe that there are Good people and Bad people, and that any mistake or lapse in judgment or instance of not being educated is a Mask Off moment, showing who is a member of the Elect and who is not. If you fuck up, that's not just a fuck up, it's Revealing. You are damned, were always damned, you were just good at hiding it, and now we know the truth and are doubly angry because not only are you evil, you lied about it. The only recourse is to shun you, and if that leads to your death, so be it. Anyone who's seen any micro celebrity get canceled saw this in action.

And the only way you can prove you're a member of the Elect is to operate as if you have nothing to hide. You have to loudly and proudly proclaim your righteousness. If you don't have anything to hide why would you be worried? Privacy is suspicious. You Must Speak on everything they deem important or else you obviously agree with the Bad People. There is no room for discussion or healthy debate. There are no loopholes or subclauses or other points of view to consider. You're with us or against us. If you don't constantly go around saying you're with us, you're probably secretly against us. The only way to convince your neighbors, whom you inherently distrust, that you're one of the Good Ones, is to perform righteousness, parrot righteous words. The only way to redeem yourself is by grandiose acts of self flagellation, perhaps being the right demographic, or by accusing others of Heresy.

The goal is not to bring good into the world, it's to recruit more people into the same thought patterns (that's kind of all Christian denominations though). Because if you can convince your community that you're one of the Elect, that means G-d preselected you for Heaven, and you're golden. No repercussions or consequences baby. The only material benefit for you is that you "get" to proclaim you're going to Heaven and everyone has to agree with you. If anyone doesn't they're probably going to Hell anyway. You're on the right side (of history), so why should you ever self reflect or grow? Why should you question anything? Why should nuance or empathy exist? This is about Right and Wrong. We know where we stand, where do you stand?

Every single aspect of American culture and politics, right and "left" alike, was planted by the pilgrims, and it is so fundamentally antithetical to true Leftist thought. Remember all the actually successful Western Leftist movements were started in Europe (and Israel cough cough)... because they kicked all their fucking psychotic Calvinists out. Those people went to America and that's a big big big reason why we don't have any near as much of a robust Leftist movement as even socially conservative European countries (and Israel cough cough). And what's funny is I still find myself slipping into these thought patterns, which is so not compatible with Jewish philosophy or theology. It's been years and I'm still not done.

It's a hell of a drug to kick, so I definitely don't trust white goysiche college kids who've been antitheists for about 6 months since they left their Republican parents' homes to have any great success in unlearning and unprogramming from this. Which is kind of obvious in that I see them acting just like their conservative Christian parents every day on every social media platform, swap out a gun toting white Jesus with some noble savage idea of Palestine, absolving the West of its sins against the Global South.

It is a cult structured around spiritual isolation, antisocial behavior, and it is inherently against any kind of political movement that centers and celebrates the Community. It is designed to tear communities apart and foster obedience to whatever authority can force itself on them. And this has been going on for almost 500 years, there is nothing we can do about it.

Thank you for the insightful look. Their "purity culture" approach definitely had to come from somewhere.

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since taking power, Starmer has pursued a policy agenda that’s barely distinguishable from that of his Tory predecessors. He’s scrapped almost every genuinely progressive idea the Labour Party had to offer, hastened the creeping privatization of the National Health Service, waged a campaign of financial austerity against poor and sick people, endorsed anti-trans bigotry, authorized inhumane “raids” against immigrants, pursued a variety of “tough-on-crime” crackdowns, and cozied up to right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch, all while purging principled leftists from the Labour bench and installing former Tories. Words are cheap, but actions reveal a politician’s true character. With every passing day, Starmer has proven that the Conservatives’ rule over Britain never really ended at all. Because in every way that matters, Keir Starmer is a Tory himself.

[...]

