Adam Kirsch’s ‘On Settler Colonialism’ captures the futility of the anti-Israel ideology—but undersells its danger.
Rumors of the death of ideas have been greatly exaggerated. Our politics may run on vibes, and some combination of influencers and tribal loyalty may shape Americans’ intuitions. Yet there is still a throughline between ascendant ideas and important policy decisions.
It can happen like this: Young people, their approval and votes coveted by tastemakers and policymakers, embrace an idea so exotic they cannot muster the lexicon or courage to question it; that idea shapes their general orientation toward a hot-button political issue, like race or the Middle East; political campaigns rush to capitalize on this new-found enthusiasm with some policy item that resonates with that orientation, like an arms embargo on an ally fighting a war against several enemy proxies.
As the terminus of that example suggests, unfortunately, most good ideas have already been around for a while, so the new ones with the power to dislocate our politics and culture tend to be bad. Indeed, as the literary critic Adam Kirsch examines in his recent book On Settler Colonialism, the exotic new ideas shaping young progressives’ view of the West are “disastrous”—intellectually indefensible, analytically facile, and prescriptively useless at best and murderous at worst.
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
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