The Left's brain drain
What is happening to the Left in America? Ron Rosenbaum, writing in the Observer, is the latest to defect. No one can bash the Left as well as someone who has seen it from the inside. Rosenbaum says goodbye to "a culture of blindness... paralysis by moral equivalence... the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left."
Rosenbaum isn't the first. Christopher Hitchens has left The Nation. And writers like Eric Alterman, liberal on domestic issues, are hawkish on the Middle East. The prospect of war against Iraq has riven the Left.
It's tempting to see the Left splitting into anti-idiotarian and paleolithic wings, and there is something to that. But there's another factor. See a lefty come out in support of the attack on Iraq? Chances are they're Jewish. Even Christopher Hitchens, though he's anti-Zionist and plays the part of a drunken Brit, identifies with the tribe.
The meaning? For all these people, support for Israel, or nervousness about Islamic intolerance, trumps domestic political allegiance. And their defection, which follows an earlier generation of Jewish intellectuals, robs the Left of its most persuasive voices. ·Ron Rosenbaum ·Eric Alterman ·Christopher Hitchens#
