The return of the socialism of fools

To which our first response might be: what kept you? The drama of their turnaround, so that they have shifted in a matter of days from either denialism or certainly de-prioritisation of the problem of left anti-Semitism to a state of permanent Tourette’s-like denunciation of it, will make some of us think they are not entirely serious in their new determination to do battle with this prejudice. To go from failing to acknowledge the depth of the new anti-Semitism to being ostentatiously woke about how awful it is will look to many like a back-covering exercise. Less a genuine commitment to tackling one of the oldest prejudices than a performance designed to disguise their witting ignorance of, or even acquiescence to, anti-Semitic thinking over the past couple of decades. To paraphrase Shakespeare, now the left doth protest about anti-Semitism too much.

But there is an even greater problem with their theatrical new awareness of left anti-Semitism: even now they underestimate the scale of the problem. Even now, as they dial up the condemnations and churn out articles saying ‘Anti-Semitism is really, really bad’ — congrats on the insight, guys — there is a flimsiness to their understanding of the nature and breadth of the new anti-Semitism. They treat anti-Semitism on the left as an alien force, at odds with the decent outlook of their movement. But this immediately raises a question: how, then, did the anti-Semitic sensibility manage to attach itself to their movement? If this prejudice is so antithetical to their left, how did they end up aligned in various ways? That’s the question they need to ask, because if they did they might realise that, far from being an aberration, the latest outburst of an ancient prejudice tells us something very important about the entire new left and its backward politics.

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