I am in the middle of reading Joshua Muravchik’s book Making David into Goliath. You can read the critical chapter, 10, where it was reproduced in the Times of Israel.
Muravchik has done a masterful piece of history and has come up with a conclusion that has convinced me.
The great Leftist move to fight modernity and commerce originally took the shape of communism in the mid 1800’s with the hard-core belief that workers who hated modernity and the commercial world would rise up as the 'proletariat' to form revolutionary cantons to return the world to the old agrarian ways. Or to at least seize the new industrial technologies.
The proletariat was always a disappointment. Slowly the Left began to look for another revolutionary global population. With the help of the Third World movement promoted by the UN and the American versus Soviet Union conflict, the idea of a global ethnic group formed from the anti-colonialists, created a potential successor to the proletariat that would be the revolutionary future.
It is this global coalition of ethnic populations that the Left now looks to as the revolutionary basis for overturning modernity and industrial commerce.
Muravchik makes the point that ever since Israel defeated its Arab neighbors, most decisively in 1967, the Left has looked at Arabs as part of their new revolutionary coalition and Israel as part of the modern commercial monster.
Since the title of this blog concerns ‘me’, one could ask ‘How do you get in this?’
I am a consultant to the first and most significant fantasy of the Left. I am a consultant to a new group called the Diversity Coalition (no website yet) which has tens of thousands of members made up of black and Latino churches, the major American Filipino organization and an array of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean political action groups.
This coalition has found a number of American political issues on which they can agree. Principally they agree on the need for more access to employment and more access for minority small businesses into banking and the commercial market.
This finds me working for a functioning organization that is part of the wet dreams of the Global Left. The Diversity Coalition is devoid of the Left’s revolutionary ideology. It is purely American.
Don't tell the Left that such an organization could not exist outside the United State if it included Chinese, Indians and other Southeast Asians as well as Arabs. The many ethnicities might all hate the United States but such an organization would not be anti-commerce; the members would have such different worldviews they would never be able to agree on anything of substance.