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Leaving the left

After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2, like thousands - maybe millions - of others, I converted to libertarian-right.

Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.

Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.

Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem (that it was not caused by poverty, for example), their understanding of human nature and of the mind of the enemy, and of what had to be done for victory. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.

My history

• The 1980s:
  • In the 1980s, growing up under the always present threat of US-Soviet nuclear armageddon, I was fairly typical liberal-left.
  • I was pro-CND. I thought Sting and John Lennon made sense. I was against Reagan and Thatcher. I worshipped Gorbachev.
  • I supported communist Nicaragua. I marched to defend Libya against US attacks in 1986. I was pro-Palestinian and I had an Arafat scarf. I had a Che Guevara poster on my wall.

• Other signs:
  • There were other signs though. I visited Soviet occupied Europe in 1986, and I knew the Soviet Union was a tyranny. I danced when it fell in 1989. I celebrated when Ceausescu was shot. I thought this should happen to all dictators. I still do.
  • Also, I always despised Islamic fundamentalism. I only ever had contempt for the Iranian revolution, for example. I just never regarded Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to me until 9/11. Until then, it was just the backwater beliefs of primitive faraway people of no importance. I certainly didn't regard Israel's war against it as my war too. I didn't recognise the Palestinians as Islamic fundamentalists.
  • I thought anyone who criticised immigration must be racist. I knew that many third world people were bigots and racists, but I couldn't believe that one day fundamentalist immigrants would start killing us.
  • I admired the left for its opposition to apartheid and racism; its opposition to religious and sexual censorship; and its defence of freedom of sexuality, separation of church and state, and the rights of atheists and homosexuals. That hasn't changed. What has changed are mainly my opinions on foreign policy.

• The 1990s:
  • Despite the opposition of many people I admired, I supported the first Gulf War in 1991. I welcomed America flexing its muscles as a lone superpower. I thought that would make a much safer world. I still do.
  • I was a liberal interventionist in the 1990s. I was disgusted by what the Somalis did to the Americans who were only trying to help them. I wanted Clinton to bomb the Serbs, and cheered when he finally did. I wanted America (or someone) to stop the Rwandan genocide, but they didn't. I was sickened by the sadism of the Algerian jihad and had no illusions about what jihadis were like. I wanted the Taliban deposed as soon as they got into power in 1996. I would have supported war against them for any reason. I had no problem with the bombing of Saddam's Iraq in the 1990s, and I wanted Saddam to fall.
  • So long before 9/11, I had some neo-con tendencies, though I still regarded myself as on the left. I wasn't particularly bothered by Bush's win in 2000. I liked Clinton, but I didn't like Gore much.
  • Long before 9/11, I had also abandoned left-wing economics. It was obvious to me, living in Ireland, and working in technology, that left-wing economics led to poverty, unemployment and emigration. I only voted left in Ireland for their social policy (e.g. separation of church and state), and despite their economics.

• My leaving of the left, 2001-2:
  • September 11th radicalised me. It made me finally and irrevocably pro-America and pro-West. It made me re-appraise everything I grew up with. It made me pro-Israel, and newly sceptical of Europe.
  • I thought I had nothing more to learn after abandoning religion when I was 17. But I did. At age 33 I was still young enough to change, and learn the lesson of September 11th - that our civilization will die if we do not defend it. That the left-liberal worldview is wrong - as wrong as the religious worldview.
  • This is 1940 again. This is a war against fascism and the liberal left will not support it, so I am breaking with them forever.
  • September 11th is the Hungarian Revolution or the Cambodian genocide of our time - the moment when a new generation, again, realises the bankruptcy of the progressive, "correct" ideologies that all right-thinking people believe. This is the moment when a new generation, again, leaves the left, never to come back.

Christopher Hitchens

• Christopher Hitchens (and here)

• Hitchens leaves the left:
  • Hitchens' immediate gut reaction to Sept 11th - this, at last, is a war against evil.
  • This is a war against fascism by Hitchens
  • A View From The Patriotic Left by Hitchens - "Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth."
  • So Long, Fellow Travelers by Hitchens
  • Hitchens says Sept 11th was a moment the left should have seized: "Reflect upon it: Civil society is assaulted in the most criminal way by the most pitilessly reactionary force in the modern world. The drama immediately puts the working class in the saddle as the necessary actor and rescuer of the said society. Investigation shows the complicity of a chain of conservative client states, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, in the face of which our vaunted "national security" czars had capitulated.
    Here was the time for radicals to have demanded a war to the utmost against the forces of reaction, as well a full house cleaning of the state apparatus and a league of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan and with the whole nexus of dissent and opposition in the Muslim world. Instead of which, the posturing loons all concentrated on a masturbatory introspection about American guilt, granted the aura of revolutionary authenticity to bin Laden and his fellow gangsters, and let the flag be duly seized by those who did look at least as if they meant business."

