Since the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, progressives in the academy and elsewhere, National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke observed, have tried to turn a horrific attack into a gray area. And he argued that this, in turn, will have a lasting impact on the Left.

“I think this is going to have, in the long run,” Cooke said, “an acidic effect on the intersectional project. I think it might take a little while, both because shifts in our politics do, and because the Republicans are seemingly incapable of putting up a presidential candidate — or candidates for other important offices that can take advantage of this schism — but the scale of the shock has surprised me. And I think it has highlighted a distinction that often gets elided, which is between liberalism and progressivism.”

“Liberals,” Cooke said, “are motivated by a different political framework than conservatives have,” but that framework is nevertheless “one that does not have much time for the radicalism or the esoteric frameworks that mark out progressive politics. And those liberals have run headfirst into those frameworks in the last three weeks. And they’re not just horrified by them, they’re confused by them, because they had thought that the tone of those people on the progressive side was in line with their own. And it turns out that it’s not.”

This could lead to a split, Cooke said, from “some of the people who have unwittingly enabled the progressive ideology. And that will have an effect on our politics both electorally and otherwise.”

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