The 21st century began with a revolutionary left deeply resentful of the proletariat for its refusal to be led into socialist revolution, and a liberal left animated by a politics barely distinguishable from the 19th century bourgeois contempt for the working class. State socialism was a dead project, and the United States was the world's sole superpower. Anti-Americanism had become the left's substitute for real politics.

This strangely mutated left was a spoiled child, the heir to a legacy its liberal-left predecessors had built. The old-world empires had been swept away. Working people were living longer than Roman emperors. Throughout the developed world, women had the vote, and their rights in the workforce were protected.

Christianity was imploding, freedom of speech was universal, and gay people were finally being allowed to emerge as full-status citizens. Education was free. Marriage was a mere lifestyle choice. Ancient diseases that had routinely burst into plagues down through time had been eliminated. Europe, the 20th century's charnel house, was united and at peace with itself.

Liberals and leftists accomplished all this by holding fast to a standard proclaiming that what they expected for themselves, they demanded for all. But the corrosive acids of cultural relativism and identity politics were eating their way through that bedrock principle. Soon, the bonds of solidarity broke down, and no one owed a solemn duty of any kind to anyone else. "You couldn't have found a more lethal way to kill left-wing politics if you tried," Cohen writes.

Of course, what the pig-ignorant liberals and the pseudo-left should have done at the time that 'Iraq' was on the cards was to critically support the invasion and rejoice at the dismantling of a fascist regime and demand that the neo-cons make real their rhetoric about democracy and all that gumph. To think that the left was going to stop the yanks going in was a complete fantasy at the time - and what little, if any influence the left does have - should have been directed towards this solidarity action and made into a movement - who knows? - they might even have had some impact - even if minimal - on the course of events, instead of the complete and utter irrelevance that they have been - (not forgetting there have been plenty of opportunities for intervention along the way which have presented themselves without being taken up by the pseudo-wankers and the fellow-travelling liberal opportunist negativist fuckwits). Instead, we've had the idiocy that's been on display for these past few years and the complete bankruptcy of anything resembling 'progressive' politics in relation to Iraq - or to put it another way; analysis that begins from the concrete, moves to the abstract, and returns to concrete action (praxis).