Letters
Editors: Michael Walzer's "Can There Be a Decent Left? (Spring 2002) poses a loaded either/or question. My concern is that the administration is using the terrorist tragedy of 9/11 for a foreign...
...We also point out that the main problem facing the urban poor is not islands of displacement in "hot" urban neighborhoods, but the widening gap in incomes, reinforced by the spatial separation of different income groups and the ways in which the structure of local government pits them against one another...
...The rest, with a few exceptions (the first two on his list, Alperovitz and Barnet, among them) seem to me to bear out my critique...
...This is incorrect...
...The left covers a good swath of territory, and though there are some dogmatists who would like to fence it in and police it, there are more people who want it open—including people who have drifted away and might drift back if we LETTERS give them reasons for doing that...
...Anyone who fails to chant the lies of one's own nation state must be a deluded traitor...
...The authors are never really clear about whether they believe that place is causal to their analysis or secondary...
...Here, there is a grain of truth, though only a grain...
...It doesn't seem to be empirical knowledge, but rather a set of deductions from a theory...
...Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II...
...intervened for prudential rather than ethical reasons is borne out by the prevailing realpolitik in American diplomacy...
...Why are progressive local officials in such a fiscal straitjacket...
...This is Walzer's third point: the left is guilty for its "moral purism of blaming America first...
...Maybe he doesn't remember the nuclear freeze movement, which despised Soviet missiles as much as American ones...
...Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Brazil...
...We argue that federal policies--transportation, housing, tax laws, the siting of military bases and contracts, and others--have sorted people into separate and competing local jurisdictions in ways that favor business and the affluent...
...Walzer's accusations are therefore grossly unfair and mean-spirited...
...Who says that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend...
...He feels no need to defend an alternative response to "the calamity" of 9/11...
...Or Central Americans...
...I live in Philadelphia, the home of the [Quaker] AFSC, so I am familiar with this part of the left...
...I always thought that Dissent was, in part at least, a journal willing to oppose and stand up to government repression...
...What moral person would do that...
...I hate to admit that I agree with Bush on anything, but I have to admit that he was right...
...I am grateful to all the people who wrote or phoned or (it actually happened) stopped me in the street to express support for my "decent left" article...
...He is right that in the case of Bosnia, there were indeed some on the left who tried to pack that conflict into a neatly bound, classically anti-imperialist Marxist package...
...There is also a part of the left that is completely pacifist and probably opposed WWII...
...In any event, while it is true that some on the left have not always faced the lapses and abuses of their erstwhile third world counterparts, it is patently false to suggest that leftists have in general apologized for repressive regimes simply because they happened to be singled out for American military or economic punishment...
...What we do advocate is dismantling the institutions and incentives that pit many suburban jurisdictions so strongly against the interests of the metropolitan whole...
...JOHN F. COWAN Scotts Valley, Calif...
...Before doing that, however, I must clear up one point...
...might like to know that not all leftist critiques of American foreign policy since the Vietnam War have been "stupid, overwrought, [and] grossly inaccurate...
...I will try to respond to their arguments, this time (a little) less provocatively...
...Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, Saipan, the PhilipDISSENT / Summer 2002 n 107 LETTERS pines, and Iwo Jima...
...The policy agenda outlined in Place Matters seeks to level the metropolitan playing field and reduce competition among municipalities through regional cooperation on governance, taxation, and land use...
...The one thing I did not foresee was the new sycophancy of the liberal intelligentsia...
...Consider guilt for our prosperity...
...Consider ideology...
...The bombing of the World Trade Center and the wanton loss of life have become the pretext for unfolding a strategic plan for American domination of key areas of the world and something like a permanent war based, not on terrorism, but on imposing the U.S...
...For Walzer to suggest that those of us on the left were not also weeping on 9/11 for the innocents murdered that day is, in a word, despicable...
...I again grant a grain, but only a grain, to this...
...Whenever those on the left, whether in England, France, Germany, Indonesia, or Peru have criticized their government's actions, they have always been accused of putting other nations first...
...Granted, the left has not always gone about this communication in the best way--in part, yes, because of occasional outbursts of self-righteousness and a hip disregard for appearances (in politics, appearances are all, as Machiavelli noted...
...People who feel that way live that way and usually don't trouble others...
...I am also grateful to all the people, except for a few of the ideological police, who wrote in opposition to my article...
...It would be a heck of a lot better if he would simply tell us straight away how he feels about September 11, patriotism, terrorists' threats, civil liberties, the Afghan War, and so on, and spare us the sermon...
...Jan Black, Sentinels of Empire...
...Yet in Walzer's eyes such actions border on treason...
...I fit his profile fairly closely with one exception: I'm not the clueless moral retard he depicts...
...the rest of the world is passive and never responsible...
...Still, one might think that Walzer could acknowledge that if most Americans don't even know there is a left, that has not a little to do with the fact that its leading lights, like Noam Chomsky, have been blacklisted from the mainstream media...
...It was not about machismo or male displays of DISSENT / Summer 2002 n I05 LETTERS power as some feminists believe...
...I wondered a lot about this after the September events and wrote an extensive polemic at the time against some of the knee-jerk positions being taken by intellectuals on I08 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 the left...
