Jejune Sympathies

 A couple weeks ago, the leftist streamer bro Hasan Piker generated yet another round of inevitable headlines when he appeared to imply that the United States is a bigger terrorist than Al Qaeda. 

Obviously, this was a ridiculous question to pose in the first-place. These are not commensurable entities. The U.S. is a global power that has existed for two hundred and fifty years, has the largest military budget in the world, and fields troops on every continent. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has existed for less than a few decades and never had anything close to that reach. 

So asking which has a higher "body count" of violent deaths inflicted in its name is not really a relevant statistic. Of course the United States military has killed more people over the decades and centuries. That doesn't tell us whether Al Qaeda would do better or worse if they had the same opportunities. 

Regardless of whether it was even fair to put the question in these terms in the first place, though, Piker once again walked into the "gotcha" trap, and seemingly without much regret. This is also not the first time he has done so. There were his 9/11 comments; his apparent sympathy for the authoritarian government of the People's Republic of China; earlier comments on Mao Zedong, etc. 

Indeed, as Michelle Goldberg aptly put it this summer, in writing about Piker, he seems to have a pattern of "express[ing] jejune sympathies for all sorts of brutal anti-American regimes, Hamas among them."

Look, none of this should surprise us. It's something of a rite of passage for young leftists waking up to the injustices of U.S. imperialism to assume that—because we have discovered that our side is not as pure as we once thought—the other side must be more sympathetic than we had always been told. 

Out of a reaction against the horrors of what our government has been doing to other people around the world, we sometimes think the only just response would be to go over fully to the "other side." 

Walter Kaufmann, in a classic essay on the intellectual deficiencies of New Left radicalism, points out—though—that this does not necessarily follow. "The world is full of outrages," he writes, "and it is easy to sympathize with the indignation of those who paint them black. It is less easy to follow such rhetoric when it goes on to paint the other side as white. As a rule, wrong clashes with greater wrong." 

For a long time, then, I thought the best analogy to the present wave of Gen Z interest in rehabilitating the reputations of America's worst adversaries—Mao, Stalin, Osama Bin Laden, etc.—was just a version of the same thing we Millennials all went through in the Bush years: when, out of justified horror at the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the CIA torture program, etc., we simply reversed the usual polarities and said: "The enemy of my country must be my friend."

In one of his essays from 1948, however, Dwight Macdonald suggests that something even worse may be at play. 

He writes that he belonged to a generation of fellow-traveling intellectuals who believed in the '30s that the Soviet Union was making a noble effort to "build socialism" (Macdonald was a Trotskyist for a time, specifically), but that he and his contemporaries had been disillusioned by the weight of the evidence. 

"We of the thirties," he writes, "were idealists and enthusiasts, ardently believing in certain general principles; when we realized that these were being negated in practice, we turned against Soviet Communism. As long as we could deny or overlook the terrible facts, we accepted the Soviet Myth; when the facts mounted too high to be ignored, we gave up the Myth." In this regard, his generation in the 1930s sounds a great deal like us Millennials. 

But Macdonald contrasts his generation's experience with that of the "neo-Stalinists of the younger generation" who emerged after the war—the people involved in movements like the Henry Wallace campaign that sought to align the country fully with Soviet foreign policy. And this cohort, as Macdonald describes them, sounds much less like the disillusioned Millennials than like the kinds of nihilistic Gen Z fans who are streaming Hasan Piker. 

"[T]he younger generation, which grew up in an atmosphere of war, death camps and saturation bombings," Macdonald writes, "is both more cynical than we were and more sentimental [...] They don't deny the facts; they simply retort (a) we're just as bad, which is not true, and even if it were true, would not be to the point; and (b) how could they have done anything else, encircled by imperialist enemies?" 

This distinction Macdonald draws between the fellow-traveling Stalinists of the 1930s and the Henry Wallace–endorsing "Neo-Stalinists" of the 1940s seems all too reminiscent of the generational divide today separating Millennial leftists from the Gen Z variety that forms Piker's fan base. 

Those of us in the older cohort went through many of the same "jejune sympathies" they now express for figures like Mao and Lenin. We did so out of a frustrated liberal cosmopolitan idealism and moral universalism that was simply part of the air we breathed in that era. And as we aged, many of us came to realize how little resemblance historical communist regimes bore to any of our ideals, and so we abandoned any effort to defend them. 

The Gen Z leftists are doing something very different and much more nihilistic, by contrast. They seem to be perfectly aware of the "terrible facts," as Macdonald puts it, about Hamas or the PRC or the Soviet Union or what have you. But they respond with the same two tired arguments Macdonald describes: (1) the old Tu quoque move: the U.S. does it too (which, as Macdonald observes, proves nothing as to whether it is good); and (2), they had no choice, because they were forced into it by imperialism. 

Hence arises what Macdonald calls an enormous "double standard." Their crimes are always excused by circumstances; whereas our crimes only ever proceed from malice, and can never be explained by similar contextual factors. 

I hope that Gen Z eventually manages to outgrow these "jejune sympathies." Most generations do. But I do worry that they have grown up in a fundamentally more "cynical" and morally nihilistic world than we did, and that this can only have permanent consequences. Like the Henry Wallace generation of neo-Stalinists, they came into a world where the unthinkable has come to be normalized. 

In a world where the U.S. president regularly orders people assassinated all over the globe, without charge or trial (and multiple U.S. administrations of both major parties have now done this), and sends people to secret prisons to be confined indefinitely without hope of release or contact with their families, while openly promoting the most obscene, racist rhetoric against stigmatized out-groups, and seemingly getting away with it—why would they not have grown cynical about the idealism and moral universalism we once took for granted?

As a character asks in V.S. Naipaul's The Bend in the River: "What a complicated lie those words had become! How long would it take to work back from that, through all the accumulated lies, to what was simple and true?"