The New, New Left

Nelson Ascher, over at Europundits, gives his take on the post-Cold War transformation of the European left. A few excerpts:

[S]pontaneously up to a point, anti-Americanism became the alternative ideology that came to fill in the vacuum left by the failure of traditional, USSR-based communism and its Maoist or Trotskyite satellites. Before 1989, the global left had something to fight for: either the strengthening of the communist states or the correction of what they called their bureaucratic distortions. To fight for something is simultaneously to fight against whatever threatens it, and thus, the leftists were anti-Western and anti-Americans too, anti-capitalistic in short.

Now, whatever they wanted to defend or protect doesn’t exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let’s not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

Read the whole thing here. Read Wretchard's commentary on Ascher's article here.

I think that unreasoning hatred, born of frustration, is very much a characteristic of some elements of the left. It is also true that many of the reform movements that have been prominent in recent decades derived a great deal of their vigor from left-wing infiltration and support, and declined when the left abandoned them for more promising vehicles. Today, that vehicle is Islamic radicalism. Anti-globalization was yesterday's cause. Environmentalism was the day before yesterday, and feminism was the day before that. Despite this cause-hopping a fundamental fact remains -- the left has been marginalized by history and the temporary alliances it makes have not changed that fact one bit. What is more, the movements upon which the left piggy-backed have suffered from the association, expecially to the exent that they have been tainted with left-wing rage. There is no reason to believe that Islamic radicalism, with all its post-colonial resentments and dreams of a new caliphate, will be any different.