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Episode Transcript
Spencer Critchley: Based on what I hear from friends, and what I see all over the media, many liberals are deeply confused about how to respond to the campus protests over Gaza. And I think it’s an example of the confusion liberals are feeling generally over a lot of issues. I hope the following might help…
I believe much of the confusion about this issue, and about many others, can be traced to a basic conceptual mistake made a long time ago. That’s the assumption that all political opinions can fit on a single, imaginary line, from left to right.
It originated in the early days of the French revolution, when delegates debating the future of France sat to the left or the right of the King, depending on how they felt about change versus tradition. Ever since, people have kept on thinking about politics in terms of left and right.
Read more: Confused About the Gaza Protests? This May Be Why.
But for this one-dimensional, one-line model to work, there can only be one left and one right. That wasn’t true back then and it isn’t true now. There are at least two lefts and two rights. And they’re not different as in further left or further right on the same line. They’re different as in not on the same line at all.
Philosophers describe this kind of difference as incommensurable, meaning the different positions are impossible to measure in the same way.
Let’s say two people are looking at a piano. One of them is trying to guess how much it weighs and turns to the otheru to ask what they think. And the other person says, “I don’t believe in weight.”
Their opinions are incommensurable. There is no weight they’re going to be able to agree on if one of them doesn’t believe in weight.
We habitually refer to everyone on the left as liberals, and we assume any differences among them are a question of just how liberal they are. But there’s a left that doesn’t believe in liberalism, and there always has been.
Not just liberalism of the left, but the philosophy of freedom called liberalism, on which liberal democracy is based. Most members of this other left believe in some kind of democracy, but not a liberal democracy.
That’s because this other left sees liberalism as inherently oppressive.
Now, instead of continuing to call it “this other left,” I’m going to give it a name, although it doesn’t have one everyone can agree to.
It’s often called the woke left, but its own members have largely abandoned that term. And what the word “woke” means is another source of liberal confusion. I’ll try to clear it up at the end — and I hope that’ll entice you to stay with me until then.
Republicans often call it the woke, Marxist left, but although Marx is a very important influence on it, he’s only one of many.
The very complicated set of ideas behind this left might be described as postmodern critical theory. It’s usually just called “theory.” So I’m going to call this other left “the theory left” — although I welcome suggestions for a better name.
The upshot is that if we’re going to assume that the liberal left and the theory left are part of the same left, that one left will somehow have to be both for and against liberalism.
Liberals of the left are notorious for this kind of confusion. The poet Robert Frost once described his fellow liberals as people too broad-minded to take their own side in a quarrel. And he wasn’t the first to say that.
But liberals’ problem isn’t just that their minds are broad, it’s that their minds keep getting trapped in paradoxes. And the one-dimensional model of politics generates no end of paradoxes.
The controversy over Gaza features plenty of them.
One of the most significant is the paradox of progress.
Both of the two lefts believe in progress. But they believe progress is made in fundamentally different ways. It’s the difference between reform and revolution.
In all but the most extreme situations, liberals believe in reform. One reason for that is that liberalism tries to substitute reason for coercion or violence. Another is that a crucial aspect of the liberal concept of freedom is freedom of opinion. So liberals believe we must try to resolve differences through debate and negotiation, leading to reform. This view of progress is often associated with John Stuart Mill.
But the theory left sees liberal reform as simply propping up an inherently oppressive system. And it sees some opinions as inherently oppressive, too. That means that if you tolerate those opinions, you’re tolerating oppression.
The theory left inherits its concept of progress not from Mill, but from Georg Hegel, by way of Karl Marx, and then by way of a very complicated family tree.
Hegel argued that progress happens through a dialectical struggle between opposites. An existing order is challenged by a new, opposing movement. In the conflict between the two, the old order is abolished and a new one is created.
This isn’t a process of reform, but revolution. It may or may not be violent revolution, but it will involve a struggle of opposites, the abolition of the old order, and the creation of a new one.
You see the difference between liberal reform and theory-based revolution in all kinds of issues that leave liberals confused about what they actually stand for. For example, on learning about abuses by police, liberals will start looking for ways to reform the police. But members of the theory left see the police as agents of an oppressive order, so they’ll demand that we abolish the police.
And this distinction explains liberals’ confusion over much of what they’re hearing from the protests about Gaza. They may think it’s because they’re hearing from people who are further left than they are, but even very progressive liberals can feel this confusion. What’s confusing them is what they’re hearing from people who are in a different left.
Let’s look at two positions on Gaza. One might be held by progressive liberals, and one might be held by members of the theory left. These aren’t the only two positions, of course.
As we go through them, watch for the incommensurable differences, and how they’re explained by whether you see progress in terms of liberal reform or dialectical struggle.
Progressive liberals see it something like this:
They support a ceasefire, whether permanent or temporary.
