On Pramila Jayapal (RFK, Jr.) and the moral simplicity of modern leftism

 I do not like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).  Since I recoil from modern leftism, this is hardly surprising, yet there are several minor and interesting points regarding her latest teapot tornado.  Realistically, one should cast this teapot into orbit and wonder if it falls endlessly alongside Bertrand's, or better yet, waste an equal amount of time, but amid deadly heatwaves presaging even worse to come, continuing uncertainty regarding what Putin will do, the formal reveal of Trump's unitary executive plans for his post-2024 term and Manchin's hints that he will hand the White House back to Trump on a silver platter, I feel like wasting some time this morning on something silly and trivial.  Like Pramila Jayapal, a person best described as silly and trivial.

For those too busy with real life to notice what Jayapal did, said, a) good for you, you done good, and b) here's the executive summary.  (No unitary executives here.  Yet.)  She used one of the left's two insults against Israel.  She called the country "racist."  Backlash ensues.  If we maintain perspective, we understand first that what Jayapal said was not really comparable to the repeated indulgences in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories enjoyed by Ilhan Omar.  Omar, recall, describes Jews as controlling the world with money.  That's a little different, and a tad worse.  When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells people that COVID was manufactured to spare Ashkenazim and those of Chinese ethnicity, have a little perspective.  Ilhan Omar, RFK... that's the hardcore stuff.  Jayapal?  I have my big-boy pants on, and I'm not losing my shit over this.  No diapers necessary.  If this is what sends you into paroxysms of outrage, you lead a very privileged life, and haven't been hit over the head with the hardcore stuff.

So let's delve a bit and notice a few things.  First, the left has a few go-to insults.  They are as creative in their verbiage as Donald Trump, which is to say, not at all.  Once upon a time, we as a society were too skittish about naming racism, but now, the utterance has been devalued by lowering the bar too far.  It wasn't even that long ago that the word was too shocking to use.  As recently as the 2016 campaign, commentators wondered whether or not it was too outre to observe that Donald Trump is, in fact, a racist.  Yet the left has gone the other direction, and now the bar has been lowered to the point that punctuality and logic are white supremacist, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture, and if you want all the cites on critical race theorists making that same claim, it would fill a book as a codex.  Somewhere in between an inability to call Donald Trump a racist, and declaring logic and punctuality racist, there is this place I live called reality.  Yet, the left overshot reality into some combination of paranoid delusion and fantasy world where the joy of their existence is calling everyone and everything, including punctuality racist.

Yet there is something more systematic, and it is viewing everything through the lens of conflict theory.  From Marx to Bell and Crenshaw, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler and every leftist theorist, the unifying core is the idea that there is an oppressor/oppressed dyad, with the only real trick being Crenshaw's intersectionality, which has evolved into a scoring system to see who is most or least oppressed based on who has more oppressor or oppressed traits.  Race and gender/sexuality are the primary lenses through which they tally points, and all conflicts throughout history must be shoehorned into this structure.

Part of characterizing every conflict as an oppressor/oppressed dyad is asserting the oppressor to be the villain, the oppressed to be the hero, and blinding one's self to the possibility of any moral complexity.  So here is the leftist caricature of the Israeli-Palestinian dyad.  One thing matters: who is the oppressor, and who is the oppressed?

Easy, right?  I mean, Israel has put up blockades and developed new settlements in the Palestinian territories... but... they've been doing this in response to terrorist attacks on civilian populations where the Palestinians don't recognize Israel's right to exist, support suicide bombings, shut down every peace negotiation because they want Israel wiped off the map... I mean, it's almost like if I kept going, this would sound morally complicated with neither side smelling like roses.

Well, fuck.

Am I required to state a position?  Take a side?  Says who?  Who says I have to have a firm opinion, take a side?  Because the world has such clarity?  I am forbidden from seeing complication and ambiguity and withholding judgment because I see that ambiguity and complication?

