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Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 23:09:39 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Can There Be a Decent Left?
Can There Be a Decent Left?
<http://www.dissentmagazine.org/wwwboard/wwwboard.shtml>
by Michael Walzer
SPRING 2002, DISSENT MAGAZINE.
Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December
of last year, not only because of the success of the war but also because
of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghanis greeted that success. The
pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving
their beards, of girls in school, of boys playing soccer in shorts: all
this was no
doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but
also politically disarming. There was (and is) still a lot to worry about:
refugees, hunger, minimal law and order. But it was suddenly clear, even to
many opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had been the biggest
obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian crisis,
and it was the
American war that removed the obstacle. It looked (almost) like a war of
liberation, a humanitarian intervention.
But the war was primarily neither of these things; it was a preventive war,
designed to make it impossible to train terrorists in Afghanistan and to
plan and organize attacks like that of September 11. And that war was never
really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary.
Recall the standard arguments against it: that we should have turned to the UN,
that we had to prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then
organize international trials, and that the war, if it was fought at all,
had to be fought without endangering civilians. The last point was intended
to make fighting impossible. I haven't come across any arguments that
seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without
putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be
permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept
in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate
issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among
last fall's antiwar demonstrators, "Stop the bombing" wasn't a slogan that
summarized a coherent view of the
bombing, or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were
not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were
committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without
regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about
preventing future terrorist attacks.
A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually
died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the
assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of
people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the
numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that
the numbers
matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of
the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best
understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended
killing. And the denial isn't accidental, as if the people making it just
forgot about, or didn't know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is
willful:
unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can't
be true anywhere else, for anybody else.
The radical failure of the left's response to the events of last fall
raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower?
Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by
living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to
sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.
Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable
result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach
of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the
left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of
the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude
of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the
imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left
recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least
the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But
many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really
happened.
Is there any way of escaping the politics of guilt and resentment on the
home ground of a superpower? We might begin to worry about this question by
looking at oppositional politics in older imperial states. I can't do that
in any sustained way (historians take note), only very sketchily. The Boer
War is a good place to begin, because of the fierce opposition it aroused in
England, which wasn't marked, despite the cruelty of the war, by the kind
of self-hate that we have seen on the American left.
Nor were the "little Englanders" hostile to English politics and culture;
they managed to take a stand against the empire without alienating
themselves from its home country. Indeed, they were more likely to regard
England as the home country of liberalism and parliamentary democracy.
After all, the values of parliamentarism (self-government, free speech, the
right of opposition) did
not support imperial rule. George Orwell's defense of patriotism seems to
me an actual description of the feelings of many English liberals and
leftists before his time and after (even of the Marxists, some of the best
of whom were historians, like E.P. Thompson, who wrote sympathetically,
indeed romantically, about the English people). Later on, during the
Thatcher years, and particularly during the Falklands War, the tone of the
opposition was more bitter, but by then there was no empire, only sour
memories.
I think that the French story is similar. For most of the imperial years,
French leftists were as proud of their Frenchness as were people on the
right, and perhaps with more justification. For wasn't France the
birthplace of enlightenment, universal values, and human rights? The
Algerian war gave rise to a more familiar self-hatred, most clearly
manifest in Jean-Paul Sartre's defense
of FLN terrorism (in his preface to Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth):
"To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy
an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a
dead man and a free man." This suggests that it is actually a good thing to
kill Europeans (they were mostly French), but Sartre did not volunteer to
go himself
and be killed so that one more Algerian would be a free man. His was a
generalized, not a personal, self-hatred.
Why shouldn't the American story be like these two, with long years of
healthy oppositionist politics, and only episodic resentment? Wasn't
America a beacon of light to the old world, a city on a hill, an
unprecedented experiment in democratic politics? I grew up with the
Americanism of the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s; I look back on it
now and think that the Communist Party's effort to create a leftist pop
culture, in an instant, as the party line turned, was kitchy and
manipulative, and also politically very smart. Paul Robeson's "Ballad for
Americans," whatever the quality of the music, provides at least a sense of
what an unalienated American radicalism might be like. The days after
September 11 would not have been a bad time for a popular front. What had
happened that made anything like that unthinkable?