In the European edition of Politico, we can find a comprehensive list of all the Labour policies that Starmer once claimed to support, but later walked back or completely abandoned. Abolishing tuition fees at British universities? Gone. Nationalizing the “Big Six” energy companies? Gone. Offering universal childcare to all British children? Gone. Increasing taxes on the rich? Never heard of it. Abolishing the absurd, archaic institution of the House of Lords? Indefinitely on hold. Rent control? Not a chance. And so on, and so on. In place of these ambitious goals, Starmer started speaking fluent Conservative, saying that his priority was “growth, growth, growth” and citing self-imposed “fiscal rules” for why each new program couldn’t be afforded. At one point, he even cited Margaret Thatcher as a figure he admired, saying she had “dragg[ed] Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.”

2 August 2024

[womendeservehumanity]

Saw this on tumblr but op had their reblogs off. I had to put my two cents in I’m sorryyy. The cognitive dissonance, buzz words, and pure cope so many leftist “feminists” inject in their veins daily in hopes that they’ll find their unicorn man who’s a leftist feminist king who reads theory to her as if most of these leftist men aren’t former alt right edgelords who realized that capitalism harms them because they’re lower class. Completely leaving feminism out of their politics because they still hate women like their 13 year old selves.

Also her saying that speaking on fgm “too much” is a dog whistle for transphobia and and an “alt right pipeline” because it borders too much on the idea that women and girls face sex based oppression. All while using women in the global south as a taking point later on in the video. But no actually you can’t speak on something that disproportionately affects them because it might hurt people with penises feelings because you’re not making it about them all the fucking time.

Also just wanted to show some of the “comrades” that are unsurprisingly endorsing this:

All I can say is LOL

And just a personal gripe… why are so many (white) leftists so egotistical 😭 “revolutionary leftist” who do you think you are my lordddd. Really, truly they’re politically homeless in most facets and just grasp on to general ideas and concepts within leftism to feel intelligent and interesting. Like they don’t actually care about what any of this means and its purpose. it’s just sort of a fun quirk. “Hey I know about these things. I’m on a higher level of consciousness than libs. I am so smart” but don’t actually care all that much about applying it beyond owning people on tiktok.

[solitarelee]

I hope it’s ok to ask this, and I mean this incredibly sincerely

how does someone, like me, who’s not Jewish, practice solidarity with and help protect Jews in the US?

I mean honestly even just saying this sort of thing out loud goes pretty far these days. But beyond that, I think the number one thing gentiles could do is speak out when they see antisemitism in their spaces.

Like, when you see holocaust denial or revisionism in leftist spaces, be the one that's like, "hey, that's not cool, I am not okay with that, I don't think you belong here if you talk like a white supremacist."

When you see people stealing Jewish words and redefining them, correct them, be like, "actually, the word zionist goes back to the 19th century and just means the belief in the need for a Jewish state, and there's a lot of differing opinions within it abt what that means, but if it meant the thing you're saying, do you really think that 80+% of Jews would identify as zionist?"

When you see people using anti-Jewish slurs like "zio," which originates from the literal and actual KKK, point out that they are just straight up quoting former grand wizard of the KKK David Duke.

Don't participate in marches that wave flags of terrorist organizations or signs with the bodies of murdered Jews. Don't involve yourself with organizations that ban the star of david or the fucking color blue (real thing that I've seen).

Remember that old story about the bartender that threw a nazi biker out the second he walked in the door, and when asked about it, said that if you don't, suddenly you're a nazi bar? Recognize that's happening on the left, and try to either speak out about or, if you don't feel safe (and you won't a lot of times, and that's valid), just get tf out and don't be in those places or around those people. Don't let them in your life, in your activism, in your mind or heart.

And I think also a really nice thing you can do is like I said, this. Reach out to the Jews in your life and just like. Let them know you're there and you see what's happening. I feel like I'm not alone in this feeling of like, one year of the whole left gaslighting me. My gentile friends, amongst whom are atheists, Buddhists, Christians, who have reached out to me are now some of my most trusted compatriots, because the last year has taught all of us that most people won't. I think compassionate gentiles rn have the opportunity to be way more of a lifeline than they probably realize.

