Democrats: Beware
Where leftist extremism leads
THE unexpected victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary in The Bronx in June caused quite a stir, given her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and her controversial policy positions. Nonetheless, she has been enthusiastically embraced as “the future” by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Events in Britain suggest Democrats might want to exercise some caution here before they go all in.
Jeremy Corbyn has led the British Labor Party since September 2015, when he won a once-unlikely victory in the leadership contest. Corbyn has pledged himself to “21st century Socialism,” and in due course it is hoped he will enlighten us on how that differs from 20th century socialism.
“Socialism” is not a verboten word in the British political lexicon in the way it is in the United States — the lessons of the Cold War left less of an impression on the Mother Country — so Corbyn’s economic flights of fancy have gotten a lot less scrutiny than Ocasio-Cortez has.
Instead, the aspect of Corbyn’s worldview that has gotten the most negative traction are his views on foreign policy.
To the extent that Corbyn was known when he was on the backbenches, it was for his involvement in the Stop the War Coalition, which he led between 2011 and 2015. StWC combines in its membership Stalinists and Islamists, and confines its appetite for anti-imperialism and anti-militarism to actions by Western governments.
Ocasio-Cortez has shown little interest in foreign policy, though she has taken the opportunity, albeit incompetently, to express sentiments against Israel rarely heard in the mainstream. Yet such views are embedded in her quadrant of the left.
StWC, for example, is bitterly hostile to Israel, blaming it not only for maltreatment of Palestinians but the broader problems in the region — a cosmic attribution of evil. StWC has deleted from its Web site a 2014 article that saw “war with Israel as the only path to peace in the Middle East.” Anti-war, it turns out, is a flexible concept.
Emerging from this milieu, alarm bells have been ringing about antiSemitism being nurtured in Corbyn’s Labor Party from the start. Corbyn’s allies insist the issue is being fabricated by the Labor “moderates” (or Israel’s intelli- gence services, as one Labor councillor recently suggested) in an attempt to topple Corbyn.
An ostensibly independent report in June 2016 declared Labor free of systemic anti-Semitism, and Corbyn gave the author a peerage the month after. But the issue hasn’t gone away, and last week it boiled over.
Video surfaced of Corbyn saying, in August 2012, while on the Iranian state-controlled Press TV channel, that the “hand of Israel” was behind a jihadist terrorist attack in Egypt. A day later it was re- vealed Corbyn had compared Israel’s policies in Gaza to those of the Nazis at Stalingrad and claimed terrorists in Israeli prisons were part of a “political game.”
First, this took an ax to the root of the oft-made claim in Corbyn’s defense. Yes, he had kept dubious company. He referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”; supported the Irish Republican Army; was an asset for the Communist secret police in Czechoslovakia; and on and on.
But, it was said, he was naïve or trying to bridge divides; he was himself not an extremist.
Second, it might at last have precipitated a split in the Labor Party. Dan Hodges reported in The Mail on Sunday that the main questions now are the form and timing of the schism. One possibility is September, when the party will seek to institutionalize a revised definition of anti-Semitism that provides room for the extremist political views of some Corbyn associates.
Over the longer term, the impact is more difficult to judge. In a previous generation, support for IRA terrorism would disqualify Corbyn, but his lies satisfied voters and he did unexpectedly well in last year’s general election. A poll six weeks ago put Labor ahead of the Conservatives.
Still, Corbyn has not been able to win an election during the turmoil of Brexit and the aftermath of the economic crash; by 2022, in more stable conditions and with further revelations about Corbyn, it is difficult to imagine Labor’s odds will be better.
The dynamics that allowed the capture of Britain’s main left-wing party by a radical fringe with a hateful ideology are not unique to Britain. The irresistible pressure for the right to firewall itself from anything that even smells of fascism does not exist on the left with respect to Communism.
If the Democrats in America don’t start drawing lines, but insist on following the old habit of pas
d’ennemis à gauche (no enemies on the left), there’s no reason it won’t befall the same division as Labor is now facing.