On left-wing anti-semitism: Open letter to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

I wonder if anyone in the DSA in NYC is interested in talking about left-wing anti-semitism and how it is both facilitated by "oppressionist" identity politics generally, and, it seems, a part of the DSA's normal and expected discourse (way of thinking and speaking) that can be found in the pro-Palestine group that I understand is having a "teach-in" (which excludes me because I believe in open and honest discussions and not in being "taught" what to believe)?

I was treated like an enemy combattant by the leaders of this group and its upcoming panel "discussion" the other day the moment I demurred just on the one question of whether the Jews of the state of Israel are entitled to anything at all, including any possible claim to be there by right. I made clear that I was absolutely in sympathy with everything else they were conducting their holy war about: the Palestinians have been treated unjustly, and Israel bears much of the blame -- its government and army, with the encouragement of conservative American and European Jewish elites who care mostly just about their own people and are not very interested in problematizing or struggling against aspects of today's capitalism, its police states, its treatment of whoever can be marginalized, and its tendencies towards global civil war; I even agree that capitalism has been dependent on racisms and violence; I also think Israel and its people are caught up in this whether they like or not.

The truth is that these liberal leftists are part of the problem in what they do, because they are trying to fight in a global civil war, and the watchwords apparently are the "oppressed" (usually this is simplified to mean a bunch of intersecting and different demographical groups, but it can also mean the world's poor) and "oppressors."

The social justice warriors help the war/police state unwittingly by doing some of its work for them, partly in the way they treat people whom they should welcome as comrades, and not on the price of abandoning all possible internal dissent and disagreement.

This kind of discourse will always wind up targeting Jews, and the reason is surely the simplifications and their moralization, with the world conceived as a global virtual civil war between not only capitalist states but the bad-guy demographical categories that can be associated with them on the one hand, and the approved "oppressed" social groups on the other. Today the "oppressed" are for the left the new chosen people, a multiplicity of groups that are demographically defined as minorities in government population counts (in America, at least; in France, that is illegal), and that confer identities as those who count because under the system of oppression they don't. This can include almost any demographical minority group except the Jews. (It also tends to exclude the European-American university-educated people who make up most of the left to begin with, especially at its more sophisticated; such people operate under a kind of warning: what you say may be correct, but your given identity makes you potentially an adversary oppressor; maybe that is one reason why white middle class people on the left are especially eager to downplay the slightest demurral from the party line-- one that actually belongs in the first place not to the anti-capitalist left but to corporate liberalism, which wants to include all types of people, while being, in typical American fashion, perfectly intolerant ideologically).

The discourse of these leftists does not seek to interrogate and learn more about either the world today and how we can understand it, nor, crucially as I see it (I study political philosophy), how the ways we have come to think may be part of the problem. I could want to contribute something to the cause of the left and democratic socialism today, but I suspect I would encounter hostility and cancellation threats wherever I go. Some of us writers have this problem; it's hard for us to be full comrades and not fellow-travelers because we are so used to asking questions and thinking in ways that are not the business/activist manner of getting things done. And American culture is almost entirely practical and not theoretical, with the organized left also being of this kind.

Jews of course are a particular group because we have been both hated victims -- and this never seems to stop being possible -- and can be often associated with wealth and power. Those are bad things for the (pseudo-)left, so the Jews wind up being hated -- this time as the oppressors. And thus you get a formula for left-wing anti-semitism.

It will not go away because left wingers throw some flattering bones to Jews they hope are scavengering for a chance to join the left and its supposedly incipient constitutive power. Adding the names of Jews (those who can count as victims or oppressed) to the list of scheduled victim and oppressed castes will not solve the problem. It goes to the heart of the hatreds and left-wing reliance on militarist or incipiently imperial (as Christianity and Islam were, for better and worse) tactics. It is the Manichaeanism, the paradigm of civil war (good guys vs. bad guys), and the moralism of this, and the hatred that goes with it, that are the problems here. Ultimately it is refusal to think that replaces curiosity with militancy, when the two should be separated and not identified.

