The Left’s Tiki Torch Brigade

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

 

It’s been a disquieting time for well-meaning liberals who have been suddenly confronted with the realization that their own side is rife with fanatics and haters.

 

The explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling on campuses and the streets after October 7 has shaken left-of-center people who didn’t know, or want to know, who their allies were.

 

The long-standing presumption of progressives has been that their own side is identified with righteousness — with tolerance, reason, and the finest of American traditions — while conservatives are hateful troglodytes who aren’t just wrong, but ill-intentioned.

 

The various -isms and -phobias were allegedly the exclusive province of the Right, including antisemitism. Hatred of the Jews was for people carrying tiki torches at the University of Virginia, for white nationalists obsessed with the so-called Great Replacement Theory, for David Duke.

 

There’s no doubt that there are neo-Nazis and right-wing Jew-haters, who deserve to be ostracized and are, in some cases, truly dangerous.

 

But they are marginalized. They don’t have tenured positions at prestigious universities. They aren’t capable of mustering sizeable crowds on campuses and in cities across America. They aren’t organizing morally repugnant statements that engender wide-ranging debate in the political mainstream.

 

No, that’s what the Left’s haters do.

 

All that’s missing from some of the pro-Gaza rallies are the torches and the high-and-tight haircuts. But the underlying sentiment is closely related. The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the pro-Gaza protesters chant, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

 

For both, the Jews are a malignant force. For both, there is a favored population over and above the Jews (white Europeans for the neo-Nazis; Arabs for the Hamas sympathizers). For both, the Jews must be fiercely resisted. The white nationalists must fight not to be replaced by the Jews allegedly conspiring against their demographic interests, while the Free Palestine activists want to use any means necessary to literally replace the Jews living in Israel.

 

Progressive beliefs about the geography of hatred in the U.S. have also been exploded. Red America is supposed to be backward and intolerant, and Blue America open-minded and welcoming. It’s not true. It wasn’t some rural area no one had heard of that had to warn Jews to stay away from a kosher dining hall, but Cornell University, a member of the Ivy League in good standing ensconced in deep-blue Ithaca, N.Y.

 

The arc of history is not bending toward justice in this context, by the way. Thanks in large part to their miseducation in institutions overwhelmingly run by progressives, young people are more inclined to anti-Israel opinions than their elders. If they’ve been taught to hate the West, is it any surprise that they hate the West?

 

Even before the Hamas-supporting statements and demonstrations, it should have been obvious that the progressive complacency about its own well-meaning broad-mindedness was badly misplaced.

 

The woke movement that has become dominant on the left does not seek a neutral playing field, but wants to privilege favored groups and disadvantage others. The identity politics that defines the Democratic Party and so many elite institutions is all about invidious distinctions along the same lines. Almost all the social pressure and bureaucratic machinery on campuses and elsewhere devoted to intersectionality, sensitivity, and the like has been used as a weapon against ideological opponents.

 

In short, progressivism has become shot through with an illiberal, authoritarian tendency. It is commonplace for campus progressives to shout down or threaten speakers with whom they disagree, relying on intimidation to do what in a free society should be the work of persuasion.

 

Is it any wonder, then, that an Islamist terror group seeking its ends by force isn’t naturally repellent to people soaked in this way of thinking?

 

What separates the white nationalists and the Hamas fellow-travelers is, ultimately, the ethnicity of the people they want to defeat the Jews. That’s been made plain, and decent progressives should reconsider their allies accordingly.