Compact magazine has a really short, sharp piece on a problem afflicting the modern left. Without a vision of utopia or a commitment to the value of life itself, progressives are sucked into a politics of subversion and nihilism — committed only to the destruction of a society they see as fundamentally corrupt and unjust.
From author Ashley Frawley:
Why would disruption for its own sake come to be seen as progressive? Because the idea emerged that whatever perpetuates the existence of a politically unsalvageable world, consciously or not, is morally suspect. Families that reproduce patriarchy, institutions laden with racism and sexism, and so on—all are complicit in the perpetuation of a system that must be brought down. Ordinary people going about their lives are also complicit and deserve to be disrupted—hence, the tactics of climate activists who blockade roads and prevent commuters from getting to work. But within the capitalist-realist framework that “there is no alternative,” there is no faith in a better future. All that is left, then, is an endless politics of “resistance”: not overcoming, not creating, but resisting, subverting, and disrupting.
This radical politics of subversion also informed the immediate, instinctive sympathy felt on the progressive left with Hamas terrorists, rather than Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. Wasn’t Hamas’s onslaught the ultimate act of subversion that burst through the banality of day-to-day life with a dramatic spectacle? The victims were “disrupted” amid their everyday routines, their complicity with an oppressive system was subverted. Mass slaughter is the ultimate “disruption,” the ultimate “carnival against capitalism.”