One cannot fail to notice the perpetual re-emergence of a sharp contrast between two spectacles. On the one hand, we have the scenes from festivities organized by parties that are labeled ideological or secular, in commemoration of an anniversary or in honor of a founder or leader. On the other hand, we have the scenes of the festivities or rallies held by parties that represent a particular religion, sect, or ethnicity, to commemorate occasions that are meaningful to the community or to honor a certain leader or fallen member.
In the first scene, we stumble upon a small number of individuals whom a single hall room can accommodate - usually seeming scattered between its empty spaces - most of them over 60 years old.
In the second scene, we find huge numbers, with the significance of the occasion determining the size and scale of mobilization required. More importantly, this mass of people is overwhelmingly young, with the elderly occupying no more than one or two rows at the front of a packed hall, stadium, or open space. On top of that, the women seem, despite a few of these parties’ aversion to seeing women in leadership positions, to have a far stronger presence than among the crowds of the first cluster of parties, which advocate “women’s liberation.”
These two scenes, as well as what we know and can anticipate or glean from statistics and figures from time to time, suggest that the parties characterized as ideological - nationalist, leftist, secular - are facing an existential challenge. As for the rhetoric they reiterate, it bears no trace of the passage of time nor the events that substantiate it. It is a cold corpus of repetitive, tired cliches that have been echoed a thousand times before in thousands of different circumstances.
One could reply that the rhetoric of parties built around an identity is even more archaic and that they have nonetheless continued to grow and expand. This is a valid counterpoint, but it becomes less compelling when we consider that identitarian parties need not say anything beyond declaring that they are identity parties. Indeed, they are automatic or mechanical formations whose function and power are derived from the community whose interests they represent or claim to.
That is why the declining prevalence of reading, regardless of its content, weakens doctrinal parties; books and newspapers are the principal means through which such parties present themselves and recruit partisans. That is not true for the other side: reading is almost irrelevant to the success of identitarian parties, and most of the material that identitarians do read falls under what they consider their heritage. Here, reading is akin to a prayer that the faithful regularly listen to despite knowing the words by heart. It might even be fair to argue that social media content is these parties’ equivalent of what the doctrinal parties call educational material.
Ideological parties are currently withering to the point of near extinction because of the times and the sharpening of identity - ideal conditions for the identitarian parties, which are not geared towards accommodating the changes or shifting concerns of times in the first place. To them, the universe and history are purely sectarian or ethnic, rendering time and change superfluous.
The problem of partisanship, in the modern sense of the word, is not exclusive to our region. Advanced Western societies are also suffering from a decline in party membership as populist movements of all sorts surge. This development could be attributed to the setbacks of modernity and enlightenment ideals, but this flimsy diagnosis cannot be a substitute for identifying the ways in which these parties are responsible for their crisis.
In any case, abstaining from entering into ruling coalitions with these identitarian populists is the only remaining means for containing their rise. However, success here does not seem guaranteed, especially since this boycott was broken in countries like Finland and could be broken elsewhere.
It remains that the decline of partisanship in the Levant and its decline in the West are similar in some respects and different in others. If an excess of elitism, detachment from the real concerns of the population, rising migration, and the outsourcing of industry are among the greatest gifts that parliamentary parties in the West have offered populist parties, then alignment with the identitarian movements, especially Islamists, was the gift in our region. Indeed, the notion that the focus must be on “national liberation and the fight against Zionism and imperialism” has rendered nationalist and leftist forces into mere accessories of these identitarian parties.
To give one of many examples, the Lebanese communists continue to deny the fact that Hezbollah and its offshoots killed communists, whether intellectuals or non-intellectuals. This subservience has been embedded into these parties’ genetic code since the Egyptian communists dissolved themselves at Gamal Abdel Nasser’s request, with their Syrian and Iraqi counterparts following suit and joining the “National and Progressive Fronts” of the Baathists.
As for the cases in which opposition was crushed through outright mass repression, as it had been in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, they reaffirm that political parties are inherently far more vulnerable to extinction, something of the sort, than sects and ethnic groups. In turn, fawning over Khomeini’s Iran, which savagely brutalized Iranian communists, nationalists and patriots as it was “standing up to imperialism and Zionism,” it brought this approach to its peak.
As for another country, Lebanon, where these parties enjoyed freedom of action and were neither suppressed nor asked to dissolve into a front of any kind, they did all they could to fight the “sectarian regime”, whose demise has done nothing but render sectarianism as pervasive as the air we breathe.
