The Personal and the Political
The more that you study and understand human history and behavior, the more it seems, at least from my point of view, like a miracle that we ever managed to build a civilization at all. And yet, that miracle seems simultaneously like our predetermined destination. After all, little separates us today, biologically, from the tens of thousands of years worth of our hunter-gatherer ancestors; that doesn’t make the last 12,000 years of complex society a fluke, though– it means that our latent potential was simply lying dormant for all that time. And I would argue– as, I think, would many others– that as much of our potential we’ve seen come to life during that time, just as much continues lying dormant today, waiting for us to create the conditions for it to be elicited. But something is required from us in exchange for this progress, and that is to develop the ability to outgrow the ways of being and acting that served us well while we had to fight for our place on the food chain, but threaten now to pull us backward.
The basic building block of international politics may be the nation-state, but the basic building block of domestic politics is the social movement. Many like to characterize social movements as being either “left-wing” or “right-wing,” or belonging somewhere on a spectrum in-between, and this characterization can be very helpful in identifying the movements towards which one would like to align oneself. But some also recognize this characterization as an oversimplification that obscures critical distinctions between factions that may share most short-term goals but are ultimately operating according to potentially incompatible underlying philosophies. For right-wing movements, like conservatism or fascism, these disagreements can be easily brushed to the side, because these movements simply do not exist for the purpose of making most people’s lives better, so its adherents don’t care if someone with whom they mostly agree does something that they happen to see as societally harmful. For left-wing movements, it’s much harder, though, since the point of these movements is (at least on paper) to make people’s lives better, meaning that a leftist will be strongly incentivized to call out behavior on their own side that they see as contradicting that goal. Left-wing infighting is such a well-documented phenomenon that it’s said nowadays that one isn’t a true leftist until they’ve been banned from an online left-wing forum for disagreeing with someone. Left-wing infighting is something that might push someone towards adopting the more liberal stance on what’s known as the paradox of tolerance, i.e. “Does it make us intolerant for us to try to shut down viewpoints that we perceive as intolerant (e.g. racism, queerphobia, etc.), making us not only just as bad, but also hypocritical?” The liberal answer to this question tends to be “yes, it does make us just as bad,” arguing that even if we don’t like certain viewpoints, it’s not our place to decide what should or shouldn’t be said. And in an ideal world, I think this argument would make sense. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and there’s a strong case to be made that shutting down fascist narratives is a much better course of action than sitting by and allowing them to become mainstream, potentially giving fascists the opportunity to impose their values on the rest of us. This makes me basically in agreement with the socialist answer to the aforementioned question, which tends to be “no, it doesn’t make us just as bad; if anything, we should be proud to oppose right-wing bigotry wherever it appears.” There’s just one problem with that, which is that it neglects to address the fact that there are those on the left who see right-wing bigotry as bad, not because it’s bigotry, but because it’s right-wing. They’re not wrong at all in wanting to oppose right-wing bigotry, but they are wrong in wanting to oppose it with their own left-wing bigotry.
But hold on a second– I just discussed a bit ago how pervasive left-wing infighting is, so doesn’t that make me a hypocrite if I myself want to object to the behavior of other leftists? Aren’t I then contributing to the paradox of intolerance by trying to decide what should or shouldn’t be said? I don’t feel that I am, and the reason is because of a framing that I’ve seen as an elegant resolution to the paradox: that of tolerance as a social contract or a peace treaty, not a moral absolute. If two warring countries sign a peace treaty, and then one side violates it, the other is generally no longer considered bound by its terms, but that doesn’t give them carte blanche to commit war crimes. In the same way, tolerance is not inherently owed to those who are not willing to reciprocate it, but there is something else that is owed to them, just as much as it is to us, and that is recognition of their humanity. These two are often seen, subconsciously or explicitly, as indistinguishable from one another, leading many on the left to subscribe to the misconception that right-wing bigots aren’t really human; at least, not as meaningfully as we are. We imagine that because they’re just so fundamentally different, we could never be at risk of becoming like them. We fail to realize that the only reason we didn’t turn out like them, or them like us, is due to the circumstances of our birth and subsequent life experiences. We don’t have to tolerate their behavior to recognize their humanity, nor does understanding the reasons for that behavior preclude us from holding them accountable. That’s why even if I end up contributing to left-wing infighting, I feel that it’s worth it if I have any chance of addressing this issue.
I like to think of social democracy as simultaneously the most liberal viewpoint within socialism, and the most socialist viewpoint within liberalism. Liberalism believes that we must be willing to consider the possibility that we’re wrong, just as Western science has, ever since the Enlightenment in which the two grew side-by-side. Socialism believes that we must act to dismantle the oppressive systems of hierarchy that not only seem to emerge in almost every society, but that have also been deeply entrenched by European-dominated (and later, American-dominated) institutions that have attempted to assert power over every corner of the globe. In this way, they are both right. Liberals tend to tolerate too many people’s behavior in the interest of recognizing their humanity, and socialists tend to recognize too few people’s humanity in the interest of not tolerating their behavior, and in this way, they are both wrong. So if you fall into either category, and you’ve felt disheartened by any way in which you feel that your movement has failed to meet the moment that we’re currently in, I encourage you to continue reading, and maybe you’ll come away with an enriched perspective on how we’re not just fighting the far right, but our own baser instincts as well. It will also be helpful for you to have read my previous writing piece, The Case for Social Democracy, since I will be revisiting and expanding on some of the same ideas.
As a young person growing up in the progressive, cosmopolitan world of 2010s New York City (admittedly, not exactly representative of the United States as a whole), I learned that prejudice is wrong. I learned that it’s wrong not only because Martin Luther King Jr. called on us to judge people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, but also because the whole environment, from the crowded subways and parks to the renowned theatres and universities, was living proof to me of our capacity as people to achieve prosperity through peaceful coexistence. I learned that my Jewish ancestors came to this country to realize the dream of social mobility after centuries of marginalization, and that they succeeded because they were given a fair shake. And I learned that the fight was far from over, not only by seeing people close to me experience (and perpetuate) things like sexism and racism in real time, but also through the profound shock of the 2016 election.
However, not every takeaway that my peers and I absorbed by having our formative years during this era was a positive one. An implicit consensus emerged that if you fell into a category of people perceived as privileged (i.e. white, male, etc.), then you could be held personally responsible for someone else’s accumulated experiences of marginalization, whether you had acted towards them with any discriminatory or bigoted intent or not. During the nation-wide upheaval of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, this consensus was made deliberately explicit, with many adopting a view granting anyone falling into a category of people perceived as marginalized (i.e. Black/brown, female, etc.) the right to act as judge and jury to “hold accountable” anyone whose actions had made them “part of the problem.” Establishing this kind of power imbalance within the progressive movement was essentially seen as a form of reparations for the much older, widespread and entrenched power imbalances (i.e. white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.) acting in the opposite direction across mainstream societal institutions, and anyone who questioned this approach was seen as having chosen to take the side of that harmful status quo. If one was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of such a campaign to hold them accountable for some perceived misstep, their two options for recourse were to either repent like a sinner (but not performatively, since anything performative was considered just as problematic), or to attempt to flip the script and accuse your opponent of contributing to your own oppression (which would only be likely to work if you yourself came from a marginalized category). The idea that these kinds of norms could be taken advantage of by a marginalized person acting in bad faith (e.g. prosecuting a personal vendetta), rather than acting in the pursuit of justice, contradicted an underlying assumption not just of the progressive movement, but of our entire Western society as a whole: the idea that victimhood is synonymous with virtue.
Think about it: the most popular religion in the West is literally centered around venerating the victimhood of Jesus on the cross. Rooting for the underdog is the expected reaction to any kind of fictional media containing a parallel to David and Goliath. And of course, we should want the underdogs to achieve liberation from whatever situation they were put in. But history has proven the assumption, that victimhood status alone acts as a crash course in morality and ethics, to be a fallacious one. It’s well-understood that children who grow up in abusive households can grow up to become abusers themselves; however, if they do, it then becomes seen by many as though “they should’ve known better, given what they went through” and that they don’t really retain their victimhood status while enjoying a position of power. The thing is, the only way that someone like that would “know better” is if they themself make an active commitment to their own healing. The question then becomes, of whom do we expect this commitment?
At the time of writing in 2025, the progressive movement expects this commitment of the Jewish people. Many struggle to fathom how the same group that experienced genocide at the hands of a militarized ethnostate, Nazi Germany, could then build a militarized ethnostate of their own in the form of Israel. However, the progressive movement does not necessarily expect this commitment of the Palestinian people. If, in some hypothetical future, a group like Hamas were to successfully establish a militarized ethnostate at Israel’s expense, that would be seen by many as within their rights to do, given what they’ve been through. This discrepancy is a major part of what Zionists tend to furiously fixate on and characterize as clear and blatant antisemitism within the pro-Palestinian movement (although they usually don’t do a good job of articulating it), i.e. the idea that Jewish trauma makes Israeli atrocities inexcusable, while Palestinian trauma makes Hamas’s atrocities justified. People of Jewish descent around the world who find themselves appalled with the state of Israel’s behavior, such as myself, are then accused of “self-hatred” because we are seen as wanting to give away our own group’s “right” to replicate what was done to us, which Zionists ultimately see as an indispensable right, the loss of which would gravely jeopardize our survival again. (They even say this to Holocaust survivors, who presumably know what they’re talking about.) Moreover, I do not believe that this discrepancy in what we expect from whom is usually the product of antisemitism. Instead, I believe it comes from the fact that in order to establish and entrench its system of apartheid, the state of Israel hitched itself to the West (alternatively, the Global North), which has not been properly held accountable for its colonial enterprises in what we now call the “developing world” (alternatively, the Global South), and which is therefore seen as still enjoying a position of unearned privilege and power on the international stage. Given the widespread, only-partially-accurate perception of European Jews (specifically, Ashkenazim) as having enjoyed the fruits of Western colonialism in the early 20th century before falling victim to it themselves, the decision of Israeli leaders (who were disproportionately Ashkenazi, as opposed to being Sephardic or Mizrahi) to then accept the seat at the table offered to them by the Western establishment as a form of compensation for the Holocaust strikes a lot of people as representing the height of cynical self-interestedness. They feel that Israeli leaders should’ve been wiser due to their experience of victimhood, but that their privilege should’ve also precluded them from allowing themselves to be governed by the trauma associated with that experience of victimhood. On the other hand, it’s imagined that the leaders of a hypothetical independent Palestinian state would be wiser due to their experience of victimhood, and would also have a free pass to allow themselves to be governed by their trauma, only losing this free pass if they decided to seek out privilege by aligning themselves with the West, which they would likely not want to do. Alternatively framed, Palestinian leaders would be seen by some as enjoying the “right” to replicate what was done to them, specifically because if they did so, it would not serve to reinforce the existing pro-Western hierarchy. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that a reason why Israeli Jews took out their fury and pain on the Palestinian people is because they did not have the opportunity to exact revenge on the Germans, so some might argue that they lost their “right” to replicate what was done to them specifically because they targeted the wrong group, but I would still argue that they never had that right in the first place, and that Palestinians wouldn’t have it either in the event that they were presented with an opportunity to exact revenge on the “correct” group. (It’s also worth noting that the Germans had been victims of losing the First World War, followed by the Great Depression, but almost everyone understands that the Nazis were wrong to argue that that justified the atrocities that they wanted to commit.)
