Made For Each Other

DURING PRESIDENT Bush’s November 2003 state visit to theUnited Kingdom, it was notable that the demonstrations against his visit were organized by a coalition of the hard left and the Islamicists. To some it seems rather odd that the champions of rights for women and homosexuals should be in league with an atavistic movement that subjects women to honor killings and wants to return the Middle East and the world to the glory days of the Baghdad Caliphate when religious and secular power were united in a single entity.

The alliance between the Left and the Islamicists makes complete sense, when we remember that the whole point of the left is its war on the middle class. From Marx onwards the single goal of the Left has been to smash the bourgeoisie and its hateful oppression of the masses, its hateful Christian religion, its hateful bourgeois marriage. In this goal they are perfectly aligned with the goal of the Islamicists, which is to smash the world-historical middle class, its hateful humiliation of Islam, and its hateful support of the evil Jews.

Both parties are united in a war to the death against the hated western middle class.

And it makes perfect sense that the glue between the movements is their hatred of the Jews in virulent anti-Semitism. In their literacy, their Torah, their intense family culture, and their business skills the Jews are über-middle-class. They are the most middle-class people in the world. They represent everything that the left hates, and everything that the Islamicists hate.

But why do they hate us? They hate us for a very good reason: the world-historical middle class is standing in the way of both of their visions for a better world. The left wants to replace middle-class culture with a universal culture of creativity, caring and sharing, and they have come up with a new cult of sacrifice to justify their vision. Just as Christ came and died to forgive the sins of the world, the left comes to make the middle class die for its oppression and exploitation of the world.

The Islamicists are different. They want to kill us to revenge their humiliation and impotence. In this they are eerily following Hitler who wanted, after the disaster of the Great War, to return the most advanced country in Europe to the pre-industrial verities of blood and land. The Islamicists also want to return to the tried and true, the successful Baghdad Caliphate that obtained at the high tide of Islamic flood a millennium ago.

But they will fail. The left will fail because it still has not learned its lesson, already drawn in the blood of 100 million martyrs in the twentieth century. You cannot build a universal culture of caring and sharing on the graves of the middle class. The vision of the left will only succeed when it is implemented in a program of transcending and including the rules and roles of the middle class, not by destroying them. When the left gets this, they will inherit the world.

The Islamicists are doomed to failure, for they cannot beat the middle class with a culture of honor and clan loyalty. Their terror is a resort to magic that echoes the desperation of the Plains Indians and the Chinese Boxers over a century ago. Overmastered by the irresistible force of the world-historical middle class, the frustrated young men of the North American plains developed a cult of Ghost Shirt dancing and the young men of the East Asian plains developed a cult of Spirit Boxing that promised them a magical victory over their tormentors. The experience of China is sobering. It took a century of failure, culminating in the twin tower debacles of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, before the Chinese political class finally chose the option that was always available to it: join the middle class.

How can we help them? We have to teach the lefties that if they abandon their program of smashing the middle class, they will get to rule the world. But they had better hurry up, because the Chinese may get there before them, and the Chinese are not called the Jews of Asia for nothing. For the Islamicists, alas, there is nothing but the long, long road that all must travel on the way to the middle class: from status to contract, from family to individual, from honor to rules, from charisma to trust.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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