The cold war, imperial adventures in Central America, Vietnam above all,
and then the experience of globalization under American leadership: all
these, for good reasons and bad, produced a pervasive leftist view of the
United States as global bully, rich, privileged, selfish, hedonistic, and
corrupt beyond remedy. The sense of a civilizing mission, which must have
sustained
parts of the British and French left in a more fully imperial setting (read
John Stuart Mill on British India), never got off the ground here. Foreign
aid, the Peace Corps, and nation-building never took on the dimensions of a
"mission"; they were mostly sidelines of U.S. foreign policy: underfunded,
frequently in the shade of military operations. Certainly, there has been
much to criticize in the policies of every U.S. government since World War
II (see virtually any back issue of Dissent). And yet, the leftist
critique, most clearly, I think, from the Vietnam years forward (from the
time of "Amerika," Viet Cong flags, and breathless trips to the North)--has
been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate. It is the product of what
Philip Roth, in his novel I Married a Communist, aptly described as "the
combination of embitterment and not thinking." The left has lost its
bearings. Why?
I will suggest four reasons, without claiming that this is an exhaustive
list. It is nothing more than a rough argument, an attempt to begin a debate.
1) Ideology: the lingering effects of the Marxist theory of imperialism and
of the third worldist doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s. We may think that
we live in a post-ideological age, and maybe most of us do, but the traces
of old ideologies can be found everywhere in the discourse of the left.
Perhaps the most striking consequence is the inability of leftists to
recognize or acknowledge the power of religion in the modern world.
Whenever writers on the left say that the root cause of
terror is global inequality or human poverty, the assertion is in fact a
denial that religious motives really count. Theology, on this view, is just
the temporary, colloquial idiom in which the legitimate rage of oppressed
men and women is expressed.
A few brave leftists described the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda movement
as examples of "clerical fascism," which at least gets the adjective right.
And maybe "fascist" is close enough, even if this new politics doesn't look
like the product of late capitalist degeneration. It gives the left a
reason for opposing Islamic terror, which is an important achievement. But
it would be
better to find a reason in the realities of terrorism itself, in the idea
of a holy war against the infidels, which is not the same thing as a war
against inferior races or alien nations. In fact, Islamic radicalism is
not, as fascism is, a racist or ultra-nationalist doctrine. Something else
is going on, which we need to understand.
But ideologically primed leftists were likely to think that they already
understood whatever needed to be understood. Any group that attacks the
imperial power must be a representative of the oppressed, and its agenda
must be the agenda of the left.
It isn't necessary to listen to its spokesmen. What else can they want
except...the redistribution of resources across the globe, the withdrawal
of American soldiers from wherever they are, the closing down of aid
programs for repressive governments, the end of the blockade of Iraq, and
the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel? I don't doubt
that there is some overlap between this program and the dreams of al-Qaeda
leaders, though al-Qaeda is not an egalitarian movement, and the idea that
it supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
crazy. The overlap is circumstantial and convenient, nothing more. A holy
war against infidels is not, even unintentionally, unconsciously, or
"objectively," a left politics. But how many leftists can even imagine a
holy war against infidels?
2. Powerlessness and alienation: leftists have no power in the United
States and most of us don't expect to exercise power, ever. Many left
intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify
with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as
politically incorrect. That's why they had such difficulty responding
emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of
solidarity that followed. Equally important, that's why their participation
in the policy debate after the attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to
the UN, collect evidence against bin Laden, and so on) seem to have been
developed with no concern for effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They
talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for
the lives of their fellow-citizens. That was someone else's business; the
business of the left was...what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they
did. The good result of this opposition was a spirited defense of civil
liberties. But even this defense displayed a certain willful
irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so many leftists rushed to
the defense of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the
country faced real dangers, as if there was no need at all to balance
security and freedom. Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously
from the clash of rightwing authoritarianism and leftwing absolutism, but
it would be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance
for itself, on its own; the effort would suggest a responsible politics and
a real desire to exercise power, some day.
But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness
that comes with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is radical. How
else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all, live
here, and whose children and grandchildren live here, to join in a serious
debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks?
There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us
great damage.
3. The moral purism of blaming America first: many leftists seem to believe
that this is like blaming oneself, taking responsibility for the crimes of
the imperial state. In fact, when we blame America, we also lift ourselves
above the blameworthy (other) Americans. The left sets itself apart.
Whatever America is doing in the world isn't our doing. In some sense, of
course, that is true. The defeat of fascism in the middle years of the
twentieth century and of communism in the last
years were not our doing. Some of us, at least, thought that these efforts
merited our support, or our "critical support." But this is a complicated
and difficult politics, and it doesn't allow for the favorite posture of
many American leftists: standing as a righteous minority, brave and
determined, among the timid, the corrupt, and the wicked. A posture like
that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political
failure.