To be clear, I am very much in favor of holding war criminals accountable, be they Nazi-German, Israeli or Palestinian. That is not the same as carrying out collective punishment against an entire demographic. Collective punishment is the direct result of prejudice brought to its logical conclusion. Prejudice is when you see individual members of a certain community as effectively interchangeable, acting essentially as a single collective entity in close coordination with one another, so when one or many members of that group do something to hurt you in some way, it becomes okay to punish an entirely different member or set of members of that group. It becomes impossible to imagine that the people whom you’re punishing for someone else’s behavior might actually have more in common with you than with that someone else, despite the fact that they theoretically are all members of the same community. While I may be limited to my own anecdotal experiences and those of people I’ve met over time, I feel confident enough to say that just about any child who’s ever spent a significant length of time within the American education system knows firsthand just how unfair collective punishment feels. If they themself haven’t had an experience like having their first-grade teacher take their class to the school playground– not to play, but specifically to watch a different class of kids having fun– in order to send a strong message to the kids within the class who had been misbehaving, then they know someone else who has had such an experience. If they haven’t been treated like a juvenile delinquent waiting to happen because they spoke out loud on the New York City subway on a third-grade field trip–specifically in order to tell another kid (who went unheard by the adults) to stop trying to talk to them, because the group had been asked to be quiet–and then given zero opportunity to explain themself without being accused of “talking back,” then they know someone who has been treated that way. But just because the New York City-based afterschool program known as Wingspan Arts did that to me in 2011 doesn’t mean that I want every employee who has ever worked there to be treated as though they themselves are that same cruel adult who enjoys power-tripping over eight-year-olds. And I also recognize that if it’s this hard for me to imagine forgiving that organization, then it may simply be unrealistic for me to imagine that today’s Gazan eight-year-olds could ever forgive Israel, if they grow up. I recognize that the idea of offering forgiveness in the absence of any kind of meaningful accountability or restitution feels like a fundamental betrayal of one’s more vulnerable younger self. And because many people subconsciously feel that their only two choices are to hold onto their resentment or to commit self-abandonment, they then feel that they need the bigotry. They need the paranoia. And in a number of American progressive spaces, they have come up with sophisticated justifications for why those things, which are making their lives worse, shouldn’t be taken away from them.
The Wikipedia-style dictionary appropriately named Wiktionary defines the word “racism” as follows:
1. The belief that there are distinct human races with inherent differences which determine their abilities, and generally that some are superior and others inferior.
2. The policies, practices, or systems (e.g. government or political) promoting this belief or promoting the dominance of one or more races over others.
3. Prejudice or discrimination based upon race or ethnicity; (countable) an action of such discrimination.
However, the Usage notes section includes the following caveat:
The term reverse racism has been used to denote personal racial prejudice by a group that is or has been oppressed/disempowered, against a more powerful group. Some argue that this distinction does not need to be made and advocate that this be called simply racism, while others argue that the term racism should not be used at all in such cases, as racism is distinguished from racial prejudice by being supported by institutions and social structures.
This second convention listed here, which has become the standard among English-speaking progressives, makes it such that the term “anti-white racism” denotes a non-existent phenomenon. It is, of course, true that white people are not and haven’t been subject to race-based discrimination on an institutional level in the same way that other racial groups have been, so any anti-white prejudice that they may experience does not serve to re-injure the same kind of pre-existing wounds. However, I don’t really think that that’s the reason why this distinction was introduced to our modern-day vernacular. It’s much more plausible to me that it was introduced by progressives who, when facing backlash from conservatives accusing them of engaging in the same kind of racist conduct towards white people as what they claim to oppose when it’s done to other groups, defended themselves by saying, “Well, that’s where you’re wrong because you see, it’s not racist when we act this way.” Similar arguments have been made to assert that things like “anti-male sexism” or “heterophobia” are intrinsically oxymoronic. And sure, it makes sense to have a clear terminological distinction between prejudice that is backed up by entrenched society-wide institutions, versus prejudice that isn’t. But to me, the question of whether anti-white prejudice is “racism” or not seems beside the point. Is it less bad than anti-Black or anti-Latino prejudice in terms of its real-life consequences on people’s standards of living? Yes, but the progressive movement doesn’t seem like a place where we should ideally be content to be “less bad” than the other side. However, there exists a subset of people affiliated with the progressive movement that doesn’t believe that it’s even bad in the first place. From their perspective, prejudice itself isn’t the problem; specifically, unjustified prejudice is. Anti-Black or anti-female prejudice is seen as inherently unjustified, while anti-white or anti-male prejudice is seen as nothing more than the natural consequence of experiencing the marginalization within our society, and is therefore just as justified as it would be for Palestinians to replicate what has been done to them.
