Liberals v. Progressives

A glossary

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

Inner Life

,

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

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.

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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.