The Rhyme of History Revisited

Regarding lessons yet unlearned

First it was Hamas, the unspeakable brutality with which they savaged Israeli citizens and other nationals who had the nightmarish misfortune to be in their path. The rapes, the torture, the mutilations, the murders, the glee. . . the details are beyond gruesome. Soul-chilling.

Then it was the eruption of sympathy across the West—not for the massacred and kidnapped, but their perpetrators. An outpouring around our “civilized” world of solidarity for the titular cause of a sadistic, jubilant slaughter of human beings. Seriously. I’ve been trying to picture mobs of Europeans and Americans, of Canadians and Australians, learning of the gas chambers, the mass graves, the extinct families and filling the streets with the claim: “Yeah, Hitler went a little overboard—but he had a point!”

And then Holocaust Denial 2.0 kicked in. We have witnessed in real time—in the age of GoPros and their digital receipts, no less—the shameless attempt to rewrite history. To whitewash wholesale butchery, to pretend darkness is light, evil is righteous, good is vicious. Insanity.

We’ve spent the weeks since October 7th watching play out the truth of Twain’s famous phrase “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” It sent me back to reread my essay from January 2022, which I titled “The Rhyme of History,” and I gotta say, I was unnerved to see how much more urgent its message feels today, less than two short years later.

Here’s one passage, referencing genocidal massacres, that has aged disturbingly well—or not at all, depending how you look at it:

Of course, most of us rest in the conviction that we would not be among those willing to promote or excuse hatred. We would refuse to participate in merciless evil. And history shows that’s likely true. But the question remains: What would we do . . . ?

Outside the Consulate General of Israel, New York City, October 8, 2023. Photo by Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)

Chicago, October 8, 2023. Photo by Eric Cox via Reuters

New York City, October 9, 2023 Photo by Bryan R. Smith via Getty Images

Washington D.C., November 4, 2023. Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

London, Saturday November 11, 2023. Photo by Hannah McKay via Reuters

Another excerpt:

So let us not relax into the naiveté — or hubris — of believing the mistakes of the past are beyond our potential to reiterate. Let us instead attune ourselves to history’s rhyme, to its intimations in our present and stand bravely for love, that we might not lose sight of one another’s humanity, that we might never — individually or collectively  . . . actively or passively— be convinced to forsake our own.

All images from X (Twitter)

Watching what’s been going on in the streets and cyberverse of the “enlightened” West, it seems many have done exactly that: lost sight of others’ humanity and forsaken their own. Because the morally developed, genuinely humane, progressive response to sadistic butchery is to denounce it. Loudly. To back away from its perpetrators rather than take up their cause or equivocate because “they have a point.” The morally sane, morally courageous, morally responsible reaction to unhinged savagery is to wholly and unambiguously condemn it. Full stop.

How did we get to this moment in the West where so many have seemingly lost their moral minds?

Given that the streets and campuses, TikTok and Twitter (X), have swelled with so-called “Progressive” leftists claiming solidarity with jihadi terrorists, I’ve been pondering two aspects of postmodern Leftism that I would argue paved the way to this spectacle.

First is that on the political Left there is no obvious limiting principle. The question that needs answering—credit to Dr. Jordan Peterson for articulating it—is: When does the Left go too far? Many people have no answer to this.

On the Right, it’s easy. “Too far” takes us into racial supremacism, religious sectarianism, or into the extremes of ethnic or nationalist essentialism, all of which threaten the principles and peace of pluralistic societies. Because the Right is primarily concerned with conserving fundamentals—the values, traditions, and ideas that sustain cultural coherence—its focus naturally entails drawing and protecting boundaries, determining the limits of what should or shouldn’t be changed or discarded in the task of societal preservation.

But that inclination can be taken too far, warped into advancing purity ideals that foster in-group/out-group divisions, violent separatist movements, even genocidal purges.

The Right’s limiting principle is clear then: rigid obsession with either permanence or purity signals a danger zone that needs to be vigilantly guarded against. Morally grounded people on the Right draw that line.

But what about the Left?

The Left’s core concern is with opening society, with expanding tolerance by fostering compassion and acceptance for the abandoned and shunned, for the forsaken and the forgotten. Since its birth in the Enlightenment, the history of modern liberalism is the defense and empowerment of the individual’s claims for justice—social, economic, or political—against the marginalizing forces of the powerful. Thus asking “When does the Left go too far?” is really asking When does tolerance and openness go too far? When does compassion go too far? Acceptance? It seems obvious to wonder how anyone could even think there should be limits on these ideals: Doesn’t the world need more people cultivating such values?

And so it is that the Left has a more difficult question than the Right, because while its question also centers on the issue of boundaries, it is even more basic: Should boundaries exist for them at all?

We see, then, why the Left has no obvious limiting principle: because when the guiding values are tolerance, openness, compassion, and acceptance, and when the goal is advancing justice in a pluralistic society, even acknowledging a need for limits becomes a hard sell. Such a concept seems wholly unnecessary, counter-intuitive.

