The mood at the end of liberalism
On the dissolution of the PKK and Trump's Middle East policy
What a terrible line this is,
What a maddening balance—
On one side of us, leaves are falling,
On the other, it is a spring garden
- Hasan Hüseyin Kormazgil1
Momentous things are happening in the Middle East. The two things that are especially salient to me are the dissolution of the PKK and a shift in US policy away from Israel and towards Islamist rulers.
This is a discombobulating situation for those on the left. On the one hand, both of these things are things that the left has wanted in some way or another. On the other, they’re being done, not by the liberals the left has tried to convince for decades, but by stridently far-right leaders. These people are enemies of the republican tradition, but they are also more realistic than the liberal elites before them, who were either too stubborn, too cruel, or too timid for realistic alignment.
Diego Cupolo and I did a quick live event on Monday to talk about the PKK’s dissolution on Monday. It hasn’t been a very glamorous process. Guerrilla warfare isn’t really possible if the state you’re fighting has unblinking killer drones in the sky 24/7. Essentially, Erdoğan pummeled the PKK over the last 10 years, then offered them a dignified way out, and they took it. We don’t really know what the deal entails, but it’s clearly a resolution of the conflict on the state’s terms, rather than the PKK’s.
There’s a lot of emotional turmoil among Turkey’s opposition elites on this topic. Is that a good thing? Should they be happy? Why aren’t they?
Peace, after all, is unambiguously a good thing. If someone can’t be happy about it, it suggest that they might simply be blinded by their hate for Erdoğan.
There’ve been people among the commentariat admonishing people for taking this stance. It’s especially prevalent among liberals who were former AK Party allies, fell off that bus at some point in the 2010s, but are trying to hitch a ride every now and then. This isn’t a huge group by any means, but they do still write in publications like Serbestiyet and Karar, maintain a fairly decent footprint in social media and academia.
I do get where this is coming from. Being opposed to everything that happens all the time is exhausting. It exacts a toll. If your analytical faculties have to approach every political event with a foreordained judgment, the whole mechanism is going to erode over time. You also risk being boring and irrelevant.
Personally though, I’m not about to police people’s feelings. There are good reasons a reason left elites, and the population at large, feel this way. I think that most people welcome the end of the conflict on principle, but they also sense that this is a peace at their expense. People whose representatives are jailed on bogus charges, and who are increasingly condemned into a precarious existence marked by scarcity and thuggishness, can be excused for being pessimistic about the victory of their oppressors. Most of us have an intuitive understanding that politics is zero-sum.
The dynamic in Turkey is analogous with the way American leftists might now feel that Donald Trump has broken the taboos around US policy towards the Middle East. Unlike his predecessors, Trump seems to be giving Netanyahu the cold shoulder, making deals with the Saudis, recognizing Syria’s new government, normalizing relations with Iran, and recognizing Turkey’s status as a major regional power. He may even recognize a Palestinian state of some sort.
Many on the American left are going to approve of at least some of those things. They’ve long been furious at the liberal establishment for its unquestioning support of Zionism, interventionism, and their overall heavy-handed presence in the Middle East. That now appears to be over. Here’s what Trump said in Riyadh:
Far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins...It is God's job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America, and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.
I think many American leftists (Bernie supporters, or the already right-left Quincy Institute, etc.) violently agree. The situation in the US is significantly different in that there does appear to be more room for cooperation here. Unlike Erdoğan’s quarter-century foothold in Turkey, the Trump movement is still not too great a threat to deal with. The liberal establishment is also obviously far deeper in the US, and will need a concerted effort to be reformed. There’s also an argument to be made that there is a history of left-right antiwar collaboration in the US, so this isn’t entirely without precedent.
At the end of the day though, left-right collaboration can at most destroy the old, but it cannot built the new. Building is done on the terms of those in power, which today is clearly the far-right. They are princes making deals behind closed doors, deepening the already egregious inequality of the neoliberal era. The fusion of states and big technology in particular, should be very scary to the ordinary person.
From his poem Öyle bir yerdeyim ki. The journalist Ozan Gündoğdu used these lines in his excellent podcast on the peace process yesterday. Ahmet Kaya put it to music, available here: