At a Munk Debate in 2018, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson stumped his opponents by asking what should have been an easy question: “When does the Left go too far?”
America has rightly developed a heightened sensitivity to warning signs of radicalization on the Right. The unspeakable legacies of the Nazis and the Hutus, among other terrible right-wing regimes of history, have made us responsive to the slightest hints of racial superiority and malignant nationalism.
But when it comes to the pathologies of the Left, the lines are stubbornly blurry. History is replete with malevolent left-wing governments that caused unfathomable suffering, and yet America seems not to have developed adequate antibodies to leftist extremism. Our culture is suspiciously unmoved by signs of the very collectivism that sent millions to die in gulags and the fervid anti-traditionalism that fueled more than a million deaths in Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
America’s sudden institutional adoption of the radical concept of “equity,” for instance, once defined by Vice President Kamala Harris as the mechanism by which “everyone ends up in the same place,” caused hardly anyone to blink. Other instances of obvious leftist extremism were allowed access into mainstream discourse with relatively little pushback, including the incoherent “defund the police” movement and “drag queen story hour” — which, as comedian Bill Maher recently pointed out, was always more about satisfying the needs of the drag queens than educating children.
Recent events have given new urgency to Peterson’s question. Radical left-wing ideas, like their radical right-wing counterparts, have the potential to incinerate a culture and a nation. And so we must at least begin to develop a collective reflex to incidences of leftist excess. This begins with boldly naming examples as they arise.
Recent headlines supply no shortage of places to begin.
For instance, two weeks ago in Dearborn, Michigan, in the congressional district of the rabidly anti-Israel Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a pro-Hamas rally broke into a chant of “Death to America.” Days later, a group of pro-Palestinian activists gathered at the Teamsters union headquarters in Chicago to solidify plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this August. They, too, indulged in chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as their leaders whipped them into a frenzy.
The campus chaos at Columbia University in recent weeks has been no less alarming.
“There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” the students chanted at numerous points, echoing the Nazi “final solution” of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
“We don’t want no two-state,” they wailed at another point, in a call to eradicate the nation of Israel. “We want all of it!”
Another particularly ominous video captured a young woman in a mask shouting, “We are Hamas!” at a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag. (The connection between the American Left’s mask fetish and radical Islam’s insistence on veiling women is best left to psychological professionals.)
“Keep it moving Zionist pig!” someone else shouted at a Jewish student.
It should go without saying that people who chant for the death of our nation are national enemies — even if they are aligned with the political Left. Doubtless, coverage of similarly incendiary chanting by figures from the radical Right would be constant, breathless, and unapologetic; it would inspire nationwide protests, marches, sit-ins, walkouts, occupations, encampments, boycotts, etc. The political universe would grind to a halt and wouldn’t spin again until every Republican from the town council to Congress issued a repudiation.
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And we know this because that’s exactly what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when vicious and vile white supremacists (literal white supremacists) marched through the streets chanting Nazi slogans such as, “They will not replace us.” Thanks to America’s well-developed antibody reaction to right-wing radicalism, this event rightly became one of the seminal political moments of the century.
None of the behavior we are seeing on the Left today is subtle. Nor is it merely the consequence of a sustained effort at political programming in the academy — though it is certainly that as well. Rather, at its root and through its many branches, the extremism we’re seeing around the country is nothing short of a malignant ideological cancer that has spread throughout the American body politic. The pathological Left has emerged, and we must have the fortitude and focus to call it like it is.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
