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What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent? What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.Ad Policy

One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theorywhich he helped developeconomics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Ungers work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.

What this means is that nothing in our societythe economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.is predetermined toward some definitive end. They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.

What makes Ungers progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements. He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness. What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions. His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it. In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.

The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trumps election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Ungers vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyds brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate backgroundthe failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United Statesfrom the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.

The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.

There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished. Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries. Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found. Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.

DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party? MORE FROM Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of todays economy.

Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests. Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes. For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank, and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have feltand beenabandoned.

Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuingit must be acknowledgedto get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy. What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They dont.

DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?

RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.

The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural changethe criterion of depthchange in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined systemsocialism for capitalismby another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.

These generalities mark a direction. They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time. A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.

DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?

RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of todays most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economyin intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers. Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart. These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality. It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents. And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.

To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes. That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.

But it is not enough to lift up businesses. It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structurethe part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decadesimproving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners. The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans. From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.

This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed. It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor lawto organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.

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DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxesincluding taxes on wealthin diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?

RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.

That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.

DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy, seem to have far-reaching implications for education. What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?

RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.

The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.

The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family. It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.

DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.

RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen. The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.

Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics: the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics. And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.

A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madisons plan. Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics. We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.

Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracythe level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims. The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics, the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime. They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.

Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites. It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.

DSJ: Arent you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Cant your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isnt there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?

RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.

DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesnt yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?

RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the countrys self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.

DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?

RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophetsincluding Emerson, Whitman, and Lincolnwas that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.

It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price. The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.

Go here to see the original:
Roberto Mangabeira Ungers Alternative Progressive Vision - The Nation

You would think that the National Museum of African American History and Culture would be dedicated to fighting the scourge of racism, particularly vicious caricatures and stereotypes of African Americans.

Yet toward the end of May the institution posted one of the most racist documents Ive ever seen, as part of a web page about whiteness. This graphic didnt gain widespread notice until last week, at which point the museum promptly yanked it down.

But the Internet is forever, so here it is:

As of this writing, the museum has not pulled down its link to the source document on which the infographic was based.

Which just goes to prove my theory that the harder you try to be progressive, by todays standards, the closer you get to the alt-right.

Podcast July 24 2020

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Bill Kristol joins Charlie Sykes to discuss the conventions, the debate on policy vs. punish...

What does that infographicand the supposed anti-racist theory on which it is basedtell us?

It tells us that the distinctive characteristics of whiteness and white culture include:

And by implication, its telling us that black people are not characterized by any of these traits.

When I saw this graphic it gave me an immediate, creepy feeling of dj vu. Specifically, it brought me back to that period in late 2015 and early 2016 when all of the white nationalists and alt-right types migrated out of the comments sections at Stormfront and descended upon Twitter.

Do you remember what those people kept insisting? Exactly what the National Museum of African American History and Culture is telling us: That all of these desirable characteristics are distinctive and unique to the white race.

What I remember most vividly from that moment four years ago was seeing two new racial slurs: dindoo and gibsmedat.

Thats dindoo as in dindoo nuffinI didnt do nothing, but rendered in a caricature of a black dialect. The same for gibsmedata caricatured version of give me that. You get the idea. The crude stereotype that was supposed to lodge in our brains is that black Americans refuse to take personal responsibility, want government handouts instead of work, and are incapable of speaking grammatical English.

And now were getting this slime from the dregs of white nationalist Twitter echoed back at us by the Smithsonian Institution.

What the hell happened?

It should go without sayingthough in these confused times I suppose we have to say itthat none of these caricatures is remotely true.

I get why the white nationalists would want to promote them. For the alt-right, its a form of unearned self-flatteryan attempt by a bunch of pathetic losers to puff themselves up as exemplars of hard work and responsibility (which must really take the sting out of living in your moms basement). What seems incomprehensible is why black museum curators would want to denigrate themselves. Worse, why would they want to boost the careers of white academics such as Robin DiAngelo and Judith Katz (the source for that infographic) to spread these vicious stereotypes in corporate anti-racism seminars across the country?

The key to the answer is one item on that list of allegedly white characteristics: individualism.

It is now a standard part of anti-racism to describe individualism and universality as the key components of racism and white supremacy.

It is really quite a spectacular feat, when you think of it, to so completely invert the meaning of a concept. In reality, individualism and universality are the opposites of racism. To view each person as a unique individual is to reject caricatures, stereotypes, and prejudices based on race. To regard ideas and values as universal is to reject the claim that physical differences create an inherent conflict or incompatibility that overrides our shared humanity.

These ideals may be hard to implement fully in practice, but to the extent they are achieved, individualism and universality are anti-racism.

So what is to be gained by turning this on its head? Who benefits by promoting a relentless racial collectivization and building up the artificial divisions between people of different skin tones and ancestral origins?

Sadly, there is political hay to be made out of herding people into separate and irreconcilable interest groups and pitting them against each other.

As one activist put it, while explaining why it is important to capitalize the word black, the idea is to emphasize that this is a specific group of people with a shared political identity. How convenient.

