Towards a critique of carnivalistic leftism, or, how to achieve a triumph of the will of the "indigenous oppressed" and other absurdities

In politics as in art, the creative uses of intelligence can do much good, while stupidity does harm and worse; it often kills. The left often fails, especially in this country, or achieves dubious results when it is stupid. The stupidities of the left are identity politics and pseudo-nationalisms, and moralisms of the "oppressed" against social groups deemed intrinsically "oppressing." Both of these tendencies, which go together, are the stuff of fascisms. Fascism itself is a malady that often afflicts the left or people who are attracted to its causes for moral reasons. Mussolini, who began his career as a socialist, was one example; so, in a different way, was Stalin, who was less a Machiavellian of revolutionary strategy, like Lenin, than a Manichaean of class hatred, who first bureaucratized the democratic movement of socialism into a dictatorship over the proletariat by the centralized management of capital, and then turned it into a conservative populist nationalism, into which it would later disintegrate merely.

Fascism is always an affirmation of identity and of strength in its self-assertion. It always affirms an inclusive and exclusive national group, however defined. The identity politics of national subgroups tends to function as a variant form of this. Demands for equality and liberty that depend on integration and democracy move in a different and opposite direction. Democracy depends on figuring the fellow citizen as a friend who shares an interest in the common good that is to be fought about through peaceful and friendly argument pursued not out of hate and refusal to recognize the other but the will to love, recognize, and understand, and the curiosity that drives inquiry and not the mere assertion of the force of will. Democracy disintegrates when it becomes a competing show of demonstrations of the force of will. Voting itself tends to become that. Rigid blocs are solidified where voters demonstrate their will thanks to the dependance of politicians less on voting constituents than on funding by donors, and the right gerrymandering guarantees that the voters do not matter at all, except maybe as funding contributors. Soon every disagreement implies a fight as the political public sphere is destroyed, with the hope of corporate media forces, and tolerance disappears. Many people who participate in this self-destruction do not know what they are doing, and many are noble partisans of a cause worth pursuing. They hardly realize that it is a faction of the corporate state that is eager to police attitudes and sell only politically correct services and commodities, nor that the university-educated young professional class workers who channel their career frustrations sometimes into anti-capitalism and sometimes into identity demands and virtue brands often do not have the same cause exactly as poor people who protest police killings or humanitarian and moral crusade military clean-up operations. The American insistence on equality of status and the demand for recognition may or may not facilitate greater integration, democracy, and equality; it can also substitute for it.

The right identifies actions and statements with the persons making them, while the left separates these. This separation is structural to modern art and science. Science is impossible otherwise, and the modern art of the novel depends on it this disjuncture, which in traditional theater is not possible (cinema in this respect follows the novel). If my statements and actions are valid if and only if I am virtuous as a person, then instead of the interesting, there is only the proper, what is correct or incorrect.

One form of the identitarian mistake is the cult of indigeneity. This is the mythical idea that some population group (which can only be a race or something like, the imagined community of a national group) has a legitimate and exclusive property claim to inhabiting a territory, typically because they were born in it or their ancestors were. Examination of this idea reveals that it is ultimately an absurdity in all its forms.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its current dominant frames is a conflict of incompatible claims to indigeneity. But the only sane solution to this conflict lies on different terms. The only route to peace among peoples anywhere, and the only just way of administering the right to residence in any territory, is to hold that (a) whoever is there currently normally has a right to remain and not be evicted into involuntary exile on the grounds that they "do not belong" and (b) that this includes recent migrants to that territory, with some opportunity accorded also to those who desire to migrate there. (If you want to reside somewhere else, you should at least be permitted to submit an application).

The Jewish and Palestinian claims have a different basis but they are both forms of an indigeneity claim, or a claim to proper tight to inhabit a territory by virtue of "ownership." Religious Zionists believe they were awarded the territory by God, or perhaps ancient history, especially as they would like to recreate the Jewish Commonwealth of the Second Temple period that ended with the defeat by the Roman imperial forces in AD 70. Secular Zionists claim that they have a right to the territory because they were involuntarily exiled (and many of their relatives and coreligionists murdered) in the European Holocaust and the postwar rise of Arab nationalism resulting from decolonization and the breakup of the Turkish and later English and French empires. The first claim gives them a sentimental desire that is well-founded to the extent that cultural traditions, of which religions may be a particularly tenacious form, may be said to have a legitimate hold on people, but that may also be abbreviated to say that this history and tradition (and the mythology that is a part of it, as legitimate as it is) constituted a genuine desire, leading many people to want to immigrate to what is now Israel, as many did. Such a claim cannot be confirmed or refuted on any objective terms independent of it, and must be treated as fact. It is true that other countries, including the United States, might have admitted more Jewish refugees; it is an interesting opinion with valid pros and cons that that should have happened; and it is a fact that it didn't. It is also a plain fact that several millions Jews live in Israel/Palestine now, with reasons that are valid as any to want to stay, and it would at least be cruel and unfortunate to force them all to leave. It is also a fact that the Jewish state has historically not welcomed the "other indigenous claimants," and that the state has elements of Apartheid it cannot transcend as long as being a Jewish state means being a state not just with a large Jewish population, even a minority, but a state that is in character Jewish and belongs to its Jewish residents, in such a way that the non-Jewish "Arabs" or Palestinians tend to be treated as unwelcome guests or worse, often much worse. The sane left is only against the Jewish state in the way that it was against South Africa. There Apartheid ended and the white majority mostly stayed and continued to prosper, only without the state belonging wholly to them.

