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Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2002 22:02:01 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Can There Be A Decent Left? Michael Walzers Second Thoughts
Can There Be A Decent Left? Michael Walzer's Second Thoughts
by David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 26, 2001
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Peter Collier and I assembled a group of disillusioned
New Leftists for a conference in Washington we called "Second Thoughts."
These second thoughts had been provoked by many factors and events, but
most instrumental among them was the wholesale slaughter of innocents in
"liberated" Cambodia and Vietnam by political forces that had been
supported by the left. It was not the first sprouting of such radical
second thoughts. Generations of leftists before us had been repelled by the
similar crimes of Stalin and Mao and Castro, and had shed their progressive
worldviews for more sober and conservative thoughts. Indeed, Irving
Kristol, who was on the panel of "elders" we invited to our conference,
observed that second thoughts had begun with the creation of the modern
left during the French Revolution and had been repeated many times since.
Our second thoughts he said, somewhat sardonically, were in fact a Yogi
Berra moment of "déjà vu all over again."
And now it is déjà vu once more. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath
have produced a whole new generation of second thoughters in various stages
of reassessment. These include such luminaries of the literary left as
Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens who this fall joined
with their sometime opponents to defend America the arch imperial power
of the age against a radical Islamic enemy, which they previously might
have regarded as the historical agent of the Third World oppressed. Now the
editor of Dissent, Michael Walzer, has come forward with an articulate
posing of the question of second thoughts and how far to push them. A
philosopher, social critic and lifelong Democratic Socialist Walzer has
pointedly titled his article, "Can There Be A Decent Left?"
The seriousness of the question can measured by others in the fact that
insofar as there is a "decent left," Michael Walzer has exemplified it
throughout his political career. I should interject here that I crossed
political swords with Walzer nearly 40 years ago, when I was a young and
combative Marxist in England. I do not remember the substance of our
disagreements and I no longer have copies of Views, the obscure leftwing
magazine that printed them. But I am as certain that he, was the more civil
of the two of us, as I am that he, then being to my right, was more right
on the issues.
There is a sense, moreover, in which the faction of the left that Dissent
represents is itself the decent faction of the left. During the Sixties
Dissent's founder Irving Howe symbolized the resistance within the left to
the totalitarian elements who came to dominate its decade. Although in the
1980s its editors were seduced into a "critical" defense of the Nicaraguan
regime, they have an otherwise honorable record of having opposed Communism
throughout the Cold War, even if they only grudgingly supported or worse
were often excessively critical of America's efforts to contain the
Communist threat.
Yet there is a sense, also, in which "decency" more describes Walzer's
personal temperament than it does the politics of the Dissent community.
One obvious manifestation of decency is to respect those you disagree with
if they deserve it. As a matter of disclosure, I must interject here that
Dissent editor Paul Berman once described me as a "demented lunatic" -- as
though the redundancy were necessary to do justice to a political enemy,
despite the ludicrous overkill. Dissent's other philosophical figure,
Richard Rorty, has defined his left as a movement "against cruelty." But
his own writings have not been without crude demonizations and peremptory
dismissals of his neo-conservative opponents (not to mention Republicans
generally) as dolts and fascists, whose ideas a civilized progressive is
obliged to dismiss. He has even celebrated the left's political domination
of the universities, something he well knows is the result of an
ideological cleansing of conservatives that he would certainly deplore if
the roles were reversed.
In eras gone by, political second thoughts tended to focus on the left's
active support for nightmare regimes, which it mistakenly took to be
earthly paradises, and the embodiment of its utopian dreams. By contrast
Walzer's doubts originate in his observations of the left's passivity in
regard to the defense of America against a nightmare threat. This is not
wholly different from the past, but it is different enough to warrant our
attention.
"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to
identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriot feeling
as politically incorrect," Walzer writes. "That's why they had such
difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining
in the expression of solidarity that followed." In their first responses,
he notes, leftists failed "to register the horror of the attack or to
acknowledge the human pain it caused." Instead, they felt "schadenfreude,"
a German word meaning joy at another's sorrows, a "barely concealed glee
that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved."
Even though some of these leftists regained their "moral balance" (for many
it was more likely a sense of political self-preservation) they still
exhibited a myopic attitude when addressing the problem of what should be
done. Their sense of being internal exiles in America was again at the root
of the symptom: "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 ^Å what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they did." Hence the left
put its energies into defending the civil liberties of ^Å suspected terrorists.