No.  I hold firm my right to see multiple sides of an issue, withhold judgment, acknowledge the complexity of a world with an ugly history and morally flawed people, as it has always been, as it always shall be.

Yet here is how leftism commands you to see the world.  Whoever holds a stronger hand is the oppressor, and is therefore the villain.  Israel is in the stronger position.  Thus no questions are to be raised about, say, terrorist attacks on civilian populations by the Palestinians, nor the fact that the Palestinians truly believe in terrorism and the morality of terrorism.  Israel is stronger, it is therefore the oppressor, and therefore the villain.

Moreover, all villainy must be shoehorned into that which the American leftist can understand.  The only place they can go is "racism."

So why is Jayapal attempting to backtrack?  Because there's another -ism.  Or an anti-.

Why is it anti-Semitism?  How about Semitophobia?  Damn it, all the action is in the phobias these days!  We're supposed to be in charge of the media, so let's rebrand this shit!  Semitophobia!  You're a Semitophobe!  That's Semitophobic!

Where was I?  Oh, right.  The fact that there is an anti- associated means that the left has to pretend to care.  Because they are the anti-antis, or so they define themselves.  If there is a sense in which we, Jews, are oppressed, they cannot side against us because they are the ones who protect us!

The problem is that this is nothing but a pose.  Everything in modern leftism is hierarchical.  Once you get into Crenshaw's view of the world, everything is hierarchical.  Intersectionality, stripped of bullshit, is about upending and reversing what leftists see as a societal hierarchy.  If the rank-ordering of power in society goes A-B-C-D, that means the ordering from most good to most evil goes D-C-B-A, and in any conflict dyad between two groups, leftists acknowledge one mathematical principle, which is the principle of transitivity.  Side with the most good over the most evil, as determined by reversing the power rankings.

And here's the problem.  The existence of an anti- means that leftists mostly don't want to claim that we're at the top of the hierarchy.  Some do, and Ilhan comes pretty close, as did RFK, but the point is that when they come out and say it, that's basically the height of the anti-, so even when they believe it, saying it is the anti-.  Acknowledging that, they have to have some rhetorical feint to the anti-.  Yet following the actual principles of Crenshawism, when any two "oppressed" groups oppose each other in a conflict dyad, transitivity applies.  The most oppressed wins the moral goodness prize merely by being more oppressed.  Actions are as relevant to your moral goodness as in Calvinism.  So who is more oppressed?

In a Jews versus Muslims dyad, actions don't matter.  (They never do.)  There is no need to consider the kinds of complex questions I raised above that prevented me from coming to any judgments or conclusions.  American leftists don't care about the treatment of Jews in predominantly Muslim countries, and they care not one whit about the treatment of women or the LBGT population in such countries.  They love their exaggerations about the treatment of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, because that exaggeration aids in a different moral project, but everything revolves around determining who is most oppressed, and as my observations in this paragraph demonstrate, those evaluations are based wholly on the modern, US context.

All of the complexity and history of conflict in the Middle East get washed away by the following simple claim.  Muslims are more oppressed than Jews, so side with Muslims.  Is that always and everywhere true, even today?  No.  Does it follow that suicide bombings targeting civilian populations are less wrong than blockades?  No, and it is verboten even to mention suicide bombings of civilians to a leftist.  None of this follows, but leftists cannot grapple with complexity and avoid any of it by asking one question.  Who is most oppressed?

Yet when they say things that result from conflict theory, and dyads with oppression rankings, the result will sound disparaging to the point of indulging in another -ism.  At that point, adherents occasionally remember that they pretend to oppose -isms rather than looking at the world through the lens of the hierarchy of oppression.  Hence, Jayapal looks at a terrifyingly complex conflict that her limited conception cannot address, she reduces it to the simple question of who is most oppressed, describes it in her reductivist way, and when reminded of the consequences in the context of her own ostensible belief system, she's caught.

When her rhetoric reveals the hypocrisy of the assertion of perfect moral clarity, she tries to weasel her way back to a posture of opposing all bigotry.

Anyone who buys it is a fool.