Siding With the Weak Isn’t Always Right

The impulse of the left to side with weakness over strength can lead to a dark place that supports dark and disturbing things.

Image from the Anti-Defamation League.

I’ve been thinking recently, in light of events in Israel, about the way the right and the left approach strength and weakness. While some center-left figures might view the woke “oppressor vs. oppressed” lens as an aberration, Yuval Levin points out that “strength vs. weakness” has been a current running throughout left-wing thought since the very beginning of recognizable left and right, just as “chaos and order” has been a theme in right-wing thought throughout that same time. Indeed, Levin confirms my suspicion that “rich vs. poor” was simply this same leftward lens filtered through a worldview which reduces everything to economics. 

Some dislike the left-right dichotomy, seeing it as narrow and reductive. Yet, as Levin points out, political theory often succeeds when it describes something real. The terms “left” and “right” didn’t invent left and right but merely explained what already existed: a divide between two interpretations of liberalism and between two general impulses in human relations. Even as left and right shift throughout the ages, and coalitions come and go, we can see the outlines of left and right in most polities, and we often immediately feel a kinship with those on “our side,” even when we strongly disagree with them. (People who reject right and left can be found in every polity, too.)

Left and right are better thought of as two opposing tendencies rather than two coherent ideologies, although they contain within them ideologies. There are many ways to define the divide: tradition vs. social change, universal verities vs. relativism and flux, hierarchy vs. equality, individualism vs. collectivism, constrained vision vs. unconstrained vision, and strength vs. weakness, among others.

None of these maps perfectly onto right and left, although some map better than others. But together, they give us a picture of two impulses which are often at odds, which can be found throughout history, and which often create political coalitions. What defines left and right at any given moment is complex but usually involves some interaction of the above lenses (and others).

Strength & Weakness

I want to focus on strength and weakness. This is an interesting lens because it has less to do with what left and right believe and more to do with how different ideologies “code.” For instance, it is easier to understand “fascism” as right-wing under this lens than others, given fascists’ obsession with strength.

It isn’t that the right is strong and the left is weak, but that the rightward impulse will naturally be to identify with and prefer the strong, and the leftward impulse will be to identify with and prefer the weak, even among a right that is weak and a left that is strong. 

Some will object. One can, of course, think of left-wingers and right-wingers who defied these caricatures, but one can generally think of similar examples for almost every method of slicing left and right, and yet we still instinctively know what these terms mean. 

Meanwhile, some on the left will read my statement and think I have just outed the right as immoral. And some on the right will think I have just done the same for the left. 

Here is how I see it: the moral left is motivated by a desire to help the weak. The moral right is motivated by a desire to use strength for good (often to protect those who are weak). The immoral right fetishes strength. The immoral left fetishes weakness but is motivated more by hatred of strength. 

The “oppressor vs. oppressed” dichotomy corrupts human beings’ natural sympathy for the downtrodden by turning it into something which can destroy both strong and weak. Taken to its logical conclusion, there is no safe moral harbor except to be oppressed. Even “allies” must atone for their own role in “oppression” (i.e., their lack of powerlessness indicates they are indirectly harming someone weaker than themselves). Telling people that unless they are powerless, their very existence is causing harm to others repels some people and exacts a psychological toll on others. 

One of the most foundational lessons in economics is that people respond to incentives much of the time (though not always). Ranking people in an inverse hierarchy from oppressor (immoral) to oppressed (pure) creates a malign set of incentives. We see this play out when individuals and groups invent new modes and categories of oppression in order to claim victim status. We see it when individuals pass themselves off as a member of another race for reasons to do with status and position. It surely plays a role in the increased willingness of straight, white members of Generation Z to identify as LGBTQ. 

But the worst thing it does is to encourage real victims to see themselves as powerless and to remain victims (because if their situation improves, they will no longer be morally blameworthy and might even join the oppressors). Presumably victims are suffering, and therefore it stands to reason that this will increase suffering or do nothing to alleviate it. Moreover, basic psychology tells us that having an external locus of control (believing life pushes you around) and a fixed mindset (bad things have no upside) has terrible consequences. Yet that’s exactly what an ideology that tells people they are powerless victims of systemic oppression does. 