Oh and I guess also if you see someone try to hit me with a sign while I'm mourning my dead, r*ped, and mutilated friend, stop them from doing that. That'd be great on a personal level.

[lunar-years]

One thing about republicans is that those bastards will band together through hell or high water because they know it benefits them and keeps them in power, and they know how to utilize that joint power to push their agenda and get things done their way. That’s how you get someone like “never trump” J.D. Vance becoming Trump’s VP. Or someone like Megyn Kelly going from feuding with Trump throughout 2016 to speaking at his final rallies in 2024. It’s why even members of Trump’s former staff and (formerly) prominent republicans like Liz Cheney speaking out against him didn’t seem to make any sort of substantial difference. Republicans will still flock to Trump’s majority because it benefits them more than the bits they don’t like harm them.

Meanwhile, democrats tear themselves apart from the inside, refuse to engage in productive conversation, and instead dismiss full board anyone who even slightly disagrees with them, resulting in so much internal divide it’s impossible to see a clear end game or bottom line. Yes, if everyone who voted third party had voted for Kamala, it still wouldn’t have won her the election. But the problem is not merely third party voters, but third party voters plus the apathetic left who saw no point in voting at all (turnout was far lower this election than in 2020) plus the inability of both liberals and leftists to see beyond themselves and their own narrow interpretations of a perfect society to any feasible channels of actually getting CLOSE to there. If we cannot work together, work within existing systems as a starting point instead of leaping to unattainable ideals, and learn how to compromise, nothing is ever, ever going to change. The republicans figured that out a long time ago and it’s why they’re winning and we’re not.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Recently moved back to the US after living in germany for a bit, but I've been trying to keep up with german politics. Unfortunately I speak german at like an A2 level and don't have the reading comprehension to understand most news/memes/general conversation online. Would you be willing to just briefly explain the whole thing going on right now? I've sorta got the general idea from some American news outlets but I'm still quite confused.

Okay I'm probably missing a lot of Nuance as well but:

The current German government is a three party coalition between SPD, FDP and Green Party (traffic light coalition). Christian Lindner was minister of finance. As a FDP member he was a neoliberal piece of shit. He kept blocking government budgeting because he wanted to lower taxes for millionaires, lower retirement and unemployment benefits etc.

In a surprising turn of events our chancellor fired Lindner on Wednesday evening. He gave a speech that was absolutely scathing - for his standards. Our chancellor is known to have zero backbone or charisma and a monotone voice that puts you to sleep.

Now people find this pretty hilarious because 1) Lindner is a piece of shit 2) we've never seen our chancellor act like this. There's been plenty of memes about him being unemployed and several journalists have already asked him things like "will you apply for unemployment benefits" and "what do you think about people calling you Germany's cheekiest unemployed person".

But unfortunately the FDP didn't find this funny so now all other FDP ministers stepped back - except for one who left the party to save his job. This was also really unexpected and is also leading to lots of memes. Without the FDP, the coalition is broken and there's no longer a ruling majority. The current government will spend some time taking care of urgent stuff now and then in the beginning of next year there will be a "vote of confidence". A strategic vote of confidence will trigger a general election, which will happen next spring.

Unfortunately² the current coalition was not very popular in the first place and conservative and right wing parties are gaining lots of influence. We also have a new party called BSW funded by a former Leftist party member who is singlehandedly proving the horseshoe theory by being so leftist she's right wing. So there's a good chance the election will have pretty bad consequences.

But since it's been a really hard week for everyone we're all just enjoying making fun of Chrissy Lindner losing his job #unemployed.

If you want I can translate some of the memes as well.

Hope this helped!

[bitchy-peachy]

Yooo, I just saw someone calling Jill Stein a "real leftist" and I haven't stopped laughing for half an hour cos as much as anti genocide tankies love her ass there's no denying that she's a dirty disgusting genocide loving hag that admits she's only running to make Harris lose.

