Leftists Increasingly Left Behind

Another brilliant essay by Nelson Ascher on the post-Communist metamorphosis of the anti-American left:

Those whom the fall of the Berlin Wall had left orphans of a cause, spent the next decade plotting the containment of the US. It was a complex operation that involved the (in many cases state-sponsored) mushrooming of NGOs, Kyoto, the creation of the ICC, the salami tactics applied against America’s main strategic ally in the Middle-East, Israel, through the Trojan Horse of the Oslo agreements, the subversion of the sanctions against Iraq etc. I’m not as conspiratorially-minded as to think that all these efforts were in any way centralized or that they had some kind of master-plan behind them. It was above all the case of the spirit of the times converging, through many independent manifestations, towards a single goal. Nonetheless we can be sure that, after those manifestations reached a critical mass, there has been no lack of efforts to coordinate them.

And so, spontaneously up to a point, anti-Americanism became the alternative ideology that came to fill in the vacuum left by the failure of traditional, USSR-based communism and its Maoist or Trotskyite satellites. Before 1989, the global left had something to fight for: either the strengthening of the communist states or the correction of what they called their bureaucratic distortions. To fight for something is simultaneously to fight against whatever threatens it, and thus, the leftists were anti-Western and anti-Americans too, anti-capitalistic in short.

Now, whatever they wanted to defend or protect doesn’t exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let’s not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image. . .

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

But, the Belmont Club says Ascher's missed another central flaw in today's liberals--conceit:

If the Western Left is convinced of anything it is it can bend the Islamic world to its will once America has been cleared away. Samuel Huntington wrote that Islam was "convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." But he might have been describing the Left, for whom recent history has been an unaccountable theft of their birthright; a little detail they will put right when America is vanquished. But there is the additional complication of Islam and the idea that they are the Wave of the Future is so ingrained the possibility that Islam will eventually dominate is unthinkable.

But why not? Islam is 1000 years older than the Left; its population burgeoning while the Left is aborting itself into demographic extinction. More fundamentally, any honest Leftist must realize that his movement and its aspirations are rooted in the very West it seeks to destroy. Communist totalitarianism is the doppelganger of secular freedom; and the serpent in the garden must know that the desert, so hospitable to Islam, can only be a place of death for it. The Left may have embarked upon a journey of revenge. They will find suicide.

Ascher and Belmont together are spot-on. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western Liberals seemed entranced by Marxist dogma. Communism was attractive, especially to the young, since it excused failure -- individual or global -- because "the man be keeping me down." At the same time, Marxism guaranteed that the proletariat eventually would triumph (and bring "true communism"), without war. When the Berlin wall vanished, some thought it was The End of History. It wasn't--Marxism just needed a make-over, this time in post-modern dress.

Today's neo-Marxists still hate "the man"-- now embodied as America, the sole superpower--hence their siding with any group seeking America's destruction. And because radical Muslim terrorists seemed the only force capable of smashing bourgeois Western society, as they had been promised, the new Marxists became "pro Jihad" even though core liberal rights and values would be the first casualty of Muslim Shari`ah law. Which is why liberal love for radical Islam -- while useful to the terrorists -- is entirely unrequited.

In Paris to the Moon, New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik chronicled (pages 96-97) an important insight about the French version of the neo-Marxist breed:

[I]t's apparent (to us Americans) . . . that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation is.

Well replace fact (and factual for theory) in that last sentence and you have the common French view of fact checking. People don't speak in straight facts: the facts change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation is. Not, of course, that the French intellectual doesn't use and respect facts, up to a useful point. . . Conversation is an organic, improvised web of fact and theory, and to pick out one bit of it for microscopic overexamination is typically American overearnest comedy.

That's why lefty doctrine smells like it sprouted from a used car lot--despite updated terminology and Dramatis Personae, it's still college-dorm Marxism, circa 1970. That's why liberals are impervious to evidence--facts are morphed to fit philosophy.

No wonder conservatism has dominated American political thought for a quarter-century--while the left loops futile proposals founded on infantile opinions, the right's become the forward-looking party of fact, maturity, and verifiable success. Today's conservatives are both bold and optimistic; the left is depressingly dyspeptic and knows only how to say "no." Thankfully, last November, America said "yes."

(via Instapundit)