HARRY’S PLACE is one of many blogs I should be paying more attention to. Now he’s got an interesting post on reactionary nihilism on the Left:

It is clear that the Iraq war has shown that a certain section of the left really has nowhere to go except self-hatred and that a reactionary antipathy to the US and the western democracies has moved from beyond the ultra-left fringes into the mainstream of left-liberal oppositionalism.

It is precisely the spreading of ‘pure oppositionalism’ that makes it worthwhile looking closely at the activities of the Socialist Workers Party and others. Because while the details of their quasi-Trotskyist ideology remain restricted to a tiny minority, their broader outlook has gained something close to hegemony on the radical left.

Marginalizing it politically, but making it more of a threat in terms of “politics by other means.” Harry notes:

If the left’s old internationalism, anti-fascism and militant defence of democracy is finally defeated by the spread of reactionary nihilism it will not only be the left who are the losers.

Yes.

UPDATE: Andrea Harris: “If hating Amerikkka is wrong, we don’t want to be right!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten calls A.N.S.W.E.R. “the new skinheads.”

And I have some further thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: But is hatred a family value?

MORE: And still more on the spread of political hate here.