The waves of progressive enmity directed at Israel during its recent counteroffensive against Hamas started as a low-level frustration. That morphed into an anger that became a white-hot rage with the Jewish state’s refusal to succumb. To roll over. To be a good victim.
Israel’s success as a modern market economy and military power is its unforgivable sin.
It is worth bearing this in mind when we think about the progressive Left and America. More than any other cause or concern — more than abortion or the climate, far more than healthcare or taxes or the infrastructure bill — it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has become the divining rod with which we distinguish between true believers and everyone else. This is because progressives have turned it into an external proxy fight in the identitarian culture wars. Israel represents the light-skinned persecutor — in other words, in the leftist worldview, Israel is an avatar of American evil. What one believes about the Jewish state is not necessarily about Zionism or Israeli policy or even the Jews. Sometimes, it is a window into the way one thinks about America and, really, Americans.
The central notion at play is a desperation for America, as a country and as an idea, to fail — whether because its triumph would undermine the progressive worldview or because it is irredeemable at its core.
The fragmentation of the American Left dates, at least, to the 1968 Democratic convention and the crackup of the old coalition: the unions, the farmers, blacks, Jews, Catholics, intellectuals, big-city bosses. Ostensibly, Vietnam was the cause, but, really, it revolved around a long-percolating debate, a mounting existential confrontation, about what the party’s priorities should be. What it believed in, not just about the war, but everything.
Would it be a reformist party that believed in narrowing economic disparity? This was what the Left had always been. It was not radical, but it descended from a radical politics, and it tried, unevenly, to reconcile its faith in the American system with reform of that system. This made for a more ecumenical politics that brought together a cross-section of voters that would be unthinkable today: assembly-line workers, Klansmen, college professors, the sons and daughters of sharecroppers. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were its exemplars.
Or would the Democrats be a more progressive party — one that refused to work within the parameters of bourgeois society and imagined itself engineering a new, more elastic, kaleidoscopic, hitherto unimaginable America that assumed that before any meaningful redistribution of income could take place, a dramatic political reconfiguration was needed?
Over the next quarter-century, the clash became a wail and a conflagration and a long, gray hopelessness. It was exacerbated by the deindustrialization of the postwar economy and the collapse of the labor unions, and, less obviously but just as importantly, events outside the cloistered hollows of the American Left: Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of markets; Margaret Thatcher and then Ronald Reagan; the splintering of the Warsaw Pact; the Soviet collapse; the end of centralized planning in India; the emergence of Web 1.0; the globalization of commerce; a complex interdependence that seemed to have squashed the possibility of any future world war. It felt, for a few years, as if an entire constellation of forces — spiritual, dialectical, geopolitical — had leapt out of the morass of history and was now bulldozing over the ancient left-wing assumptions and pieties, the smirks, the eye rolls, the sanctimony.
Bill Clinton’s victory epitomized the identity crisis that followed this bulldozing. It was the first election about almost nothing. A style, a lingo, a generational gap, Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall, George H.W. Bush not knowing the price of a carton of milk. His campaign’s reigning assumption was that Democrats had to move right, but he was a progressive. Or appeared to be. He’d protested the war! He’d smoked marijuana! He spoke a smoothed-over redneck patois, but you knew you were being conned. Clinton was a contradiction. He was ambiguous.
By the time he left office, the existential wandering, the what-are-we-doing-here-ness of it all, had become the new modus operandi. Codified. As if Democrats’ raison d’être was to win — if need be, by coopting or repackaging other people’s ideas, about the estate tax or welfare or bombing other countries or, years later, healthcare. That it was no longer clear whom they were winning for, what they were trying to accomplish, had been papered over by a robust jobs market. The internet.
The old class consciousness was dead. The Levittowns were rotting. The cities were exploding — they were alive! But they were becoming ferociously expensive. There was no more proletariat. Democrats were politicking, legislating, inside a palette of ideas, a vernacular, that bore little resemblance to the old ways.
The progressives, the descendants of the anti-war protesters, the angry, bespectacled, mostly white, college-educated children of Chicago, funneled into the vacuum. They had been ascending the totem poles of every major institution in the country — the corporations, Silicon Valley, the studios, the universities, the media conglomerates — and now, they were pushing in on all sides of the party. In 2002, The Emerging Democratic Majority was published, and that seemed to validate everything they believed: demography was destiny. Soon, America would be mostly black and brown, and, conveniently, black and brown voters voted Democratic. Once again, the forces of history were contriving to elevate one camp, one cause or belief system, above all others.
Instead of viewing the world through the prism of class, as the liberals had insisted on, the progressives viewed it through that of race and gender, jettisoning the old economic determinism in favor of an identitarian determinism. There was a bit of a tussle — Bill Bradley tried to recenter the old liberal cause; ditto Howard Dean. They had an ability to cross communities and racial and ethnic boundaries. They had a “Free to Be You and Me” quality to them, a John Denver-ish, this-land-is-your-land-this-land-is-our-land thing that lent the whole enterprise a nostalgic touch. But the progressives were not nostalgic. Nostalgia was for white people and conservatives. The divisions were becoming starker.
Barack Obama should have been the synthesis candidate, the candidate who wove back together the liberal and progressive bonds, the one who said: Let us return to Chicago, August 1968, let us undo the division, let us rebuild, repair, remake this coalition as we forge a new economics, a new compact, a more equitable society. He was a solid orator. He could be preachy, but he knew how to lift the crowd. But he didn’t get how to lead, how to corner senators and congressmen, Democrats, Republicans, force them to hammer out a deal, any deal. He wasn’t intimidating.