For the profiteers of a tribalistic, us-versus-them politics, the worst threat is the person who sees him- or herself as an individual.

But herding people into collectives requires that we invent inherent differences between them, which requires carving up various attributes of human character, ability, and culture and assigning them to one group or another. One of those groups is always going to end up being assigned the least desirable characteristics.

In a way, though, I suppose todays progressives are going full circle. Recent debates over the legacy of Woodrow Wilsonthe president who brought segregation back to federal hiringhave reminded us all that the first batch of progressives were barking mad racists obsessed with eugenics and steeped in racial caricatures.

Lets not allow their successors to drag us back to those days while insisting that theyre moving us forward.

See the article here:
Where Progressives and the Alt-Right Meet - The Bulwark

This is the point in the campaign when progressive groups begin assembling lists. Whats colloquially known as the Plum Book is the list of the more than 7,000 appointments that a president gets to make.

There are groups making lists of progressives for Plum Book jobs, as well as lists of prospective Cabinet officials. Here is a particularly thoughtful one, from Data for Progress.

The most instructive item is the list of progressive nominees for Treasury secretary. The Treasury secretary needs to know all the byzantine details of the plumbing of how the financial system worksand also the abstruse details of the accumulated financial-engineering abuses that need to be remedied.

Whats interesting is how short is the list of plausible candidates. Wall Street has had such a lock on Treasury secretary and related subcabinet jobs for so long that the bench is rather thin. Under Carter, Clinton, and Obama, lefties simply did not get these posts.

Heading the Data for Progress list is Sarah Bloom Raskin, a genuine progressive who served both as a governor of the Federal Reserve and as deputy secretary of the Treasury. Shes perfect, with both a deep understanding of the plumbing of the financial system and a commitment to reform. As an Obama administration appointee, Raskin doesnt seem all that scary. But she is almost a category of one.

The other proposed nominees are Richard Cordray, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; former labor secretary and renaissance progressive Robert Reich; and Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, a notable expert on sustainable development and critic of financialized globalism.

Any of them would be great. But the usual suspects would veto them as not sufficiently versed in how the Treasury works. Indeed, the typical definition of that requirement virtually limits it to Wall Street veterans.

Its time to rebuild the progressive bench, so that we have a more plausible farm-team system. Only by breaking the Wall Street link and lineage can progressives take back the government as well as taking back the presidency.

Read more here:
Bidens Cabinet and the Thin Progressive Bench - The American Prospect

In 2018, the Chinese government, under pressure from mounting evidence and United Nations scrutiny, changed its approach: it stopped denying the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang, and instead presented them as vocational skills centres, attended on a wholly voluntary basis by the regions Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims.

This threw up a number of questions: if the students were there voluntarily, why did a single classroom have five surveillance cameras? Why were they dressed in identical jumpsuits, and who volunteers to sit in a classroom chanting I am a citizen who obeys laws and regulations anyway? A researcher, Shawn Zhang, found what he believed to be satellite images of the same centre, which gave a clearer picture of its conditions: surrounded by razor wire and watchtowers. The following year, the so-called China cables were leaked, detailing the nature of this vocational programme the top line, allow no escapes.

Chinas actions are unforgivable, but one thing it can be forgiven for is not taking seriously the censure of foreign governments. While the Trump administration was considering sanctions, Donald Trump himself was guilty of detentions; migrant children were also being separated from their parents in the United States, some dying from neglected medical needs. The UK government, meanwhile, was charged by its own MPs with putting trade before human rights, Theresa May having declared a golden era for Anglo-Chinese relations. The current Conservative administration has conveniently forgotten events as recent as the past 18 months, and is claiming to have always strenuously decried Chinas human rights abuses.

So we enter what has all the hallmarks of a new cold war with a global superpower, under leaders who have variously forfeited their own moral legitimacy, vacillated over decisions such as Huawei for secretive but guessable reasons and prioritised and deprioritised human rights as the mood took them, while simultaneously trying to weaponise a pandemic that really needs no geopolitical dimension to be a crisis in its own right. Its enough to make a progressive quake, but just because Dominic Raab is using the plight of the Uighurs for his own sabre-rattling purposes doesnt mean that plight is unimportant: it is central. There is no meaningful world order that doesnt start at the prevention of genocide. We should take the concept of universalism, rather than capitalism versus communism, as the guiding principle in a forthcoming conflict that hopefully will remain cold but probably will not simply evaporate.

To think about what that would look like in concrete terms, we need to turn to the last cold war, which, at certain points, undid the left. Naturally unwilling to buy into an assumption of capitalist supremacy, many found it hard to condemn elements of communism that were plainly abhorrent. As superpowers fronted up to one another, the discursive space to say Youre actually both wrong, in different ways, to different degrees, at different times, with different consequences vanished, even though it was true.