• Hitchens is still wrong about a lot:
  • Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis (*) criticises Hitchens for his remaining attachment to butchers like Trotsky. See review.
  • (*) Not that Martin Amis is one to talk. See the worthless rubbish he wrote after Sept 11.
  • Interview with Hitchens, 2003 where he still can't see Trotsky for what he was.

  • Hitchens talks rubbish about the genocidal communist butchers of North Vietnam. He calls them "a very civilized foe and if they had had weapons of mass destruction, for example, wouldn't have used them and didn't target civilians, .. were not torturers and mass murderers and so forth." In short, Hitchens has been wrong all his life, and he still doesn't realise it.
  • More rubbish: "I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge."

• Hitchens talks more rubbish about Vietnam, August 26, 2007.
  • He claims that: "If one question is rightly settled in the American and, indeed, the international memory, it is that the Vietnam War was at best a titanic blunder and at worst a campaign of atrocity and aggression." Had America's opponents turned out to be democrats who wanted to build a free society, he would have a point. Since they weren't, he doesn't.
  • He is absurdly impressed by the fact that: "Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in proclaiming Vietnam's own declaration of independence". So what? Ho Chi Minh could have set up a parliamentary democracy after 1946. He chose not to. Why? Because he did not believe for one minute in parliamentary democracy or a free society. He was a totalitarian communist thug. Why can Hitchens not see this?
  • "It is true that the collapse of the doomed American adventure in Indochina was followed by massive repression and reprisal, especially in Cambodia, and by the exile of huge numbers of talented Vietnamese. But even this grim total was small compared to the huge losses exacted by the war itself". So the Cambodian genocide, the boat people deaths, and the North Vietnam killings were "small" compared to the Vietnam war? Please provide numbers, Hitchens, to back up this claim.
  • You've got to hand it to him, though, for tortuously trying to justify his past writings, by claiming simultaneously that the Vietnam war was wrong and the Iraq war is right. Is there anyone else in the world who holds these two positions simultaneously?

• Leaving Iraq would be like leaving Vietnam

• As I say, Hitchens' analysis is not the best. The conservative analysis is, I find, far superior. So Hitchens does not really make my list of writers on politics that I like. Maybe someday. But he needs to change more.

Other apostates from the left

• David Horowitz
  • David Horowitz on Hitchens (also here)
  • Horowitz himself of course is also an apostate leftist, as are many, if not most, of the modern conservative and libertarian thinkers.
  • Radical Son by David Horowitz - A leftist has Second Thoughts.

• The mind of the left - What is wrong with us that we are attracted to leftism when we are young?

• Another person this is happening to is Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler. Read his Goodbye to the left (also here).
• Clive James in the Guardian after Bali - the Australian left forced to face the bankruptcy of its beliefs.

• Andrew Anthony
  • The book The Fallout (2007).
  • Andrew Anthony on how 9/11 smashed his left-wing self-image: "If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself."

• Ann Clwyd's journey from liberal-left Greenham Common Labour to neo-con ally
  • Iraq is free at last, Ann Clwyd, March 30, 2004, The Guardian - "Some will continue to argue that internal repression is not a matter of legitimate concern for other countries. I disagree."

• William Shawcross has made a similar journey, from promoting in the 1970s the idiotic theory that the Khmer Rouge killed because they were "angered" by US bombing (rather than because they were genocidal communists), to a modern day supporter of Bush.
  • They should be ashamed - on Robin Cook, Clare Short, and other opponents of the freeing of Iraq. - "The record will .. show that Mr Cook and Ms Short have behaved in a manner which should shame even them."
  • Shawcross' site still promotes his appalling book on Cambodia, Sideshow, which blames the US for the Khmer Rouge. He should simply renounce this book. Like Hitchens, he does not make my list of writers on politics that I like. He needs to change more.

• Cinnamon Stillwell

• Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, lost his faith by meeting Soviet dissidents: "I returned [to the Soviet Union] in 1990 to spend 11 years as a foreign correspondent. Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to suffer and go to prison for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism. I had a strong sense of the high price my friends were willing to pay for the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school - but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization: freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and movement."

• blogger ex-leftists:
  • Tim Blair
  • Bookworm Room
  • other stories (and here)

• The Euston Manifesto - Leftists who recognise Islamism for what it is.

