Asks If There Can Be a Decent Left in a Superpower
Walzer, Michael
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...
...You have to be a little wild to be a radical...
...They are radical only in their abjection...
...All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars...
...The good result of this opposition was a spirited defense of civil liberties...
...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...
...I grew up with the Americanism of the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s...
...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...
...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...
...1) Ideology: the lingering effects of the Marxist theory of imperialism and of the third worldist doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s...
...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 attacks on the Twin Towers, the war is unjust...
...But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes with abandoning any such desire...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent and the author, among many works, of Just and Unjust Wars...
...There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage...
...They talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow citizens...
...The days after September 11 would not have been a had time for a popular front...
...This last point is especially important...
...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...
...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 Afghans greeted that success...
...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...
...Left politics starts with the defense of these three...
...And maybe "fascist" is close enough, even if this new politics doesn't look like the product of late capitalist degeneration...
...And that war was never really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary...
...So, let's go back over my list of reasons for the current indecency...
...But ideologically primed leftists were likely to think that they already understood whatever needed to be understood...
...It's not the case that because we are privileged we should turn inward and focus our criticism only on ourselves...
...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...
...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...
...Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism...
...foreign policy: underfunded, frequently in the shade of military operations...
...That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed...
...The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder...
...Perhaps the most striking consequence is the inability of leftists to recognize or acknowledge the power of religion in the modern world...
...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...
...WHY SHOULDN'T the American story be like these two, with long years of healthy oppositionist politics, and only episodic resentment...
...Ideology: We certainly need something better than the rag-tag Marxism with which so much of the left operates today—a Marxism 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...
...Any group that attacks the imperial power must be a representative of the oppressed, and its agenda must be the agenda of the left...
...The last point was intended to make fighting impossible...
...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...
...Is there any way of escaping the politics of guilt and resentment on the home ground of a superpower...
...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...
...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...
...We can be as critical as we like, but these are people whose fate we share...
...Some of us, at least, thought that these efforts merited our support—or our "critical support...
...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...
...It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing...
...But shouldn't an internationalist left demand a more egalitarian distribution of power...
...was NATO reaching for control of the Black Sea...
...The left sets itself apart...
...But even this defense displayed a certain willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so many leftists rushed to the defense DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 21 AFTERSHOCKS of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers—as if there were no need at all to balance security and freedom...
...government since the Second World War (see almost any back issue of Dissent...
...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...
...At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda...
...they managed to take a stand against the empire without alienating themselves from its home country...
...The spectacle of European leftists straining to find some economic reason for the Kosovo War (oil in the Balkans...
...After all, the values of parliamentarianism (self-government, free speech, the right of opposition) did not support imperial rule...
...Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously from the clash of right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing absolutism, but it would be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance for itself, on its own...
...That was someone else's business...
...Wasn't America a beacon of light to the Old World, a city on a hill, an unprecedented experiment in democratic politics...
...solidarity with people in trouble seems to me the most profound commitment that leftists make...
...a possible pipeline...
...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...
...the business of the left was . . . what...
...It isn't necessary to listen to its spokesmen...
...Recall the standard arguments against it: that we should have turned to the United Nations...
...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...
...4) The sense of not being entitled to criticize anyone else: how can we live in the United States, 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...
...Something else is going on, which we need to understand...
...But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened...
...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...
...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 North Vietnam)—has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate...
...Why can't we accept an ambivalent relation to American power, acknowledging that it has had good and bad effects in the world...
...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...
...In fact, Islamic radicalism is not, as fascism is, a racist or ultranationalist doctrine...
...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...
...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 23...
...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...
...There was (and is) still a lot to worry about: refugees, hunger, minimal law and order...
...and that the war, if it was fought at all, had to be fought without endangering civilians...
...there is no reliable accounting...
...The defeat of fascism in the middle years of the twentieth century and of communism in the last years were not our doing...
...Well, yes, in principle...
...But what the aftermath of September 11 suggests is that we have not advanced very far—and not always in the right direction...
...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...
...2) Powerlessness and alienation: leftists have no power in the United States, and most of us don't expect to exercise power, ever...
...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 22 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government...
...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...
