Consider a lapse (or two) into senselessness in a generally sensible piece by a generally sensible author, Anatole Lieven. The thesis:

By their shameful, spineless stance on the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, European leaders have doomed whatever remained of their global influence and their pretensions to promote a “rules-based international order.”

They are also helping to dig the graves of their own political parties, and quite possibly of European democracy.

Fair enough. Now for the first lapse:

This fusion of Muslim minority politics with the far left is likely to drive still further the turn of much of the populist right not only to an increasingly open and vicious racist Islamophobia, but also to fierce support for U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East.

This comment suggests that the “turn of much of the populist right” to racism is the fault of the Left, particularly what Lieven calls “the far left.” The underlying principle seems to be: if A takes a principled stand of some kind, and B “driven” in response o racism, B can’t be held responsible for his racism, but A can. Applied to the present case: if the Left opposes Britain’s complicity in genocide and wars of aggression, and the populist Right turns in response to racism, the Right’s turn must be accepted as a fact of nature, so that the Left is to be blamed for it.

The operative assumption here is self-evidently incoherent. If we can hold anyone responsible for something, it’s the perpetrator of some wrongdoing. If one party isn’t responsible, it’s the one resisting the perpetrator. Lieven manages to invert that truth, blaming not only the victims but the victims’ advocates in the process. Here’s an alternate possibility: we could attribute agency to the (individuals that constitute the) Right, hold them responsible for their own racism, blame them for it, and explain the recrudescence of racism on the Right by citing their pathological motivations.  Why is that so hard? Why does the Left have to be accused of everything, including the gratuitous malfeasances of its antagonists?

Lieven goes on to describe the problematic internal divisions of the British Left:

Both of these left/right blocs are deeply divided internally. On the left, obsessive adherence to “woke” agendas runs up against the deep social conservatism of most Muslim communities, especially when it comes to the position of women.

The word “obsessive” signals a criticism. The implicit criticism seems to be that the “woke” branch of the Left is too woke. “Woke” is a metaphor. Put more literally, the criticism is: the secular-egalitarian branch of the Left is too committed to secular egalitarianism. This is a problem because the other branch of the Left consists in part of Muslim apologists for patriarchy, and this patriarchal branch, I suppose, is offended by the assertive secular egalitarianism of the first branch. The result is internal division within the Left, which undermines the cohesion necessary for electoral victory.

I doubt that Anatole Lieven has any first-hand, real-life experience with Muslim patriarchy, or any real-life sense of how to deal with it. I have about fifty years of both, so I feel entitled to say that he’s gotten this exactly wrong. The basic tactical asset of patriarchy is precisely its obsessiveness. Patriarchal Muslims–whether in Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran–are obsessed with the idea of institutionalizing a patriarchal version of Islam. Given this, secular egalitarians who fall short of asserting an equally obsessive adherence to “woke” egalitarianism stand no chance of prevailing against them. You can’t prevail against a bunch of obsessive ideologues by dialing back  your obsession to defeat them.

This is an AI generated image depicting a commitment to the judicious temperament in a European city, but otherwise of dubious relevance to the post

Whether Lieven admits it or not, a choice is required. Suppose you confront partisans of patriarchy, Muslim or otherwise, within your movement or elsewhere. Do you want to stop them, or are you content to let them practice what they preach? If you want to stop them, you have to do the very thing Lieven is criticizing: maintain an obsessive adherence to a woke agenda, and confront them with it. You have to match their obsessive adherence with yours, and pit your agenda against theirs. If you regard “wokeness” as a Christian heresy, then feel free to alter your vocabulary and say that you have to fight a jihad. Or call it a “crusade” for all I care. But whatever vocabulary you use, there’s no getting around what you have to do.

If you’re not interested in stopping or at least impeding or challenging them, you can no doubt dispense with all of the above. You can replace the wokeness with half-avowed excuses for patriarchy, the obsession with complaisance, and the woke agenda with pragmatist opportunism. The problem is, in doing so, while you may win an election or two, you’ll eventually lose the moral high ground.

Once you do, you’ll inevitably subvert your own electoral strategy by creating a mystery of what it is that you’re fighting for. What’s the point of “winning,” ultimately, if you’re willing to march in lock step with patriarchy? What are you winning at? The criticism Lieven makes in his article is that the British center-left has ceded the moral high ground to the Right and Center. The underlying point is that you can’t claim the moral high ground by ceding it. Fair enough. The problem is, that’s simultaneously the criticism Lieven is making (to one party) and the advice he’s giving (to another). The woke Left has the moral high ground as against the Islamo-patriarchal ethnic Left. Why cede it?