Also (*wheezing*) it's floating around that she got endorsed by David Duke, a former KKK leader. If its true, I ain't surprised cos a lot of your third party vote pushing fucks have been racist and speaking over brown and black people on here for quite awhile.

[eretzyisrael]

by Corey Walker

In the hours following Bowman’s loss, left-wing commentators immediately shifted blame toward AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, attributing the election results solely to the group’s financial resources. 

Olayemi Olurin, a leftist pundit and fierce critic of Israel, floated the idea that AIPAC engineered a smear campaign against Bowman by inundating voters with misleading campaign ads. 

“It’s not a leftist conspiracy theory that AIPAC quite literally spent more money than ever before to unseat Jamaal Bowman for his stance on Israel,” Olurin posted on X/Twitter. “New Yorkers were drowned in ads smearing Bowman — that coupled with the redistricting of his district cost him the seat.”

Bowman appeared on Olurin’s YouTube channel earlier this month to discuss the state of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. During the interview, the congressman compared Israel unfavorably to the United States, claiming that both countries were built upon a foundation of “white supremacy.” He also suggested that the Jewish state was responsible for the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks, which resulted in the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Cynthia Nixon, a former New York City mayoral candidate and progressive commentator, accused AIPAC of being operated by “far-right Republicans” and blamed the group for flooding the primary race with millions of dollars in an attempt to remove Bowman from office. Similarly, Bowman has denounced AIPAC as being an alleged tool of “racist” Republicans and allies of former US President Donald Trump. 

“Bowman is the last Congress person of color in a NY district not wholly in NYC. And let’s be clear — the record $20 mill spent against him did not come from Dems in this Dem primary but from anti-abortion, anti-climate justice, anti-worker far-right Republicans. You do the math,” Nixon posted on X/Twitter.

Blaming the Jews is standard operating position. EY

[genderkoolaid]

You mentioned that "we need a good word to describe being unfairly cast as an oppressor to cover up/ignore oppression (not just for transandrophobia but also antisemitism) because its so fucking concerning!!" Yep! This also seems like a common thread in anti-Asian racism here in the States (though I'm not personally the one to speak on this) and in ableism against autistic men.

Mhmm I think there's an important distinction between "x group is all dirty slobs/losers/criminals/helpless/etc" bigotry and "x group are all super powerful oppressors/rich/influential/etc." especially because there are leftists that may quickly call out the former, but unquestioningly swallow the latter. Like what happens when leftists treat Jews like they're all white non-visibly-jewish & upper class, or trans men like they're all white passing upper class het & gender conforming. I feel like there's a lot of leftists especially online who only recognize bigotry as blatant hatred that makes a group seem inferior and are incapable of recognizing that, very often, bigotry (ESPECIALLY antisemitism but also very much different forms of transphobia depending on who's talking) will make it's targets seem powerful. Specifically to target more disenfranchised members of a dominant group by saying "THESE people have all this power and influence while YOU suffer and it's actually THEIR fault". Way too many people casually slip in shit like "Jews are barely oppressed & overplay antisemitism" and "trans men all pass super quick and become untrustworthy misogynists as soon as they come out" into their "radical" beliefs

[jewishbarbies]

would it be wrong of me to assume that us (me and other non Jewish people) non Jewish people are not in a position to discuss whether Zionism should exist or not? Or whether anti Zionism is or isn’t antisemitism?

I don't know. To me, Zionism is a Jewish concept. It was created by Jewish people due to the treatment of Jewish people by non Jews at the time (as well as present).

With that said, it is quite strange that a lot of non Jewish people have basically “hijacked” the voice of Jewish people, if that makes sense. A lot of non Jewish people are speaking over actual Jewish people about Jewish things.

Non Jewish people “deciding” whether Jewish people deserve or do not deserve a homeland.

