Graham Platner is just one example.
Graham Platner is just one example.
D espite “his own visceral contempt for their adherents,” the future supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, found utility in integrating “the influence of the leftist ideologies that had made such a mark on the Middle East over previous decades” into his revolutionary pitch.
That is how Jason Burke, author of the new book The Revolutionists, describes the genesis of what would become the Iranian “red-green alliance” in his epic retelling of how the Marxist militants of the 1970s evolved from Cuban-style communists into socialist pan-Arabists and, eventually, Islamists.
Subtly, Khomeini and his deputies integrated the Marxian left’s grievances and language into their own Islamist movement, as well as their “familiar binary divisions,” Burke writes. The poor would be mobilized against the rich, the slum dwellers against elites, the needy against the aristocrats, and all good Muslims against the Jews. On that particular front, the State of Israel was little more than an epiphenomenon. The entity that truly sought to establish “world Jewish government” was, in Khomeini’s estimation, the United States. Hence America’s designation as “the Great Satan.”
As the Islamic revolution drew nearer, the Iranian left made accommodations with the Islamists, and the Islamists committed themselves to studying the Marxists’ military tactics as well as their theories about the West’s inevitable collapse.
“On their crowded bookshelves, works by major Islamist thinkers competed for space with Persian translations of the key texts of the New Left,” Burke writes of intellectual life in Tehran on the eve of the revolution. “Like so many others, they had read Che Guevara, Regis Debray, Frantz Fanon, and other iconic heroes of the anti-colonial struggle, and believed the victories of insurgents in Cuba, Vietnam, and Ireland showed the way to Iranians who dreamed of ousting the Shah.”
Islamist revolutionary thinkers integrated attacks on “world imperialism, including multinational corporations and cultural imperialism, racism, class exploitation, class oppression, class inequality, and Westoxification,” Burke adds, referring lastly to a popular pre-revolutionary book that equated the consumption of Western culture with intoxication and chemical dependency.
The secular Iranian left told themselves that they would be fine. After all, these weren’t just fanatics but religious fanatics, and spiritual imperatives could be counted on to curb their bloodlust. Moreover, Marxist dogma envisioned a world in which religious reaction would invariably fade away. Even after the revolution, the scions of the international Marxist left — from Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault — hailed it as a victory for the proletarian cause. Champions of Foucauldian thought even believed Iran’s Islamists would introduce a desirable “spiritual dimension” to the practice of revolutionary politics.
In the end, this alliance of convenience collapsed, and the “reds” were purged by the “greens.” The Iranian “red-green alliance” was doomed from the start to end in fire. In the West, however, a version of that conspiracy of shared interests is holding firm. The activist left in America is increasingly attracted to an “eat the rich” economic philosophy coupled with a deep hostility toward the world’s various Satans, great and little alike.
Maine’s Graham Platner is a “red.” Literally, by his own admission, he “became a communist” late in life — inverting the intellectual trajectory that most well-adjusted adults follow. Despite the Nazi death’s-head favored by Schutzstaffel concentration camp guards that he had tattooed on his chest (the political inconvenience of which belatedly compelled him to investigate the symbol’s provenance), Platner once maintained that it’s impossible “to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.” He seeks to expropriate as much private wealth as possible and funnel it into public services from which you are not permitted to opt out, allowing for as much of that cash as possible to flow into the coffers of the left’s activist organs.
But, as Phil Klein argued convincingly, what made Platner stand out — indeed, what ultimately scuttled his pedigreed Democratic primary opponent’s campaign — was his uncompromising hostility toward Israel and, perhaps more important, the U.S. policies that advance Israeli security initiatives. It would be too charitable to conclude that Platner’s objectives end with the severing of the U.S.-Israeli security relationship. The candidate’s repulsive rationalizations for a deadly 2014 Hamas raid on Israeli soldiers suggest his goals are broader than that.
So, too, are Abdul El-Sayed’s. The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan shares Platner’s far-left economic policy prescriptions. He wants to soak the rich, nationalize the health insurance industry, and create an economy that runs on “worker power” in which laborers are once again forced to surrender their wages to unions. But what makes El-Sayed’s candidacy stand out is that he alone among his conventional Democratic opponents gives voice to an antipathy toward Israel that is fanatical in its vehemence. El-Sayed is a “green.”
The candidate made a name for himself in this race by attacking Israel as “pretty damn evil.” The Jewish state and its “war criminal” prime minister are genocidaires, he maintains, and America is complicit in that extermination campaign. El-Sayed’s candidacy got an observable boost from his association with the podcaster Hasan Piker, whose pro-Hamas and anti-American credentials are unassailable. Like Platner, El-Sayed claims his goal is to uncouple America and Israel, but his rhetoric betrays his more malign intentions.
“We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel,” read his campaign’s statement in the wake of a failed attempt to massacre Jewish schoolchildren in his home state, “and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” The extended effort in that document to implicate Israel in a terrorist attack conducted by Israel’s enemies on American Jews with no connection to Israel save their faith is an ominous portent.
Progressives already see the emerging contours of the American “red-green alliance.” Like their battered Iranian counterparts 50 years ago, they’re making their accommodations. “‘Voters have a different theory of what is electable right now,’” writes New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, quoting a “media consultant to both Platner and El-Sayed.” And Goldberg is ready for whatever this leftist confederation has to offer: “As America slips deeper into social and economic crisis, the electorate might gravitate toward leaders offering far-reaching solutions.”
America is not nearly as far gone as Europe, where the “reds” are already green and the Islamists do not disguise their designs in euphemisms. As one British Green Party candidate recently maintained, “Ramming a synagogue isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s revenge.” But the outlines of what brought Iran low a half-century ago are visible here, too. And, as in the Iranian experience, the “reds” will be tolerated so long as their movement has the patina of a palatable populist face. For now, it’s the rest of us that have to worry.