A key component of the rationale for this stance is the perception that people who enjoy some privilege within this system (i.e. white people, men, etc.) uniformly experience benefits from the marginalized status of others, and never any drawbacks of their own. This is categorically untrue, but most people who can attest to its falsity don’t necessarily know how to articulate it in a way that won’t be interpreted as invalidating the experiences of those whose perspectives could be expanded by this explanation. As a cisgender man, I personally do not feel that the set of privileges coming from that identity are worth what the patriarchy asks me and my fellow men to pay in exchange (and of course, even if it were “worth it,” that still wouldn’t make it right). From the age that little boys are old enough to speak, it is communicated to them in no ambiguous terms that the best way to achieve validation from their peers and guardians is to so thoroughly adopt the mask of uncompromising toughness as to forget that another, more authentic self existed underneath the persona in the first place. They are taught not to explore their inner lives or to share their feelings with other boys, who are likely to be the first friends that they ever make (since cross-gender friendships can be frowned upon for anyone by their peers at that age). And above all, it is emphasized to them that they must never cry. Any boy who is unable or unwilling to meet these terms risks not only being bullied at school, but also at home if he is unfortunate enough to grow up with a father adhering rigidly to traditional gender roles. Of course, much of the justification for denying them these things is the idea that “those things are for girls,” reflecting the misogynistic worldview that anything that’s feminine is lesser. But at the same time, little girls demonstrably benefit from being encouraged to develop their skills in these realms, to the point where various transgender men have commented on how much colder their interactions began to feel once others around them no longer perceived them as female. When these little boys become adolescents, they enter a world where, in addition to not being genuine around their male peers, they are also discouraged from being genuine around their first potential female romantic interests (which will also be expected within our heteronormative culture). Instead, it becomes a competition to get with only the hottest girls and to wear down any resistance that they may offer until they agree to essentially be made into prestigious accessories. Any teenage boy who actually cares about whomever he may become intimate with risks being labeled a “simp,” which ideally he wouldn’t care about, but this is still an age where peer approval is paramount for many. Of course, the girls on the receiving end of this behavior are well within their rights to feel mistreated (although there are certainly some who are more willing participants), but the suffering that they experience due to this and the suffering that the boys experience due to the emptiness behind their façade are fundamentally intertwined. By the time when everyone involved reaches full adulthood, it’s quite possible for the damage to be irreversible, to the point where some young men’s neglect to make an active commitment to their own healing becomes eclipsed by the violence that they then enact as a consequence of that neglect. Also, with the partial exception of the high school years, the overwhelming majority of adults by whose authority the boys will be expected to abide within a school setting will be women, some of whom may have a tendency to treat these boys like simply more poorly-behaved girls, rather than recognizing their specific needs (which, of course, is not an excuse for boys to behave in an uncivilized manner). If they live in a more liberal area, there will also likely be a number of public-facing initiatives to honor things like Women’s History Month and invest in the success of girls in STEM– both valuable efforts to address historic disparities, but which may give some boys the impression that school is an environment where their needs are just not a priority, unless balanced out by other forms of recognition.
At the same time, there is no shortage of stories where women and girls have recounted experiencing covert or overt sexism within the education system (and of course, within society more generally). It is not my intent at all to brush this problem aside or treat it as only meriting secondary priority. However, as a result of these experiences, there is a non-insignificant portion of the feminist branch within the progressive movement that believes that young boys and men should pay for their role in the hierarchy by having their needs go unmet, and that any resistance to this proposition is proof of “fragility” on their part (ironically then inadvertently echoing the patriarchal narrative that proper masculinity requires toughness). They say that if young boys and men want things to change, then it’s their responsibility to just advocate for themselves in the way that women and girls have, but then the boys and men who do so are told to stop taking up space and centering themselves, as I touched on in The Case for Social Democracy. They say that the male mental health epidemic would go away if men just simply chose to stop being oppressors, and somehow imagine that men who genuinely do uphold patriarchal practices would actually listen to more progressive men (who are also by no means exempt from the mental health epidemic) telling them why they’re wrong, when in actuality, they would just write us off as “soy betas” or something. They tell male survivors of sexual assault that “maybe now you understand how women feel,” as if the fact that their assaulter most likely shared the same gender as them somehow means that they were just getting what they deserved. If you’re reading this and find yourself skeptical of the significance of this portion of the movement, I would encourage you to remember the ubiquity of the ragebait-driven social media algorithms that will take screenshots of such rhetoric and blast them across millions of screens, dramatically amplifying the voice of what I ultimately believe is probably a vocal minority. I don’t think that the majority of non-male progressives that I’ve met in real life feel this way, or would deliberately choose to treat men who want to help solve these problems as instead being part of them. I do think, though, that the majority of progressives that I’ve met would feel hesitant to openly discuss this issue, out of concern that other progressives would jump down their throat, accusing them of at the very least having misplaced priorities. After all, you know who else claims to believe that anti-male discrimination (as well as anti-white or anti-heterosexual discrimination) is wrong? The fascist far-right, and we won’t be caught dead seeming to agree with them. It’s seen by a number of people on the left as though men’s issues can wait, at least until women’s and non-binary people’s issues have been adequately resolved, while in the meantime, they should kind of just turn the other cheek and put up with being treated as though they matter less, which we’re reminded of by each instance of a pro-Palestinian advocacy group seeming to care primarily about the number of dead women and children in Gaza. (The aphorism that “men are respected; women are valued” seems to ring true to me in many situations, and both sides want what the other side has, while tending to take for granted that which they already have.) This has consequences in a democracy (although, we don’t exactly live in one at this moment, but maybe one day we will again), given that if people don’t vote for you because they feel that you want to reshape society according to your values while also being okay with their exclusion, then you lose elections (and anyone who was insisting prior to the 2024 election that the outcomes of elections don’t matter has not been vindicated by history, to put it lightly, which is also not to say that we should be satisfied with the lesser of two evils). This remains the case regardless of whether or not you feel that it should be your responsibility to care how voters from other demographics feel. One would think that progressives would not want to deliberately act in a way that they know runs a higher-than-necessary risk of generating public backlash, at least for their own sake, if not for the sake of those outside the movement.
