Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left

Whatever you think of Israel, there's just no future in "global intifada" and "Death to America".

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

Ostensibly, this is supposed to be an economic blog. So how are leftist protests, like the ones currently happening at Columbia University, related to economics? Unfortunately, there are several connections. First of all, leftists are potentially an important vector by which economic ideas enter our discourse — if it weren’t for the Bernie Sanders movement, we probably wouldn’t be talking about things like student debt relief, universal basic income, national health insurance, and so on. The Seattle WTO protests highlighted a bunch of problems with the way globalization was being done in the 90s, Occupy Wall Street made financial reform more urgent, and so on.

Second of all, leftists can affect electoral politics, which has a huge impact on which economic ideas get implemented. Right now, Palestine protests are occurring on college campuses and on urban freeways. But this summer, there will probably be major protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which could affect the tenor of media coverage of Biden’s reelection campaign — much like the protests of 1968. Although Trump is more pro-Israel than Biden, Palestine protesters feel that Biden has betrayed them, and focus all of their ire against him and other Democrats. Thus, it’s not impossible to imagine that leftists could ultimately tip a very close election to Trump.

So yes, leftists and their Palestine protest campaign are a thing I should probably talk about. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is the end of an arc of American leftism movement that began in the 1990s, gained strength from the Iraq War and the financial crisis, and reached its apex in unrest of the late 2010s. Leftists would like to believe that the Palestine protests are reinvigorating their movement; instead, I think they represent a dead end that the movement won’t easily be able to recover from, no matter who wins the election in November.

The reason, in a nutshell, is that the Palestine protests represent an unreasonable ideology. Even setting aside the extremists who show up to the protests and say antisemitic things and express support for Hamas and Iran — and it isn’t at all clear we should set them aside — the Palestine protests embrace an unworkable ideology. They represent a distorted, fantastical view of foreign policy, an anti-Americanism that can’t possibly be appeased or mollified, and a set of unworkable and often immoral policy demands.

This is a movement that’s going nowhere, and serves to do little except weaken the nation and misdirect the energies of the youth.

Steelmanning the Palestine protests

Before I bash the Palestine protests, I want to make sure I’m not being unfair to them. In some circles, this is called “steelmanning”.

Newspaper columnist Will Bunch recently tweeted the following:

Bunch is, of course, wrong. The America half a century ago had plenty of protesters whom most Americans would regard as unreasonable today. Anti-nuclear protests, protests in favor of population control, the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage”, and many other leftist protests of the time look misguided or just plain stupid in retrospect — and that’s to say nothing of right-wing protests that were happening at the same time. We tend to remember the successful movements, like the Vietnam War protests or the Civil Rights marches, and forget about the ones that failed.