The insane left is motivated largely by white guilt and to some extent politically misdirected black rage. It is a very prominent American phenomenon. The obsession with the indigenous here leads mostly to absurdities. The sane answer is integration, the logic of which is the opposite of the separatism that was promoted in the 60s by black nationalists. This promoted the idea that because white Americans are part of a culture that generally under-recognizes the culture and experiences of black Americans, they are guilty oppressors, for that failure of recognition is a crime. But it is more a consequence of a social arrangement that everyone agrees was unjust, and in which most people are innocent until educated into better ways of thinking and acting. Responsibility is the opposite of guilt and blame, and it is the way of building a society in peace instead of destroying it in war,

Add to this that few American blacks would want to return to Africa, and there is no reason why such things should be asked for, since they are absurdities. The responsible person does not ask, must I not hate you so given the wrongs I suffered in the past? But, here we are now, what do we do? The question of politics that bears on the possibility of just government is what is to be done.

Guilt and blame are about identities. Identity politics has destroyed much of the liberal left in America.

It has also damaged the Jewish world, and helps to sustain fantastic projections onto the Jewish state for the purpose of facilitating pride and legitimating whatever it is people are presently content to have or want. That does not mean the things people have or want should be delegitimated or taken away from them. It does mean that it is a posture of conservatism that is not necessarily very productive to celebrate your identity and pride, and link this to ethnicity or some other index of group membership.

The Jews are the world's least indigenous people. They migrated everywhere. But so did lots of people. This is where the world's future lies.

Consider, who are the indigenous Europeans, those of Germany, France, or anywhere else, and does that really matter? Now many Germans are from Turkey or Syria, and many French are from Algeria or West Africa. You could say that is the fault of colonialism, but why treat it as a fault? The world today is a post-colonial one, and that is a largely good thing, even if we must recognize that colonialism was in many ways an evil, perhaps because as Walter Benjamin famously said, "every document of civilization is a document of barbarism." Most of world culture now is hybrid. European influence is huge, and most "third world" intellectuals do not complain about it but simply live with it, happy to take what they can from where it comes from, and happy often to speak a language that is "native" to the place without necessarily complaining about the use of English or any other. Most people in Latin America are not actively engaged in pursuing a fantasy of abolishing Iberian colonialism, though they are quite aware of the barbarisms it involved. We can certainly assume that what happens in time is not predetermined but partly an effect of chance and a law of alternative histories that are counterfactually possible, like the possibility of a European modernity that included the rediscovery of classical antiquity, secularism, the birth of modern science, and modern egalitarian and liberal revolutionary movements, including In Haiti and elsewhere, and that would not have involved the Spanish inquisition, the burning of heretics and witches, and countless other barbarisms. But the Mexicans mostly don't have a politics which blames the Spanish for conquering the Aztec empire and remaining "improperly" on the indigenous lands. They also have a healthier national myth that regards the nation itself a the produce of a mixture. What is wrong with the north Americans that we are so caught up in our balkanized tribalisms? The world's future is not a set of distinct ethnically exclusive national states on the Wilsonian and post-Westphalian model; it is a set of geographical states in a global economy where each state is a mix of social groups. Israel/Palestine will eventually adapt to this reality. For now, however, it is caught up in a war that promises to benefit no one.

The politics of the idiotic pseudo-left are latently fascist and might be described as the political mythology of total carnival, where all power relationships are reversed. This expresses resentment. The real beneficiary may be corporate and governmental elites that want to rule in an authoritarian manner by policing people with speech codes.

In art and the world of ideas, we can seek to identify the problems, explore the questions, and raise new ones. This is different from merely taking sides, as if the whole of the life of the mind were a kind of two-party system, with each side moralizing everything, so that the adversary is not a fellow citizen and therefore virtual friend to be argued with in a curious and joyful manner, but a kind of enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. Demonstrations often serve in this regard similar to voting: they manifest the force of numbers and strength of will backing a particular position that is almost always identified with the interest, will, and character or collective personality of one faction. The factions will not be opinions, but peoples.

But in a real social movement there is normally creativity. People don't just stand visibly on one side or the other, nor take up weapons of some kind, including the instrumentalization of art and journalism for the purpose. Instead their participants engage in lots of creative thought and experimentation.