And though the criticism doesn’t apply specifically to Lieven, the question remains: why are Western elites so eager to fight Islamic theocracy with bombs when it’s thousands of miles away, but so reluctant to fight it with words when it’s right here in their midst? Could it be that the first thing requires nothing of them, whereas the second makes demands? Or is it that they get a thrill out of mayhem and destruction, but no comparable thrill out of disciplined action for the common good?

I understand the rationale for Lieven’s argument. The claim seems to be that Britain has lost its way, and can only be brought back to sanity by electoral victory. Electoral success requires cohesion, and cohesion is subverted by internal friction between warring ideological camps. The prescription then becomes: suppress the internal dissension between them in the name of overall unity until victory is achieved. Then worry about the differences that came up along the way.

I’m not British, but I’ve heard a version of this song before. For the last two years, Democrats in the United States have been arguing that we should ignore the issues of Israeli apartheid and genocide over there so that we can focus on what’s really important right here, and win some elections. Lieven’s argument is a mirror image of this inverse-binocularism. Ignore the patriarchy here, he seems to be saying, so that we can make a dent in apartheid and genocide over there.

The truth is that you can’t do either thing without doing both at once. You can’t focus on fascism here without refusing complicity in fascism abroad, and you can’t refuse complicity in aggression abroad while placating proto-fascist patriarchy here. You have to define the common denominator of ethical commitments that constitute the ticket of entry into your movement, and then enforce it with “obsessive” zeal. You have to marginalize and exclude racists, fascists, and sexists here–and as appropriate, criticize, cancel, picket, and boycott them as well–so that you can, in good conscience and with full consistency end your entanglements in those things abroad.

If the exclusions cost you elections or some other proxy of political success, then you have to accept that as the cost of principled action. If you can’t accept it, you have no business avowing principles. And if you can’t do that, you can’t stand for justice, the principle that gives any movement its raison d’etre.

I asked AI for an image of “the woke Left,” and this is the instructively incoherent slop it produced

I say this not as a leftist but as a fellow-traveler: the problem with the Left is not, as so many seem to think, its ideological rigidity or refusal to compromise, but its systemic inability to handle internal disagreement in a productive way. The Left lacks a sense of what constitutes a legitimate disagreement in need of internal adjudication, and what is simply an assault on decency and common sense in need of exclusion.

Instead of generating an autonomous account of its own of these things, it’s internalized the criticisms of the right-wing anti-woke industry, and used that as a substitute for thought. This is why one finds supposed leftists nowadays using the language of “wokeness” as though it meant something, and policing its boundaries as though doing so was a useful or meaningful enterprise. It’s actually a hopeless enterprise, an attempt to police the boundaries of the Left with the conceptual tools of the Right. There’s no worse intellectual strategy than to adopt the terms of your adversaries.

If anyone wants my advice, I’ll give it: stop worrying about bullshit like “wokeness,” and set some real priorities in ordinary English. Start by asking and trying to answer one difficult question: What counts as a permissible disagreement within a contemporary movement for justice, and what demands unapologetic exclusion?

Once you do, the answers to a handful of other questions will become clear. What benefit can a pro-Palestine movement derive from Muslim defenders of patriarchy simply because the victims of Israeli policy happen largely to be Muslims? None. 

What point would there be to a fight against Israeli apartheid if the fight required acquiescence in the worldview of, say, Muslim (or Christian) anti-Semites? Less than none.

What value is there in electoral successes that sell out the principles for which the election is contested? Same answer.

Should Muslims be offended that AI images uncritically re-package the primordial Orientalist cliches of the past two millennia? Here they might have a point. 

Should we be anxious that Muslims will be offended at criticisms we make that contradict their religious dogmas? No–no more than we should be worried that Jews, Christians, or Hindus will be offended by similar criticisms. Their inability to handle criticism shouldn’t become ours. Contrary to prevailing dogma nowadays, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam need criticism, as do plenty of their un-woke adherents. There’s something absurd about a Left that gives religion a free ride while going on witch hunts after the woke.

I have fifty years of dealing with Muslim patriarchy. I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, and I’ve suffered misery under it. It comes in different flavors and varieties, and I don’t dispute that it’s possible to negotiate a reasonable modus vivendi with its milder versions. But above a threshold, it invites and deserves wholesale rejection. The Left has, for better or worse, become a congeries of ethnic groups practicing some version of identity politics. There are more and less reasonable versions of that, but the unreasonable versions have to be dealt with in a frankly adversarial way, even if it overturns somebody’s genius electoral strategy. What’s only too obvious is that there is no genius electoral strategy there, much less one to sell out for. Critics like Lieven should have the sense to admit that, and stop blaming the “far left” for the sins of a society that’s lost its mind.