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“The US war effort is failing to create an effective puppet regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban is slowly but surely eroding US influence. In the face of major strategic losses, as evident in the astonishing assassination of top military officials, Obama had to mount a political spectacle—a ‘military success story’—the killing of unarmed bin Laden, to buoy the spirits of the American public, military and its NATO followers.”

— James Petras

The American academic James Petras is a leading member of a pro-tyrant left. Among his latest essays are “The Euro-US War on Libya,” “The US War on Africa,” “Egypt: Social Movements, the CIA and Mossad.” His latest book is titled War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America. Tempting as it is to simply turn away, it is important for democrats to understand the pro-tyrant left. It is vastly influential on campuses and its ideas are trickling down into the wider culture.

In the short twentieth century, the rise of Stalinism, a reactionary but non-capitalist social system, disorientated the left—bar some fragments—more or less completely.

The left clung to the dogma that the only social system that could follow capitalism was socialism. It imagined itself involved in a duel between capitalism and socialism. It thought that state ownership equalled socialism. And so—with honorable exceptions—a pro-tyrant left emerged in the twentieth century.

There was a slow scouring out of the habits of mind, the sensibilities and the values of an older left-wing culture that had been rooted in the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the ethical socialism of the mass European labor movements. In its place was put power-worship, authoritarianism, and a cult of the transformative power of revolutionary violence.

Many became critical supporters of totalitarianism—notwithstanding their knowledge of mass killings, gulags, political-famines, and military aggression.

Crucially, in the 1960s and 1970s, while the New Left innovated in the realm of culture and personal relations, when it came to geopolitics it mostly fell into line as cheerleader or apologist for one authoritarian “progressive” after another. As this New Left aged and drifted to the faculties and publishing houses it declared itself to be anti-anti-communist. In practice, it blamed America first.

After 1989, and the collapse of its global alternative to liberal capitalism, much of the pro-tyrant left simply refused to rethink. Rather than give up either its Manichean view of a world composed of two camps of progress and reaction, or its r-r-revolutionary style, it recreated both. How? By substituting a spectacular, inchoate and implacable negativism, centred on a conception of America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan” in the place of what had been a coherent (if wrong-headed and tyrannical) program for social reconstruction.

After 1989, and especially after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the old idea that Stalinism (its crimes notwithstanding) was objectively progressive against the West, morphed into the idea that all opposition to “US imperialism” or “Empire” was a “resistance” or “multitude” that must be (its crimes notwithstanding) supported, or at least not opposed energetically.

This pro-tyrant left thinks it holds the key to the entire world in the palm of its hand. If America is opposed to a tyrant, then—there is some dubious logic here, but this really is the crucial move—the tyrant must be opposing America. And—this is the last stretch, stay with me—therefore the tyrant is an “anti-imperialist” and, objectively, “progressive.”

And these ideas have been adopted in softer forms throughout the culture—we see it in the refusal of emotional commitment to the West in its battles against dictators and terrorists, the refusal to credit the West with anything but malign intent, the tendency to blame ourselves when we are attacked, the demonization of Israel, and the pathological refusal to see plain the nature of forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who were defined by the leading American academic Judith Butler as “part of the global Left.”

When the 17th-century English revolutionaries dreamt of “a world turned upside down” it was not this they had in mind.