This thing we call the "Left" has always had more or less the same goals as liberals and liberalism in general—increasing liberation and integration of the formerly marginalized and disenfranchised, a more egalitarian distribution of assets and power, and a platform of amelioration where citizens, mostly through education, become more tolerant and open-minded and less tribal and xenophobic. I see the difference this way: liberals and Leftists are like two drivers in two different cars who want to end up in the same place, but whereas liberals follow the rules of the road (good-faith debate, compromise, respect for law and norms), Leftists are happy to put the pedal to the metal and achieve their goals, as they say, by any means necessary (even if a few people get run down on the way).
As liberalism has gradually crumbled in the past decade or so, and liberal society has become toothless and feckless, the brakes have come off, and now all the Left's worst instincts and most grandiose power schemes hold the field with no institutions, leaders or power centers to oppose them. And as we've seen in other times and places when the Left dominates, the same patterns emerge: this supposed movement for liberation quickly becomes dogmatic, intolerant, authoritarian, ruthless toward dissent and dissenters, obsessed with power, and deeply convinced that their ENDS are so noble and pristine that any and all MEANS are justified achieving them.
Leftism has also always been a type of quasi-religion or political religion (like the Jacobins and their Cult of Reason) and in this case the religion has now been renamed Social Justice and has two great strengths: 1) ours is a post-God deracinated time where people are desperate for meaning and purpose, a simplistic moral worldview, and rituals to enforce dogma and group coherence; and 2) this new faith has been born and bred in our most prestigious universities and it has essentially been installed in two generations of young people, who now worship at the altar of Social Justice, which provides morality, worldview, etiquette and social status. For most educated young people under 30ish, embracing "Social Justice" is what all Good People do, it's simply a synomym for kindness.
But all faiths live on symbols, are rooted in and founded on symbols, and there is currently no stronger symbol than the mythical fantastical "Palestinian": people from another culture with another language who are foreign enough to be repurposed for Western consumption, who've expertly positioned themselves to meet all the psychological and emotional needs of the young lost souls of the West: poor brown indigenous victims of settler-colonial oppression, who just want grandpa's farm back. And who are just as angry and violent now as they were decades ago, their conflict and grievance inexhaustible, especially since their strategy involves endless jihad and posing their martyred children for the nearest camera. (And there is no stronger symbol than a bloodied baby or child.)
So if you add up this new faith and its disciples and their needs (not to mention the money that's made by media orgs cultivating and catering to their sacred beliefs) plus the eternally violent Platonic Victims the "Palestinians", PLUS add History's most hated tribe and perpetual scapegoat as the villain (the demonic Jews always secretly controlling the planet and its people), and voila—there's simply so much symbolic power here that it's become almost impossible to resist.
Israel/Palestine is the great symbolic apocalyptic millenarian crusade of our time and it's essentially the strongest current mass mania in our age of media-generated mass manias. It has deranged everyone involved and will have to burn itself out somehow.
“Men, it is said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” — Charles MacKay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
The Left have always been Communists and have called themselves Progressives, Liberals, Democrats etc.
They were the party of slavery, Jim Crow, Poll Taxes, the KKK and the destruction of the Black family. through making them dependent on the government - LBJ took care of that.
Their moral superiority is garbage and a lie. Hence their hatred of Israel, Christians and Jews and their embrarce of Islam was a piece of cake.
Hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular has become a substitute for the traditional religions the people on the left abandoned. Participating in this miasma gives the individual a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves.
Bravo, Joshua. Crossing out " progressive" and substituting with " regressive" is my own subconscious talking, and I believe is at the heart of the issue.
Just as there are physical contagions, there are mental ones. The Left has been infected. Choose the poison: political marxism with its inhumanity and/or Islamism with its literally regressive barbarism. Qatar pays. As long as it subverts the West, anything, any ideology is worth their billions.
Make no mistake, the right is infected too. See Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, for example.
But those with the weakest links were the left. Thus universities were bought and converted. Thus were the intellectual upper crust seduced and galvanized as well. The incongruous and generally appalling spectacle of Kamala Harris representing the Dems' future at the last election marked a turning point. Mamdani continues the degradation. Now El-Sayed looms.
But at the deepest level, it is the continuous moral decline and inversion in the entire West , the result of an ancient rebellion against the strictures represented by Israel, as Freud saw earliest on ( " Civilization and its discontents"), where Israel represents the vivid symbol and memory of such enchained barbarism.
It was always there. Never disappeared. It now explodes with renewed force. The Left being pronouncedly more secular than the Right, are less restrained. They don't believe Jesus will return as long as Israel still lives, as for example, evangelicals do.
Alliance with Islam settled the Left's regressive fate. All that is left is virtue signaling to cover up for the emerging savagery.
Well said Joshua. Led by the socialist radicals, the left is unrecognizable from what I and my family respected. Led by antisemites disguised as anti-Zionists, they welcome radical Islam into government and society. I listen for objection to Jew hatred in my own country and I hear silence.
Thanks! This totally resonates with me as well. I also grew up in LA in the 60’s with a father who was an anti war activist. I’ve become a single issue voter: the single issue is combatting antizionism and supporting the only homeland in the world for the Jewish people, all as a means to protect being Jewish for me & my descendants.
I don't "recognize" them either, but in my case, "recognize" is used similarly to those who don't "recognize" Israel. I literally fired all of my 'leftist', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'Democrat', 'Democratic Socialist', and outright 'communist' friends. I am none the 'poorer' for it. Communication was not a necessary part of our relationship anyway. I am referring to perhaps hundreds of 'people'...
Welcome to sanity lane. These lunatics are running our institutions. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and many of us got tricked by not paying attention to the indoctrination going on in our educational systems.
One might even conclude that the progressive/DSA wing of the Democratic Party is the result of decades of ideological influence in America’s Universities that have been all too happy to accept funding from Islamist interests and have produced a generation of useful idiots …
Josh, another great article thank you. I am reading a great book, The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad. It is an excellent read about society today.
I think a fundamental point is missing in your article. The obsession with Israel stems from the infection of islamisation in western society. This insidious process has been taking place over the last 30 or so years, such that the integration in state run organisations, academia, politics, together with the massive funding from the likes of Qatar. From October 7 2023, the stage was set, for the obsession against Israel and Jewish people to flourish.
The problem isn't just that the Left has abandoned you. The Right has abandoned me. In Canada, there was a centrist party called the Progressive Conservatives (merged in 1993, essentially disappeared) that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In the US, it is entirely unclear how I should vote. There are some moderate Democrats than don't hate Israel and there are a few moderate Republicans that don't hate Israel. But more than just the progressive left has become politically homeless in the United States.
2. outsized success in every endeavor undertaken by the Jews
3. The most egregious - taking a miserable strip of land and turning it into one of the most successful technological & military countries on the globe and the consequent ability to defend themselves.
This thing we call the "Left" has always had more or less the same goals as liberals and liberalism in general—increasing liberation and integration of the formerly marginalized and disenfranchised, a more egalitarian distribution of assets and power, and a platform of amelioration where citizens, mostly through education, become more tolerant and open-minded and less tribal and xenophobic. I see the difference this way: liberals and Leftists are like two drivers in two different cars who want to end up in the same place, but whereas liberals follow the rules of the road (good-faith debate, compromise, respect for law and norms), Leftists are happy to put the pedal to the metal and achieve their goals, as they say, by any means necessary (even if a few people get run down on the way).
As liberalism has gradually crumbled in the past decade or so, and liberal society has become toothless and feckless, the brakes have come off, and now all the Left's worst instincts and most grandiose power schemes hold the field with no institutions, leaders or power centers to oppose them. And as we've seen in other times and places when the Left dominates, the same patterns emerge: this supposed movement for liberation quickly becomes dogmatic, intolerant, authoritarian, ruthless toward dissent and dissenters, obsessed with power, and deeply convinced that their ENDS are so noble and pristine that any and all MEANS are justified achieving them.
Leftism has also always been a type of quasi-religion or political religion (like the Jacobins and their Cult of Reason) and in this case the religion has now been renamed Social Justice and has two great strengths: 1) ours is a post-God deracinated time where people are desperate for meaning and purpose, a simplistic moral worldview, and rituals to enforce dogma and group coherence; and 2) this new faith has been born and bred in our most prestigious universities and it has essentially been installed in two generations of young people, who now worship at the altar of Social Justice, which provides morality, worldview, etiquette and social status. For most educated young people under 30ish, embracing "Social Justice" is what all Good People do, it's simply a synomym for kindness.
But all faiths live on symbols, are rooted in and founded on symbols, and there is currently no stronger symbol than the mythical fantastical "Palestinian": people from another culture with another language who are foreign enough to be repurposed for Western consumption, who've expertly positioned themselves to meet all the psychological and emotional needs of the young lost souls of the West: poor brown indigenous victims of settler-colonial oppression, who just want grandpa's farm back. And who are just as angry and violent now as they were decades ago, their conflict and grievance inexhaustible, especially since their strategy involves endless jihad and posing their martyred children for the nearest camera. (And there is no stronger symbol than a bloodied baby or child.)