4. The sense of not being entitled to criticize anyone else: how can we
live here in America, the richest, most powerful, and most privileged
country in the world, and say anything critical about people who are poorer
and weaker than we are? This was a major issue in the 1960s, when the New
Left seemed to have discovered "oppression" for the first time, and we all
enlisted on the side of oppressed men and women and failed, again and
again, to criticize the authoritarianism and brutality that often scars
their politics. There is no deeper impulse in left politics than this
enlistment; solidarity with people in trouble seems to me the most profound
commitment that leftists make. But this solidarity includes, or should
include, a readiness to tell these people when we think they are acting
wrongly, violating the values we share. Even the oppressed have
obligations, and surely the first among these is not to murder innocent
people, not to make terrorism their politics. Leftists who cannot insist
upon this point, even to people poorer and weaker than themselves, have
abandoned both politics and morality for something else. They are radical
only in their abjection. That was Sartre's radicalism, face-to-face with
FLN terror, and it has been imitated by thousands since, excusing and
apologizing for acts that any decent left would begin by
condemning.
What ought to be done? I have a modest agenda: put decency first, and then
we will see. So, let's go back over my list of reasons for the current
indecency.
Ideology. We certainly need something better than the rag-tag Marxism with
which so much of the left operates today, whose chief effect is to turn
world politics into a cheap melodrama, with all the villains dressed to
look the part and one villain larger than life. A tough materialist
analysis would be fine, so long as it is sophisticated enough to
acknowledge that material interests don't exhaust the possibilities of
human motivation. The spectacle of European leftists straining to find some
economic reason for the Kosovo war (oil in the Balkans? a possible
pipeline? was NATO reaching for control of the Black Sea?) was entertaining
at the time, but it doesn't bear repeating. For the moment we can make do
with a little humility, an openness to heterodox ideas, a sharp eye for the
real world , and a readiness to attend to moral as well as materialist
arguments. This last point is especially important. The encounter with
Islamic radicalism, and with other versions of politicized religion, should
help us understand that high among our interests are our values: secular
enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government.
Left politics starts with the defense of these three.
Alienation and powerlessness. It is a common idea on the left that
political responsibility is something like temperance, moderation, and
cleanliness, good bourgeois values that are incompatible with radical
politics or incisive social criticism. You have to be a little wild to be a
radical. That isn't a crazy idea, and alienated intellectuals may well
have, more than anyone else,
the anger necessary to begin the critical project and the lust for
intellectual combat that sustains it. But they don't necessarily get things
right, and the angrier they are and the more they are locked into their
combative posture, the more likely they are to get things wrong. What was
necessary after September 11, and what is necessary now, is an engagement
with our fellow citizens that recognizes the fellowship. We can be as
critical as we like, but these are people whose fate we share; we are
responsible for their safety as they are for ours, and our politics has to
reflect that mutual responsibility. When they are attacked, so are we; and
we should join willingly and constructively in debates about how to defend
the country. Once again: we should act as if we won't always be powerless.
Blaming America first. Not everything that goes badly in the world goes
badly because of us. The United States is not omnipotent, and its leaders
should not be taken as co-conspirators in every human disaster. The left
has little difficulty understanding the need for distributive justice with
regard to resources, but we have been practically clueless about the just
distribution of praise and blame. To take the obvious example: in the
second half of the twentieth century, the United States
fought both just and unjust wars, undertook both just and unjust
interventions. It would be a useful exercise to work through the lists and
test our capacity to make distinctions, to recognize, say, that the US was
wrong in Guatemala in 1956 and right in Kosovo in 1999. Why can't we accept
an ambivalent relation to American power, acknowledging that it has had
good and bad effects in the world? But shouldn't an internationalist left
demand a more egalitarian distribution of power? Well, yes, in principle;
but any actual redistribution will have to be judged by the quality of the
states that would be empowered by it. Faced with states like, say, Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, I don't think we have to support a global redistribution of
political power.
Not blaming anyone else. The world (and this includes the third world) is
too full of hatred, cruelty, and corruption for any left, even the American
left, to suspend its judgement about what's going on. It's not the case
that because we are privileged, we should turn inward and focus our
criticism only on ourselves. In fact, inwardness is one of our privileges;
it is often a form of political self-indulgence. Yes, we are entitled to
blame the others whenever they are blameworthy; in fact, it is only when we
do that, when we denounce, say, the authoritarianism of third world
governments, that we will find our true comrades, the local opponents of
the maximal leaders and military juntas, who are often waiting for our
recognition and support. If we value democracy, we have to be prepared to
defend it, at home, of course, but not only there.
I would once have said that we were well along: the American left has an
honorable history, and we have certainly gotten some things right, above
all, our opposition to domestic and global inequalities. But what the
aftermath of September 11 suggests is that we have not advanced very far,
and not always in the right direction. The left needs to begin again.
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