One of the things that I’ve always detested about a certain segment of the left is what I often call “bravery on the cheap.” We saw a lot of it during the George W. Bush years. Some critics of the administration would assert that Bush was Hitler reincarnated and then pretend they were Martin Niemöller heroically speaking truth to power by opposing him. Hollywood was full of this sentiment. Actors would win an Oscar® and use their acceptance speech to vow they won’t be silenced or some such.
It was all B.S.
For starters, telling an auditorium full of Hollywood liberals exactly what they wanted to hear didn’t take a lot of courage. The last time I saw real courage at an awards ceremony, it was when Ricky Gervais told the assembled bigwigs that no one cares about their political opinions.
The much more important point is this: If Bush was Hitler—or even Hitlerish—very few of these people would say boo about him, because they’d be terrified. It was precisely because Bush was not anything like Hitler that people could criticize him without paying any price at all. Martin Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp. Naomi Wolf got a book contract, Michael Moore got another movie deal, etc.
A lot of protest-addicted people are like the dogs who act ferocious when they’re on a leash or behind a door. But when the leash comes off, they smell the other dog’s butt and say, “It’s all good.”
I mean, look at how Hollywood and academia have kowtowed to China over the last decade. They can’t even be counted upon to oppose a foreignauthoritarian regime when doing so comes at a price. The anti-Bush vitriol was all performative bravery on the cheap precisely because there was no price to pay and, often, there was ample upside.
George Orwell made a related point as only Orwell could. People revered Gandhi for his courage in speaking truth to power against the British, without ever acknowledging that it was precisely because the British were British—i.e., a liberal people—that his nonviolent tactics could work.
Gandhi, Orwell wrote, “believed in ‘arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.” There are any number of legitimate criticisms of British rule in India, but if the British were Hitlerite or Stalinist, no one would know who Gandhi was.
Also, a standalone line from this piece worth placing in a thousand other contexts: “One doesn’t necessarily have to agree completely with this observation to concede that it is not just plausible, but actually quite defensible.” How much trouble could we avoid if we somehow found a way to that sentiment more often? Instead, as Goldberg puts it, we get cheap “bravery” and “soul-sickening cowardice.”
On that note, and since I’m quoting Jonah Goldberg, there’s something else I want to put a pin in, from his recent podcast interview with Yuval Levin. Goldberg notes the asymmetry between the antisemitism on the left and on the right, its different “nature, motivations, and function,” and he concedes that antisemitism is more marginal, even much more marginal, on the right. But the left’s antisemitism is for the most part “couched in euphemism”; to most on the left, it’s not about being antisemitic, or even anti-Israel, it’s about (they say) being pro Palestinian, pro peace. (Arguable, and not, here, by me, argued in either direction; see above paragraph.) The right’s antisemitism, however, partly due to its opposition to political correctness, skips the euphemisms. And since “cynicism is hard to maintain,” provocative trolling and just-asking-questions speak becomes serious ideology.
“The fact that there is tolerance for that kind of non-euphemistic antisemitism on the right, however, marginal [it is],” says Goldberg, “feels to me a more open negotiation with evil than what’s going on on the left.”
A more open negotiation with evil…