Keep your politics à la carte

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team – whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions.

Rarely has set-menu morality been put on more vivid display than last week. Left-wing cheering, flag-waving and brandishing of bloodthirsty anti-Semitic posters to applaud the Hamas rampage through Israel – which included infanticide, geronticide, rape and the indiscriminate massacre of civilians – has already been roundly decried by other commentators. Let’s put aside our revulsion for a moment, then, to puzzle out why so many westerners celebrated what would otherwise seem universally repugnant barbarism.