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Notes -
Vibe shift?
I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.
Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?
In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.
I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.
I don't really understand how this paragraph connects to the first paragraph. "I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad." How does the premise connect to the conclusion? I don't think most left-ish people's support for immigration or DEI are premised on whether or not certain other leftists will excuse atrocities committed by Hamas.
I think it's likely more, "I am surprised by how the same set of ideals that led me to support what I support (i.e. immigration and DEI in this particular case, which are also two of the most prominent issues broadly supported by the people of this ideological cluster) also led others to support things I find heinous by my own values (i.e. excusing atrocities committed by Hamas in this particular case). This leads me to question how much and how well I understood these ideals; perhaps I ought to analyze them more carefully, in a way that leaves me genuinely open to changing my mind such that I no longer support things that I support now (i.e. such as immigration or DEI)."
I personally experienced a (likely much more minor) version of this around 10 years ago, in observing the justification of blatant and bald-faced lies done by some of the more extreme (though relative to me at the time, these people were barely extreme) people on my end of the political spectrum. This wasn't some "EUREKA!" moment where I cast off my previous beliefs in one fell swoop, but I was compelled to analyze the empirical, logical, and philosophical bases of my ideology at the time, resulting in me, over time, learning to throw away some (many? Most? That might be too optimistic) of the more absurd policy positions that I used to support before.
So I know it's possible, but I honestly doubt that this will or would cause any sort of meaningful shift at the national level. Not because of the control that the left has over academia and journalism, but mainly because people just don't really tend to think things through like that. There will likely be some people who go through something similar to what I did, but there will also likely be some people who become more sold on the correctness of the ideology because they enjoy and admire the bloodthirstiness openly displayed by the slaughter-apologists, and it's pretty much impossible to tell which number will be higher, or who will be in which category.
Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.
Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.
I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.
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