Walzer is himself still unwilling to put it so bluntly. This would mean
finally stepping away from the left, which he is unready to do. So he
applauds the exaggerated concern of the left for, say, the prisoners of
Camp X-Ray, calling it "a spirited defense of civil liberties" and a "good
result." But this is a minor hesitation in the face of the large question
he has raised about the way the left sees and feels itself to be an alien
force in its own country. For this is a classic second thought.
In my own passage out of the left, nearly twenty years ago, it occurred to
me that my revolutionary comrades never addressed themselves to the obvious
questions for social reformers: "What makes a society work?" Which is the
preamble to "What will make this society work?" In all the socialist
literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted, for example, to
the creation of wealth. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the
conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created.
Was it any surprise that the socialist societies they created broke world
records in making their inhabitants poor?
Michael Walzer puzzles at length over the failure of the left to understand
the religious nature of the al-Qaeda enemy: "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." He notes that
"a few brave leftists" like Christopher Hitchens have described the
al-Qaeda movement as a "clerical fascism." (Actually this is a lingering
political correctness in Walzer. Hitchens described al-Qaeda as
"Islamo-fascists," which is quite different from those Catholic clerics who
supported Franco in Spain.) But he does not seem to grasp the religious
roots of radicalism generally, and therefore fails to understand the
affinity of American radicals for al-Qaeda and its Palestinian kin.
The indecent left reacted badly to 9/11, concludes Walzer, because
ideologically it is still under the spell of the Marxist schema. These
"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?"
This is an excellent reading of the political left. But Walzer is still
puzzled: "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?"
This question reveals a gap in Walzer's perception of the left that has its
roots in his own decency and in the fact that, after all is said and done,
he is a moralist and reformer, not a revolutionary. There is, in fact, a
large literature examining the religious character of the modern
revolutionary left written by authors as different as Berdyaev, Talmon,
Voegelin, Niemeyer, Furet and Kolakowski. (I have, of course, written
extensively about this myself in Radical Son and The Politics of Bad
Faith.) If one looks, it is not hard to see how the left's social melodrama
fits neatly the traditional Judeo-Christian eschatologies, from which its
key texts were derived (Marx, after all, came from a long line of rabbis).
There is the Fall from an idyllic communal state, the travail through a
vale of suffering and tears, and then a social redemption. There is the
passion for moral purity and the purges witch-hunts in fact that
result. The redemption projected of course comes not through the agency of
a divine Messiah but through the actions of a political vanguard and its
power in the socialist state.
In the last thirty years, but particularly in the last dozen it has been
impossible for leftists to visualize the utopian redemption that one once
motivated their mis-labeled "idealism." The catastrophe of every socialist
scheme of the 20th Century has had a devastating effect on leftwing
optimism and replaced it with the a corrosive, anti-capitalist nihilism
that makes it impossible for most leftists to defend a country which
compared to its enemy is a veritable heaven on earth. All that remains of
the revolutionary project is the bitter hatred of the society its exponents
inhabit, and their destructive will to see bring it down. This answers
Walzer's question as to how so-called "progressives" could be either so
unwilling or so slow to distinguish or defend their own country a
tolerant, secular democracy -- in the face of an evil force and its
terrorist attacks.
Peter Collier and I drew attention to this nihilism more than a decade ago
in a book we wrote about our second thoughts. We, too, pointed out the
sense of alienation as the defining element of the "progressive" left. As
editors of Ramparts magazine, we had produced a cover featuring a seven
year old the son of our art director Dugald Stermer holding the flag of
the Vietcong, America's communist enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said,
"Alienation is when your country is at war, and you want the other side to
win." Oddly enough, in our "second thoughts" book, Destructive Generation,
we offered as an exemplary statement of this alienation a quote from
Michael Walzer: "It is still true," Walzer had written, "that only when I
go to Washington to demonstrate do I feel at home there." The statement
made more than a decade ago measures Walzer's present second thoughts. Like
Christopher Hitchens, who published a beautiful tableau of his own
transition for Vanity Fair after 9/11, Michael Walzer has come home.
His second thoughts are not really different from the second thoughts of
others before him despite his stubborn unwillingness to really let go of
the alienating force. As presently stated they are inspired by the nihilism
of the left, rather than a rejection of the left's visionary goals. In the
end, Walzer does not actually answer the title question of his article with
a "no." But he comes very close. "I would once have said that we [the left]
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."
Those of us who have already had our second thoughts are naturally
skeptical of this optimism: The left has been beginning over again since
the French Revolution. And over and over. If it has to begin yet another
time after all this tragedy -- if it is déjà vu all over again -- why not
give it up entirely and save the world another century of grief?
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David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of
the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
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