In Search of the People (Part III)

(Part I, II)

While leftist revolutionaries around the world came to embrace third-world peasants, Arab nationalists, and even Islamists as manifestations of the People, Western revolutionaries had a problem as they lacked these groups at home. The United States never had a peasant class. In Europe, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had eliminated the peasant class in a mostly bloodless fashion and, until the end of the twentieth century, Arab and Muslim migration were not significant issues. The solution was to turn to racial and later sexual minorities.

Mid-twentieth-century American radicals “discovered” blacks, a group that was honestly being oppressed. At a time when white workers were embracing the New Deal and its protections for unions and even going so far as to vote for Eisenhower, blacks stood out as a group whose problems could not easily be solved by lobbying for some changes to current laws. Blacks were up against the well-organized conspiracy of segregation that was passively facilitated by a wider white society that, even subconsciously, looked down on blacks and did not see their plight as a priority.

In the end, though, the mainline Civil Rights Movement proved a failure for leftist revolutionaries. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in defeating formal segregation by pursuing a moderate path that was fundamentally unrevolutionary. It avoided violence and framed itself as being within the American tradition. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., blacks were Americans who, as Americans, were now coming to collect on the American promise. He succeeded precisely because he managed to convince white America that he was not a revolutionary but an American asking for perfectly reasonable American things. 

While the Civil Rights Movement itself proved distinctively unrevolutionary and, even more subversively demonstrated that a reformist movement really could bring about real change within a liberal democracy, it still ended up proving useful to the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, while well-intentioned and perhaps necessary under the circumstances, effectively eliminated the constitutional balance between the federal and state governments. Now the federal government can force any law upon a state simply by claiming that it is a matter of civil rights, leaving us with a dangerously overpowered federal government just waiting for leftists to take control and turn it to their own ends.

At the end of the day, the Civil Rights Movement did not solve the economic problems facing the black community. This caused many civil rights leaders, including Dr. King in the last years of his life, to drift toward a more revolutionary mindset. This did nothing to help actual black people. This should only be expected as the purpose of a leftist revolution is not to improve the lives of actual individuals. A group is only useful, and therefore only counts as part of the People, when their problems are not being solved. Thus, leftist revolutionaries have needed to keep blacks poor and blame American racism for it. One can see this most easily in urban policy and education, areas dominated by the left, that have utterly failed the black community economically but have kept alive a sense of grievance.   

The less plausible the charge of racism, in the conventional sense, has become, as Americans have become less racist, the more racism has needed to be redefined in ever more abstract frameworks. This has benefited leftists as it makes the case for revolution. If you are black and your goal is for white people to not hate you and conspire to keep you out of middle-class jobs or even murder you, there is no need for a revolution. If your goal is to not be an outsider in a culture created by white people for the benefit of white people, then the only solution is for there to be a revolution. This will tear down white American culture and place blacks as the People at the center of the new culture. White people will be stripped of any positive identity and left only with the option of being allies of blacks if they wish to not be oppressors. 

The most important leftist success of the 1960s was the sexual revolution. This was indirectly connected to the Civil Rights Movement. As Shelby Steele has argued, white American parents who were complicit in tolerating segregation and felt guilty about it were not in a position to challenge their children over whom they slept with and their kids knew it. Sexuality has long been a tool of revolutionaries as communities require rigid sexual rules to establish clear lines of kinship that place children within the group. Allow children to be born outside of clear families and their community becomes the non-community of the revolution. The Sexual Revolution has been particularly effective at maintaining blacks as a revolutionary class. It has inhibited economic growth within the black community. At the same time, anyone who points this out can be charged as a racist. Thus, blacks are more likely to assume that the source of their problems is racism, as manifested in bourgeois values like the nuclear family, and the only solution is revolution.  

The Sexual Revolution also created a new oppressed group that could serve as manifestations of the People for leftist revolutionaries, sexual minorities. It was leftist revolutionaries who decided that gay people were actually a group as opposed to simply individuals who pursued an action that should or should not be tolerated to various degrees. Furthermore, the fact that the sexual revolution made sexual repression a form of oppression rendered gays an oppressed group. Gays are an even better class of revolutionaries than blacks as accommodating them within a traditional society is even more difficult, hence gays are more likely to assume that their only solution is the revolution and will not be bought off by minor reforms such as the removal of anti-sodomy laws.