And to the movement’s great credit, I do feel that I’ve seen the gradual, tentative emergence of (or perhaps, a return to) a more mature and genuinely inclusive approach since the 2024 election, which has then also earned its credibility through accomplishments such as Zohran Mamdani’s landslide victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. But I also feel that it may take more than that in order to repair some of the lingering damaged trust. Take, for example, the viral “Man vs. Bear” trend that fed the ragebait algorithms for months during the spring of 2024. The basic premise was a thought experiment inviting the reader to ponder whether they would rather encounter a man or a bear if they happened to find themself wandering alone in the forest. Quickly, the overwhelming consensus among women who engaged with the trend was that they would rather encounter a bear. This makes sense given the original framing of the question, since forests are known to be one of bears’ primary habitats, so it would not prompt a suspicious reaction to encounter one there. However, the “discourse” also quickly left this original framing in the dust, with many adopting the stance that since encountering either specimen would essentially mean a likely death sentence, at least a bear would be humane enough to grant one a “dignified” demise. In response, a number of men (some of whom were certainly engaging in bad faith) objected to what they felt to be an offensively dehumanizing comparison, arguing that they should not be seen as guilty until proven innocent. Those who had dug in within the pro-bear camp, which took to calling itself “#TeamBear” and started producing its own branded merchandise, then essentially responded by saying, “Who cares that your feelings got hurt?? We have to deal with way worse; notice how you people can’t take a fraction of what you dish out. We have a right to defend ourselves.” It was not exclusively women promoting this stance, either; some progressive men presented themselves as sympathetic voices, essentially saying, “Yeah, you have every right to see us as guilty until proven innocent; it’s better for you to do what it takes to survive, even if that means treating us with disrespect.” While this act of selflessness may have come from admirable intentions, I don’t think it’s fundamentally a good precedent to set to establish the expectation that anyone who wants to be an ally demean themself in order to earn others’ respect (which, in the case of anti-Zionist Jews, could then look like “self-hatred”). Meanwhile, the set of women who themselves voiced misgivings about tarring an entire demographic with the same brush, citing the presence of men that they perceived as trustworthy within their own lives, were called “traitors” or “pick-me’s” (terms that really can apply in some circumstances, e.g. Lauren Boebert or Candace Owens, and which are also applied to Palestinians who are willing to work alongside Israeli peace activists, such as at organizations like Standing Together). Those calling them this, in so doing, were also making a noteworthy exception to their otherwise-default rule of thumb that marginalized people automatically know what’s best for them and won’t make the wrong choices, which of course stems from the premise that victimhood is synonymous with virtue. This, of course, is what’s really at the heart of the issue, given that the men who objected to being seen as worse than bears were then interpreted as invalidating the women’s virtue, and by extension, their victimhood, since it was considered that the only way that you could object to someone’s behavior is if you saw them as something other than a victim. As a result of raising the issue of hurt feelings, these men were then interpreted as claiming victimhood status, and by extension virtue, for themselves. This should remind you of the bitter contest between Palestinians and Israelis pertaining to who has been more thoroughly victimized, and is therefore justified in whatever actions they see fit to take. In both cases, there is a group with more power and a group with less, but neither side is powerless, and neither side is victim-free. In both cases, people simultaneously want to achieve liberation and also want to be able to hold onto their victimhood status even after achieving it. And more generally, in both cases, people want the cycle of trauma to end, but also feel that they should be exempt from the responsibility to make the active commitment to their own healing that would be necessary in order to remove their contribution, large or small, to the cycle. After all, who would want to heal when being hurt is your ticket to being revered by people whom you perceive as moral?
