His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

Suggested reading

The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

Suggested reading

How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

Suggested reading

The Tories can learn from the American Right

By Aris Roussinos

Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Putin needs a buffer in Ukraine, said one on Twitter. Would you be a buffer, was one reply, and the tweet was duly taken down. The far Left’s most pleasing character trait is its cowardice. It collapses easily. Nato expansion is de rigueur in eastern Europe for countries seeking to join the EU, said a woman at a Stop the War meeting, as if national sovereignty — which she is blessed to have — is something trivial for those defending it in Ukraine.

Stop the War says we shouldn’t arm Ukraine or impose sanctions: it will only encourage Putin. Such is their determination, a man with a Ukrainian flag was escorted from a meeting this weekend as he cried, “Shame!” I would have listened to him but that is not part of their culture: not when they are met with opposition, which they do not like, and to hear them now praise “diplomacy” — as they did — is bizarre because it involves listening. During the meeting they congratulated themselves on their courage for speaking as they do, among friends — the media were barred for immorality even as independent media is fleeing Russia — and inside a liberal democracy.  Such is their toxicity now, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell pulled out of a Stop the War rally.

They may be a pottage of vanity, self-deception, and rage, but they have been clear on Ukraine, even before the hammer and the sickle appeared at a rally in London this week. “In [the] game of great power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea let it be Russia,” they said in 2014, when Jeremy Corbyn was their chair. “Some of us have never supported Putin,” he says now, a coward among cowards.

The willingness to understand Putin was obvious, again in 2014, when Corbyn’s spin doctor Seumas Milne, a rich Communist sympathiser, appeared with Putin at PR junket alongside leaders of the European far Right. A surprising number of far Left leaders are rich as if they, who don’t really need politics, can afford uniquely unserious ones. If you are rich, it doesn’t matter if the Socialist Utopia never comes. Dreaming, to steal their language, is a privilege.

For George Galloway, an original sponsor of Stop the War, closeness to tyranny seems to be a soothing and instinctive need. His address to Saddam Hussein in 1994 is infamous: “I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability and I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory in Jerusalem.” Another sponsor was Andrew Murray, a rich Communist sympathiser; yet another is Jeremy Corbyn himself. Plenty of them failed to oppose Bashar al-Assad, even as Muslim activists begged them to. They didn’t support aid convoys to Aleppo — too imperialist — or the White Helmets pulling bodies out of Russian-bombed rubble in Syria. They are only anti-war when the West is the aggressor. There are no just wars when the West fights them is their reasoning, if we are calling it that; but every war against the West is, if not just, then at least understandable.

But this isn’t pacifism, however they may brand it. It is Occidentalism: hatred of the West, and, with that comes hatred of parliamentary democracy too, because it is disappointing and hard work.

What real — rather than self-serving and performative — sympathy do they have for those beyond themselves? Who have they really helped beyond themselves? I often wonder what would happen if they threw themselves behind moderate Labour with all their fury as an experiment in real politics — if they acknowledged, for instance, that a Socialist Utopia is unlikely in a country that is also a monarchy. But this kind of self-reflection and generosity is not in their nature.

More from this author

Corbyn's Labour resounds with loathing

By Tanya Gold

Consider their brutal anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t know he is an anti-Semite, but that doesn’t make him any less of one. Much can be laid at the door of their idiocy; like idiots, their world is binary. They do not think the West can be saved, and they will not help others save it.

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them. Tory Right or soft Left: to the far Left there is no difference. Every day they say so on social media: Liberals and Centrists are bemused to find themselves called far Right. It’s poison on the doorstep. It made former miners vote Tory in 2019 because if soft Left is far Right, why not? The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner. I concluded that they do not believe in parliamentary democracy, because they do not believe in the legitimacy of opposition. It’s a defect that makes a nonsense of any good within them. It isn’t a whimsical thing. It’s a structural fault.

So, their kindness to Putin this last week — their willingness to see the world from his point of view, even as he destabilises it — is no accident. It is, consciously or not, a recognition of similar desires.

