recusance

To refuse to suffer is a sign of weakness rather than of courage, and, moreover, was it not a sort of recusance to take leave of life in despondency, an abjuration of the Christian faith which is based upon the sublime words of Jesus Christ: 'Blessed are they that mourn.'

As a discernible contingent of the left in Western Europe and North America, activists as well as intellectuals, treks across to the kind of pluralist politics pilloried by Palmer, he is clearly entitled to ask whether this is a new trahison des marxistes, the latest in a repeated series of recusances that have so often plunged erstwhile socialists into rightward flight.