The commitment that this set of progressives has instead made, to assert their status as having earned the right to bigotry, is sometimes so emphatic that they are willing to accept being on the receiving end of it from other progressives in exchange, because on a certain level, they understand that it would be hypocritical not to. For instance, a progressive who is both white and non-male may accept being treated as culpable for the historical atrocities of white supremacy in exchange for being able to treat men as collectively culpable for the historical atrocities of patriarchy, because being able to do the latter is too important to them to give it up (and also, because they feel no choice but to accept the former, so they may as well get something in exchange. This also parallels the trade-off that many conservatives make, i.e. accepting being treated as subhuman by those above them in the hierarchy, and as a reward, being empowered to then do the same to those below them). Consider then also how this practice intersects with the intricate dynamics surrounding national identity. It is a core tenet of the progressive movement that immigrant communities within “developed” Western countries should have the ability to claim the identity of their host country; i.e., there’s no reason why someone whose heritage is originally Asian, Arab or Latin-American shouldn’t also be able to be Portuguese, Swiss or Australian. This viewpoint does not necessarily extend, however, to people of European heritage who immigrate in the opposite direction (who are often also instead termed as “expats”); e.g., if I, as a white American, were to move to Egypt or India, even if I were to go through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen there, a foreign guest I would remain. There are a number of potential interpretations that could explain this consensus, but one that seems particularly relevant in this context is the perception that those who adopt a “Global-Northern” identity, in so doing, thereby also voluntarily accept culpability for the history of colonial brutality, whereas by hypothetically adopting a “Global-Southern” identity, I would be attempting to escape my culpability for said history. This framing explains the fervent passion with which a number of American progressives, even those within marginalized communities, advocated in favor of the deliberate act of electoral self-harm known as voting for Jill Stein in the 2024 election, or abstaining altogether. They knew, logically, that siphoning votes away from Kamala Harris would objectively increase the likelihood of the unmitigated disaster that marginalized communities have been suffering from since Trump’s inauguration in January, and so they argued that if the rights of Americans cannot be protected without “voting for genocide,” then those are not rights that we as Americans deserve to keep. Despite their own opposition to the genocide that the American government was facilitating, they unhesitatingly accepted culpability for it, and developed such a desperate need for absolution as a result that they were willing to victimize themselves in order to get it. This was despite the explicitly stated preference of Gazans themselves for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in a number of interviews prior to the election, and somehow I doubt that these Gazans, who are at this moment suffering from stage-five malnutrition because of Trump, would be grateful for the principled stand that Jill Stein voters in swing states courageously took (in fact, I can imagine that some might instead perceive these voters as having selfishly indulged in their American privilege). I also think that the appreciation for Putin’s Russia (a far-right dictatorship) within some far-left circles can be similarly explained, and additionally echoes the distaste for Israel, especially given the context of the somewhat commonplace implicit preference within these circles for trans women, who are often seen as exhibiting unparalleled valor, over trans men, who are occasionally seen as traitors. Russia was once a Western empire under the Tsar, but turned its back on the West upon the establishment of the Soviet Union, a stance which it has retained long after communism there has been dead and buried (unlike most other post-Cold-War Eastern European countries, which enjoy varying degrees of integration with the West today). By forgoing the privilege that could have been re-bestowed upon it, and instead taking an active stance against Western interests (by invading Ukraine, and subsequently paying the price in terms of things like sanctions), it is seen from within this far-left perspective as though Russia has essentially become the trans woman of the international stage, whereas Israel, by seeking out Western privilege, as discussed earlier, has essentially become the trans man of the international stage. (They also don’t really see Ukraine as fighting a defensive war to maintain its independence, but as merely serving the Western military-industrial complex.) Nobody really denies that violence and oppression have existed within and between non-Western cultures since long before capitalism was invented; it’s just seen by some as though there isn’t really a valid reason for someone engaging in good faith within the progressive movement to bring it up. That’s why we’re given false choices such as the one between standing in solidarity with Muslims against Islamophobia, and standing in solidarity with queer people in Muslim countries against queerphobia, and why we hear things like “Damn, that’s crazy that Russia bombed another Ukrainian hospital. Have you considered that the U.S. has done worse (including being partially responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and then pressuring them through capitalist shock-therapy, thereby pushing Russia down this path in the first place), and you should focus on them instead??”, because, and say it with me this time, victimhood is synonymous with virtue.
Ironically, this axiom has even been used to promote viewpoints from within certain communities that would easily be recognized as bigoted if they came from outside of those communities. It would be an appalling thing to say within a progressive space that “Palestinians can’t be expected to respect other people’s human rights…”, unless one were to then finish by saying “…and that’s not a bad thing, and in fact it would be unfair to expect that of them, because of how thoroughly they’ve been victimized,” and suddenly, there are some for whom it seems that that sentence becomes A-okay. (Of course, you could replace “Palestinians” with “Jews” in that sentence, and it would fit right in as part of an official Israeli government statement.) This has been characterized as the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and it can filter into otherwise insightful analyses of other social issues as well. For example, it is well-understood that the widespread practice of standardized testing as a tool to assess high school students’ readiness for college often has the effect of reinforcing racial disparities, given that Black and brown students may lack access to the kind of preparation that would help them perform well on the tests, a problem which we could potentially solve. However, once the framing shifts to something like “Standardized testing is racist because it holds Black and brown students to the standards of intellectualism and rigor of white-centric culture,” the soft bigotry of low expectations is at play. Of course, it may seem, from the point of view of someone making a statement like this, that expectations such as “respecting other people’s human rights” and “meeting standards of intellectualism” are by default hypocritical, given that people with white privilege tend to face lighter consequences for falling short of these expectations than when people of color fall short of them. However, just because the white establishment has been hypocritical in applying the judgement of these standards across our society doesn’t mean that the standards themselves are wrong. Moreover, I believe that in most cases where an institution has perpetuated harm as a result of the distortion (deliberate or otherwise) of its purported principles, that shouldn’t lead us to automatically discount whatever pieces of wisdom were maybe originally underlying those principles. I don’t think that we should discount the value of a society built upon the principles of reason and open discussion just because the European countries where the Enlightenment flourished then went on to colonize five other continents, nor do I think that we should discount the message of mutual tolerance that Jesus is known to have preached just because Christian institutions have been responsible for promoting some of the most virulent hatred in modern history. And I certainly don’t think that the travesties carried out under Soviet-style communism (carried out, in many cases, by people who had previously been victims of the Tsarist aristocracy or other similar systems) mean that we should abandon the ideal of a better world for all.
