The pro-life Catholic activist commended the article in Jacobin but wouldn’t help his newsletter’s readers find it. “I refuse to link to the original article from Jacobin magazine, a Marxist publication. Know thy enemy,” he explained. He linked instead to a blog that quoted the piece.

The activist, Ed Mechmann of the archdiocese of New York, is a man of intelligence and intellectual sobriety. I know and respect him. But he made a mistake in not pointing his readers to the article itself. It’s an example of a mistake made by people across the political spectrum. I edit the opinion page of a city newspaper and get frequent letters complaining that I had published someone the writer thought the enemy.

“Know your enemy” is always good advice, but knowing your enemy may include knowing in what ways they’re not enemies but allies. It requires reading more widely and sympathetically than is popular at the moment, on the possibility that people you think very wrong still might know something you don’t.

Because they very often do.

In the late sixties, the Catholic psychiatrist Karl Stern wrote an appreciation of Rosa Luxemburg, the Communist martyr who died in 1919, and a harder leftist than anyone at Jacobin. A German Jew who escaped the Nazis, Stern became a Catholic in Canada in 1943, a story told in his 1951 autobiography The Pillar of Fire.

He praised Luxemburg and other leftists in essays and addresses collected in, Love and Success, and Other Essays. “Those of us who still remember the early Communists have a serious handicap when it comes to assessing the present world situation in terms of the ‘bad guy,’” he wrote. “So many of those Communists of our early encounter were ‘good guys.’” He mentioned Nikolai Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain as men with the same memories: twentieth-century theologians, one Orthodox and one Catholic, who are now beloved of conservative Christians.

The Communists he knew were “men and women of messianic fervor who looked upon the underprivileged of this world as the mystic bearers of good tidings, frequently gave everything they had to the poor, and were ready for the supreme sacrifice. Some of them, when I reminisce today, put me to shame.”

Though he sympathized with some communists, Stern didn’t sympathize with communism. In The Pillar of Fire he calls it a “political pantomime of Messianic fulfillment,” that “ends up in that form of equality which is a feature of machinery, of a world of machinery in which human life loses its creative significance.”

But in the same essay in which he praises Luxemburg, he points to the “religious origins of the communist movement,” and the ways those origins led them to see aspects of human life in the world to which most Christians were blind. Marxists and Christians should have talked, but “alas, the churches were much too firmly built into the given social structure for such an encounter ever to have taken place. The ‘institutional’ all but blotted out the ‘prophetic.’”

Christians lost something they should have had – and something they would have had, had they not closed themselves off from the left-wing critique. America’s and Europe’s churches had accommodated themselves to Western capitalism in a way that distorted their witness, and refused to talk with the people who could have corrected them.

Had Ed Mechmann encouraged his readers to read Jeremy Appel’s “The Problem with Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Policy,” not just the summary on the website he used, they would have read a thoughtful article with which they would have mostly or entirely agreed.

But one written by a man who sees the matter from the left, a way that fills in holes in conservatives’ usual way of seeing it. People on the left are often able to see the effect of economic life on issues like euthanasia: an aspect of the problem that some conservatives have only lately come to, and even then not with full conviction or understanding.

Political conservatives usually favor moral and psychological explanations over economic and sociological ones. This approach leads them to emphasize telling people to change themselves, while ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that restrict how much people can change themselves. That’s like evaluating an athlete’s performance and paying no attention to whether he was playing on a perfect day or in the pouring rain with forty-mile-per-hour winds.

Appel, who approaches the issue of euthanasia from the left, sees something Mechmann didn’t. “I always thought legalizing euthanasia was a no-brainer,” Appel writes, believing that of course people should be free to choose what seems best to them. He came to see that it meant the state saying, “We’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

The way he’d thought about it before “held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, which are often out of their control.”

Ed Mechmann closed his message urging his readers to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written sixty years ago. He shared a link to it, and called it “one of the greatest works of politics and morality in US history.”

That instruction contradicts his claim about Jacobin in a way I don’t think he saw. Many of his ideological and religious predecessors, the people who occupied the same cultural position he does now, would have felt in 1963 about any writing of King’s the way Mechmann feels about Jacobin. They wouldn’t want to read him, because he was the enemy.

They had as much reason, as far as they could see, to think King the enemy as my friend thinks he has to believe the socialists at Jacobin are the enemy. King upset the order of society, threatened the established (and they thought natural) relations of the races, raised tensions, risked provoking violence from white racists and Black radicals, subverted the political process, and asked for too much too soon.

Why would anyone read such a radical? What could he possibly have to say worth knowing? “Know thy enemy,” they might have said while telling their readers not to read him.

My friend shares more in common with the leftist writer than he does with many on the right, tainted as they are by social Darwinian libertarianism and by neoliberal faith in “the market.” You can admire without agreeing, as Stern admired Luxemburg, and learn from someone on the other end of the spectrum without changing your commitments.

We should know our enemy. But that means knowing who our enemy really is, and who is a friend in disguise, and the only way to know which is which is to read nearly everyone with sympathy.