Yet limiting principles provide two critical functions for maintaining a lasting, cohesive society: moral clarity and social stability. When recognized and upheld, limiting principles serve as guardrails that help protect against chaos, against the corrupting influence of individuals or groups driven by the will to dominate—which is to say, by ego run-amok—in all its ugly and inevitable manifestations.

The absence of any recognizable guardrail on the Left has thus, not surprisingly, become its moral undoing. Because in proceeding as if there are no viable limits to the pursuit of openness, tolerance, compassion, and acceptance, as if the claims or aims of people on the Left are, ipso facto, grounded in morality, unpolluted by ego corruption and its attendant chaos, many on the Left have fallen into a trap disguised as virtue.

Indeed, the best impulses of many good people who sincerely seek a kinder, gentler, more inclusive society have been co-opted through the last century, and particularly the last couple decades, to serve a deceptive and destructive ideology. It is an inflexible worldview of Good versus Evil that gives rise to the very same in-group/out-group divisions and genocidal impulses that the good people of the Right reject, when upholding their own limiting principle.

Which brings us to the second, related aspect of the new Left that needs examining: the politics of identity.

When Karl Marx’s predicted Proletariat revolution—the “inevitable” overthrow of the ruling class by the working class—failed to materialize by the early 20th century, his theoretical framework was not discarded as null. Instead, it was gradually retrofitted through the rest of that century by post-modernists, who swapped the economic concerns of “class” for the socio-political concerns of sex and race, and more recently, gender. The result is that the simplistic, Marxist lens of class struggle, which flattens every human relationship into a base contest for power, has been refocused to frame men as Oppressors of women, whites as Oppressors of non-whites, and the “heteronormative” as Oppressors of the “queer.”

The danger of identity politics is that it calls forward our tribal instinct to sort human beings into reductive categories: innocent/guilty, worthy/undeserving, friend/enemy. It manipulates the aspirational language of justice to rationalize labeling individuals as perpetrators or victims depending on their immutable biological traits. The concepts of personal agency and accountability, so foundational to the classical liberal view of humankind, are nullified by the totalizing filter of group status, such that every person is complicit in oppression or innocent of it, not by their individual decisions or actions, but by virtue of their particular identity markers (and to the extent they have many of them, by their “intersectional” ranking).

The impact of this way of thinking is that it conditions people to stop noticing or valuing each others’ individual humanity. To dismiss, or even disdain it. It requires adherents to discard the Enlightenment disposition that elevates the person out of their tribe so they may be recognized—and treated—as a subject in their own right, and instead elevates the tribe to explain—and chain—the individual in a role they didn’t choose. In a script from which they may not opt out. Identity politics fosters and rewards a glib, undiscerning view of history—the complex story of human triumph and suffering—and so draws people into the same narrow, identity-based in-group/out-group thinking that mirrors the worst reasoning on the Right. And which leads to the same brutal place: rationalizing the instinct to scapegoat and dehumanize the Other.

History has shown us where that leads.

October 7th was but the latest illustration.

The Enlightenment liberal argument, grounded in the recognition of human beings as equal in their Creator’s eyes, managed over the centuries to tame our tribal instinct by elevating the egalitarian claims to life, liberty, and justice regardless of one’s biology or bloodline. It rejected the precept of “might makes right” used throughout history to justify human subjugation. Indeed, it provided a coherent moral framework through which human slavery was ultimately recast from acceptable as a historical given to abhorred as a heinous crime against human dignity. It promoted tolerance of differences and respect for individuals against the tribal—which is also to say, collectivist—imperatives of conformity and blind obedience to authority.

The limiting principle on the Left, then, should be recognized as the politics of identity with its obsessive sorting and labeling of individuals as morally innocent or culpable—virtuous or tainted, victim or oppressor—based on their birth traits. (Or in the case of gender claims, on the harmful fantasy that material reality bends to personal yearnings.)

The challenge for liberals who champion the virtues of tolerance and openness, compassion and acceptance, is to recognize that their humanistic ideals can be co-opted to subvert their own core claims and aims. For liberalism to survive, its champions must start drawing the line at allowing reductive identity-based group claims to be granted priority over individual responsibility, accountability, and reward. Because that is manifestly the Left’s danger zone, the deceptive path to its self-destruction.

The good news is that a silver lining has emerged from the tumult of October 7th’s aftermath. A lot of good people on the Left have been jarred into awareness by the spectacle of virulent antisemitism being openly supported and unapologetically defended by “Progressive allies” in other arenas of leftwing activism, including, especially, academia. Identity-based politics has been exposed as a seedbed for bigotry—the philosophical kinsman of Far Right extremism—and the logical endpoint of pursuing or even tolerating it has been dramatically drawn in the minds of many.

It’s a good start. But the task for true liberals who wish to reclaim the Left isn’t just to acknowledge they have a limiting principle, it’s to figure out how to draw and hold that boundary amidst a framework of ideals that seem, counter-intuitively, boundless. It is not a small problem for those whose deepest values are tolerance, compassion, openness, and acceptance, especially in a world of cheap narratives, powerful interests, and social media mobs. But for the sake of our Western democracies and a peaceful future for all our children, I pray they find their path and their courage. History’s rhyme is all around us, the lessons of our past waiting to be met.