Marx called upon the workers of the world to unite, and this was partially intended as an antidote to the emerging nationalist movements of the 19th century. He recognized that nationalism was a tool used by bourgeois elites to convince lower-class soldiers from their own country to go off and kill other lower-class soldiers from a different country, but if the two sets of soldiers realized that they had more in common with each other than with their respective elites and joined forces, they could depose the elites and build a new, international order. However, there is a way in which the essence of this insight has fallen to the wayside in favor of the much more emotionally resonant core tenet of Marx’s lens through which to see the world, which is to attempt to identify the oppressed and the oppressor in any situation. With this approach, it can become easy to designate entire identity-based demographic categories as “oppressors,” preventing others from seeing what they may have in common with them. This is not the same as designating the bourgeoisie as such, because class is not an identity-based category in the way that race or gender is. Moreover, it is understood by some progressives that any kind of prejudice that targets an aspect of someone’s identity that they cannot be expected to have the ability to change about themself is wrong, and a person’s race and gender certainly fall into that category. This presents another angle from which to approach the paradox of tolerance; i.e., it doesn’t make us hypocritical to want to tolerate queer people but not Nazis, because you can choose whether or not to be a Nazi, but you can’t choose whether or not to be queer in the same way. But, there are some on the left who feel that you can choose whether or not to be Israeli, thereby permitting them to promote anti-Israeli bigotry that pushes the limits of what can reasonably considered “anti-Zionism but not antisemitism.” They argue that if a Jew born in Israel really wants to stand on the right side of history, they would ditch their Israeli identity, and ideally move back to whatever European country their grandparents migrated from (ignoring the existence of the considerable number of Israeli Jews whose more recent heritage is not from Europe, but from other Middle Eastern and North African countries). This also parallels the Zionist argument that if Palestinians really want to prove that they’re not antisemitic, they should just be willing to be subjugated forever. But these are fundamentally not fair things to ask of either side. Most modern-day Israeli Jews have never been to the countries from which their ancestors made aliyah (which, in some cases, happened centuries ago, not decades), and would essentially be immigrants in a foreign country if they were to go back there. The question of whether Israel “has a right to exist as a Jewish state” or not is beside the point here; the fact is that Jews have made their home in that land once again, whether we like how earlier generations of them did it or not, and every time when a leftist argues in favor of kicking them out against their will, they give Zionists another reason to double down. Simultaneously, that doesn’t excuse Israeli Jews of conscience from the responsibility to step up and advocate for justice for Palestinians, as more and more of them have been doing, since even before October 7th, 2023, but certainly since then as well; the families of the Israeli hostages, for instance, have been some of the loudest voices in favor of ending the war, and have been routinely ignored by their own government, which prefers to use the hostages as justification to make the Palestinians of Gaza pay in rivers of blood for something that most of them didn’t do. (Ironically, it seems to me that one runs a higher risk of being accused of antisemitism for opposing Netanyahu in the United States than within Israel itself. Moreover, it’s clearly hard for people across the political spectrum to separate a country’s government from its people.) Just because collective punishment is wrong doesn’t mean that we as human people don’t hold a collective responsibility to one another and to ourselves. (Ultimately, collective punishment doesn’t even work as an effective deterrent; it may be tempting to say “oh well, if that group’s leaders didn’t want their people to be collectively punished, they should’ve thought about that before choosing to hurt us,” but this doesn’t account for the reality that for authoritarian nationalist leaders, letting their people be on the receiving end of collective punishment can actually strengthen their position, since whichever community they lead will become more likely to unquestioningly rally around their cause.)
It is my sincere hope that enough progressives will realize this to begin to make the movement something more than what it is today. After all, what kind of movement are we if we tell people that they’re part of the problem if they’re not hateful enough? It’s commonly said by those defending themselves against allegations of bigotry that “oh, I can’t be [racist/sexist/etc.], I have [black/female/etc.] friends,” by which they usually mean that if they were really a bigot, then their friends from marginalized groups wouldn’t choose to associate with them. And sometimes, this really is a cop-out excuse, but a common progressive response to this is to say, “well, those people who you think are your ‘friends’ don’t actually think of you as a friend, and are only tolerating your presence because they’re scared of a conflict that could hurt them (but also, you shouldn’t really try to apologize to them or make things right, because then you’d be at risk of centering yourself).” What kind of movement are we if we actively attempt to prevent people from trusting members of different demographic categories, and then expect people not to develop a sense of prejudice as a result of this lack of trust? (This also has the effect of reversing the long-held position that marginalized groups are not and shouldn’t be treated as monoliths.) It’s commonly implicitly extrapolated from the axiom that victimhood is synonymous with virtue that privilege is synonymous with vice, and as a result, progressives who have the opportunity to live a decent life may feel a sense of obligation not to take that opportunity, feeling that the state of the world demands their perpetual unhappiness. And of course, we shouldn’t be happy about the way things are, certainly not yet. But what kind of movement are we if we present our philosophy as one that calls for an ongoing state of heightened panic? I can think of several adjectives for such a movement, but “uplifting” and “effective” are not among them.