Furthermore, the fact that even considering gays as a group is an invention of leftist revolutionaries has meant that the gay community is intrinsically tied to the leftist revolutionary cause and cannot easily exist without it. It makes perfect sense for a black conservative to still want there to be a black community such as their presumably black families. It is hardly obvious why an Andrew Sullivan style conservative gay community would want to operate as a gay community as opposed to being a tolerated minority within their presumably heterosexual families and the wider community. Keep in mind that gays, unlike blacks, are usually not raised with their identity. This is something they consciously embrace as teenagers or later in life.  

Much as with blacks, the gay rights movement involves an act of motte and bailey duplicity. Now that the sexual revolution has happened, it makes sense to not stigmatize people for sexual acts between consenting adults. We might even take the next step and say that government should recognize same-sex marriage. None of this, in itself, would be particularly revolutionary. On the contrary, accommodating homosexuals in such a fashion lessens their ability to serve as revolutionaries and risks their status as a manifestation of the People.

The revolutionary doctrine would be to say that the sexual acts of homosexuals give them authenticity as a manifestation of the People that heterosexuals lack, particularly if they submit themselves to traditional morality. Heterosexuality does make one part of the People but their oppressor. As such, heterosexuals need homosexuals to redeem and make them part of the People. This is done by allowing heterosexuals to become allies and share in the task of tearing down society and rebuilding it around homosexuals.

Homosexuality requires someone to do, or at least desire to do, something that most people would find repulsive. This limits the number of people who can be gay. The solution is for sex education that will encourage more people to overcome any predispositions against engaging in gay sex so there can be more gay people. Alternatively, there are the bi-sexual and queer identities that anyone can embrace. Thus, the LBTQ+ identity has the ability to become a larger group than African Americans and thus a better claim to being the American People. And since LGBTQ+ identity really means nothing more than rejecting traditional sexual norms, this manifestation of the People can be relied upon to truly embrace the revolution as their very identity is meaningless otherwise.  

More recently, as homosexuality has gained mainstream acceptance and lost its revolutionary edge, we have seen the rise of a transgender identity, which furthers the revolutionary logic of homosexuality. Unlike homosexuality, which requires no great metaphysical leap to accept that a person really is attracted to people of the same sex, accepting that someone is trans requires buying into a larger metaphysical system that the person really is a different “gender” from how they were identified at birth. The reason for accepting this new metaphysics is that leftist revolutionaries have placed transgender people as an authentic manifestation of the People and to reject this claim makes you an oppressor and not part of the People. This means that transgender people are dependent on leftist revolutionaries not only to have a transgender community but even to be trans in the first place.

Transgenderism, building off queer identity, is something so nebulous that anyone can claim to be trans and, thus become a manifestation of the People. That being said, “authentic” transgenderhood requires hormone injections and surgery. Going through this means that not only are you the male or female that you claim to be but you are more authentically that gender than those “assigned” their identities by their doctor at birth, thus you are an authentic manifestation of the People. Cisgender people can only become part of the People by being allies of transgenders and acknowledging their greater authenticity.

In the present discourse, it has become common to see rhetoric like “Gaza to Ferguson” or “Queers for Palestine.” If one thinks in terms of helping members of particular groups improve their physical lots in life and overcome oppression, this sounds strange. We are talking about different groups in different parts of the planet, with different needs that might even clash. For example, Hamas believes in murdering gay people. 

These claims begin to make sense once you realize that we are not talking about actual blacks, homosexuals, or Palestinians. Instead, these are simply names for manifestations of the People, united in being rhetorically useful for leftist revolutionaries. The point is not to improve the lot of members of any of these groups. On the contrary, doing so would lessen their usefulness to the revolution and render them no longer manifestations of the People.  Thus, we are not interested in helping gay Palestinians. Such a Palestinian undermines Palestinian peoplehood and, thus, it is a revolutionary act of the People to kill them. By contrast, a gay person in the United States does represent the People so not wishing them mazal tov on their wedding is a counter-revolutionary act that makes you an oppressor. 

