One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

the moral prohibition on siding with any administration that endorses genocide will force a different flavor of the exact same logic that centrist liberalism has depended on for so long: hold your nose and align with the least worst thing. Only the least worst thing will no longer be the mild, ethics-agnostic emptiness of modern Western liberalism, nor will it be the multitude of barbaric authoritarians and their secret prisons. It will be communal solidarity, or else nothing, a walking away from all of this. Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one’s soul. They will instead support no one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this. And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.