On Islamist Terror and the Left

Glenn Greenwald speaks to and rebuts a rhetorical move that’s become common across the political spectrum: when it’s pointed out that US and European foreign policy makes some contribution toward radicalizing Muslim populations, including the turn to terrorism, the response is that anyone who makes such a claim is: a) denying the agency and autonomy of terrorists; b) overlooking the role of religion as an independent variable, which some want to see as completely unrelated to any other variable. You see this response increasingly among certain parts of the left, and Glenn shows why it’s wrong.

I would add two points to Glenn’s analysis.

First, with regard to the agency/autonomy claim, it surprises me that leftists would repeat an argument that conservatives pioneered in their assault on liberal and left approaches to crime in the 1970s. Whenever the left tried to see crime as a symptom in part of social and material conditions, the right accused the left of engaging in excuse-making and a denial of individual responsibility. It was a simplistic, though lethally effective, political move, which has now, in the context of the debate over Islamist terrorism, migrated across the political spectrum.

Come to think of it, that move today re agency and autonomy also reprises what a lot of liberals did in their attacks on the French and Russian Revolutions in the 1970s and 1980s. Against anyone who tried to see the Terror or Bolshevik violence as in some measure a response to material realities (the persistence of the old regime, the threat of counterrevolution and foreign invasion, etc.), it was claimed that such a view eclipsed the role of revolutionary agency and ideology. Yet in making that argument, liberals threatened to separate entirely revolutionary agency and ideology from the realities of political and economic life, as I argued in this piece I did for the Boston Review on Arno Mayer’s study of terror in the French and Russian revolutions.

The two analogies here are admittedly imperfect because some leftists today do want to see religious fundamentalism and terrorism as a response to real conditions, only theirs is a particular account of what those conditions are: not the power politics of US or European imperialism but instead the secular changes of capitalist modernity, which threaten established identities and familiar social ties, creating an enervating anxiety and anomie. Here these leftists reprise an old psycho-social argument of 19th and 20th century social thought, which I analyzed in my first book on fear, and which, ironically, was historically used by liberals against the left (just read Arthur Schlesinger or Talcott Parsons). Which brings me to my second point.

Second, with regard to the religion argument, I can’t help but feel that some of the left are using the Islam/terrorism nexus as a way of conducting their own campaign, rooted in the domestic politics of the West, against a) what they see as a softening on the religion and identity question among the left; and b) what they see as certain moralistic/puritanical, quasi-religious, tendencies on the left. It seems like leftists should just have that debate—about the role of religion in politics, about the sources of religious belief and identity, about the proper role of morality, etc.—out in the open, and not try to conscript areas and peoples of the world that it knows little about in order to conduct a thinly veiled battle against their opponents.