Dear Friends,
I’m sharing another piece that’s Israel/Palestine-themed and focusing on how Israel/Palestine intersects with the ongoing culture wars. I don’t particularly want to write endlessly about this, but the truth is that it’s hard to think about anything else. At the partner site
, shares my affection for punctuation marks — in her case, the footnote.Best,
Sam
THE STATE OF THINGS
Liberals: Everything is basically ok but there’s room for improvement.
Progressives: Everything is terrible and getting worse.
VIOLENCE
Liberals: Violence is agency-driven and an anomaly. The right approach to handling violence is a court of law with a heightened degree of compassion for the accused. Through good institutions, violence is be isolated and then gradually squeezed out of societies.
Progressives: Violence is structural. Wherever there is a power imbalance there is violence. The way to handle violence is fundamentally personal and moral — to decide whether you are on the side of the powerful or of the victims and, once having committed to the side of the victims, to rigorously scrub out any trace of complicity with power in one’s character and in one’s actions.
THE WEST
Liberals: The West is, first of all, a region of the world, like any other. The West, in the course of time, developed some tricks of economy, technology, governance that allow for greater societal wealth and for an effective smoothing-out of types of power imbalances which have existed in all societies at all times. The West has a colonial past that needs to be reckoned with; but the period of post-war decolonization, with the cessation of avowedly imperialist ideologies in the West, serves as significant atonement and offers the chance to move forward.
Progressives: The West irredeemably corrupted itself with slavery, colonialism, and deeply-wired racist ideologies. Attempts at “reform” are, inherently, hypocritical — and in practice lead to “soft power” and “neocolonialism.” The only possible redemption is a whole-hearted transfer of power to those who were historically oppressed.
PROGRESS
Liberals: It’s slow but real. The world is less violent and more just than it was in the pre-modern period.
Progressives: The only progress is social justice. The crimes of the past are so enormous that a concerted transfer of power and a dedicated period of catharsis and atonement are the only possible means of absolution.
VICTIMHOOD
Liberals: To be a victim is an unfortunate condition calling for compassion and a societal effort to prevent similar acts of victimization.
Progressives: Victimhood is truth. It is the physical manifestation of the often-hidden but always-violent imbalances of power.
POWER
Liberals: It exists as a largely malevolent force. Intelligent institutions can chip away at and defang power. Excellent institutions can harness it as a force for good.
Progressives: All human relations exist on the matrix between who has more power and who has less. The job of society is to move power away from the undeserving oligarchy and towards the people.
THE STATE
Liberals: A necessary compact for harnessing certain types of productive power.
Progressives: Rooted in violence and theft but somehow useful as a tool for generating a society-wide field of discourse.
CAPITALISM
Liberals: Far from a perfect system but it seems to work. The trick is to tame its excesses and to circulate wealth through social institutions.
Progressives: An evil to be everywhere opposed. (Although what the alternative is is far from clear.)
SEX
Liberals: An apolitical activity. Of political importance only when the state and society can act only to rectify some abiding cultural prejudice (e.g. homophobia, entrenched forms of misogyny).
Progressives: The underlying, foundational power imbalance. Achieving social justice hinges on eliminating patriarchy.
LIBERALISM
Liberals: It’s a good thing!
Progressives: It’s a completely untenable and hypocritical system, raw power in a threadbare disguise. The basic issue is that liberalism depends on capitalism, which depends always on vast social inequities; and on the state, which depends on violence. The best that can be said about liberals is that they are sometimes well-meaning and genuinely oblivious to the actual foundations of power.
PROGRESSIVISM
Liberals: We basically like progressives, who clearly mean well and have some valid critiques. However, progressives never seem to propose any concrete, structural solutions.
Progressives: We know that we’re short on practical proposals, but the edifices of imperialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy are so enormous that what we first must do is tend to ourselves, our spirit, the community of the like-minded. Once that is achieved, then we may be able to see beyond the blinders and prejudices and, with big hearts, to create a genuinely better world.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Liberals: Israel is a state like any other with a right to defend itself. The imbalance of Israel’s power over Palestine is highly concerning, as is the right-ward drift of Israel’s government. The situation is untenable and, as the stronger entity locally, Israel bears a great share of the responsibility for alleviating Palestine’s suffering and working towards peace. However, let’s not forget that the Palestinians also have agency. Hamas, which is terroristic to its core, has become effectively the representative government in Gaza, which means that Gazans have roughly the same responsibility for Hamas’ actions as Israeli citizens do for Israel’s government. The important thing is to limit the human suffering and one shining day come back to the peace table, but, in the meantime, let’s understand this as a complex and impossible situation, with both sides having agency and both bearing responsibility for a great deal of suffering.