Nothing that is said about how bad things are in the region for the Palestinians and how wrong or culpable Israel is will, even to the extent that those claims are true, solve this problem. Which has other unsavory consequences, too, to be sure. Ultimately, this kind of left-liberalism winds up unwittingly aiding a fascist totalitarian logic that is already in their thinking.

Reflexively, they hit bad quickly and hard with a mixture of ad hominem claims about me, who supposedly is an enemy of their cause because I dared to suggest any sympathy for what to them is only the other, wrong, side (or for any of the people within that side, people whose desires to live secure and normal lives are not so different from everyone else's; what if we wrestled with that problem of security rather than just attacking those who are susceptible to want it, a broad class indeed?). It is an intellectual authoritarianism to strike a full war posture like this. What loses is the possibility of using speech and dialogue to try to understand better the problems in the world that we are part of.

Either thought is open inquiry or it is war. These social justice warriors will put me in the enemy camp the moment I challenge the slightest jot, tittle, plank, or statement in their rhetorical war game. But then what is the interest in the discussion? It's enjoyment of self-propagandizing. In saying this, I would indeed be liable to criticism as red-baiting, if it were not that I am fully committed to and desire, as it were, the existence and success of the left or something like it.

I was invited to cancel my membership and seek a refund of my member dues, something I will not do voluntarily. I was treated as a person to be cancelled. And on the basis of a summary judgment, the kind people make when they take someone aside, out of a group, to give them a correctional dressing-down and talking to. Not on the basis of a claim that had to be defended with arguments that were not already simply assumed to be true: claims about me, about the issue at hand, about the supposed good and bad guys, themselves of course enjoying an impunity, beyond criticism, a feature surely of our administrative system of governance which has so depoliticized our society that the last president could only appeal to the irrelevance of any veridical character to the statements made by those in power, his message being: True or false, I don't care, what I mean when I see this is that is only to tell you what I want you to do. No discussion; it's not even possible when some of the discussants proclaim their refusal of sincerity in their performative uses of speech to threaten or motivate.

I was immediately marked for exclusion, because I said the wrong thing in saying anything. With evident great anger, the excluding bosses, who claimed to speak for the DSA itself, ranted with strings of conceptual shibboleths affirming the position on the situation in Israel/Palestine and the facts that are part of the theories that sustain their rhetorical belligerence. Since I cannot learn anything from such rehashed rantings, and I believe no one else can either, I refuse to attend such a "sit-in" and ask that they be cancelled and replaced with genuine conversations among people who disagree about, for God's sake, something.

The problem is not with the factual historical and contemporary details about what is bad and who is wrong. The problem is that being on that much of a war footing leaves nothing really to talk about. The people who attend the "teach-ins" will do so because they are already inclined to "like" what they hear, and will learn more about how they can and should articulate this shared position both to others and to themselves. It will be reinforcing ideologically and satisfying and perhaps it will either win new converts to the democratic socialist cause (in a very anti-democratic way!), or, more likely, will help to fire up participants to act by using rhetoric that appeals to their ability to become enraged.

The resulting rage may be correct in response to certain things that Israeli governments have done over the years. Though, these things are actually (though such relative evaluations, often evoked defensively, justify nothing, of course) not more but less horrible than: the Nazi death camps that killed more than 5 million Jews and nearly as many people in several other categories, including "medical" ones; the Soviet Gulag Archipelago; the crushing by Soviet tanks of the Budapest and Prague uprisings; Mao's Cultural Revolution, American slavery (which they will say is part of the same thing, colonialism), colonial butcheries, like Belgium and the Congo and the British in Ireland and many other places; the avoidable attacks on civilians in WWI and WW2, if any were; the American use of the nuclear bomb in Japan; the Khmer Rouge massacre of what passed for the local middle class; pogroms in Europe, in the 20th century as in the 11th and others; and many other things, including American mass incarceration.

These might most or all be theorized as part of one thing or several things, as sharing a single common logic or more than one. Like most Jews who are on the left, I have room in my mind and heart for outrage at oppression and injustice towards people other than those in my family, tribe, or nation(s), and no need to omit any from mention. But of all these things and others, I ask just one question: Is Israel, and its existence as a Jewish state, an evil, and if it is an evil or a mistake, is it an evil on the same level as, say, the Chinese imprisoning of Muslims, or the Khmer Rouge massacres, or the Gulag, the Nazi camps, etc.?

