Cathy Seipp - who also runs the excellent Cathy’s World blog - had an interesting column up in the LA Times yesterday built around the notion that:

“ … one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

While a somewhat sweeping generalization, it goes to the heart of the Fortuynist argument that the groups that benefited most from the liberalization of our society in the 1960s and 70s, probably are least aware of what they stand to lose if radical Muslims and their western appeasers are allowed to embrace and implement a new social agenda.

Seipp’s claims sparked a sharp rebuff from Gabriel Rotello on the Huffington Post where he countered by compiling a list of notable gays and women who have taken on the excesses of radicalism in our midst. That of course is a fairly superficial way of addressing the issue as anyone can come up with a list that contains Sullivan, Bawer, Manji, Hirsi Ali and the late Fortuyn. But it doesn’t address the core of the issue and therefore Rotello largely misses the point.

The fact that the focus is on these few brave individuals that speak up and who now in some cases have to live under police protection proves Seipp’s point: it is the left at large that has been silent. Where is that mass movement, where are the rallies, those concerted efforts that characterized women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards? And it is not just gays or women: there is a string of left-wing causes which always managed to find a joint umbrella under which it protested the free west’s accomplishments, think of the “women against nukes” or the various “animal rights” groups. I grew up in a country that was in the vanguard of this leftist revolution and which as a result spawned a political and media establishment that was firmly rooted in the values of this post-war social and cultural revolution.

And therein lays the exact problem. The journey from young and dynamic social renewal to becoming entrenched and institutionalized interests does not really allow for ideological deviation. On the contrary, and any alignment against the politically correct establishment is punished by expulsion which is precisely what someone like Pim Fortuyn experienced. “The bullet” as one of Fortuyn’s assistants remarked shortly after his death; “came from the left”. And although I am hardly an expert on the dynamics of gay or women’s rights movements, I have read enough of Andrew Sullivan and Tammy Bruce to know that their views are not terribly popular among the established constituencies that helped propel these writers to prominence.

The mainstream left of recent is confused and struggling to find a response and a revamped agenda to the challenges of the new century where capitalism is triumphant and jihadism the next mortal threat. The absence of a clear new agenda combined with a desperate attachment to the old one hardly makes for a compelling call to take to the streets and protest ‘en masse’ for basic rights such as drawing a simple cartoon.

And so it is today. Last Friday’s demonstration in support of free speech at the Danish Embassy yielded only a few hundred participants, among them two rather famous men who have long ago been ejected by the left. It underlines that today’s progressives – those who look forward – remain small in numbers. The North American and European majority consists of people who are either part of the confused and silent left or sufficiently lethargic and disinterested to stay home while their rights and future are steadily frittered away. Not a great slate to defend the free world with, but then the mass protest movements of the left started out small too. Let’s see if the left remains silent or if somehow their own dissidents can force them into some critical thinking and finally some action.