We have witnessed the leftist and liberal perspective make an appearance in the aftermath of the Taksim protests. Our biggest problem with the Left is their attempt to make a revolution out of a resistance movement shaped by the highest socio-economic classes, in other words, the bourgeois. Our biggest problem with the liberals, on the other hand, is their unwavering faith that they have already found the unquestionable truth. The common ground that brought the left and the liberals together is mundane. There is no philosophical solidarity or merging of perspectives on a world view. The name of the common ground is the anti-political.
The leftists with their maximalist demands and the liberals with their ideas of wholesale democratization construct similar positions. The maximalist demands exceed the limits of rational expectations and as such are rendered meaningless. Liberals, on the other hand, with their idea of wholesale democratization expect the impossible to happen under current global conditions and as such turn to a political tragedy. In the final analysis, what emerges is a world of complaints and demands that have the appearance of the political, but in fact do not correspond to anything in the world of the political. When their complaints do not produce the quest for justice and also their demands do not produce any tangible results, both the leftist maximalists and the liberal wholesalers become more aggressive. What they really produce is nothing but a childish idealization of the political. Those who make demands without considering the context, conditions, actors, possibilities, morals and intelligence do not have anywhere to go but the childish idea of the political they produce.
Precisely for this reason, they assume selfish sensitivities are democratic demands; fewer constraints are freedom, insisting on one’s own truths is freedom of expression, offering solutions for one’s own benefit is a quest for justice and voicing one’s own fears in the form of complaints is politics. They cannot utter sentences that are not in the command form. They constantly conflate the possible with the idea and what is desirable with what is feasible. Although it is them who constantly remind us about the diversity of the population, the solutions they produce are quick fixes that disregard that diversity. Their methods are simple – they first assess the problem by detaching it from its political and social context, then they offer a solution to it under laboratory conditions.
The complex social and political problems do not correspond to any meaning in this leftist-liberal Disneyland world. In fact, that various dynamics shift simultaneously does not have meaning, since the solutions offered display a rather problematic relationship between time and space. The leftists and the liberals possess the necessary models that can make an abstract question out of all problems and then solve them with the primitive positivist models of 19th century. They do not care much about realities that taint their beautifully modeled theories. From this perspective, it is not surprising that they have declared an enemy out of Erdoğan. Erdoğan reminds them of all that they have tried so hard to ignore. They have only one response to the unavoidable and undeniable problems and obstacles Erdogan reminds them of: But, Mr. Prime Minister, your style is so harsh!
[Hurriyet Daily News, 28 June, 2013 ]