So if you add up this new faith and its disciples and their needs (not to mention the money that's made by media orgs cultivating and catering to their sacred beliefs) plus the eternally violent Platonic Victims the "Palestinians", PLUS add History's most hated tribe and perpetual scapegoat as the villain (the demonic Jews always secretly controlling the planet and its people), and voila—there's simply so much symbolic power here that it's become almost impossible to resist.
Israel/Palestine is the great symbolic apocalyptic millenarian crusade of our time and it's essentially the strongest current mass mania in our age of media-generated mass manias. It has deranged everyone involved and will have to burn itself out somehow.
“Men, it is said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” — Charles MacKay, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
The Left have always been Communists and have called themselves Progressives, Liberals, Democrats etc.
They were the party of slavery, Jim Crow, Poll Taxes, the KKK and the destruction of the Black family. through making them dependent on the government - LBJ took care of that.
Their moral superiority is garbage and a lie. Hence their hatred of Israel, Christians and Jews and their embrarce of Islam was a piece of cake.
They are evil.
Hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular has become a substitute for the traditional religions the people on the left abandoned. Participating in this miasma gives the individual a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves.
Bravo, Joshua. Crossing out " progressive" and substituting with " regressive" is my own subconscious talking, and I believe is at the heart of the issue.
Just as there are physical contagions, there are mental ones. The Left has been infected. Choose the poison: political marxism with its inhumanity and/or Islamism with its literally regressive barbarism. Qatar pays. As long as it subverts the West, anything, any ideology is worth their billions.
Make no mistake, the right is infected too. See Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, for example.
But those with the weakest links were the left. Thus universities were bought and converted. Thus were the intellectual upper crust seduced and galvanized as well. The incongruous and generally appalling spectacle of Kamala Harris representing the Dems' future at the last election marked a turning point. Mamdani continues the degradation. Now El-Sayed looms.
But at the deepest level, it is the continuous moral decline and inversion in the entire West , the result of an ancient rebellion against the strictures represented by Israel, as Freud saw earliest on ( " Civilization and its discontents"), where Israel represents the vivid symbol and memory of such enchained barbarism.
It was always there. Never disappeared. It now explodes with renewed force. The Left being pronouncedly more secular than the Right, are less restrained. They don't believe Jesus will return as long as Israel still lives, as for example, evangelicals do.
Alliance with Islam settled the Left's regressive fate. All that is left is virtue signaling to cover up for the emerging savagery.
Well said Joshua. Led by the socialist radicals, the left is unrecognizable from what I and my family respected. Led by antisemites disguised as anti-Zionists, they welcome radical Islam into government and society. I listen for objection to Jew hatred in my own country and I hear silence.
Thanks! This totally resonates with me as well. I also grew up in LA in the 60’s with a father who was an anti war activist. I’ve become a single issue voter: the single issue is combatting antizionism and supporting the only homeland in the world for the Jewish people, all as a means to protect being Jewish for me & my descendants.
I don't "recognize" them either, but in my case, "recognize" is used similarly to those who don't "recognize" Israel. I literally fired all of my 'leftist', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'Democrat', 'Democratic Socialist', and outright 'communist' friends. I am none the 'poorer' for it. Communication was not a necessary part of our relationship anyway. I am referring to perhaps hundreds of 'people'...
Love your writing!
As a friend - of a different political persuasion, can you imagine it? - said to me: 'You didn't leave the Left. The Left Left you.'
Welcome to sanity lane. These lunatics are running our institutions. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and many of us got tricked by not paying attention to the indoctrination going on in our educational systems.
One might even conclude that the progressive/DSA wing of the Democratic Party is the result of decades of ideological influence in America’s Universities that have been all too happy to accept funding from Islamist interests and have produced a generation of useful idiots …
Josh, another great article thank you. I am reading a great book, The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad. It is an excellent read about society today.
I think a fundamental point is missing in your article. The obsession with Israel stems from the infection of islamisation in western society. This insidious process has been taking place over the last 30 or so years, such that the integration in state run organisations, academia, politics, together with the massive funding from the likes of Qatar. From October 7 2023, the stage was set, for the obsession against Israel and Jewish people to flourish.
The problem isn't just that the Left has abandoned you. The Right has abandoned me. In Canada, there was a centrist party called the Progressive Conservatives (merged in 1993, essentially disappeared) that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In the US, it is entirely unclear how I should vote. There are some moderate Democrats than don't hate Israel and there are a few moderate Republicans that don't hate Israel. But more than just the progressive left has become politically homeless in the United States.
The Jews are guilty of 3 things:
1. deicide
2. outsized success in every endeavor undertaken by the Jews
3. The most egregious - taking a miserable strip of land and turning it into one of the most successful technological & military countries on the globe and the consequent ability to defend themselves.
There will never be absolution for the Jews.