Left politics and the closing of the liberal mind

American liberals are finding it increasingly difficult to imagine ideological disagreement.

Brian Beutler, writing for his Substack:

Examine the engagement around any remotely positive statement or piece of news about Biden circulating online and you’ll find it drowned in a torrent of left-wing coded attacks… We know Trump world is behind some of these schemes. I strongly suspect that a peek under the hood would reveal they’re behind it all.

Brian has always been an unambiguous liberal, but watching his politics devolve over the past several years has been genuinely disquieting. In 2016 he maintained a fairly reasonable relationship with the left; you can get a sense of it in articles like this one. Here he has no problem with conceding “the fact that the Sanders bloc is large and growing” or accepting that this “simply reflects ideological divisions”. How the hell did he go from that to this unhinged conspiracy theory that Trump is behind all “left-wing coded attacks” of Joe Biden?

It’s tempting to read this as cynical rhetoric in the service of the party or even as pandering to a lucrative media market, but I think there’s a better explanation: media liberals are losing their ability to imagine ideological opposition. The left’s politics are fairly common outside of the US and have a long and well-documented history. It’s easy to pick up a book and see what we are likely to think about a given topic and the substantive reasoning behind it, even if you happen to disagree with it.

But liberals like Beutler simply seem unable to accept that any of this is real. They are not, that is to say, liberals in the traditional sense: people who are open minded, who value a pluralistic society because it facilitates the world’s real diversity of perspectives and values and judgments, and who value liberal institutions because they (aspire to) mediate real disagreements without recourse to violence. There is a certain epistemelogical humility coupled with a mature theory of mind that lies at the heart of liberal theory; but in the media at least, this has become increasingly rare.

Consider Israel’s war on Palestine, for example. Solidarity with Palestine has been a core commitment on the radical left for the better part of a century now, and our criticism of Israel has only become more strident in recent decades. There are volumes of literature laying out the left’s substantive case. There are endless examples of leftists making serious sacrifices — getting arrested, getting blacklisted, or worse — for their position on Israel. And this has never been a critique that has spared Democrats. Here’s how Chomsky was writing more than thirty years ago about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon:

It therefore benefited from the active support of the Reagan Administration, which was condemned by Democratic liberals and others farther to the left for not exhibiting proper enthusiasm for this merciless assault, which left over 20,000 dead, overwhelmingly civilians. (Deterring Democracy p. 187)

No one who has even a passing familiarity with left politics should be surprised by its reaction to Israel’s ramped-up aggression. But this is an utterly typical sentiment among liberal pundits today:

The theory that leftists are just chasing social media engagement is always met by liberals as some kind of novel and fascinating insight, but it’s become such an intellectual crutch that I’m hard pressed to think of a left position they haven’t done this with. Undoubtedly there are leftists who are mostly just in it for attention, but this is true across the political spectrum; it’s just a banal fact of online that gives us little further insight into into what leftists think, or what anyone thinks.

There are a full range of other moves, of course. Five years ago it was popular to insist that left politics just expressed secret bigotry: instead of defending Clinton’s vote on Iraq, you would just say that leftists hate women and don’t want to see one as president. Occasionally liberals argue that left politics reflect embarrassing psychopathology, EG they are just angry at dad, but this rhetoric is much more popular among Republicans. Another move is to accuse leftists of “cosplay”, which I have yet to figure out; the implication is that we are just pretending to be radicals, but Democrats only say this because we really are opposing them and they are mad about it.

These are all just variations on ad hominem, but once you start noticing how ubiquitous it’s become it’s hard to keep calling contemporary liberals “liberals.” Intellectually at least they are much closer to what liberals have historically called “totalitarianism”; their ideological commitments are so totalizing that they can no longer imagine anything else. In a healthy liberal discourse, conspiracy theories like Brian’s would be dismissed out of hand even by other liberals. But today if you want to rationalize away left criticism of Democrats, you can say just about anything.