Linkpost note: I originally avoided cross-posting this to Lesswrong because I felt readers would likely feel it was too political, but now that top posters have been prominently advancing arguments on the specific premise this article argues against, and engaging in related naked political posturing as predicted by this model, I felt it was timely, relevant, and well within revealed standards.

Yassine Meskhout asked for an explanation of the recent emergence of anti-Zionism as a left-wing litmus test, especially salient in the aftermath of the October 7th attack in late 2023. In an unrelated conversation, a friend asked me what recourse ordinary people are likely to adopt as the state breaks various promises to them. My answer to the latter developed a surprising answer to the former.

Our system of government has two interlocking features: it refuses to hear an individual making a reasonable argument, and it systematically disrupts collective threats that fall outside mainstream coalition politics. The result is that reasonable arguments about individual circumstances get drowned out by a competition between acceptable collective identities threatening their rivals.

Under some historical conditions, individual moral appeals could drive real change. Under Quaker norms in Pennsylvania, someone making the simple argument 'you wouldn't like it if someone did it to you' could gradually build support for abolition. People came to see slavery as sufficiently similar to war that they chose to stop inflicting it on others.

On the other hand, consider this story shared by Zvi on his Substack:

I was told a story the week before I wrote this paragraph by a friend who got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way.

As a close friend of the victim, I know additional details. When consulting legal counsel, he was explicitly advised that judges or prosecutors wouldn't respond well to statistical arguments about actual risk levels in child endangerment cases. His lawyer advised him to take a nonsensical online parenting class from a community-service-hours mill as a form of groveling. When he told friends about the incident, many offered advice about what he should have done differently or how to protect himself from authorities in the future. Some suggested trying to get the crazy lady in trouble. No one suggested trying to get the cops in trouble. No one's response was 'That's outrageous - I'm going to tell my friends and we're going to write to City Hall about this.' No one saw it as an opportunity for collective action on the basis of a shared interest as rational individuals - only for individual adaptation to avoid future persecution. ^[1]

Consider another example: I myself once needed to change my toddler's diaper in a public library. Finding no changing table in the men's room, I had to decide whether I could safely use the women's room. I ended up deciding that I could get away with it if challenged, by declaring my gender "whatever is consistent with being able to care for my child". But it's messed up that that's the first place my mind went, instead of appealing to reason directly, like, "this is a necessity for anyone caring for a child so it's crazy for me not to have access to it on the basis of my sex."

You might think there are other ways to address these problems - changing laws through democratic process, or appealing to universal principles. But any such attempt must come either from an individual speaking as such, or from someone speaking as part of a collective identity. In my experience from childhood onward - and I would love to hear the good news if yours is different - it is rare for individual appeals to reason to work against even apparently slight political forces. ^[2] Instead, they stonewall, either pretending not to be able to understand, offering wildly inappropriate remedies (like a vendetta against a crazy lady), or if called out clearly and persistently enough, becoming angry at the complainant for presenting such an uncomfortable complaint.

In practice, identities maintain power by credibly threatening collective action, often via state mechanisms. Consider the importance of "protected categories" in civil rights law. Aspects of individual interests not represented by such collective identities get systematically ignored.

Martin Luther King Jr held America accountable to its own founding ideals and biblical principles - reminding the nation it had already explicitly committed itself to human equality and dignity. Yet even these appeals to honor stated principles weren't enough on their own. It wasn't just the logic of King's words that commanded attention - it was the thousands of people marching behind him, the economic pressure of boycotts, and the constant threat of cities erupting if change was denied. This combination of moral appeals backed by collective power didn't just win specific concessions - it established principles and precedents that could be used by others with analogous claims. The Civil Rights Act's ban on discrimination became an intellectual framework that women's groups and others could adapt for their own struggles. The power got attention, which allowed the appeals to reason and precent to create further lasting precedents.

Roughly as the 1960s ended and '70s began, America shifted to a radically lower-trust regime, ^[3] and appeals to shared principles lost their power. Without the intellectual work of appealing to reason, collective action increasingly produced zero-sum adjustments rather than reusable principles. Dissident identities increasingly turned to organized violence by the 1970s. The FBI's response was methodical - from assassinating Fred Hampton in 1969 as the Black Panthers tried to combine community programs with armed resistance, to developing general techniques under COINTELPRO for preventing such combinations. These FBI counter-intelligence programs included infiltrating groups to sow internal paranoia, disrupting attempts to form coalitions across constituencies, and specifically targeting leaders who could bridge different communities. Any group that successfully combined collective identity with political violence, especially if they showed promise in building broader support through community programs, became a priority for neutralization. Today's dissident identities largely work within the system rather than threatening it - if you can't beat them, join them.

The result is a kind of forced atomization. Modern alienation manifests as either diffuse anxiety/depression or sporadic individual violence (see Adam Lanza Fan Art). Some researchers have suggested intelligence agencies may have influenced these patterns - from documented CIA behavior-modification programs like MKULTRA, to the complex ways intelligence agency actions (like the handling of Ruby Ridge and Waco) shaped domestic political violence. The transition from organized domestic terrorism to serial killers seems to line up about right with the CIA's documented often-lethal terror hijinks. But whatever the cause, our vital national resource of violent weirdos has been successfully redirected from participation in shared identities with a dissident vision for society, to individual acts of psychotic violence.

Anti-Zionism offers the coalition of the left what the system usually prevents: a collective identity that commits political violence. It reads as leftist both because it's anti-Jewish (Jews being, if not white, at least excluded from the POC categories most strongly protected by the left) and because it's explicitly opposed to the legitimacy of nation-states. If you can't beat them, beat them. The fact that Hamas developed its ideology abroad meant this identity could form outside the reach of FBI disruption techniques. The movement's rapid adoption as a left-wing qualifier follows directly from this unique position - where domestic attempts at forming such identities would have been disrupted early in their development, this one arrived fully formed. That this political violence was simply imported and adopted as a left-wing identity marker, rather than arising from any strategic thinking about leftist goals, suggests we're seeing product-market fit for politically-coded acting out rather than a movement likely to achieve anything interesting or constructive.

1. Trying to get the crazy lady in trouble might seem like a counterexample, but the main systematic problem people would have a shared interest in addressing was the behavior of the cops, not the behavior of the woman having a very bad day because her car had broken down. The impulse driving that suggestion was not so much an attempt to solve the external problem, but an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance of being asked to acknowledge an injustice performed by a party too powerful to retaliate against, by redirecting the urge to retaliate against a weaker party; pecking order dynamics. ↩︎

2. The civil courts still seem to do this, but decreasingly, after relentless propaganda against the idea of legal liability in the 1980s and 1990s led to the imposition of new legislative limits on tort liability, and a drastic decline in the utilization of civil courts in the US. "Fewer than 2 in 1,000 people … filed tort lawsuits in 2015 … That is down sharply from 1993, when about 10 in 1,000 Americans filed such suits" ↩︎

3. MLK was assassinated in 1968. Fred Hampton was assassinated in 1969. The US exited Bretton Woods in 1971, after which there is no unambiguous economic evidence of net widely shared value creation. See also Have Americans Become Less Violent Since 1980?. ↩︎