Nick Cohen's New Statesman piece 'Where have all the children of the left gone' continues to incite discussion, particularly here and here. One of Cohen's main claims is that the alliance between the revolutionary left, or what remains of it, and political Islamism is unprecedented. I'm not sure that's right. There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called 'New Left' in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled 'New Styles in "Leftism"' (the essay was first published in Dissent and was subsequently collected here).
Howe specified seven "characteristic attitudes" of the then-nascent New Left, at least five of which are prevalent in leftist discourse today. These are:
- 'An extreme, sometimes unwarranted, hostility towards liberalism.'
- 'A vicarious indulgence in violence, often merely theoretic and thereby all the more irresponsible.'
- 'An ... unreflective belief in "the decline of the West".
- 'A crude, unqualified anti-Americanism, drawing from every possible source, even if one contradicts another: the aristocratic bias of Eliot and Ortega, Communist propaganda, the speculations of Tocqueville, the ressentiment of postwar Europe, and so on.'
- 'An increasing identification with that sector of the "third world" in which "radical" nationalism and Communist authoritarianism merge.'
And, by a happy coincidence, Norman Geras discusses a piece in the latest issue of the New Statesman by John Pilger (intermittently accessible to non-subscribers) which displays several of the attitudes just enumerated.