Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
Should we, half a century later, reconsider the morality of Hiroshima? "No," will retort apostles of what may be called "Patriotic Correctness." (I borrow the phrase from Robert Hughes.) For...
...and harnessed American insecurities...
...about pandering to the National Rifle Association...
...This is why it is vital to think through "principles governing the conduct of war...of democratic peoples," as John Rawls writes in a symposium on Hiroshima in this Dissent...
...No inquiries, please—about overheated clamor against Washington...
...about embracing Pat Robertson, with his apocalyptic, conspiratorial world-view and fundamentalist foot soldiers...
...it sidesteps the moral and political questions that are decisive for democratic well being...
...But a democracy must always ask itself troubling questions, even about a war in which our side was so clearly in the right...
...They need the sixties in order to distractAmericans from afflictions more recent—what Republican administrations did in the 1980s—and those immediate—what right-wing politicians and radio hosts foster in the 1990s...
...about exploiting race problems for political gain...
...A cardinal component of 1960s Patriotic Correctness was in focus again this past spring...
...For these PCers, self-questioning is always tantamount to anti-Americanism...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 291...
...Time, perhaps, for a "metanarrative" for the other four-fifths of the population...
...In a parallel argument, Elizabeth Kiss warns that feminists who spurn the concept of rights in the name of postmodernism imperil their own project...
...Their efforts have been effective, as David Plotke points out in his analysis of the "Contract With America...
...Those blaming "the 1960s" for everything might, after McNamara's admission, reflect on just what set things amiss in that decade...
...The right needs populist diversions precisely because its neo-states-rights proposals are irrelevant to structural economic change...
...Moreover, historical memory is essential to a polity's self-understanding...
...Of course, one does not really expect such deliberation from a Gingrich or a Limbaugh...
...Democratic government was once perceived as an essential counterweight to corporate power...
...Patriotic Correctness substitutes ardor for argument...
...linked them to a program...
...Nowadays, as corporate power is strengthened by neoliberal globalization and as the ability of democratic regimes to set domestic priorities weakens (see Ian Robinson's article), Republicans insist: make national government less effectual...
...So, after the Oklahoma City bombing, "mainstream" conservatives were "indignant" when challenged to think about the overlap between their political obsessions and those of the radical right...
...When Robert McNamara's concession came, it was with a relentless insistence: however terrible the policy sin, the sinner could not have behaved differently, either while in office or after, as Richard Nixon continued the war...
...Such moral acrobatics serve as a useful reminder of why many young Americans were radicalized in the 1960s, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad...
...The importance of alternative narratives from the left can be seen in Marshall Berman's presentation of human rights as "the fundamental modernist idea...
...We were wrong, terribly wrong," declared the ex-defense secretary who presided over our descent into a disastrous war three decades ago...
...Gingrich brands Democrats foes of "normal Americans" and Limbaugh bellows about "maggot-infested dope-smoking peace pansies" because smears are easier than explaining why, after a decade of Reaganomics, the richest 20 percent of households possess 80 percent of the country's wealth...
...As if multinational corporations will, when "downsizing" American workers, be more responsive to state legislatures...
...The morality of memory," notes Michael Walzer, "applies to us" no less than to other countries...
...Indeed, while "postmodern" leftists were denouncing "metanarratives" in the academy, Republicans drew on stories and myths of what America was, is, and should be...
...American insecurities are, in fact, due to structural transformations in the economy—the shift toward postindustrialism and globalization...
...M.C...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