Progressives: Israel/Palestine is the quintessential microcosm of all of the power imbalances of the current state of the world. Israel is fundamentally imperialist, racist, buoyed by capitalism and by the naked exercise of overwhelming military power. To look at what’s actually happening in Gaza is to see all the hypocrisies of liberalism unveiled. Any belief in social justice has to start with a better life for Palestinians.
Obviously, it’s this last set of discrepancies that’s spurring me to write the piece. It’s been very startling to me what’s happening in my WhatsApp and e-mail and family conversations over the last weeks. The people I’m talking to tend to be operating with completely different vantage-points on Israel/Palestine and which are based on a widely divergent set of assumptions about the world (some of which I’ve tried to itemize above).
What’s so striking is that the people I’m talking to, with such different perspectives, are often of the same class, have attended the same schools, are apparently indistinguishable from one another. Talk to these same people about Trump, or the Dobbs ruling, or Dubya, and they’ll say pretty much the same things as one another. But the schism is more profound than I realized. My sense is that the current eruption of hostilities in Israel/Palestine may be the watershed moment in left-leaning discourse for — who knows? — a generation. It almost perfectly lays bare the liberal/progressive faultlines, which tended to be obscured in various points of common cause.
It’s probably fairly obvious to anybody reading this that I am a liberal. I find the progressive vantage-point to be naive, dangerously sure of itself, and, in its emphasis on collective action, uncompromising analyses, and absolutist moral positions, almost wholly removed from the tangle of actual human relations in the actual world.
That being said, I do understand the impulses behind it and am sympathetic to some of its critiques. Maybe the right framing (although most contemporary progressives would reject this Occidentalizing lens) is that it’s a reprise of the Enlightenment debate which, on one side, pitted Locke, Burke, the tradition of the American Revolution against, on the other, Rousseau and the French Revolution. The debates at that time anchored on questions of human nature (the tempered optimism of Locke, the belief that humans were fairly good but that there were certain structural issues that needed to be checked with clever institutions; as opposed to Rousseau’s view of a deep human goodness trampled over by society); and on questions of governance (the representative government of the English-American school as opposed to Rousseau’s impressive-sounding-but-always-maddeningly-unclear “general will”). The content of the Rousseauian view seems to get swapped out once a century or so, but without losing its fervor — with Rousseau’s amour-de-soi and romanticism giving way to Marxist economics and with Marxism in turn giving way to Foucault’s narratives of power and to a hyper-charged post-colonial ethos from writers like Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, etc.
I would submit that neither the liberal nor the progressive framing are all that useful when it comes to Israel/Palestine, which is a uniquely vexing set of problems featuring a set of interlocking power disproportions and two groups of people living in very close proximity to one another that really and truly hate each other — problems that are likely beyond the capacity of either liberal or progressive social theory to set right. Israel/Palestine falls into a different domain, which is the realm of no-good-solutions, of intractable problems, where what we hope for is a minimization of death and, eventually, some compromise peace that neither side will be close to happy with but that both sides will begrudgingly accept.
In the meantime, though, Israel/Palestine is a prism on which everybody sees what they want to see and, superimposed on which, the liberal/progressive split becomes very nearly insupportable. The prayers at the moment are all for the Middle East — for the ongoing sufferings of Gazans; for Israel’s grief over 10/7 — but some compassion needs to be inwardly directed as well for those in the West who are seeing their friendships fracture and their family members divvy up between being “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine.” It’s a real split, and my guess is that it’s going to bitterly divide left-of-center Westerners for a long time (and, unfortunately, right at the moment when political coalition-building is most needed to deal with a mad-and-bad right-wing). Basically, it’s going to suck, and the only possible way through is some mutual understanding, some healthy dialogue. Inshallah. B’ezrat Hashem.
This was a great idea, excellently done.
I am a Liberal so I naturally was nodding along with what you wrote.
After, I tried to think of an argument for the Progressive POV that for some problems you have to resort to an absolutist ethic, i.e., by any means possible.
I thought of the Abolitionists, the radical progressives of their time. Without them, slavery might have lasted longer. In the judgement of history, the Abolitionists were on the right side of history.
So, yes, I'm a Liberal but one who understands that history might yet mock my beliefs.
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about
The first thing that strikes me is that even given the limits intrinsic to summary, you are creating a strong binary distinction between positions that are in practice and theory more often mixed or hybrid. Part of that is precisely that you are describing liberals and progressives in both of those registers. Distinctions that may seem sharply drawn at the level of theory--say, between "violence is agentive and anomalous" and "violence is structural" tend to mix or erode quite quickly between liberals and progressives when applied to particular situations. I also think your breakdown has the typical problem that these kinds of binary listings tend towards, which is they're generally set up to favor the loyalties or affinities of the person doing the breakdown--they are often a rhetorical sideways into "self and other".
