H/T Harry’s Place
This Seymour Martin Lipset article in a 1971 edition of the New York Times Magazine entitled, The Socialism of Fools, is quite astonishing. Lipset, writing for the NYT of the early 70s (a newspaper, politically, almost unrecognizable from the Grey Lady of today) uncovers the ominous ideological trends occurring on the New Left at the time – with regard to their increasingly extreme antipathy towards both Israel and Jews more specifically.
While Lipset was diagnosing a political pathology that was still largely a phenomenon of the New Left (or far-left), the gradual influence of what were still, largely, somewhat marginal ideas, in 1971, on the more mainstream left became evident in subsequent decades, and it is simply impossible to not see the haunting similarities between tropes employed by “mainstream” left publications – such as the Guardian – today with those of the radical-left of 40 years ago cited by Lipset.
While you should read the entire essay, linked below, here are a few passages of interest from Lipset’s piece:
Here’s a passage about Jewish participation in groups compromised by anti-Semitism that is especially interesting in the context of CiF Watch’s reports on the Guardian’s Jewish writers – and their tendency to be among the most comfortable not only in delegitimizing Israel, but in engaging in outright anti-Semitic tropes.
