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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 15, 2024

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Ah, I think the bit I was referencing was below the paywall. Here's what I was quoting:

  1. The Palestine protests

I recently wrote a post about the Palestine protests that sums up much of what I think here: Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left

Basically, I think that although Israel’s war in Gaza is unpopular, the Palestine protesters are earning few friends in the U.S., thanks to their support for even the most violent and savage armed resistance, their desire to forcibly and bloodily redraw national maps in the name of “decolonization”, their aggressive protest tactics, and the whiff of antisemitism around their movement.

But there’s another important effect of the Palestine protests besides boring and annoying the American populace. Leftists have attempted to subsume every progressive cause — climate change, racial justice, abortion rights, gender equality, trans rights, even affordable housing — into the Palestine issue. Many have started to call this the “omnicause”.

And because Palestinian revanchism is an unpopular cause, and because the protesters have generally acquitted themselves badly, Palestine threatens to drag down all the other progressive activist causes into an abyss of unpopularity. Climate activism, trans rights activism, etc. will now have a whiff of radicalism about them that they didn’t possess before — there will be a general understanding that folks like Greta Thunberg ultimately aim not at the redress of individual problems in the framework of our existing society, but at the violent overthrow of that society in the name of “decolonization”.

Most progressives are not leftists. Most thought Thunberg was cute when she was a kid shouting at old men about her stolen future, but will be less impressed by her keffiyeh-wearing incarnation. But leftist activists hurt the progressive cause, by giving a movement that should seem staid and responsible the whiff of 70s-style radicalism. Progressives are far more institutionally powerful than they were in the 70s — they command the majority of the professional and managerial classes, and they occupy positions of power in corporations, academia, and the government. But when leftist activists are out there setting the tone on national news night after night, it makes progressivism seems like a movement that will never stop, never be satisfied, and never settle down.

That perception will drive a lot of Americans in a conservative direction.

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