• Nick Cohen (and here)
  • The book What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (2007), about the left's support for Islamism: "the story of how the liberal left of the 20th century ended up supporting the far right of the 21st".

• Former hard-leftist David Aaronovitch
  • His documentary, No Excuses for Terror (2006) is a stunning indictment of the modern hard left and its tolerance of and apologies for violent reactionary Islamist religious fascism, from Hezbollah to Hamas to the London bombers to the Iraqi so-called "resistance".

People in the middle

• Can There Be a Decent Left? by Michael Walzer. See response by Horowitz.
• The Left has lost its way and lost its voice by Camille Paglia
• The Liberal Quandary over Iraq - on the new phenomenon of "liberal hawks". - Read the scene at the end with the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya.

• Julie Burchill
  • I'm not a fan of Julie Burchill. She seems rather silly and unserious to me. Even when she is making a good point, she does it in such a sloppy way, often with daft over-generalisations. But she too is undergoing a journey:
  • Good, bad and ugly - Julie Burchill leaves The Guardian because of its bias against Israel. ".. if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under."

  
  

• Thomas L. Friedman
  • Friedman is an intelligent liberal, trying not to agree with Bush and the neo-cons, yet smart enough to see the good they are doing. Now, I have resolved that conflict by saying that the liberals are simply wrong and the neo-cons are right. Friedman isn't there yet. So he's not on my list of writers on politics that I like. But maybe someday.
  • He has a good line in tough criticism of the Islamic world, but he is too critical of Israel and the US. Unlike much of the left, he does basically support the democracies. It's just he's so negative and critical. He never celebrates the West's achievements, for example. Instead he always moves on to criticism of the next job. He never celebrated the fall of Afghanistan or Iraq, for example.
  • The Chant Not Heard by Thomas L. Friedman. Copy here.
    • ".. even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. ... I don't know if we can pull this off. ... But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad"
    • "For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, 'Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it from here.'"
  • One of the comments here expresses my feeling about Friedman: "Here's a typical Friedman column since the war started. He knows that our course of action is just, but he can't get past the fact that it's Republicans doing it. So he has to rain on the parade at every opportunity even though he supports it."
  • Friedman eventually gives up on Iraq, Aug 2006: "three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means "staying the course" is pointless, and it's time to start thinking about Plan B - how we might disengage with the least damage possible." Well it was always going to happen. People like Friedman are not reliable allies.

  
  

• Paul Berman
  • Terror and Liberalism, 2003, by Paul Berman - An intelligent liberal tries to deal with the fact that his side won't oppose religious fascism.
    • He also argues that fascism, communism and Islamofascism are all different sides of the same thing - the totalitarian reaction to liberalism that really got going in 1914.
    • See his article, Oct 2001. - "The genuine solution to these attacks can come about in only one way, which is by following the same course we pursued against the Fascist Axis and the Stalinists. The Arab radical and Islamist movements have to be, in some fashion or other, crushed."
    • Ch.6, "Wishful Thinking" tells the fascinating story of the left in France in the 1930s, who were so "anti-war" that they tried to "understand" Hitler's demands. After conquest, they went on to serve in the Vichy government, while the liberals who opposed Hitler were sent to the camps.
  • Horowitz on how Berman just can't make the psychological leap to actually praise Bush

  • A Friendly Drink in a Time of War, by Berman, shows his infantile prejudice against Bush (one reason he doesn't make my list of writers on politics that I like), but he also expresses well the disillusion of former believers in the left like me. The left doesn't support democracy in the Arab world because: "a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships ... Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs. ... The old-fashioned left used to be universalist - used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. ... But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! ... The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left"

  
  

• The atheist Sam Harris is somewhere in the middle, against the right, but also critical of the left.
  • The book The End of Faith
  • Sam Harris v. Dennis Prager

  • Head-in-the-Sand Liberals, September 18, 2006, contains lots of sense:
    • The left does not understand Islamism: "liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world - specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith. On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right."
    • I don't like his hostility to the right, but I love his bluntness on the war: "This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy." If you believe in death for apostasy and blasphemy, then we are at war with you. It is not a legitimate opinion. You are the enemy.
    • He says our enemies number as high as "tens of millions of people in the Muslim world". Sadly, he is right. This does not mean we have to fight them all. But we need to be realistic about how many people support the enemy side.
    • And he understands this war is about hallucinatory religious and totalitarian ideas, not about "poverty", "oppression" or foreign policy: "And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism."
  • And sadly the article contains lots of nonsense too:
    • He is just silly about the Western right, focusing on irrelevant people like biblical Christian fundamentalists: "Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies." Nonsense. The people speaking with moral clarity about the war are the neo-con right (of many religions and none). The biblical Christian right are not listened to outside their flocks. They have no influence, and their statements are full of confusion, not moral clarity.
    • "The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, ... The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists." Rubbish. Name names as to who you think are "fascists". One could just as easily call Sam Harris a "fascist". He is as hard on Islam and Islamism as any European I've ever read, save perhaps Oriana Fallaci.
    • In summary, Harris is so obsessed with distancing himself from (perhaps imaginary) American "biblical Christian fundamentalists" and European "neo-fascists" that he fails to see the vast number of reasonable people (including secular people) lined up on the right. In short, he's got a long way to go before he makes my list of writers on politics that I like.
  • Discussion of above article