The MP is, of course, Jeremy Corbyn.

Rebecca Long Bailey has rightly been pilloried for awarding him 10/10 for his leadership, despite his leading the party to its worst defeat since 1935. But I’d bet my mortage on her being far from alone. Mr Corbyn remains as popular as ever with members.

Jeremy Corbyn will stop being leader in April. But he won’t stop being Jeremy Corbyn — the Jeremy Corbyn, that is, who spent decades campaigning and speaking about his political passions, and who will be given a new freedom when he steps down. That’s why Labour is going to find it impossible to escape from his shadow in 2020 — and beyond.

Just look at what happened after the election. Twitter, effectively a Left-wing echo chamber, was filled with Labour members tweeting that they want Mr Corbyn to stay on. They regard the result not as an indictment of his leadership — but of the voters. Labour, they believe, would have won were it not for the distorting effect of Brexit.

I write this not just to expose the self-delusion of so many Labour members. It is, rather, to understand the implications. Because whoever is chosen to succeed him as leader will, by definition, be second best. This matters not because of the members but because of Mr Corbyn.

Anyone who thinks that even after leading Labour to such a catastrophic defeat, Mr Corbyn will simply retire to his allotment, clearly hasn’t paid attention to his first 32 years as an MP, before he became leader in 2015.

As a backbencher — and indeed long before he was first elected in 1983 — pretty much all he did was campaign and speak about the various causes that motivated him. These were the same causes which have remained with him all his adult life and which haunted him as leader — such as his hero worship of dictators such as Castro and Chavez, his support for terrorists like Hamas and the IRA and his hatred of the West and regard for our enemies, such as Iran and Russia.

Consider his behaviour since losing the election. He refused to step down immediately, despite the urgings of colleagues. He has posted a series of bizarre videos on social media, behaving as if he had led Labour to some kind of triumph. As 2019 ended, he described it as “quite the year for…our Labour movement”. That’s one way of putting it.

And then, yesterday, he began the first of his ‘living dead’ Prime Minister’s Questions sessions, a humiliated and discredited figure nonetheless insisting on his right to ask the Prime Minister six questions every week.

The idea of him going silent when he stops being leader — even as a courtesy to the new leader — is preposterous. For Mr Corbyn, loyalty has only ever been a one-way street. As leader, he demanded loyalty from his MPs — but when he was a backbencher, he never once accepted the idea that he should respect the party leader or stop campaigning for his causes. Famously, when Labour was in government between 1997 and 2010, he voted against the party whip 428 times, far more than any other Labour MP.

Mr Corbyn is typical of a strand of the Left that believes its conscience gives it licence to behave as it sees fit. This was part of what made him such a terrible leader, since he has always been convinced of his own rectitude. Anyone who disagreed with or questioned him was therefore, by definition, immoral.
This will not stop when he returns to the backbenches. He will not suddenly lose the arrogance that has fuelled him as leader. Rather, he will revert to his previous behaviour, offering vigorous support to his favourite causes. And he will do so freed from the pressures of leadership.

We can expect to see him re-joining the Stop the War Coalition, the Trotskyite group he used to chair which campaigns against the West and supports dictators such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

We can expect to see him speaking at the numerous fringe protests against the West which occupy the weekends of the hard Left. And we can expect to see him lending his support to other extremist campaigns and supporting Russia and Iran.
But there is a big difference from such behaviour before he became leader. Back then, he was a minor backbencher — a figure of no significance other than among his fellow Trotskyites. No one else paid him the least attention when he droned on. Now, however, he is the former leader of the Labour Party.

No matter who succeeds him, Mr Corbyn will revert to type. He is incapable of doing otherwise. That will be annoying enough for a new leader from his own hard Left wing of the party. But imagine if the new leader is someone such as Sir Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips, who will be genuinely seeking to distance themselves in the eyes of the public from Mr Corbyn. There he will be, campaigning and vocal. And there, too, will be the members, who regard him as their political hero.

Labour’s Nightmare on Corbyn Street is far from over.