The modern Left's rickety foundations
Utopian dreams are again threatening liberty and democracy. The modern Left's obsession with who is oppressing whom has put us on a dangerous path.
The modern Left’s hatred of Israel is symptomatic of a wider derangement that is poisoning and threatening Western political discourse.
Jews are history’s most persecuted people, and Israel is the world’s most improbable state. Both ought to be poster children for the Left’s struggle against oppression. Yet, they loathe Israel and are rabidly anti-Semitic.
This makes sense once you realize that Israel and Jews threaten the modern Left’s rickety intellectual foundations. A big part of the woke narrative is the notion that historical injustices must be remedied for society to move forward. This is the thinking behind demands for reparations for slavery in the United States and under the British Empire. Most recently, Holland and Portugal have been undergoing episodes of self-flagellation over their slave-trading pasts that, short of inventing a time machine, cannot be undone. In this analysis, the impact of historical repression continues to oppress minorities today, who are suffering from systemic disadvantages, racism, and intergenerational trauma.
There is some truth to this. No one thinks that history has no impact on the present. Nevertheless, Israel’s success burrows away at this belief’s foundations. The trauma and horrors of the Holocaust and mass expulsion from Muslim states have not stopped Jews building a prosperous and successful democracy within a human lifetime. Diaspora Jews have done well, too, despite having migrated to the US and elsewhere with nothing just a few generations ago. This should not be possible under the oppressor-oppressed narrative the Left thinks explains the world.
Rather than admitting their whole paradigm is flawed, or even just in need of refinement, they instead made sense of it by moving Jews from the oppressed column to the oppressor column of their political ledger.
The desire to shoehorn everything into a woke narrative comes from the Marxist idea that under capitalism, everything is a struggle between oppressive capital and oppressed labor. The modern Left has superimposed this on to all conflicts. Religious disputes, climate justice, North-South development, sexism, nationalist struggles, racism, LGBTQ rights, and all conflicts must be contorted to fit this narrative.
At Marxism’s core is the aim of tearing down society’s capitalist edifice. The modern Left has widened this beyond capitalism. They want to overthrow everything they see as oppressive, which amounts to destroying Western civilization. This is not alarmism. Marxist experiments brought so much misery in the 20th Century that it is emotionally difficult to absorb.
Building a society that disapproves of bigotry and discrimination, and attaches legal and social penalties for such actions, is about as far as a society can go before descending into authoritarianism.
Yet, it is not enough for the progressive Left. They want to go further and reprogram people so that they do not even have such thoughts. This is rooted in the Marxist idea of the perfectibility of man. This desire to build a utopia is a direct path to tyranny.
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