Leftists, Islamists, and Other Spoiled Children
The coalition makes no sense. Until you look at the psychology.
Many years ago, when Britain was still a vaguely serious country and “soft power” didn’t sound like a punchline, I spent time working in China doing my bit for Sino-UK relations. I occasionally visited Xinjiang – a vast western province home to the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority now subject to mass internment, forced labour and what several governments have formally recognised as genocide.
The Uyghurs I met were friendly and curious, getting on with the business of living like everyone else in that watchful country. I’ve thought about them occasionally over the years. I wonder how many are suffering under the CCP’s brutality today.
I don’t expect to see mass marches through London or New York for the Uyghurs any time soon. No trending hashtags, no flags in bios or TikTok sermons. True, a handful of activists keep vigil outside embassies, but they go largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, the big NGOs barely mention them, and celebrity activists – usually so keen to side with the oppressed – have more suitable causes to amplify.
To someone unfamiliar with the moral rot running through these movements and institutions, these omissions would look inconsistent at best. For those of us paying attention, it’s all grimly predictable – selective outrage on questions of Islam being a signature move of today’s left.
Consider Hannah Spencer, a Green Party candidate in a recent British by-election. Matt Goodwin asked her on television the simplest of questions about terrorism in Britain, specifically about a night almost a decade ago that saw 22 people murdered – ten under the age of 20, the youngest an eight-year-old girl.
“Why are those things happening?”
The answer, of course, is a simple word: Islamism. Yet Spencer couldn’t say it because in left-wing politics, “Islamism” is treated like a swear word at a children’s party. Instead, the question triggers an automated response. Attacks like Manchester happen, she said, “because people like you are dividing people”.
There it is. If the bomber had been a white supremacist with a Hitler tattoo, would she have struggled to say “Nazi”? Of course not. She’d have jumped up on the sofa and bellowed it from a megaphone. But the word “Islamism” works like a hypnotist’s trick on a certain type of person. The word “Islam” in any negative context is even worse. Snap your fingers and suddenly politicians are incapable of forming the word, instead looking baffled and indignant.
Spencer isn’t an oddball at the edge of Western politics. She is our politics today, albeit someone less fluent in the language of evasion. She merely said what an entire class has been hypnotised to think. Her only mistake was to say out loud what more seasoned politicians obfuscate and dissemble.
None of this emerges from nowhere. Behind the hypnotised political class are the movements that do the hypnotising, and they recruit a very specific psychological type – often in much larger numbers than we usually care to admit.
You’ve met someone like this. You’ve probably muted them on WhatsApp. It’s what satirist P.J. O’Rourke called the spoiled child – “miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.” He was talking about the left, but every political tribe breeds its own variety. The right has its own, as I’ve written elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the spoiled child finds communism or radical Islam especially irresistible because these ideologies divide the world into simple binaries of oppressor and oppressed, believer and infidel. Like all utopian systems, they come packaged with slogans and flags and answers to everything. They excite the despotic and the useless because they promise control and eliminate the need to think too much or wrestle with complexity.
It’s a human instinct most of us grow out of: the fantasy of being finally in charge. But for the spoiled child, it’s a chance to settle things in accordance with – what, exactly? God’s law? The natural order of things? Justice? These are secondary considerations to an impulse that is simpler and uglier than any ideology.
Which brings us to Poppy and Abdul. While Poppy waves rainbow flags in solidarity with gays, Abdul, an Islamist, dreams of throwing them off the nearest building.
It’s a coalition that makes no sense. Until you look at the psychology.
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