There may be ways in which some of these things follow a logic that is still operative. If so, that's a problem, as it means that

"Never again" is a far from certain declaration, however successful the Jews of Israel are in avoiding their own victimhood in another massacre.

Whatever is said, it can easily be recognized that the kind of left-liberal social justice warriors I have described will always save their deepest indignation, and indeed, hatred, whatever their rationalizations, for the Jews, or something associated with all, many, or some of them. Listen to leftist radicals in America in the last couple of generations, as I have: the rage mounts to a frenetic height otherwise unapproached when injustice ascribable to Jews is at stake. The mood is as unmistakeable as the objects targeted: It is a very determined and well-reinforced self-taught rage that is not easy to distinguish from hatred. Israel and the figure of the politically conservative Jew (which I myself do not belong to) is spoken of not as a fraternal comrade but part of the enemy camp. Is it? Is it necessarily? Is it presumptively?

Israel today is in some ways a first-world society living in and as an armed camp. It certainly is far too complex to be reduced to that, but it does tend to have some of these features. This is as much of a problem perhaps as the excessive wealth and social injustices in the days of the Jewish and Biblical Prophets. If there is a global equivalent, it lives as if behind fortress walls, pleasant lives with plenty and leisure, while outside those walls the global civil war against the poor takes place. That's awful, though many people on the left in the US and Western Europe live lives not utterly outside this ready to hand schema of the privileged classes.

I suggest that there is one good reason one could advance for speaking especially about and to Jews: They are more likely to listen, because our tradition includes self-criticism and a deep striving for social justice. An Israeli prime minister is more likely to conceded any point than the head of state of old Maoist Cambodia and a lot of other places. Indeed, nations that are democratic enough to pretend to be tend to be like this; the lack of closure of the state of things in a given society or world that a war thinking tends to produce (the closure) is precisely the reason why an organized left can exist in a society like ours and engage in open public discourse. We cannot reduce the world's political geography to a matter of imaginary entities like evil empires, and precisely because it is almost always the case with such myths that they have some truth that the myth does not invent but only exaggerates.

Sometimes the left-wing jihad, which intellectual does little more that string together shibboleths everyone already knows, reminding us that there is oppression afoot in the world, and it matters, just gets a bit too self-righteous, sure of itself, and angry.

The British have had to face that anti-semitism took down the left in the last election, and the left bears part of the responsibility for this otherwise tragic defeat for the working class and poor of Britain.

The American left could avoid this. I wish it would. I fear there is no place on it for someone like me, who never supported any cause or organization or position without some reservations, a writer who writes about political problems as a way of thinking about them, and thinking about them in an effort to arrive at solutions or even formulating problems that are not already well-prepared and ready to serve to the entire crowd in the socialist mess hall. I generally have sided as a writer, and certainly do as an avid student of mostly left-wing contemporary European political philosophy, with the more left-wing positions in various debates and discussions, but I am not interested in being a soldier in a virtual civil war to be fought discursively (and with marches and banners) whose stakes and meanings have already been decided. Especially when it turns to excluding the likes of me the moment we do anything else but cheer on cue as part of the chorus.

Actions may need to be strategically focused; discussions should aim not to be mere demonstrations of unanimity. If you need that, say that it is a rally and these are speeches leaders make to the people gathered in the square as they wait to resume the march. Don't call it a discussion, and don't arrange teach-ins for members or others, when actually much on the left is not a bunch of true facts we have knowledge of (but that put us wholly in the right), but a set of theories and problems and questions that people should think about. Could we have strategy without theory and inquiry? Pardon me if my mistake is to not realize that most meetings and discussions in the DSA are for motivational purposes rather than those of thought.

Those leaders who insult my intelligence will, given power, limit my liberty, I am sure. If they do this broadly, the left party will get its candidates elected, but in forgetting its mind it will lose its soul and its reason for existing. The proof that this can happen is that it often has. Ignoring this problem will limit the left's influence, even if at the moment it seems to be on a roll.