What corrodes the Left today is not simply the Right. It is the liberal inside our own ranks. The one who occupies Left spaces rhetorically but abandons them the moment politics becomes uncomfortable. The one who can chant “liberation” in the abstract yet suddenly discovers a crisis of ethics the moment the discussion turns to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or any actor that sits outside the polite grammar of Western liberal respectability.
This political ambiguity – what we might simply call kak politics – is not a minor irritation. It is structural sabotage.
Every serious historical moment in which the Left might have pushed reaction back has instead been dissipated by this liberal moral panic masquerading as principle. Instead of analysing power, we retreat into moral theatre. Instead of confronting the empire, we perform outrage at the imperfect actors resisting it. Politics becomes an exercise in public virtue rather than a struggle over the material organisation of power.
This pattern is not new. It has a long intellectual genealogy, and some of the most perceptive political thinkers of the last century warned us about it.
Liberalism as a form of supervision
Steve Biko, writing in the thick of apartheid, understood the liberal problem with remarkable clarity: “a white man who says he is not responsible for apartheid and who wants to remain comfortably removed from the real struggle”.
The issue for Biko was never simply that liberals disagreed with radicals; the deeper problem was that liberal politics often positioned itself as the gatekeeper of legitimate resistance.
The white liberal, Biko argued, is frequently someone who wants to remain morally opposed to oppression while still retaining control over the political terrain on which that opposition unfolds. Liberalism becomes a form of supervision: sympathetic in tone, but ultimately invested in preserving the structures that produce the injustice in the first place.
Biko observed that liberal involvement in Black struggles often had the effect of moderating and diluting them. The liberal wants change, but not the kind of change that disrupts the social order from which he benefits. He wants justice, but preferably without the turbulence that accompanies real transformation. What follows is a politics of constant restraint. Resistance must be reasonable. Liberation must remain polite. Struggle must remain legible to those who do not suffer its consequences.
The result is a peculiar form of political paralysis. Instead of dismantling structures of domination, liberalism manages the tempo of resistance. It sets the boundaries of acceptable dissent. It tells the oppressed not only what they should resist, but how they should do it.
Political stupidity arising from colonisers
Earlier, Frantz Fanon diagnosed the deeper psychological terrain on which this drama unfolds. At the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks, he writes with characteristic bluntness that there are simply “too many idiots on this earth”.
The remark is not a casual insult. It is a philosophical provocation. Fanon is naming a form of political stupidity produced by colonial society itself – a way of thinking that prevents people from recognising the structures that dominate them.
For Fanon, colonial power does not merely occupy territory; it reorganises perception. It teaches the colonised subject to see the world through categories established by the coloniser. The liberation struggle therefore becomes entangled in a psychological drama: the colonised subject begins to measure his legitimacy against the moral expectations of the very system he is resisting.
When translated into contemporary politics, the pattern is immediately recognisable. The question ceases to be whether imperial domination is being challenged. Instead, debates revolve around whether resistance conforms to liberal standards of acceptability. Does it look respectable? Does it speak the right language? Does it satisfy the moral expectations of audiences situated safely outside the theatre of violence?
The conversation shifts from power to posture.
Dangerous illusion of liberal progressivism
Walter Benjamin warned us precisely of this phenomenon in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. The most dangerous illusion of liberal progressivism, Benjamin argued, is the belief that history naturally moves toward improvement. The liberal imagines that reaction appears as an anomaly – a sudden rupture in an otherwise progressive historical arc.
Benjamin rejected this entirely. Fascism, he insisted, is not a deviation from modern political order; it is one of its possible outcomes. The belief in inevitable progress becomes politically catastrophic precisely because it encourages passivity. Instead of confronting power in the present, we reassure ourselves that history will eventually correct it.
Liberal politics lives inside this illusion. It believes that stability is evidence of progress, and that disorder is evidence of political failure. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates the opposite. Moments of apparent stability often conceal the consolidation of domination beneath the surface.
Moderation as an incubator of extremism
Yanis Varoufakis has described the contemporary version of this dynamic in his analysis of the European debt crisis. After the financial collapse of 2008, liberal governments across Europe imposed austerity regimes that devastated working populations while presenting those policies as technocratic necessity. Democratic choice was replaced with managerial governance. Economic suffering was reframed as fiscal responsibility.
The consequences were predictable. As Varoufakis notes, when liberal technocracy empties democratic institutions of meaningful power, reactionary movements quickly fill the vacuum. The far right does not rise in spite of liberal governance; it rises because liberal governance often strips politics of its capacity to respond to social crises.
What appears as moderation becomes the incubator of extremism.
This is why the liberal corrosion of Left politics matters so profoundly today. When the Left internalises liberal frameworks of legitimacy, it begins to police resistance more aggressively than it interrogates domination. Energy that should be directed at analysing structures of power is redirected inward towards the disciplining of discourse.
We can see this dynamic unfold repeatedly in contemporary debates around the Middle East. The moment the question of imperial power emerges – whether in relation to sanctions regimes, military alliances or the architecture of occupation – the conversation is quickly redirected. Instead of analysing the geopolitical structures shaping the conflict, discussion becomes fixated on the moral character of those resisting that order.
Iran must be condemned. Hamas must be condemned. Hezbollah must be condemned.
The condemnations multiply until the original structure of power disappears from view. The political question is replaced by an ethical performance. Moral clarity becomes a substitute for political analysis.
This is precisely what Fanon meant when he spoke about the ideological distortions produced by colonial power. The colonised subject becomes trapped within frameworks of legitimacy designed by the coloniser. Resistance is judged not by its political effectiveness but by whether it conforms to the moral grammar of the dominant order.
And this is precisely what Biko warned about when he insisted that liberation movements must define their own political horizons rather than seeking validation from liberal intermediaries.
When the Left loses sight of these lessons, it becomes strategically disarmed.
Instead of confronting the structures that sustain empire and inequality, it dissipates its energy in internal debates over tone, language, and moral posture. Political clarity gives way to ideological anxiety. The result is a Left that speaks constantly about justice yet struggles to act with strategic coherence.
Meanwhile the Right operates with far fewer illusions. Reactionary movements rarely hesitate to defend their interests. They do not agonise endlessly over the moral purity of their alliances. They act strategically, building power patiently while their opponents debate the etiquette of resistance.
Benjamin once wrote that the task of revolutionary politics is to “brush history against the grain” – to interrupt the narratives that normalise domination and expose the hidden catastrophes beneath them.
The tragedy of contemporary Left politics is that it often does the opposite. Instead of interrupting the narrative of liberal progress, it reproduces it. Instead of analysing power, it performs virtue.
And history is not patient with that kind of confusion. DM
Ali Ridha Khan read for an MA in political studies at the University of the Western Cape, where he held Andrew W Mellon Foundation fellowships at the Centre for Humanities Research. A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he writes on political theory, Black Consciousness, aesthetics and the emotional life of politics in post-apartheid South Africa.