People going the other way (from "right" to increasingly "left")

• Andrew Sullivan wrote eloquently in support of liberating the Middle East in 2001-3, but ultimately he could only support the flawed Republicans for so long. Because he could not support those flawed people who are pursuing the fight, he has abandoned the fight itself, and now spends most of his time criticising our side rather than the enemy.

• Richard Dawkins had moments of insight in 2001. But then the darkness came over once again.

Others have been moving in the wrong direction for longer - bravely opposing Saddam when he was America's friendly dictator in the 1980s, but then betraying that by switching to supporting him once he became America's enemy from 1990 onwards.

• Tariq Ali once opposed Saddam. Now he supports the Baathist resistance.

• George Galloway once opposed Saddam. Now he supports the Baathist resistance.

• Harold Pinter once championed the oppressed Kurds of Saddam's Iraq. Now he opposes America that liberated them.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

• Geoffrey Wheatcroft

• His instinctive dislike for the left came out after 9/11:
  • Give me Churchill, not Burchill, Oct 28, 2001, supports tough military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He recognises his support for Tory isolationism in the 1990s might have been wrong: "I was one of those who deplored the bombing of Serbia. Elementary observation now suggests that Serb forces are no longer terrorising Kosovo, that Serbia is returning to something like democracy and that Milosevic is on trial. Would that have happened if we had dropped John Pilger, Julie Burchill and Simon Jenkins on Belgrade (tempting as that thought is)?"
  • Two years of gibberish, Sept 11, 2003, attacks intellectuals' responses to Sept 11th, and says their response should be taken with awareness of their appalling history: "an alarmingly high proportion of the eminent writers of the past century veered towards the totalitarian heresies of left or right, attracted by communism or ... by fascism. This might not be accidental. Imaginative writers are distinguished not by a sweeter character (too often very much not), greater intellectual honesty, or even deeper intelligence, but ... a way of looking at the world which is interesting because it is exaggerated or distorted."

• But the feeling is soon forgotten, as his Britain-first, anti-American isolationism returns. Now he is on the same side as the left:
  • Servile and deeply unpatriotic: The Tories need to rethink the US alliance and speak for England, May 5, 2005 - attacking Britain's alliance with America, praising Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind, and longing for the old days of cynical Tory realpolitik and isolationism.
  • A rare sight: a party leader's penitent change of course, Sept 28, 2006 - hoping Cameron will be an isolationist; attacking neo-cons, the Iraq War, and Britain's alliance with America; and praising old-school Tory realpolitik figures like Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind, Ian Gilmour and Douglas Hogg.
  • Geoffrey Wheatcroft wants the Tories to go back to the kind of party I would never vote for. I hope he's wrong that Cameron is the man to take it there.

• Brad DeLong, January 16, 2004, attacks Wheatcroft for describing the emergence of the US as "a bitter pill" for Britain. "First of all, the emergence of the United States as the greatest power on earth in the twentieth century was not a "bitter pill" for Britain. It was Britain's greatest strategic advantage. It's the equivalent of being dealt two aces in the hole at the start of a seven card-stud poker game ... The loss of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Britain - which is what would have happened without the United States - would have been a considerably more "bitter pill" than having an amazingly powerful ally willing to join your side in your big wars."
• As Brad DeLong points out, Wheatcroft's Little Englander Tories are no heirs of Churchill: "they have, somehow, forgotten what it is to be a Great Nation. Winston Churchill's Britain was truly a Great Nation because it placed itself in harm's way - when everyone else was running for cover - to fight and destroy Nazism. A Britain that made peace with Hitler in 1941 because American Lend-Lease aid was insufficiently generous would not be a Great Britain, but a Very Small Britain indeed."