The real purpose is for there to be the revolution. This will place the truest manifestation of the People, leftist revolutionaries, in power. In the end, not only will whites, Christians, and Jews not be part of the People but even the "oppressed" groups, which were supposed to be favored to make up for their lack of privilege will eventually also lose their place as they stop being needed and can be replaced with a more plausibly revolutionary manifestation of the People.   

Oppression and Alienation: Understanding Palestinian Terrorism

This post owes a debt to Clarissa. I made the decision not to talk about Russia here for the purpose of space and lack of competency in the field but much of what I say here about Hamas and the logic of alienation being used to justify irrational cruelty as an end in of itself has been influenced by her discussions of Russia’s motivations for invading Ukraine and their sense of grievance against the West.

Classical liberalism is fundamentally concerned with physical oppression. The problem with the world is that there are people out there willing to burn people at the stake for believing the wrong things about the nature of the Eucharist or some other obscure metaphysical issue. If only people learned to interfere in other people's private lives a little less, the world would become significantly better, though still far from a perfect, place. This needs to be contrasted with the leftist revolutionary tradition stemming from Jacques Rousseau. Here, the central crime is alienation. To be clear, there is usually a connection between physical oppression and alienation. People who claim alienation will usually be able to claim some sort of historical persecution. This allows leftist revolutionaries to cloak themselves as struggling against some sort of oppression. The reality is that alienation is distinct from physical oppression. By blurring the distinction, leftist revolutionaries can claim that opposing them by definition makes you an oppressor and justifies their use of physical violence against you. This has important implications for understanding current events like the Israel-Hamas war and why people on the left are so willing to support Hamas even as it goes against every value the left pretends to support. 

With persecution, Zayid does a conscious malicious action to Umar, who is the passive victim. The logical implication of this is that Umar has the right to respond by doing bad things to Zayid to cause him to stop. With alienation by contrast, Umar is the victim of historical forces that Zayid might, in some sense benefit from, but are certainly not his creation. These forces render Umar passive and stop him from developing his authentic self as a member of a particular group. Furthermore, alienation might even cause Umar to develop a false consciousness where he becomes grateful to Zayid as his benefactor and comes to identify with Zayid's group. If Zayid were merely Umar's persecutor, he could do something about it; mainly, he could stop or at least lessen his persecutory actions. With alienation, there is nothing that Zayid can do. First, he is not the cause of Umar's alienation, just the practical manifestation of it. Second, any attempt, on Zayid's part, to help Umar will actually increase his alienation. With persecution, there can be more or less of it; with alienation, its mere existence is an ultimate evil. Despite the fact that Zayid is not responsible for Umar’s alienation, by equating alienation with physical oppression, Umar gains the moral right to harm Zayid even if Zayid is a good person who honestly wants to help Umar.

How does this thinking look when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Imagine a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7. He is going to work in Israel and gets stopped at an Israeli checkpoint where a soldier beats him up. This would be physical oppression. In a classical liberal story, our Palestinian would get to work and his Israeli boss and co-workers would become aware of the injustices of Israeli rule over Palestinians. This they reject out of their liberal universalist humanism, which teaches that there is really no such thing as Israelis and Palestinians; rather, we are all united in a common humanity. As such, in addition, to getting the Palestinian to a hospital, the Israelis join with the Palestinian to protest against military abuse and work for a two-state solution or even a single secular liberal democracy for all. 

This story becomes quite different if we look at it from the perspective of alienation. Here, the primary crime of Israel is not any land they took from Palestinians or the occupation but the fact that they stand in the way of the development of a true Palestinian consciousness. From this perspective, the real threat is not the Israeli soldier. On the contrary, the soldier serves a valuable purpose. His persecution of Palestinians serves to awaken their consciousness as Palestinians, who as victims of Israel can claim moral superiority. By contrast, the liberal Israelis, through their universalist humanism, challenge the very notion of Palestinian identity. In fact, the more that they attempt to limit Israeli oppression the more they increase Palestinian alienation. It would not help if the liberal Israelis decided to leave their land and give it to the Palestinian. The Palestinian would still live under the hegemony of Western thought as he would be tempted to be grateful to the liberal Israelis and try to now be like them.  