Strength vs. Weakness

I think it’s deeply wrong to tell people that it is impossible to be good and strong, that strength is bad, and that the only way to be good is to be weak. For one thing, it isn’t true. Doing the right thing is often hard. It can take tremendous courage, grit, and discipline. Defeating the Nazis wasn’t a matter of moral purity. It was a matter of military power. 

It’s wrong to demonize talent (strength) and success (a marker of strength). It’s wrong to demonize those who try to help people help themselves (Horatio Alger), or to demonize the behaviors known to improve people’s lives (the success sequence). Yet these are the implications of any ideology which views strength as problematic and weakness as a virtue.  

One gets the sense from some leftists that they believe the only way to be moral in war is to lose. How else can we explain their willingness to overlook terrible crimes committed by the Viet Cong while excoriating America for every mistake? According to some organizations, international laws of war should have exceptions which excuse “national liberation organizations” (terrorists) for breaking them. In other words, we should literally overlook evil things done by evil people so long as the evil people are fighting someone more powerful than themselves (usually the United States or Israel). They may be bad people, but it isn’t fair. 

Civilians working for the U.S. Navy say their mission is to ensure the United States never fights a fair war. America should possess an overwhelming technological advantage in order to crush our enemies and end wars as quickly as possible. The United States should be strong because we are a good nation and because we can use our strength to do good. But by the logic of some on the left, America is bad because it is strong. We shouldn’t grow our navy, or use it to police the oceans (especially not by killing Houthis), because that would be “problematic.” 

Which brings us to a similarly “problematic” nation: Israel. Many see the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as unjust because even though the Israelis are fighting an organization of savages (Hamas) who rape defenseless grandmothers and hide behind their own prepubescent nieces and nephews, Israel is powerful, and the Palestinians are weak.

John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg go farther. They argue the reason the left hates Israel is that the Jews didn’t stay victims after the Holocaust. Israel’s original sin wasn’t anything they may have done to the Palestinians. It was making themselves strong. It was that after centuries of persecution culminating in a genocide which wiped out over half the world’s Jewish population, Jews in Israel decided that if “never again” was to mean something, they had to take survival into their own hands. 

The existence of Israel is a black eye to the progressive arc-of-history narrative: the collective soul-searching of the West after the Holocaust didn’t win back the trust of the people the West failed. The Israelis can never trust their fate to any historical enlightenment. If Judaism is to survive, it will be because Israel guarantees it survives. Israel made itself strong because the alternative was to be destroyed. It can never fully trust any nation, for every nation has failed the Jews in the past.

Even though Israel is socially progressive, this codes as hard-right because it smacks of “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.” The left detests this, and the right admires it. While many other complicated reasons factor into the right’s support of a socially progressive, formerly socialist state and the left’s hatred of it, no doubt this plays a role.

Moral Strength and Weakness

It isn’t wrong to be motivated by weakness or strength. What matters is what you do with that motivation. I’ve always believed strength could be used for good and could make doing good more effective. I’ve always believed that weakness was undesirable and that the right thing to do was to help those who are weak to become stronger. 

I may not believe their solutions will solve problems, but I don’t object to a left that sympathizes with the vulnerable or emphasizes inequality. What I object to is the demonization of using strength for good or to help people improve their lives.

Reflexively siding with the strong can lead rightists to a dark place. But reflexively siding with the weak can lead the left to a similarly dark place by encouraging them to hate the good who are strong and to love the weak who are evil. The immoral right believes that might makes right. The immoral left believes that the weak are always justified, no matter how horrible their actions, and that the strong are always evil, no matter how hard they try to make the world better. 

The immoral left and right may not be “farther” left and right than deeply-ideological-yet-moral leftists and rightists. But the moral right and left should recognize each other’s virtues, even as we disagree about means and ends. The alternative is to drive our ideological opponents deeper into their particular aberration. If the leftward and rightward tendencies are often as much a matter of personality as anything, we will always have left and right. Neither side will ever vanquish the other. We on the right should desire our opponents to be members of the “moral left,” and our opponents should desire the same of us. 

Israel isn’t blameless. But neither are the Palestinians, even if they are weak. The left’s sympathy for the weak blinds them in this matter and keeps them from making the distinctions which should be obvious. Israel makes mistakes. But at least the Israelis try to do the right thing. The same cannot be said of their opponents. 

When it comes to morality, the most important lens isn’t strength and weakness. It’s right and wrong. 

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712