Progressive jargon demystified

When people hear the thick, cluttered, academic jargon that characterizes the output of left-wing progressives, they tend to shy away from things that seem to represent a kind of new gnostic knowledge they are destined not to comprehend.

In On Settler Colonialism (W.W. Norton, 160 pp.), Adam Kirsch, who works as a features editor at The Wall Street Journal, renders a substantial chunk of progressive thinking understandable while at the same time challenging it. He also explains the worldview that’s caused many academics to put the modern state of Israel in the crosshairs of the progressive left.

What exactly do liberal academics mean by “settler colonialism”? It’s not a combination of words one readily runs into even in the elevated confines of The New York Times.

Settler colonialism is a version of white guilt. In essence, the idea promotes historical grievances against the continuing echoes of Europe’s colonization of the rest of the world during the last five centuries. And who are these settlers? White people of European and English extraction in the Americas are a prime example.

According to Kirsch, the project of settler colonialism is a conversation among the settlers about their own identity. But rather than offering a plan of action, settler colonialism appears to be a kind of political theology. By identifying as “settlers,” proponents of this worldview identify themselves as a new kind of original sinners. This time, rather than offending God, they have committed a never-ending crime against the original possessors of the land.

Some readers may have experienced the reading of a land acknowledgment at a public event. In essence, these acknowledgments are declarations, usually by universities, that a particular tribe held the land many years previous, before colonialism stripped the tribe of its rights. It is worth noting such acknowledgments are never accompanied by a plan to return the land. That renders such rituals another form of cost-free virtue signaling that Kirsch calls a kind of “rhetorical competition.”

Kirsch points out that instead of producing real history, those working in this stream write stories about the past with the intent of changing our view of the present. In these narratives, moral ambiguities go unmentioned, and original inhabitants tend to occupy a frame of pure innocence without appreciation for their own sins. The proponents of settler colonialism ignore the reality that almost all land occupied across the globe was won, at some point, through conquest and not obtained via some variation of the social contract.

This naïve outlook seems to accept the idea that only certain parts of the human race are infected with sin. Had the white race not existed, the thinking goes, the whole earth might have been a paradise.

But what does this have to do with the Israeli state?

Theorists and enthusiasts of this progressive worldview can’t unwind whole continents and restore them to some kind of precolonial Edenic bliss. But for activists, Israel offers itself as a tempting target. Progressives can code the Israelis as European-adjacent with the Palestinian Arab occupants cast in the role of displaced natives. That means Israel is the one place where settler-colonialism activists can attempt to enact their ideas. Thus, “From the river to the sea” sloganeering aimed at pushing the Jewish inhabitants from the territory altogether rallies tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s in Israel that such thinkers, advocates, and activists hope to see their dreams realized. Kirsch points out the obvious, though: The Jewish Israelis are a strange choice to be seen as colonizers when they hold their own long-standing claim on the land—a claim that is well documented both in history and in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.