Mick Hartley

James Kirchik, in the Tablet, on the regressive left and the new attacks on Hillary Clinton:

Like the Western “imperialism” it decries, this regressive left is vestigial in its own political commitments, which are essentially cribbed from Third Worldism, the Cold War-era concatenation of socialist economics and authoritarian politics. Central to the occult politics of Third Worldism, in which soulful headgear and free lunch programs oddly always seem to combine with brutal violence towards outspoken women, Jews, gays, inquiring reporters, and other devilish embodiments of “bourgeois” rights-based democratic societies, is the belief that the “global south” is poor, backwards and benighted because the West is rich, racist and powerful. This obligates not only massive and ongoing monetary transfers by developed countries to undeveloped ones as perpetual recompense for what they “stole,” but also excuses the non-Western world’s every existing social, political and economic affliction—from corruption to migration to terrorism….

The misogyny directed at Clinton from within progressive ranks marks a significant moment in the evolution of the American left, reifying a crude yet increasingly influential form of identity politics known as “intersectionality.” …[T]his dogma assigns varying levels of righteousness to groups based upon their claimed “marginalization” and victim status. A powerful force on both college campuses and in the broader left-wing activist community, intersectionality is now threatening to subsume the old Democratic Party coalition of ethnic minorities, Jews, gays, intellectuals, and the working class—in which the various elements supported one another in achieving the universalist goal of a more equitable and just society—and replace it with a hierarchy that relegates certain groups, by definition, to lower places on the victim pyramid. The first to get kicked down were Jews, followed quickly by gays. Currently, it’s a war on women, symbolized by Hillary Clinton and anyone who supports her. For reasons that are important to understand, the ones at the very top of the pyramid are now always—no matter what day, or situation—Muslims.

To intersectionality’s rigid and impersonal classification system the regressive left has applied the Third Worldism of Frantz Fanon, who wrote romantically of “the wretched of the earth” as noble savages. Today’s noble savages of the left are Muslims, who, after 9/11, assumed the role traditionally occupied by the proletariat in radical chic regressive left imagination: an undifferentiated mass of people perceived as the greatest victims of Western imperialism. Before embracing the aims of political Islam as their own, progressives should do their due diligence and investigate whom they’re getting into bed with. The 2013 Pew Research Center report, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society,” is perhaps the most comprehensive study ever done of global Islamic attitudes. Conducted over the course of four years, the report comprises the views of 38,000 Muslims, gathered through face-to-face interviews across 39 countries and in over 80 languages. According to its findings, “solid majorities in most of the countries surveyed across the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia favor the establishment of sharia” and in “most countries surveyed, majorities of Muslim women as well as men agree that a wife is always obliged to obey her husband.” Seventy-five percent or more of Muslims in 33 of 36 countries believe homosexual behavior is wrong, a similar number in 29 of 36 countries oppose pre-marital sex, and at least half in 11 of 37 countries support polygamy. Eighty-four percent of Palestinian Muslims support stoning adulterers, and 66 percent support the death penalty for apostasy. As horrifically demonstrated by last month’s mass migrant sexual assault in Cologne, the Arab Muslim world has a “sick relationship with women,” in the words of Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, a relationship that, among other evils, produces forced veiling, clitoridectomy, and reconstructive surgery for broken hymens.

What does the logic that licenses such attitudes as a higher form of political morals make of the competing interests of gays—who wish nothing more than to live unmolested—and Hamas, which wishes to throw them off the rooftops of high buildings, or the Iranian theocracy, which, when not denying their existence, hangs them from construction cranes? Merely mentioning the mutual incompatibility of these wants is itself a sign of Orientalism and imperialism, for, in the words of Columbia professor Joseph Massad, it is a “Gay International” whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist” in Muslim lands. A “gay identity,” you see, is a devious Western notion with all sorts of political and cultural connotations that do not pertain to the Muslim world, where guys sometimes just fuck other guys without being at all gay. Flipping the entire, decades-long struggle for the recognition of gay people and their equality on its head, Massad insists that the very notion that someone can “be” a “homosexual,” as opposed to merely performing homosexual “acts” upon an underage boy or one’s cousin (a common practice in Muslim countries where sex of all types is highly policed), is not only confining but also deeply racist—since it is used to portray as backwards and barbaric Muslims societies that are in fact, yes, wait for it, far moresexually enlightened and liberated than Western ones….

Which brings us to the Jews, whose millennia of victimization, culminating, in living memory, in the worst mass-murder in the history of mankind, would appear to guarantee them pride of place in any coalition predicated upon historical victimhood. Except it doesn’t. Because “all oppression is connected,” and Muslims rank higher than Jews on the victim pyramid, those who oppose institutionalized racism and police brutality in the United States must therefore oppose Zionism, secularism and Western “imperialism” in the Middle East, because Muslims say so. The Jewish interest in national self-determination—as opposed to the Palestinian interest in national self-determination—doesn’t even factor into these discussions.

To achieve this tiered totem of torment, the regressive left has racialized an ethno-religious conflict over borders in the Middle East into one whose moral touchstones evoke the anti-apartheid struggle and American civil rights movement….

It's a well-aimed polemic, but to what extent the regressive left are now at the forefront of the Bernie Sanders campaign against Hillary Clinton, as Kirchik seems to imply, I couldn't say. Personally I'm hoping for a Clinton win, not out of any conviction, but simply because she seems the best – the most heavyweight – out of a very poor bunch. Sanders just seems too lightweight to me – but I admit I haven't followed his campaign with any diligence. For an alternative view here's Paul Berman, again in the Tablet:

This is what Bernie Sanders has stumbled on—an already existing hidden continent of young people’s angers and aspirations, which is Occupy’s legacy. And Bernie turns out to be the ideal political leader for this circumstance. He is authentically and without calculation the senator from Occupy. He has been delivering the same anti-plutocratic speech all his life, even if he has lately updated his denunciation of millionaires to a denunciation of billionaires. Never has he appeared calculating or self-interested, not in any normal sense. The country as a whole has never known him because, during most of his political career, he appears to have thought of himself modestly as a maverick from his own idiosyncratic Vermont, without grander aspirations. Still, back in December 2010 he delivered an eight-hour filibuster speech in the Senate, denouncing the tax bill and President Obama’s compromise with the Republicans, which may have led him to recognize the joys and benefits of theatricality. Evidently it struck him that, in America, nothing is more theatrical than a run for president. And he has discovered that, as was never true before, his oratory about billionaires, super PACs, and the rigged economy has an audience.

The young people, for their part, have discovered for the first time that someone from the Establishment—a United States senator is a figure from the Establishment, even if he says, “I do not have a super-Pac, I do not want a super-Pac!”—speaks their language. And from this combination of elderly senatorial plutocrat-bashing and a new mood among the young has emerged an American leftism of a fresh and novel sort—economically oriented in the style of the classic leftisms of a century ago, marked by none of the pathologies (if I may) that have so badly damaged the American leftisms of more recent times. The cult of anti-Americanism and self-hatred, the manias for anti-Zionism and persecuting the Jews, the culture of resentment, the tone of euphemism and dishonesty, the malign influence of avant garde academics, the authoritarian yearnings and the attraction to dictatorships in other parts of the world, the backstage maneuvers of the annoying and insane Bolshevik micro-parties—not one of these miserable traits has popped up in the Bernie campaign. On the contrary! The Bernie movement appears to be as simple and upright as Bernie himself.