• As John Bolton says: "'If the Brown government wants to be more European than Atlanticist, let's hear it. If they would rather not have a special relationship, let's hear it.' And then comes the zinger: 'If they want to be a part of Europe in the same way as Belgium and Luxembourg, let's hear it.' Bolton believes Britain must face the question: 'Do you want to be an independent country or a county in a big Europe?' The way he tells it is guaranteed to offend our national pride, but you can't say he hasn't warned us. 'If Britain wants to be subsumed into the European soup, the United States will have to react accordingly - and we will, make no mistake.'"

Johann Hari

• Johann Hari

• I said above that Christopher Hitchens doesn't quite make my list of Writers on politics that I like. Johann Hari is another notch down the scale. He's slightly worse than Hitchens, but still speaks sense sometimes. He's not as completely lost to reason as these people. See his interview with Hitchens.

• Johann Hari should be on our side, but isn't. Here he explains why not. He's explaining why good liberals, even if they hate Islamism (as he does), shouldn't support Bush and the American right.
• I'd like to go through his list, because it's a good list of where I differ from the left (and where I don't):

  
  

  Hari says:	I say:
  "there needs to be a Marshall Plan for the Arab world"	I disagree: (1) The source of terror is not economic. (2) A Marshall Plan will achieve nothing if these states are non-democracies. The Western European countries after 1945 were democracies, not tyrannies.
  "and a determined effort to tackle legitimate Muslim grievances"	I disagree: Muslim grievances are mostly imaginary. The problem is the lack of democracy and freedom in the Islamic world. The Islamic world must be changed - against their will if necessary.
  Goals he claims are equally important as the WoT: "The fight against climate change"	I disagree: (1) Climate change may be imaginary. (2) The left's solutions are to stop growth and spread poverty. Climate change would be better than that.
  "The fight against the continuing existence and potential use of nuclear weapons"	I disagree in the sense that I am happy with possession of these by democracies. I agree that their possession by non-democracies is a major threat. But this is entirely part of the WoT.
  Other goals on which he claims the American right are on the wrong side: "The fight to extend democracy to peoples remaining under tyranny"	I disagree that the American right are on the wrong side. This is the very core of the WoT, and perhaps the main reason for the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, only the right seems to have this vision of ending all non-democracies. The left seems totally opposed to this vision.
  "The fight to ensure that democracy is meaningful, and not hollowed out by corporations, the rich .."	Just another leftie whining because no one votes for him.
  "The fight for equality for gay people"	Pretty much done in the west. The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states. So you should support the people who are doing something about those states - i.e. the American right.
  "The fight for equality for women"	Pretty much done in the west. The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states. So you should support the people who are doing something about those states - i.e. the American right.
  "The fight to end the disastrous "War on Drugs""	Yes, I'm with you on that one. It's just not as important as the WoT, so it's just going to have to wait. Of course, if there was a party that was sound on drugs and on the WoT, we wouldn't have to choose, but there isn't.
  "The fight to end the spiritual tyranny of "religion""	Pretty much done in the west. The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states. So you should support the people who are doing something about those states - i.e. the American right.
  "The fight against poverty"	You're simply wrong on the solutions. The solution to poverty is democracy and capitalism. You think the problem is: "the extreme .. neo-liberalism imposed on much of the world's poor" and the lack of "social democracy .. corporate regulation [and] redistributive taxation". You are campaigning against the things that will end poverty, and in favour of the things that will increase it.

  
  

• Hari's list is interesting. For some issues I agree with him - but think the WoT overrides them. For other issues I simply disagree with him.
• I'm not the same as Hari. I am basically a libertarian or neo-conservative. So I'm closer to traditional conservatives than Hari, who is liberal-left or a social democrat. But yes, I do have some problems with the American right. Yes, I do have some problems with Bush. But it seems clear to me that the War on Islamism overrides all these for the moment.

• Johann Hari defends the thug Hugo Chavez.
• Scott Burgess replies (and here): "And now a gedankenexperiment. Imagine that George Bush was shutting down opposition TV stations, passing laws forbidding making fun of him, implementing enabling laws and overturning term limits for his own benefit. What are the chances that Johann Hari would describe that behaviour as "dictatorial"?"
• Oliver Kamm on Johann Hari

• Johann Hari introduces Mark Steyn in an article, with that classic left-wing snobbery, as "a Canadian former disc jockey called Mark Steyn". As if somehow Hari is a more profound thinker than Steyn!

X leaves the left. Y attacks him. Later, Y leaves the left.

1. Christopher Hitchens.
2. Paul Berman.

And the story will repeat. Maybe in the future George Monbiot or Richard Dawkins will get sense and leave the left. 9/11 didn't do it for them. But some further, worse attack could. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.