...I meant to be provocative, and they were indeed provoked...
...And what about a topic he scarcely mentions...
...The difficulty is not policy, but the politics that flow from a misplaced emphasis on place...
...I submit that the idea that the U.S...
...g., the possibility that the United States might assert an imperial prerogative against good people and bad, client states as well as independent-minded regimes...
...John Pilger, Hidden Agendas...
...For example, John Kasarda has shown that the proportion of census tracts in the hundred largest cities with at least 20 percent in poverty increased from 27.3 percent in 1970 to 39.4 percent in 1990, While those with 40 percent poverty increased from 6 percent in 1970 to 13.7 percent of the total in 1990...
...Chalmers Johnson, Blowback...
...Richard Barnet, Roots of War...
...I agree with many of the policies they advocate to promote metropolitan social equity...
...Editors: Michael Walzer's "Can There Be a Decent Left?' is a story I have heard repeatedly since September 11, from the right and the center...
...JOHN SANBONMATSU Chicago, Ill...
...It was not...
...Mihiel salient and Belleau Wood...
...OK, Dissent will oppose all efforts at domination, wherever they are manifest...
...They are against war, pure and simple...
...Does Silber want that...
...As Nietzsche pointed out long ago, the powerless have a penchant for railing against the world and for nursing grudges against the dominant few...
...9/11 was the worst day of my life...
...SUSAN STEIN Philadelphia, Pa...
...There were conscientious objectors to World War II...
...For example, we propose that in redistricting battles, progressives should push to shift some sure-fire Democratic voters from overwhelmingly safe congressional district seats into adjacent swing districts so that liberal Democrats can contest elections in these volatile and critical districts...
...But because we have a long lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks of getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...A political strategy built on the belief that the boundaries reflect economically homogeneous places has a strong potential to be counterproductive...
...Sclar finds it curious that we "do not deal with the phenomenon of gentrification...
...John Sanbonmatsu wrote a piece as long as my own...
...Once again they fail to consider causal complexity and focus instead on spatial effect...
...Note the "grains of truth" he allows me...
...If place is merely exacerbating—and I agree that it is—then why frame a political strategy designed to reduce social inequality around a factor that is not causal...
...Can Walzer name a single prominent American leftist who has ever declared sympathies for America's jilted lovers—thugs like Noriega or Qaddafi...
...DISSENT / Summer 2002 NM...
...left, for in New Zealand and Australia exactly the same responses reverberated) "has lost its bearings," and that its now dominant mix of self-hatred, guilt, and resentment is both morally unappealing and politically disarming...
...Editors: Michael Walzer's furious critique of the American left would have been more impressive had its targets not been straw...
...Issues such as environmental quality and justice, anti-privatization, and so on, are more likely to sustain broad progressive regional coalitions than will an indictment of intra-jurisdictional fiscal inequity...
...The reaction after September 11 highlighted in a serious way that the left (not only the U.S...
...Letters must be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...I have always considered myself a liberal but have been dismayed by the appalling views coming from the institutional left over the past six months...
...Walzer's second "explanation" for why American leftists cannot criticize thugs like the Taliban is that we leftists feel so powerless, and experience such profound alienation from our culture that we are incapable of having "decent" values, like love of country...
...Michael Klare, Beyond the Vietnam Syndrome, Low Intensity Warfare, Resource Wars, Supplying Repression, and War Without End...
...But we are revolted by the drug wars, systematic racism among police and prosecutors, environmental despoliation, and the steady loss of our civil liberties...
...The problem is that they too heavily conflated it with place...
...The typical metro area has more than a hundred local governments, all seeking to attract investment and affluent residents and exclude the poor and the near poor...
...Consider U. S. foreign policy...
...It is an excellent and much-needed piece...
...The book's central theme is that Iniever before have economic classes sorted themselves into separate governments the way they have in the United States today...
...My concern is that the administration is using the terrorist tragedy of 9/11 for a foreign (and domestic) policy agenda that goes far beyond a response to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban...
...See, among many other valuable books, Gar Alperovitz, Cold War Essays...
...It in no way follows that therefore we have no love of country or that our geopolitical analysis is skewed...
...He says we are indecent and have lost our bearings...
...It is worth a good fight to improve the balance...
...If the perverse and incomprehensible response of so many leftists to September 11 has any merit, it will have been to cast a spotlight on what has become, over the course of a generation, a profound deterioration of moral and political judgment...
...We appreciate his grace under pressure and his sensitivity as we coped with the unexpected loss of our regular designer, Daniel McClain...
...I could not easily have provided so many examples...
...Our detailed analysis of voting trends suggests that this is possible, but that it will require labor activists, community organizers, liberal Democrats, and others to rethink their strategies...
...But my answers were meant to be tentative...
...Yes, there are still a few crude materialists banging around out there...
...For example, there were many others who criticized the U.S...
...Holly Sklar, Trilateralism...
...Walzer paints the left as being parochial and anti-intellectual and "stupid" in the face of subtlety...
...We believe, and Place Matters argues, that we can build a majoritarian political coalition for social and economic justice around an agenda to address the nation's urban crisis with fundamental reforms...