To be clear, Palestinian alienation should be understood within the larger perspectives of Arab nationalism. Once upon a time, Arabs were a dominant power. Then came Imperialism, where Arabs came under European domination. More than just an injustice in the sense of persecution, it brought about alienation. Remember that, unlike the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the French and the British had a plausible argument that it was their right and moral duty to "civilize" Arabs. As such, Arabs lost their proper consciousness of being superior but also came to suspect that the West might really be better. To make matters worse, just at the moment that the British were finally leaving the Middle East, you had the establishment of the State of Israel and it turned out Arabs could not even defeat the Jews. This would imply that Arabs were really pathetic unless we assume that the Jews are the center of a vast conspiracy. The only way to escape this alienation is for Arabs to decisively demonstrate their superiority so that they no longer even have to compare themselves to the West. By destroying Israel and saving the world from the Jewish conspiracy, they would show that they had deserved to be on top as the movers of history all along. (To be clear, while being an Arab is not the same thing as being a Muslim, Islam can easily be substituted for the purpose of this narrative if that is what appeals to the particular individual.) 

Solving Palestinian alienation would require that Palestinians not only physically defeat Israel but do so in a way that gave them the moral high ground as the superior culture. This simultaneously means that Israelis must acknowledge that the Palestinians were right all along but that all the real work was done by Palestinians. Following the logic of Robin DiAngelo, Israelis would have to work to dismantle not only the State of Israel but also even the liberal Jewish identity that made it possible while acknowledging that, due to the enormous crime of Zionism, there is nothing that Israelis can ever do to atone for the unearned privilege of being Israeli. Even for Israelis to take credit for dismantling Israel would be an act of oppression as that would imply that Palestinians are not fully capable on their own and need the help of Israeli "white saviors." All credit must go to the Palestinians who not only defeated Israel all on their own but were magnanimous enough to allow Israelis the illusion of helping out of a desire to help even such loathsome beings as Israelis. In truth, Being an Israeli so twists a person's thinking that even their attempts to atone are secretly still attempts to exert power and therefore oppression. As such, there really is no way for Israelis to help Palestinians solve the problem of alienation. The closest that an Israeli can come is to acknowledge that there is nothing that they can do to atone for the crime of being Israeli but they can only strive to learn to better humiliate themselves. 

Clearly, Palestinian alienation cannot be solved and that is actually the point. As long as Palestinians never overcome their alienation, they can never be held responsible for any of their actions. Furthermore, they have a blank check to commit any atrocity. All of this becomes justified as part of the struggle against oppression. This is a highly attractive offer, one that few people have the mental health to resist.       

Once one recognizes this distinction between physical oppression and alienation, so much of what might confuse regular Westerners about the Israel-Hamas war begins to make sense. Why did Hamas seize power in Gaza after Israel left in 2005 and turn it into a terror base, building tunnels instead of trying to improve the economy? What sort of advocate for Palestine could have thought that attacking Israel on October 7th was a good idea knowing that it would lead to the current devastation of Gaza we are now seeing? Living in peace with Israel once Gaza could develop as its own state might have improved the lives of ordinary Palestinians but it would have still left them in Israel’s shadow, both economically and morally. To overcome their alienation, Hamas needs to defeat Israel militarily while claiming the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.

Most of the towns that were hardest hit were populated by Israelis on the left. These were people who worked hard to improve relations with Palestinians and provide employment for them. This kindness was repaid by Palestinian workers providing intelligence for Hamas on the layout and security procedures of these towns. The largest number of Israeli civilian casualties came from the Nova Music Festival, which presumably had a similar ratio of conservatives to liberals as you would find at Burning Man. This has helped unite Israel. Unlike attacks on settlements, which allow Israeli leftists to argue that it is only the "mean oppressive right-wingers" that stand in the way of peace, the attacks of October 7 have made it abundantly clear that Hamas wants to murder all Israelis, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. It is liberal Israelis who truly threaten Palestinian identity. As long as the world thinks that there is a version of Zionism that is ok, they will not allow for the full river to the sea liberation of Palestine. Just as there can be no such thing as a liberal Nazi, there can be no such thing as a liberal Zionist. To demonstrate this point, it is precisely the liberal Zionists who must be murdered.