At the very least, we have to stop shouting down our own allies for agreeing with us. When the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by ICE early on in the second Trump administration, a number of anti-Zionist Jews responded by pointing out the historical parallels to other far-right authoritarian regimes (most notably, obviously, the early years of Nazi Germany), arguing that the Jewish community doesn’t tend to fare well in such environments. This message was specifically targeted to try to reach other Jews, who might’ve been more on the fence about being sympathetic towards Khalil. However, some non-Jewish progressives then framed this message as in fact serving to reinforce white supremacy, by placing the hypothetical needs of future Jews over the active needs of real-life Palestinians. Shooting yourself in the foot like this is a choice, one that the movement does not have to make. However, it does make sense on a certain level that when someone from a privileged group presents themself as an ally, some then see it as a challenge to expose the wolf in sheep’s clothing, given that many would prefer an enemy who’s honest from the start rather than one who presents themself deceitfully. When so-called “feminist men” such as Neil Gaiman have their covers blown, it undermines the credibility of all allies, who may already be perceived as low-hanging fruit for others to dump their trauma onto. After all, according to this point of view, if they’re really allies, then they should welcome such treatment. They’re seen as safer targets than people from privileged groups who haven’t made the same kind of commitment to the movement. This is especially the case for former conservatives looking for a new political home; of course, it makes sense to initially treat them with greater skepticism, but we also don’t want to punish them for the attempt to become the kind of person we want to see more of. (It’s also worth mentioning that even fascists can recognize dehumanization as wrong when it happens to people against whom they don’t have any specific agenda; a striking example of this is how the Nazi ambassador to China, John Rabe, used his influence to shield several hundred thousand Chinese civilians from the Japanese rampage in Nanjing, while Imperial Japan granted asylum to tens of thousands of Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Europe, even while these two governments were theoretically allies during the Second World War.)
Maybe in Marx’s day it was true that the disenfranchised and left-behind could overthrow the established order because they had nothing to lose but their chains, but ultimately I don’t think it’s true today. Just look at why a general strike to call for sweeping social change has simply not been in the realm of feasibility in the United States in recent decades. If everyone decided to stop going to work, most people (including many white people, who certainly don’t feel privileged, and who sometimes take offense to the perceived invalidation of their economic insecurity by progressives) would run out of money to pay for things like food and healthcare relatively quickly. Then what? There’s no guarantee that the capitalist establishment would give in at that point to whatever demands were being made of them. Imagine, on the other hand, a scenario in which people’s access to food and healthcare would be guaranteed, even while going on strike. Suddenly, this kind of mass mobilization becomes much more realistic, precisely because people would theoretically have more to lose. Having something to lose doesn’t make whatever you have to lose automatically ill-begotten. Having something to lose can give you something to fight for.
Ultimately, all of the evidence we should need that the individuals on both sides of a system of hierarchy are human people is just the sheer number of instances in which both sides, regardless of how much power they have, fall into the same psychological pitfalls. The worldview of far-right conservatives is one that allows the monkey brain to take over and drive them to prioritize the needs of themselves and their cohort at the expense of all others. It should be clear at this point that many progressives feel that same instinct too; I know there are times when I have. Zionists expect that they’ll be hated no matter what they do, so they don’t feel that they lose anything by behaving in a way that makes people hate them, just in the same way that some young Black men expect that they’ll go to jail no matter what they do, so they don’t feel that they lose anything by turning to a life of crime. It’s said that we as people want to judge others by their actions, but want others to judge us by our intentions, and I can’t even necessarily say that this is an unreasonable thing for most of us to want. But there are a number of other things that many of us start out wanting as children, like to be able to not go to school or to only eat candy. And as it is, not all adults even really mature out of that phase. The choice before us now is to grow up as a civilization, or to leave things as they are. And of course, just because kids are often less mature than adults doesn’t make their personhood any less real. Kids are capable of being the kindest, most sensitive friends, and also of being the cruelest, most selfish bullies, because these are both contained within the realm of what is possible within human nature.
I imagine that there are some who, if they were to read this, might see the perspective that I’ve laid out here as one that I’ve only been able to develop because of the various ways in which I enjoy privilege. They might say that adopting a perspective like this is not necessarily something that marginalized people could do, because it might require them to heal in a way that would be unfair to expect of them. The reason they might say that is because they wouldn’t know, just from looking at me, that I’m a member of the neurodivergent community, and could easily claim virtue through my victimhood status if I so wished. However, I don’t want to be a person who judges books by their covers. I don’t want to replicate what’s been done to me towards people who had nothing to do with it. And I hope that, after reading this, neither do you.