Out with the Old, In with the Nothing:

A Critique of the Left’s Never-Ending Critique

(Tres de Mayo, Francisco Goya, 1814)

“No, I wouldn’t say I’m an antizionist really, I guess you could say I’m a post-Zionist, or whatever. Like, I think it made sense to create the state at the time that they did, but I’m super critical, maybe hyper-critical, of the state as it is. I guess I want to be a part of the Israeli left… the problem with the left though is that they don’t really have a clear vision of the future. That’s the problem with the left… they’re really good at critiquing things, just not that good at offering a vision of something better.”

I had to keep myself from laughing. You could put those words on a time travelling postcard and send them to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and they would still be just as true.

I overheard these words in the Beit Midrash awhile ago, and I was dumbfounded at the brazen honesty of them.

Because in them lies the summation of the left’s political problem.

The left is extremely good at smashing the idols of the old world with reckless abandon, and it does so with extreme precision and brutality.

Chairman Mao once referred to the ancient ways as “The Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

These Four Olds, he said, needed to be rooted out of society through revolutionary zeal and replaced with… well, it wasn’t entirely clear what they were to be replaced with.

After he declared his political jihad against the Four Olds, the Cultural Revolution began, uprooting a Chinese culture that had existed for millennia along with any old thinkers who still held onto these antiquated ideas.

Students dragged their antiquated teachers into public squares and shamed them, pouring ink down their throats and forcing them to wear degrading and shame-inducing signs.

(Teacher publicly shamed by students during the Cultural Revolution)

And those were the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones were slaughtered.

All in the name of cultural critique.

The modern left is only different in means, but, in terms of ends, the goal remains the same – the complete destruction of Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits.

Old Ideas, like the ideas upon which the United States was founded, are passé. Anyone who describes themselves as a “constitutionalist” or a “fan of the founding fathers,” is sneered at and mocked as though they were walking around wearing petticoats and powdered wigs.

The ideas behind the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence have been universally abandoned by the left.

The idea of “equality” has been replaced by the newer, more fashionable idea of “equity.” While I have been told for my whole life that we, as a society, should move past equality and focus on equity, I could not, for the life of me, tell you what equity meant.

Old Culture, like the culture of free speech and open discourse, has been removed from our lexicon. Now, we talk about “hate speech” and “safe spaces.”

Of course, as any victim of the Cultural Revolution would tell you, these safe spaces only apply to people who practice “right thought.”

Despite the myriad safe spaces on college campuses, there is not one square foot of academic space in which a Zionist can feel safe.

Old Customs, like marriage and the family, are looked upon as ancient ways of imposing misogynistic chains on women, and anyone who looks on marriage as a positive social good will be laughed out of the room.

Even the word “women” is passé.

And Old Habits, like going into the office for work or going to church on Sunday, have been discarded writ large.

But this tendency for the left to dispense with the old while not offering anything new, is, ironically, not new. In fact, it is as old as modernity itself.

(The Death of Marat, Jacques Louis-David, 1793)

What we now call “the left” was born in the French Revolution, out of Rousseau’s vision of society remade from the ground up. Unlike liberalism, which grew from Locke and Jefferson and sought to secure individual rights by limiting power, leftism aimed to overturn the entire social order.

Liberalism produced American democracy; Leftism produced Marxist authoritarianism.

I still remember the first time I heard one of my contemporaries say, “I’m not a liberal – I’m a leftist.”

At the time, in 2014 or 2015, his meaning was clear – I am not a liberal Democrat like my parents, I am a revolutionary.

I do not ascribe to the petty-bourgeois politics of my parents who are content with the idea of “incremental change” – I want complete change, and I want it now.

And this is a belief that has spread across academia and university students faster than Mono.

Of course, this is nothing new.

As my father once taught me, "any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head."

The problem now is that 40 is the new 20, and the West has raised two generations of children who refuse to grow up, children who are very good at critiquing what their parents built but not so good at building new things for their children.

My post-Zionist friend was inadvertently brilliant.

At a certain point, all people must decide if they wish to continue criticizing the world they inherited, or if they wish to get involved in building a new one.

Leftism is a never-ending treadmill of critique; that’s why you’ve never met a happy leftist.

That’s why, despite over 100 years of Marxist rule in different parts of the world, every leftist will tell you that “it just hasn’t been done properly yet.”

(Propaganda poster from the “Four-Olds Campaign”)

That’s how Mao was able to say that, after more than 15 years in power, the difficulties of his reign were somehow someone else’s fault.

The French Revolution, the well from which all Leftism springs, was a resounding failure.

And it was no one’s fault but the revolutionaries themselves.

They could wax poetic about the sins of the “Old Regime,” of which there were many, but they could not offer a better vision of a future without them.

They destroyed the Old ideas of nobility and royalty.

They destroyed the Old Culture of Catholicism.

They destroyed the Old Customs of holidays and ceremonies.

They even destroyed the Old Habits of the calendar, rearranging time so that weeks were ten days long, each month had 3 of these weeks, and they would add in five or six extra days as needed.

And, for all of that destruction, the people of France got what? A nice piece of paper that declared the rights of man and the citizen and a very modern, very humane, way of executing political enemies.

The greatness of the American Revolutionaries, by contrast, was not in what they destroyed, but in what they built.

They built the world’s first functioning republic that protected individual rights and provided for the common welfare.

Was it perfect?

Absolutely not.

Was it a better vision than any that had been offered before it?

Absolutely.

To point at the ideas of our ancestors and show every blemish is no great achievement.

Had Abraham merely smashed all of the idols in his father’s shop, he would not be remembered as one of if not the greatest man who ever lived.

He would be remembered as a teenager who had a temper tantrum.

Instead, after smashing all of his father’s idols, he dedicated his life to creating a worldview and a connection to Creation that has provided hundreds of generations of human beings with wisdom, comfort, and understanding.

He was certainly not the only idol-smasher who lived 3600 years ago, but he was the only one who replaced those shattered idols with something better.

The left, which is so good at critiquing the world around it, has yet to show the world that it can offer something better than liberal democracy.

It can point out all of the flaws with liberal democracy and parade them around as much as it wants, but it has not, in nearly 250 years, offered anything better.

Until it does, it will continue to founder and poison everything that it touches.

Modern politics is perverse.

In a competition between leftism and liberalism, liberalism wins every time.

But there are no more champions of liberalism out there.

I take great pride in saying that I am an old-fashioned liberal, an American Federalist and a British Whig – that those parties don’t exist anymore makes no difference to me.

As long as I live, I will support what we once called liberalism, no matter how long this siege lasts.

I was raised on the left, but I was raised on the left hand side of liberalism, far to the right of leftism.

My politics haven’t changed – the world has.

If that makes me a part of the Four Olds, then so be it.

I would rather burn with the old world than tear it down for nothing new.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai