The left’s redemptive hatred

Yes, the radical left hates the US, but not because it wants to destroy it.

My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

One of the widely noted ironies of our current moment is that the radical left, which has been so passionate in bashing Israel and Jews over the Palestinian issue, has observed near total silence on the protests in Iran and the regime’s genocidal crackdown.

Despite their ostensible commitment to freedom and human rights, American and foreign leftists seem unconcerned that a nationwide uprising against a totalitarian regime is taking place, and the regime clearly believes it can slaughter its way out of it. Nonetheless, as thousands of bodies pile up, the silence continues.

Numerous commentators have posited that this silence reflects the radical left’s virulent anti-Americanism: the radical left despises America and thus supports any regime, however horrific, that opposes the United States—and indeed, Israel. Radical leftists share the Iranian theocrats’ view of America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” The fall of the Iranian regime would thus mark something like a victory for both “Satans” and must be prevented, if only through silence.

Indeed, the left’s fealty to Iran and its proxies is not new. For example, when arch-terrorists Qassem Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah were executed by the US and Israel, respectively, the Bible of the radical left—the New York Times—practically erected mourning tents for the fiends.

Nor can the radical left’s lionization of nations like Venezuela, Cuba and, at certain points, the USSR and communist China be ignored. If you an enemy of the United States, you can always find radical leftists willing to, at best, engage in apologetics on your behalf.

It must be said that there is a great deal of truth in this. By and large, radical leftists do hate the United States. Indeed, they hate it with remarkable passion. To them, America is slavery, genocide, imperialism, and exploitative capitalism all the way down. Israel, as a strong ally of the US, is seen as complicit in these crimes. Thus, the enemies of the US and Israel, like Iran, are fighting the good fight, and must be seen as progressive forces of liberation worthy of aid and comfort.

However, this hatred is often misunderstood. It is not a treasonous hatred but, in its paradoxical way, a redemptive hatred. That is, radical leftists hate the US, but love what they want to make of it.

In a sense, this redemptive hatred is derived from elements of Christianity, though entirely stripped of their religious trappings. It is based on the idea that the US is founded in original sin—usually slavery—which is the source of all of America’s other alleged sins.

The goal, however, is not to annihilate the sinner. The radical left does not want to destroy the United States. Instead, it wants to transform it in an apocalyptic manner, to bring about its quasi-messianic redemption, purifying it of racism, capitalism, imperialism, and all its other supposed sins in a single, convulsive moment. Then, a perfected nation will emerge upon which leftists can finally bestow their love. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” as the Book of Revelation puts it, “for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”

This redemption, it must be said, is fundamentally a moral redemption. It is wrong to see the radical left as nihilistic. It is often nihilistic in method, but these methods are employed in service of ferociously held idealistic principles that are as moralistic as those of any saint.

But unlike the saint, and much like the mullahs of Iran, the left’s morality is a demonic morality. It is the morality of the zealot, the inquisitor, and the tyrant. It is a morality that can admit of no self-restraint or self-examination. It demands that the redemption of the world be achieved “by any means necessary,” including a mountain of bodies.

This is by no means new. It has defined fanaticism at least since the ancient pharaoh Akhenaton sought to destroy the old religion of Egypt in favor of his chosen god Aten. This iconoclastic, condemnatory, and eventually murderous morality is, sadly, a historical constant. It seems that the desire for the redemption of the world by fire is bored very deep into the human psyche.

It should be no surprise, then, that today’s radical leftists have chosen to maintain their silence on Iran. They feel, perhaps unconsciously, a certain kinship with the Iranian tyrants who are now trying to “redeem” their society by fire.

I do not mean to say that the radical left wishes to kill thousands of Americans to get what it wants, though individual acts of violence—such as the Weather Underground’s terrorism or the murder of Charlie Kirk—inevitably occur. After all, if they actually destroyed the United States, there would be no United States left to redeem. The question is how much damage the radical left can do in pursuit of its apocalypse. The answer, I fear, is a very great deal.

But the radical left should take care, because its dark alliances threaten not only to discredit it in practical terms, but also to demolish its own dreams of redemption. Americans are already ill-disposed towards the radical left, and the sight of it allying with theocratic tyrants will only harden this opposition. The resulting frustration may prompt the radical left to despair of its redemptive vision. In the face of a United States they want to transform but is unwilling to transform, radical leftists may decide that there is nothing left to do but destroy it.

This may push them, at long last, into the nihilism they have so long elided in the name of their new earth, with terrible results for the US, but even more terrible results for them.