At first glance, it might seem absurd to accuse Israel of genocide. Where are the Israeli gas chambers and crematoria or their equivalent infrastructure-intensive machinery to indicate a top-down conspiracy to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible? Does anyone believe that even right-wing Israeli officials care so much about killing Palestinians for its own sake that they would sabotage the Israeli war effort to cause Israel to fall under foreign occupation just to kill a few more Palestinians? Here, genocide must be understood in the sense of alienation as opposed to physical oppression. Genocide in the sense of alienation does not require anyone to be murdered. You are guilty of genocide if you do anything to interfere with the development of a group’s identity. From the perspective of alienation, the Israelis living near Gaza and minding their own business, even if they were little kids, were the moral equivalents of Nazi concentration camp guards so it was right to kill them. 

From a leftist revolutionary point of view, such actions were not genocide. The Palestinian people rising up against their oppressors as part of the recovery of their national identity can never be guilty of genocide. Furthermore, Israelis, since they are oppressors, have no true identity to be wiped out. On the contrary, as we know from Freire, attacking an oppressor is not really violence but a redemptive act of love.

In a perverse sense, Hamas has been successful. The October 7^th attack surprised Israel. It required years of sophisticated planning and logistics. Now, no one can think of Hamas as incompetent at least militarily. An even more important victory for Hamas is that they have demonstrated that they can kill Israelis in all sorts of horrific ways without losing popular support on the Arab street or even on Western college campuses. The fact that Western leftists have been forced to go against their stated values such as protecting rape victims demonstrates the moral power of Hamas. They are so powerful that they do not have to conform themselves to Western values. On the contrary, it is the Westerners who wish to confirm to Hamas’ values.         

Shelby Steele argues that much of the radicalism of the 1960s was made possible because the mainstream white establishment had lost its moral authority due to being implicated in the crime of enabling segregation. As such, white elites now needed blacks to return to them the moral authority they previously possessed. This meant surrendering in the face of the demands of student radicals regardless of whether these demands had any connection to improving the lives of blacks living in poverty. 

A similar dynamic may be playing itself out between the Western left and Hamas. The Western left has a hypocrisy problem. For all of its rhetoric of overthrowing Capitalism, it has been too easily seduced by its comforts. Campus radicals are not about to give up their iPhones let alone the opportunity to work for Apple. This has given rise to a corporate pretend radicalism without any substance that actually strengthens big business.

Much as the Civil Rights movement revealed the hypocrisy of 1950s white liberals by showing what an actual liberal movement could be, Hamas has shown what it means to truly be a revolutionary decolonization movement. Hamas does not allow concerns about codes of conduct or even the day-to-day welfare of the residents of Gaza to stand in the way of their struggle against Zionism. The Western left knows that to restore their credibility as a revolutionary movement they need to embrace Hamas as the true embodiment of everything the left hopes to be. By supporting Hamas from thousands of miles away, leftists can maintain their moral authority as revolutionary opponents of Capitalism while still being able to live lives of Capitalist comfort at home.

One thing that I would hope readers take away from my discussion of alienation is that it is fundamentally a mind virus. Alienation cannot offer solutions to real-world problems. It is precisely the attempt to do so that worsens the problem. Thinking of oneself as suffering from alienation cannot even solve the personal psychological problem of alienation. On the contrary, feeling alienated is an addictive drug that feels good in the short run precisely because it presents the perfect excuse for not taking responsibility and attempting concrete actions to improve your life. All of this is quite intentional. The purpose of left-wing revolutionary ideologies is to have a revolution that places leftists in power. This requires a class of individuals who are psychologically broken to such an extent that they cannot function in society and therefore can be pushed into supporting a never-ending revolution in the hope that they can somehow be healed.

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