The exception was the transnational peace movement, specifically the campaign for European nuclear disarmament, which achieved a number of things. First, by taking aim not at ideologies but at the arms race, it was able to build networks between grassroots movements. It didnt have to erase or minimise anyones experience in order to hold an allegiance to one side or the other. This in turn created an alliance between peace and human rights movements across both blocs, which strengthened and extended the ambitions of both, so that what had previously been an argument based on necessity if you can destroy the world with 10 nuclear weapons, why do you need 100? became an argument based on rights: what right has any worldview to destroy lives, or even create the conditions for them to be destroyed? Lastly, of course, it achieved its aim: the end of the arms race, which itself signalled the end of the cold war.

That past doesnt map neatly on to our present, but it does offer some guiding principles. The first is that universal human rights have to remain the ultimate goal. They cannot be up- and downgraded, according to the exigencies of trade or any other international agreement. The second is that any change to the Chinese modus operandi will not come about because a different superpower imposes it by force or sanctions, but from opposition within its own political ecosystem, of which the democracy movement in Hong Kong is the vanguard and not the extent; international manoeuvres must start with the humility of recognising that. Most importantly, none of us can scuttle away from a dire situation simply because we dont trust our own leaders and their allies to be attacking it in good faith. Ones enemys enemy is, inconveniently, sometimes even worse.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Read more:
Progressives can't leave criticism of China to the new cold warriors - The Guardian

The past few weeks have been eye-opening for American Jews. I would have never believed that numerous celebrities could post videos of Louis Farrakhan, Ice Cube could post bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracies, and Desean Jackson as well as Nick Cannon could engage in classic and undeniable anti-Semitism with virtually no broad-based condemnation. There will always be those who stand up against hate no matter where it comes from Jemele Hill, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley come to mind as recent examples. But, those courageous few are unfortunately the exception rather than the rule.

The reason that the toleration of anti-Semitism seems so surprising is that it is being tolerated by those who are supposed to be standing up for groups that are victims of prejudice. Who would have thought that progressives those who spend their days being angry on other groups behalf would somehow let anti-Semitism slip? I sure wouldnt have. But, then again, nobody else did either.

The root of progressive anti-Semitism, however, becomes much more clear once the thin veil of tolerance and acceptance is understood for what it truly is a fragile faade that will crumble at the slightest touch. The truth is that progressives look at Jews as just another group of oppressive white people that are taking advantage of the poor, the working class and the various oppressed minority groups in America. This is a message that finds its chief megaphone in Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. While people claim that Farrakhan and Nation Of Islam are irrelevant fringe actors, the truth is that they have found themselves in positions of tremendous influence. This influence has made its way into mainstream American discourse.

Progressives who subscribe to Nation of Islams pernicious philosophy see the financial success of American Jews, the political success of the State of Israel, and assume that there must have been foul play involved. To them, every disparity can be attributed to discrimination. To them, if that is not worthy of hate, then nothing is.

The issue with this narrative is that it is an outright lie. Over half of all hate crimes committed due to prejudice against a religious group are committed against Jews and all indicators available suggest that anti-Semitism is rising once again. In New York, anti-Semitism accounts for more than half of all hate crimes. It is ignorant at best, malicious at worst, to claim that anti-Semitism is merely an issue of the past. Moreover, we cannot discuss anti-Semitism in a context that ignores the Middle East and the state of Israel. With Irans supreme leader putting out a call for a final solution just weeks ago as well as Hamas Charter, still today, calling for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews around the world, anti-Semitism in America is just the tip of the iceberg.

While anti-Semitism in America seems to have died down tremendously over the past 70 years, and the numbers show that it has, the fact that this singular form of hate is still pervasive in some communities as well as seemingly acceptable in our popular culture and among celebrities is undoubtedly startling. This is not evidence of oppression against American Jews the Jewish people have a far too long history of true oppression to claim that the United States in 2020 can even be compared to our past but rather it is evidence of prejudice that is readily ignored by those who would like to ignore it.

The true irony is that neither anti-Semitism, nor anti-Zionism, (but I repeat myself) are progressive in any true sense of the word.

If progressives see it as their duty to stand up for groups that have historically been victimized, it is truly impossible to understand how Jews could be left out of that equation. The only way to create a fictional history absent of Jewish oppression is one where the Holocaust never happened, there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and there is no anti-Semitism in the Middle East. To claim any of the antecedent phenomena never took place would be to engage in historical revisionism as well as anti-Semitism of the highest order.

Beyond anti-Semitism in general, anti-Zionism in particular is not progressive in any real way either. Defining the term will help explain why.

Zionism is, in its most simple terms, the Jewish right to self-determination. Moral humans generally, and progressives in particular, should be standing for the self-determination of all people. So, to somehow come to the conclusion that by standing for the right of self-determination for all groups with the exception of Jews is somehow progressive seems more than a little odd.

It is not only anger-inducing, but also thoroughly depressing, to see the willing and, at times, prideful ignorance of the faux-progressives that occupy our media, popular culture and college campuses. For those who continue to readily ignore some hate, they must realize that anti-Semitism has a long and ugly history one that refusing to acknowledge will not suffice to make it disappear.

Jack Elbaum will be attending George Washington University in the fall. His writing has been featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com

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Progressives, Stop Ignoring Anti-Semitism | Jack Elbaum | The Blogs - The Times of Israel