Non Jewish people “deciding” whether certain Jewish customs can be altered or not (for example, didn’t Jewish Voice for Peace, which according to jumblr is not Jewish, try the whole teacup mikvah or something? Whatever they called it. A lot of people were upset about that).

Non Jewish people labelling any and everything Jewish as “genocidal”. For example, I read about some discourse regarding the phrase “Am Yisrael Chai”, many non Jewish leftists are saying that that statement is against Palestinians because it mentions Israel and refers to the Jews as the people of Israel, which according them is false because “Palestinians are the true original people of the region, not Jews”.

Non Jewish people “deciding” what is and isn’t antisemitism, for example, one of the earliest examples of this that I saw was the discourse about the whole “river to sea, Palestine is Arab” statement and whether or not that was antisemitic. A lot of Jewish people tried to explain how that statement is bad, and non Jewish people basically just said… “no, you’re wrong.”

Or when Jewish people explained that the term “zio” is a slur coined by former KKK grande wizard David Duke and is antisemitic in nature, and non Jews just said… “it’s not antisemitic because we’re not referring to Jewish people, we’re referring to Zionists!”

There’s so much more, but I’m sure you already know that. How can this shit even be combatted? How can us non Jews do and be better? How do we even get through to people who do this stuff?

no, that’s a reasonable thing to assume. on some level, everyone regardless of group should support landback movements for all peoples, and that includes jews. At the same time, whether or not zionism is acceptable or even just what zionism is, is explicitly a jewish conversation and goyim really should not be involved. it’s definitely a bit of a grey area, but it’s pretty easy for goyim to simply recuse themselves from intracommunity conversations like zionism. no one gets to determine what our terms mean or assign morality to them but us. it’s the same basic respect afforded to other ethnic/minority groups.

as far as how goyim can combat this antisemitism and entitlement, just speak up. don’t associate with and support people insistent on being antisemitic, help educate people willing to learn by directing them to jews and jewish created resources, speak up online and irl when you hear/see strangers and people you know engage in this. it’s okay if you don’t feel comfortable or knowledgeable enough on the issue to say something authoritative, it’s perfectly fine to leave the situation and/or just link resources.

the whole point is education and respect. learning how to spot propaganda and teaching your friends/circle can be a surprisingly powerful first step.

[queer-geordie-nerd]

I'm sending this to you as a fellow Brit so I'm assuming you have been following all the post office stuff that's come out over the past year and I can't help but see the similarities between the way the locals turned on former sub-postmasters overnight, shouting and verbally abusing them in the street, throwing bricks through windows and destroying their property and the speed at which a lot of leftists turned on Jews the moment it was publicly acceptable to become monsterous without consequences.

I'm trying not to be fatalistic about it but (and I'm only speaking from UK experience) it does seem like the majority of the population are just champing at the bit for the opportunity to become violent bigots and October 7th and the war since then, the lies from the Post Office, COVID, has given a huge swathe of people who until now have had to be "anti-racist" and "pro-peace" the opportunity to get out all of their frustration and desperation to cause harm on a new target who has been declared "fair game".

I don't think humans are inhertantly bad but I think there is certainly a degree of people who want to cause problems just waiting for the right opportunity to mobilise normal people into violence by redefining their violence as just and worthy against people deserving of the pain and suffering. And people don't ever seem to ask why and how it could happen. We always focus on the instigators but never on why regular people seem to be radicalised into hatred overnight. It's really kinda scary.

I'm hoping a reasonable government might slowly help reduce the amount of hate in this country but I don't know if I have the energy to get excited yet 😭

I haven't been following the post office stuff very closely but I do know the general outline of what's been happening. Unfortunately, you're bang on when you say that once people think they have an acceptable target to vent on, all bets are off and the veneer of civility just disappears. And the problem with that is it's really hard to put a lid back on and get people to take a step back and think rationally once they've indulged their worst selves. The Tories have certainly not helped in that regard absolutely, and like you, I can only hope that things might improve somewhat now that they're gone.