Yates Fletcher

In response to Roohola Ramezani’s “Progressive Moral Reasoning and Iran’s Revolt”

This article brilliantly dissects the reasons behind the (somewhat puzzling) relative invisibility of the current popular revolt of the Iranian people against the autocratic rule of their mullahs, but the framework of Ramezani’s analysis can, I think, be profitably applied to some of the fundamental discontents of our domestic politics. His basic position is that while Western media “make the revolt intelligible to Western audiences,” certain blindnesses lead them to “obscure its defining feature: the decisive collective rejection of ideological governance.” His choice of the word “ideological,” rather than “theocratic,” already hints at the width of the arguments he will be making. In my understanding, “ideological governance” is rule implemented by “true believers.” Whether the true believer be Robespierre, Lenin, or Khomeini, the pattern is the same: preoccupation with ideological purity, claims to absolute moral authority, and the demonization of apostasy.

In my view, this analysis has relevance on our domestic scene, particularly to the relative invisibility of the “revolt” of moderate Trump support in the last election. I take it as a given that almost all of the election noise was generated by the faithful minorities I call Magastan and Wokestan, as they fired their ad campaigns at each other over the heads of the hapless, effectively disenfranchised majority in the middle. It had to be true that the winner was the one who garnered the most support from this middle, but most post-mortems were surprisingly incurious—or outright disingenuous—about why.

My view is that it was, if not decisively, at least decidingly, a collective rejection of ideological governance by the middle. Some readings that led me to accept Ramezani’s analysis include social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and linguist John McWhorter’s 2021 book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Haidt’s book outlines five foundations upon which moral judgements are based: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. The moral profile of any given individual can be discerned through straightforward, apolitical questionnaires that assign weights to the relative importance of each foundation. The resulting profile is remarkably good at predicting an individual’s left/right political orientation. Broadly speaking, left-leaning individuals place almost all weight on the first two foundations, while right-leaning individuals show a rough balance across all five. A corollary is that the right is much better at understanding the left than vice versa. The right is more likely to see where the left is coming from but disagree with its prescriptions, while the left is more likely to see objections as morally vacant excuses—or, more succinctly, the right thinks the left is wrong, while the left thinks the right is evil. This may be an exaggeration, but Haidt’s findings offer compelling reasons to believe that an overly moralized politics may exhibit the pathologies of a fundamentalist religion.

McWhorter’s book provides a fuller investigation of the parallels between wokeism and fundamentalist religions, including the defining features of ideological purity, claims to absolute moral authority, and the demonization of apostasy. This perspective has been amplified by others, and there is no need to catalogue it here. I will only note McWhorter’s attention to the telling absence, within the woke catechism, of any doctrine for the forgiveness of sins.

The point I am making is not that the progressive left is wrong to adopt a moral foundation of care for harms done to perceived victims. Communism chose the moral foundation of economic fairness; Hitler chose the sanctity and purity of the Aryan race; Khomeini invoked the authority of the prophet. The fundamental problem is that moralizing politics into ideological governance by true believers must, in the end, lead to failure. The refutation of all such claims rests in reality, not in some alternate morality.

So when Ramezani argues that progressive media are blind to the revolt’s most important dimension, he may be onto more than he realizes. When he writes, “Decades of ideological rule have hollowed out the state, leaving a crumbling economy and a corrupt political system unable to fulfill the most basic functions of government,” he could just as easily be describing our largest blue-state cities.

He could also be addressing claims that Supreme Court justices are “morally deficient” when he writes:

“The revolt marks a judgment on this experience—that politics organised around moral redemption cannot sustain a livable society. Iranians are rejecting the idea that political authority must constantly instruct, purify, or redeem its subjects. They are attempting to place political power within limits that are institutional rather than moral. The tragedy of much external commentary is that it treats this judgment as a pathology rather than as a conclusion. The demand for normalcy is recoded as fear; the search for authority as authoritarian temptation; the appeal to continuity as denial. In each case, the revolt’s political reasoning is flattened into psychological deficiency.”

