Anthony’s explanation for this development is that left-liberals are so mired in bourgeois guilt and cynicism that they lack the necessary strength of will (or in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, the ‘testicular fortitude’) not only to criticize non-western Others, however tyrannical or fascistic, but also to firmly defend their own ideals. Against this mentality, Anthony sketches out a vision of the liberal-left that is democratic, tolerant, internationalist, egalitarian, and civic-minded – and one that isn’t remotely afraid of making some large claims for itself. In a recent interview for Channel 4 News, [2] Martin Amis recorded his dismay, if not surprise, at how many of the audience of a literary event at which he was speaking, [3] felt unable, at his request, to register their sense of moral superiority over the Taliban (only a third of the audience thought that they were superior). Amis then went on to declare that he did indeed feel superior to the beheaders of infidels, the stoners of women and the persecutors of gays. In The Fall-Out, Anthony similarly testifies to his dismay at the laxity of the liberal-left’s response to reactionary Islam, and exerts a great deal of energy in showing why Amis’s sense of moral superiority is right.

Two things in particular shocked and appalled Anthony about the attack: first, the radical insouciance of the attackers – ‘the apparent absence of compunction, the offenders’ lack of fear of censure, their obliviousness to social constraint’; and, second, the ‘the compliance, almost conspiracy, of the silent onlookers’ (p. 172). What he also found dispiriting was the absence of an adequate liberal-left vocabulary to describe the attack. Sure, he says, there’s a liberal-left way of evading the problem of interpersonal violence, which involves characterizing the perpetrators of violence as the victims of wider social forces, like unequal life-chances or alienation, about which nothing, short of a radical restructuring of society, can be done. In other words, there’s a liberal-left way of doing nothing about violent crime – ‘of waiting for society to change, for it to become less unfair, with more equitable wealth distribution so that street violence would miraculously disappear’ (p. 164). But, Anthony argues, there isn’t a compelling liberal-left narrative of how we can act, in the here and now, to better protect ourselves from the violent. This lacuna, Anthony convincingly suggests is part of, or reflects, a broader lacuna in the liberal-left imagination: a failure to properly confront and take seriously threats unrelated, or external, to democratic governments.

For Anthony, the liberal-left has some very important things to say about state power, and what should be done to limit it. But it is decidedly less vocal on the equally crucial Hobbesian question of how individual citizens can be best protected from the violent actions of their fellow citizens. The Fall-Out is an injunction to liberals and leftists to think seriously about this latter question, and not to bewitch themselves into thinking that only the first matters.