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The Pro-Tyrant Left
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Tempting as it is to simply turn away, it is important for democrats to understand the pro-tyrant left. It is vastly influential on campuses and its ideas are trickling down into the wider culture. In the short twentieth century, the rise of Stalinism, a reactionary but non-capitalist social system, disorientated the left -- bar some fragments -- more or less completely.

There was a slow scouring out of the habits of mind, the sensibilities and the values of an older left-wing culture that had been rooted in the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the ethical socialism of the mass European labor movements. In its place was put power-worship, authoritarianism, and a cult of the transformative power of revolutionary violence.

Crucially, in the 1960s and 1970s, while the New Left innovated in the realm of culture and personal relations, when it came to geopolitics it mostly fell into line as cheerleader or apologist for one authoritarian “progressive” after another. As this New Left aged and drifted to the faculties and publishing houses it declared itself to be anti-anti-communist. In practice, it blamed America first.

After the collapse of its global alternative to liberal capitalism, the pro-tyrant left simply refused to rethink. Rather than give up either its Manichean view of a world composed of two camps of progress and reaction, it recreated both by substituting an implacable negativism, centred on a conception of America as the “Great Satan,” in the place of what had been a coherent (if wrong-headed and tyrannical) program for social reconstruction.

After 1989, and especially after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the old idea that Stalinism (its crimes notwithstanding) was objectively progressive against the West, morphed into the idea that all opposition to "US imperialism" or "Empire" was a "resistance" or "multitude" that must be (its crimes notwithstanding) supported, or at least not opposed energetically.

This pro-tyrant left thinks it holds the key to the entire world in the palm of its hand. If America is opposed to a tyrant, then -- there is some dubious logic here, but this really is the crucial move -- the tyrant must be opposing America. And -- this is the last stretch, stay with me -- therefore the tyrant is an "anti-imperialist" and, objectively, "progressive."

These ideas have been adopted in softer forms throughout the culture. We see it in the refusal of emotional commitment to the West in its battles against dictators and terrorists, the refusal to credit the West with anything but malign intent, the tendency to blame ourselves when we are attacked, and the pathological refusal to see plain the nature of forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah.


http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/new/blogs/johnson/The_Mind_of_the_ProTyrant_Left
Filed under: Anti-Americanism Democracy Human Rights Left New Left Stalinism Totalitarianism
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