...Certainly, there has been much to criticize in the policies of every U.S...
...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...
...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...
...The Algerian war gave rise to a more familiar self-hatred, most clearly manifest in Jean-Paul Sartre's defense of National Liberation Front (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...
...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 II...
...In fact, inwardness is one of our privileges...
...I think that the French story is similar...
...Indeed, they were more likely to regard England as the home country of liberalism and parliamentary democracy...
...Foreign aid, the Peace Corps, and nation building never took on the dimensions 20 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS of a "mission...
...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...
...A holy war against infidels is not, even unintentionally, unconsciously, or "objectively," a left politics...
...was entertaining at the time, but it doesn't bear repeating...
...The overlap is circumstantial and convenient, nothing more...
...Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed...
...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...
...It gives the left a reason for opposing Islamic terror, which is an important achievement...
...Leftists who cannot insist upon this point, even to people poorer and weaker than they are, have abandoned both politics and morality for something else...
...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...
...Nor were the "little Englanders" hostile to English politics and culture...
...there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination...
...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...
...WHAT OUGHT to be done...
...It would be a useful exercise to work through the lists and test our capacity to make distinctions—to recognize, say, that the United States was wrong in Guatemala in 1954 and right in Kosovo in 1999...
...I can't do that in any sustained way (historians take note), only very sketchily...
...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...
...Equally important, that's why their participation in the policy debate after the attacks was so odd...
...and we should join willingly and constructively in debates about how to defend the country...
...Theology, on this view, is just the temporary, colloquial idiom in which the legitimate rage of oppressed men and women is expressed...
...When they are attacked, so are we...
...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...
...It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian intervention...
...What was necessary after September 11, and what is necessary now, is an engagement with our fellow citizens that recognizes the fellowship...
...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...
...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 judgment about what's going on...
...but any actual redistribution will have to be judged by the quality of the states that would be empowered by it...
...The alienation is radical...
...Later on, during Margaret Thatcher's terms, and particularly during the Falklands War, the tone of the opposition was more bitter, but by then there was no empire, only sour memories...
...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...
...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 kitschy and manipulative—and also politically very smart...
...There is no deeper impulse in left politics than this enlistment...
...It is nothing more than a rough argument, an attempt to begin a debate...
...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...
...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 scar their politics...
...IWILL SUGGEST four reasons, without claiming that this is an exhaustive list...
...that we had to prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then organize international trials...
...In some sense, of course, that is true...
...Or more accurately, in the only superpower...
...What had happened that made something like that unthinkable...
...We may think that we live in a postideological age, and maybe most of us do, but the traces of old ideologies can be found everywhere in the discourse of the left...
...Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 19 AFTERSHOCKS and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power...
...To oppose the authorities, whatever they did...
...Yes, we are entitled to blame the others whenever they are blameworthy...
...For wasn't France the birthplace of enlightenment, universal values, and human rights...
...Even the oppressed have obligations, and surely the first among these is not to murder innocent people, not to make terrorism their politics...
...But how many leftists can even imagine a holy war against infidels...
...I have a modest agenda: put decency first, and then we will see...
...The left has lost its hearings...
...A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure...
...we are responsible for their safety as they are for ours, and our politics has to reflect that mutual responsibility...
...His was a generalized, not a personal, self-hatred...
...In fact, when we blame America, we also lift ourselves above the blameworthy (other) Americans...
...The left needs to begin again...
...Once again: we should act as if we won't always be powerless...
...Faced with states like, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, I don't think we have to support a global redistribution of political power...
...the effort would suggest a responsible politics and a real desire to exercise power, some day...
...it is often a form of political self-indulgence...
...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...
...But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way—that the 3,120th death determines the injustice of the war—is wrong...
...This can't be true anywhere else, for anybody else...
...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...
...The pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys playing soccer: all this was no doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also politically disarming...
...But the war was primarily neither of these things...
...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...
...they were mostly sidelines of U.S...
...We might begin to worry about this question by looking at oppositional politics in older imperial states...
...If we value democracy, we have to be prepared to defend it, at home, of course, but not only there...
...And the denial isn't accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn't know about, the everyday moral world...
...Whatever America is doing in the world isn't our doing...
...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...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