Invariably when you dip into a particular thinker's instantiation of views on these subjects, there's more subtlety and complexity. Take "The West". The position that the "West is a region like any other" is an argument that many progressives take up in some form or another--Dipesh Chakrabarty's call for "provincializing the West" calls for restoring the West to that status intellectually and normatively; Fredrick Cooper and Jane Burbank's Empires in World History works to put European empires in global perspective in order to be far more specific about what is particular to Europe after 1500; Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony wants to do the same. On the flip side, there is a very substantial number of liberals across the spectrum of liberal thought who hold to some version or another of European exceptionalism, often in a positive sense, but not always. The degree to which those "tricks of governance, technology, etc." enabled imperialism--or were enabled by it--is also a discussion where you find liberals, progressives, and radicals in a variety of positions rather than in a strictly binary opposition.
Just to stick on this point for a second, if you go to the opposition of "imperialism ended, so that takes care of that" versus "there is no possibility of reform, only transfer of power in its entirety", not only is there a messy, complicated spectrum between those positions, but for those who do take the latter position, it's not primarily a charge of "hypocrisy", it's about what *structure* is, and about the moments in historical time where some sort of agentive possibilities open up in structures--e.g., it is not a complaint about the seeming insincerity of actors promising reform, it is an assessment that they will be unable to effect reforms even if they wish to do so.
I think this is where all of the binaries you're setting up amount to a kind of straw-man reading of oppositions over the situation in Palestine and Israel. For example, liberals tend to in general take seriously the constraints that authoritarian rule and material conditions impose on the exercise of political agency. No liberal that I've ever encountered would hold people in refugee camps in the middle of the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia responsible for their failure to overthrow Mengistu and the Derg and therefore complicit in Mengistu's attacks on civilian and on their own starvation. Meaning that the argument that Gazans have the same degree of political agency as Israeli citizens, if it's one that liberals actually harbor, is deeply distinct from the kinds of arguments they would make about states, power and political agency otherwise. Similarly, Palestinian rights attract far *more* ardent attention from some progressives than many other struggles that seem similarly urgent or intersectional, which requires some recognition. (Moreover, the entire issue divides progressives internally, and not just along the lines of Jewish progressives v. non-Jewish progressives). Moreover, the emphasis on agency is very precisely one of the things that produces intense contradictions across the spectrum of opinion both in historical analyses and in thinking about the present--who is credited and exempted from responsibility is not a consistent or persistent kind of claim within liberal or progressive thought. E.g., your view that this situation is (like most) sui generis in some fashion is one that I think you'd find most liberals or progressives (or none of the above) harboring in some way if you were patient enough with their thinking and didn't just stick to one-note sloganeers. The problem with that, in the end, is that the contradictions that people can harbor within complexity are themselves frustrating or enraging or unhelpful.
What is one to do, for example, with Benny Morris doing detailed, responsible, thorough historical research and concluding that the state of Israel in fact has systematically tried to occlude the truth, which is that the Nakba happened more or less as many Palestinian intellectuals and advocates have claimed, and that Palestinians were in fact forced violently or coercively off of land with the deliberate intent of transferring it to Israeli ownership and then arguing that even though that's what happened and it needs to be admitted without flinching, he believes that it had to happen and should not be apologized for or undone. Indeed, at one time, Morris argued that this showed that future expulsions would have to occur, as a Jewish state could not exist with Muslims or Arabs within its borders. And yet Morris has also agreed that Israel's rule in the West Bank amounts to "apartheid" and even more recently, has conceded that barring some kind of peace that all sides accept, an exclusively Jewish state cannot possibly persist indefinitely, no matter how militarily powerful it is.
I think many intellectuals would exhibit similar complexity and contradiction when pressed for details, though many might not be as forthright or rigorous about it as Morris. I don't think those complexities would neatly align with your grid. I think many people in everyday contexts have similarly muddled or messy views of many things, and it ill-behooves any of us to sanctify our own positions by aligning them with the best part of a binary. Perhaps all of us should start where Morris started, which is just wanting to look at the way the world is and has been without trying to pre-empt realities that don't fit the grid. There are plenty of histories since 1960 where I don't think your sketch of what liberals believe about power, the West, progress, etc. conforms very well to the facts on the ground, or amounts to whistling past the graveyard. But there are also many histories where progressives, if and when they resemble your sketch, are doing the same. A more curious and self-reflecting way in might be to think that when people have come to some conclusion that seems liberal or progressive, they might be reasoning up from something real they've tried to grapple with--or have experienced--rather than reasoning down from abstractions.