Meanwhile, the many tornadoes circling around him, the populisms of the Left and Right, were metastasizing.
By 2016, the progressives were the establishment. There was still a sizable liberal constituency — these were the people who voted for Bernie Sanders, who cared about identity the way most decent people cared about equality and civil rights, but thought that the main thing was money, jobs, healthcare, the end of student debt. That ecumenical appeal.
But it wasn’t enough to fend off the progressives, who had a very powerful weapon in the culture, the prevailing norms, the new idiom. The social-media platforms were progressive. The investment banks were progressive. So was everyone. If you weren’t, you were racist — or maybe racist. The possibility of the taint was crippling. It was best to signal one’s correctness to preempt any potentially damaging insinuations. This was all the progressives had to do to get one to heel. Nice brand you got there — would be a shame if someone tweeted something.
Now the ugly descent was speeding up. One rose through the ranks of the progressive latticework by demonstrating, signaling, one’s forward-lookingness. One had to use the right words, have the right opinions, have the same tastes. Everything was politicized, so it mattered where you bought your groceries, what kind of pet you owned, what you ate for dinner, the way one talked about sex or technology or some otherwise very boring billionaire, floating around the planet in his silly jet, who wanted to send a rocket to Alpha Centauri. There had always been some degree of this inanity, but now, it was ubiquitous, and it was being talked about, posted, shared, and retweeted with a kind of ritualistic fervor that was mystifying and childlike. We liked to blame all this on social media. We missed the point. Social media had just tapped into what we already wanted, and then it gave it to us, in sickly waves, over and over and over.
The signaling game meant that, as in other radical or radical-adjacent societies, the way one got ahead was by constantly demonstrating one’s bona fides. The most efficient way to do this was to accuse other people of bad things. That was a good way of sidelining competition or venting this or that anger and giving voice to some unresolved conflict, and it provided one with something of a short-term prophylactic. He who accuses must be above reproach, right?
The world that white progressives put together stubbornly refused to fall into place. The progressives put black women at the top of the mountain. They were the seedbed of the intersectional movement, and they were going to save us from our darkest, basest impulses. They were supposed to have suffered the greatest — they inhabited a unique swatch of real estate in the topology of suffering. When Georgia went Biden in November, we were told, once again, that it was black women — in the form of Stacey Abrams, whose refusal to concede the 2018 gubernatorial race provided Donald Trump with a very nice precedent in 2020 — who would rescue the republic. Never mind that it was mostly boring, white suburbanites, who had tired of Trump’s antics, who made the difference. Like almost every constituency, black women, who were far more complicated and thoughtful and hard to generalize about than the progressives could possibly fathom, voted in greater numbers for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016.
The world progressives faced still didn’t make much sense to them.
But they still knew who to put at the bottom of this taxonomy: the white exemplar. The striver. The anti-sufferer. He, or she, who suspected the whole thing was a ruse. Who mostly went along uneasily. Who suspected that maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t end well. Searching for clarity, progressives expanded the category to include “white-adjacent” exemplars: Jews, Asian Americans.
It was not that the progressives loathed the Jews the way the white supremacists did. (This would be the real white supremacists, not the white supremacists of wokeish lore, which is basically every white person ever, but the real, blood and soil neo-Nazi white supremacists, who think Jews are monkeys and like to tweet at Jewish journalists images of crematoria and yellow Stars of David.) And they had complicated feelings about Asian Americans. Yes, of course, we should #StopAsianHate — but also, we should eliminate standardized tests that Asian American students tend to perform well on. The progressives loathed puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit where they wanted them, mostly because they succeeded — they defied the prevailing wisdom that all was rotten and bankrupt and in need of toppling.
The progressives wanted to believe that all was rotten, needed to believe it, because if it wasn’t, then what would happen to the progressive identity? The progressive identity was premised on the assumption of saving everyone else from some great unspeakable darkness. But what if there wasn’t some unspeakable darkness forever blocking justice? What if progress simply happened incrementally, by way of markets and occasional governmental tinkering, slowly, democratically? What if it did not require a campaign or a march on Washington? What if America was not evil? What would one’s cause be then? What would one be?
And so, we can feel America clawing itself apart. Obsessing over its immutable traits. Teaching its children to hate each other. Submitting to the algorithms.
Even worse: We sense that, lurking behind this cannibalization, there is a subset of Americans who want America to fail. Who resent its success. Who believe its success amounts to an argument against them and their worldview — their identity. And in an age when identity is everything, this counterideology represents an existential threat and must be treated as one.
The people who think this way — the radicals and the progressives wading after them, like toddlers, into the new radicalism — used to comprise the fringe of the fringe. They are still not the majority. But now, they wield power.
Their power feels paradoxical: They embrace a politics, an identity, that revolves around a well-documented topology of suffering, and they infuse those believed to have suffered the most with a profound wisdom.
This, of course, requires a villain. All mythologies do. The villain is, naturally, white — one who is congenitally disposed not to suffer. The villain is a striver, a defier of odds, a builder who does not care how hard something is, who possesses great sympathy but does not believe he, personally, can afford to wallow. The villain is a repudiation of the topology of suffering. The villain is loathsome. In America, he is everywhere.
Peter Savodnik has written extensively for Vanity Fair and other venues. He is the author of The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. He can be found on Twitter @petersavodnik.