They’re horrified at what Hamas did on October 7th and they’re horrified at what the Netanyahu government is doing now. They believe that nothing justifies killing civilians deliberately, or through deliberate negligence.
But whether or not they think Israel is living up to the values it claims to stand for — the values of a liberal democracy — they believe in those values, not the ones Hamas stands for. In killing Palestinian civilians, Israel acts against its declared values. In killing Jewish civilians, Hamas fulfills its declared values.
Liberals don’t believe killing civilians will produce a just, peaceful solution to the extremely complex issues involved, no matter who’s doing the killing or why. That will require negotiation and reform, which is why liberals tend to favor a two-state solution.
But members of the theory left are likely to think about Gaza dialectically, like this:
Israel is the existing order, which they see as an oppressive colonial power.
They see Hamas as an opposing movement for liberation.
In the struggle between these two opposites, they think violence against civilians may be justified, for reasons I’ll explain. Limits on freedom of opinion are justified too, because some opinions are seen as oppressive. Chief among those oppressive opinions, in their view, is support for the existence of the state of Israel, otherwise known as Zionism.
And they believe that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be the abolition of Israel, from which will emerge a free Palestine.
This is the thinking behind the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Liberal protesters will argue that it doesn’t mean eliminating Israel, but protesters of the theory left probably mean it exactly that way. It fulfills the logic of theory as they read it, and in particular the branch called postcolonial theory.
A related slogan is “Resistance is justified.” A liberal will probably agree with that, while assuming that the resistance is probably going to be nonviolent. But by a popular understanding of postcolonial theory, any resistance against a colonizer is justified, including terroristic attacks on civilians, because they are “settler-colonialists,” whose presence is seen as an act of colonial aggression.
That’s the argument behind the assertion,“There’s no such thing as an innocent settler-colonialist.” The claim that Israelis are settler-colonialists is hotly debated. But even if you think they are, you’ll have a hard time squaring liberal values with the deliberate targeting of civilians.
Only the most extreme members of the theory left go so far as to defend the mass torture and killing committed by Hamas on October 7th, although some of them are college professors or other people with outsized influence. But many members of the theory left do support Hamas. To justify that, they often cite the writings of Frantz Fanon, one of the most-read and most-taught postcolonial writers.
This is not to say that Fanon represents all of postcolonial theory, but he does represent the version of it embraced by much of the theory left.
I understand the critiques of liberalism, and I make some too. But I remain a liberal, both because I believe in liberal values and because I believe all the alternatives are worse. But my purpose here isn’t to convince you I’m right about liberalism. It’s to show how fundamentally different it is from the theory left. If you’re a liberal and you try to find a way to agree with the theory left, you’ll often find yourself in a world of paradoxes and confusion.
I don’t see how anyone can be both liberal and anti-liberal.
In addition to being known for the quote about liberals I mentioned earlier, Robert Frost is better known for a poem he wrote about choosing one of two roads on a snowy evening. Sometimes you do have to choose a road, based on where you think it leads.
As I’m recording this, President Biden has recently spoken about the campus protests, and so has Bernie Sanders. Their remarks illustrate what I’m talking about here.
Bernie is a progressive and Biden is more moderate, but both are liberals, as can be heard in their remarks. Both defend the liberal principle of free speech and the liberal principle of the rule of law, with Bernie leaning harder towards free speech.
Many of the protesters and their supporters are Bernie-style progressive liberals, but many are progressives of the theory left, and those are two fundamentally different kinds of progressive.
Now, as promised: Why is the word “woke” so confusing, and what does it actually mean?
It’s confusing because it has more than meaning — and they’re incommensurable. By one of them, any liberal should be proud to be called woke. But by the other, liberals can’t be woke.
The first meaning is the original one. Black Americans were the first to use “woke” as an adjective, meaning not just “awake” but “awake to what’s really happening,” and in particular “awake to racial injustice.”
I would hope all liberals are woke in this way, and everyone else too.
But the other meaning reframes wokeness according to theory. By this definition, liberalism is a source of racial injustice. That’s because it’s a product of the Enlightenment-based, Western European worldview, which theory sees as inherently oppressive, colonialist, and racist. So according to theory, you can’t be truly woke unless you reject that worldview, and reject liberalism.
If you’re not familiar with theory, it takes more explaining than I imagine you’ve signed up for here. But I’ve spoken and written about it elsewhere — if you’re interested, you might want to start with a post called “A Guide for the Confused.” And I’ll have more to say about all this soon.
Links
- President Biden on campus Gaza protests (CSPAN)
- Senator Bernie Sanders on the protests (prepared remarks)
Image Credits
- Portrait of Georg Hegel: Jakob Schlesinger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Portrait of John Stuart Mill: George Frederic Watts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