Likewise, he could be describing the performative nature of much political, artistic, and academic discourse—on full display in self-congratulatory awards ceremonies that few bother to watch—when he writes:

“The Iranian revolt forces a reconsideration of an assumption that quietly underwrites much contemporary political judgment: that political legitimacy flows primarily from moral alignment rather than from the capacity to govern. Within progressive discourse, movements are evaluated according to how closely they mirror approved languages of emancipation, recognition, or universal justice. Increasingly, political life is treated as a form of moral expression—an arena in which values are performed, identities affirmed, and ethical positions signaled to distant audiences. In this framework, legitimacy is conferred by adherence to norms rather than through institutional reliability or public authority. Politics becomes legible not by what it sustains, but by what it denounces.”

His concluding paragraph could easily have been written to address our own present distresses:

“Progressive frameworks, once powerful tools for naming injustice, increasingly function as gatekeepers of political intelligibility. They determine which demands count as meaningful and which must be explained away. Movements oriented toward coherence, continuity, or collective self-rule are judged by standards designed to reward transgression and dissent. In the process, entire forms of political action become unintelligible—not because they lack substance, but because they do not conform to the moral aesthetics of the moment.”

Allen Zeesman

In response to Benny Morris’s “No Friends but the Mountains”

Benny Morris’s essay, “No Friends but the Mountains,” offers a clear-eyed and historically grounded account of the Kurdish predicament in Syria. Its greatest strength lies in its refusal to romanticize either Western policy or Kurdish prospects, and in its insistence that today’s events belong to a much longer and more sobering history.

I would like to offer a clarification rather than a disagreement, which is that the Kurdish tragedy described here is less a case of betrayal than a demonstration of the limits of moral performance in an international system structured around recognized authority and enforceable power.

The essay frames recent developments largely as another episode of Western “betrayal.” That description is understandable and emotionally resonant. But Morris’s own narrative also supports a slightly different interpretation: that the problem was not the breaking of a promise so much as the absence of a promise that could ever be sustained.

The U.S.–SDF partnership, as Morris shows, emerged within a narrowly defined anti-ISIS context. It was effective within those limits, but it was never clearly translated into a broader political commitment to Kurdish autonomy, let alone statehood. When the military rationale receded, so too did the partnership. From Washington’s perspective, this may have appeared as strategic closure rather than abandonment, even if the human consequences for the Kurds were severe.

What makes the Kurdish case especially painful is that it challenges a common Western assumption: that responsible conduct, moderation, and moral credibility will eventually generate durable protection. The Syrian Kurds governed territory, restrained violence, cooperated with international forces, and took on burdens that others avoided, including the detention of ISIS fighters and their families. Yet these actions, admirable as they were, proved insufficient in the absence of recognized and enforceable political authority.

Seen in this light, the Kurdish tragedy is not only about cynical great-power politics or regional hostility. It is also about the constraints of an international order in which sovereignty, force, and clearly legible authority continue to outweigh moral performance alone.

The familiar Kurdish saying, “No friends but the mountains,” endures not merely as an expression of bitterness, but as a sober reflection on this reality. Morris’s essay brings readers close to this conclusion, and for that reason it contributes meaningfully not only to understanding Kurdish history, but to understanding the hard limits faced by all stateless or semi-recognized peoples.

Kelly Alvin Madden

In response to Claire Lehmann’s “Epstein Mania on the Digital Borderlands”

Where are the apologies of the mistaken witch hunters?

Up the road from me here is Salem, Massachusetts. The town has turned its history during the witch trials into neo-pagan tourism. But what you will not find easily there—and almost nowhere in the aftermath of our modern “witch trials”—is public recognition of personal wrongdoing.

Ann Putnam Jr., one of the primary accusers during the Salem witch trials, publicly confessed and sought forgiveness in 1706 when she joined the Salem Village church. She admitted to having been deluded by Satan, leading her to falsely accuse innocent people, including Rebecca Nurse, and expressed deep remorse for the harm caused by her testimony.

Samuel Sewall, a judge in the trials, expressed repentance on January 14, 1697, during a day of fasting declared by the Massachusetts General Court. He stood in Boston’s South Church as his apology was read aloud, taking the “Blame & Shame” for his role in the wrongful convictions and seeking forgiveness for the tragedy.

Thomas Fiske, the foreman of the jury, along with eleven other jurors, signed a Declaration of Regret in 1697, asking for forgiveness for their part in condemning innocent people during the trials. This collective apology acknowledged their errors in judgment and the harm inflicted on the accused.

Samuel Parris, the minister whose household sparked the initial accusations, issued an apology in his 1694 essay Meditations for Peace.

Of course, probably none of these people was attacked more viciously after recognizing their misdeeds, either.