Why Won't The Far-Left Argue?

The far-left is presumptuous like no other political group

Yesterday, I went to check out the protests for Palestine at my university. Contrary to media histrionics, the protestors are not especially intimidating—it’s hard to be intimidated by a purple-haired androgynous man wearing a shirt that says gays for Palestine (the shirt actually used a synonym for gays). But what was odd about the protest was the complete lack of interest in persuasion.

The people at the protest were not moderates. They were not people with a fundamentally liberal view of the world, who simply thought that Israel treated the Palestinians poorly. There were some people who thought that, but they were all protesting on behalf of Israel. One person said he had quite significant criticisms of the way Israel was carrying out the war, but was a proud zionist, proud to defend Israel’s right to exist.

The people protesting for Palestine, waving around Palestinian flags, chanted calls to globalize the intifada (in their defense, they probably don’t know what intifada means or what the last one resulted in) and calling for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. Other times they chanted things like “no peace on stolen land,” in one case while having a peace sign tattoo (the irony seemed lost on the person doing that, sadly).

Now, most of the people there were completely uninformed about the conflict. No doubt most people chanting from the river to the sea had no clue what river or what sea they were talking about. Those who called for divestment would’ve been unable to name where they wanted to divest from beyond vague generalizations about divesting from companies funding the war effort, an action that would have a completely negligible effect on Israel. But they went along with the movement because they were far-left—they shared the broad political sentiments of the other protestors—even though they knew almost nothing about the conflict.

So both the people who knew what they were talking about and the people who didn’t were extremely far-left. There were no chants for anything like a two-state solution, but many chants calling for intifada, a one-state solution, and violence. Yet despite how radical they were, they seemed completely uninterested in anything approaching persuasion.

Mention economics to a radical libertarian and they’ll talk your ear off about it for hours on end. They’ll write long articles and books about it. They’ll major in economics in college so as to confirm their previous libertarian beliefs. They accept that, being politically fringe, they actually have to change minds. And they invest lots of time doing that.

If you talk to a Curtis Yarvin-type monarchist about the optimal government, they’ll argue about it for hours on end. Neoreactionaries were famous for writing absurdly long articles going back and forth with those who disagreed with them. Because they were fringe, because most people disagreed with them, they didn’t have the presumption that challenging them was gauche or indicative of moral failing. They were willing to get down dirty and argue.

And yet it seems like people at Palestinian protests—and many on the left more broadly—just don’t share this view. They prattle on and on about liberating Palestine from the river to the sea and calling for Intifada, and act as if asking obvious questions like “I’m no expert, but I got the sense that there were some Intifadas before and they didn’t turn out great, and if the last ones didn’t turn out great, wouldn’t it be a bad idea to do another one?” They call for eliminating the police, yet spend very little time thinking about what would be done to criminals in such a case. They act like the badness of capitalism is something so obvious that it barely needs to be argued for. This was especially confusing and ubiquitous in high school debate—where the entire point of the activity is to argue—but is much broader.

This is, of course, very far from universal. There are many on the left—even the far left—who are quite willing to argue. Yet this is relatively rare comparatively, and especially rare among activists. Many on the left seem to treat activism as an alternative to persuasion rather than a method of persuasion.

At the Palestinian protest I was at yesterday, the people waving around an Israeli flag asked numerous people to dialogue. They waxed poetic about the importance of dialogue when people disagree. In fact, one of them, when talking to people holding up signs saying “Jews for Palestine,” discussed the way Jews have resolved disputes since the dawn of human history. Yet not even the pro-Palestinian Jews would argue (you know something is really up when Jews won’t engage in Talmudic debates about things).

The level of presumptuousness is really quite stunning. People calling for the eradication of Israel act like their position is so self-evidently correct, so clearly righteous, that any person with questions must be of corrupt moral fiber. They don’t seem to realize that they are the political fringe, with their political views being far less popular than the view that Trump is importantly messianic.

They hang in small bubbles, full of people who share all their views. We all occupy bubbles—most of my close friends know about the argument from psychophysical harmony, and a lot of them are utilitarians or something near. But many of the protestors seem totally unaware that there is a world outside their bubble, where regular, normal people regard them as crazy.

It’s not just at protests. The Zionist groups on campus, I’m told, have reached out to the pro-Palestinian groups to have dialogue. The pro-Palestinian groups flatly refuse. They even refuse to dialogue with moderate groups interested in peace. They have an explicit policy: don’t talk to zionists.

This is an utterly terrible state of affairs if one is at all interested in left-wing politics. The campus protestors who call for a violent intifada, and then act like their call is so self-evidently righteous that they don’t even have to argue for it are poison for Democratic politics. The lunatic campus protestors who refuse to vote for Biden and make left-wingers look insane are quite bad news for the left-wing establishment. As Freddie Deboer says in an article titled Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand:

The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics. When someone like David Shor gently says that they in fact do have to care about politics, and points out that they’ve accomplished nothing, they attack him rather than do the work of making their positions popular. Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds. Nobody gives you what you want. That’s not how it works. Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Not only do many on the far-left act as if they are exempt from explaining what they support, but they also roll their eyes at the claim that they should actually have something like a justification for their beliefs. They act as if they are special, exalted over all other fringe political views by dint of the strength of their convictions and the trendiness of their views in a small number of elite circles. If they ever want to get anything done, if they want to change minds, they will have to get off their high horse, and take persuading people seriously, rather than acting like the uninitiated are psychopathic, bloodthirsty demons beyond the reach of decency or persuasion or concern.