...What the American left should be demanding is that our government participate in and help pay for the reconstruction of the country...
...Our political analysis starts by recognizing that the United States is now a majority suburban nation, but it stresses the growing economic, racial, and social diversity in the suburbs...
...Their letter speaks of "the institutions and incentives that pit many suburban jurisdictions so strongly against the interests of the metropolitan whole...
...Irwin Silber thinks that 9/11 has become a pretext for American domination of key parts of the world...
...There is indeed a serious pacifist literature on nonviolent resistance, but I haven't heard anyone try to explain how that might be effective in this case...
...But do you expect me to ignore Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki...
...In my experience, most of those on the left who opposed the Afghan War did so for deeply held ethical or moral reasons...
...Michael McClintock, The American Connection...
...We encourage Dissent readers to decide for themselves whether our analysis makes sense...
...Cowan writes as if only the United States has agency...
...Or that defending our ConstiLETTERS tution from religious fanatics like John Ashcroft—because religious fundamentalists and theocrats, Walzer should know, also come in Christian and Jewish flavors—would be considered an honorable and quintessentially American act...
...Nonetheless, it is consistent with the cartoon he draws of the left as a whole...
...GEORGE SCIALABBA Cambridge, Mass...
...and E.P...
...One might have thought that trying to pierce the propaganda veil of the mainstream, corporate-owned mass media in order to observe the reckless dangers provoked by our policies might be a "patriotic" act...
...We accept e-mail submissions to editors@dissentmagazine.org, but request that you also provide a street address...
...In fact, many studies show that economic segregation, particularly the spatial concentration of the poor, is substantial and rising...
...Sclar claims that we exaggerate the degree of economic segregation...
...Editors: Thanks to Michael Walzer for writing Can There Be a Decent Left...
...If the left seems so often to be talking to itself, it is largely because it has been forced to rely on nineteenth-century tactics to do so...
...But pacifists have the same obligation that the rest of us have: to explain to their fellow citizens how they believe the United States can protect itself against future terrorist attacks...
...Note to Walzer: You will be hounded and pilloried by the institutional left, ruled as they are by a parochial insularity and dogmatism...
...Nor should we as citizens of the United States be willing to accept that the role of our government is to impose the values of capitalism everywhere in the world...
...Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, Deterring Democracy, Necessary Illusions, Rogue States, Towards a New Cold War, and World Orders Old and New...
...Without getting on my patriotic high horse, I believe that America, too, begins with decency, moves on to sympathy, and proceeds to action...
...We do not oppose suburbs, but rather unregulated real estate development, government policies that promote sprawl, and a fiscal system that undermines the capacities of new suburbs, older suburbs, and central cities alike...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...Along with this escalation of military intervention, Bush and Ashcroft have spearheaded a major assault on the Constitution and hard-won democratic rights, likewise justified in the name of national security against terrorism...
...It was the worst day in the life of every other leftist I know...
...I'm not going to oppose a policy just because I don't agree with Bush's domestic agenda...
...This is ideology, not knowledge...
...The net result is growing spatial inequality, in which the place where one lives definitely matters...
...The Campaign circulated countless petitions in support of dissidents in the East bloc which were signed by—gasp!—American leftists...
...Progressives have few resources...
...We conclude, however, that although these efforts make life better for poor and working-class families and neighborhoods, they do not counter underlying trends producing greater inequality, because municipalities lack the resources and legal authority to address these underlying trends...
...As for speaking "straight away" about my own views of 9/11, terrorism, the Afghan War, and so on—I tried to do that in the Winter 2002 Dissent in an article called "Five Questions about Terrorism...
...Frank Brodhead and Edward Herman, Demonstration Elections...
...We had seen how our nation's realpolitik had helped sow a killing rage in the hearts of a whole generation of militant Muslims, and others...
...Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, East Timor, El Salvador, and Nicaragua...
...Walzer's suggestion to begin with decency and then see what happens seems so right...
...We present a detailed discussion of widening overall inequalities of wealth and income and of the often neglected importance of the spatial dimension of inequality, which, we argue, exacerbates the effects of overall inequality, narrowing the access of the urban poor to good schools, health care, bank loans, grocery stores, and many other basic goods and services...
...It is never "understandable" for America to use violence...
...I do apologize for not invoking this Habermassian phrase and also for forgetting about the blacklisting of Noam Chomsky from the mainstream media...
...I nowhere suggest that left opponents of the Afghan War are traitors or that "their actions border on treason...
...Cowan claims that the bulk of left opposition to the Afghan War was pacifist in character...
...Solar says that the problem with our discussion of economic segregation is that "lifestyle is about wealth, not location...
...Yet it is all too characteristic of Walzer's approach that he ignores any facts that inconveniently get in the way of his caricature...
...It reduces economic inequalities and improves conditions for the poor by tightening labor markets, raising incomes, and expanding federal spending on social services, especially affordable rental housing and homeownership...
...The Fiscal Policy Institute recently reported that in New York State over the last decade income inequality has increased not only between the top and the bottom but also between the top and the middle...
...For the brutal apparatchiks who seized power in Grenada in 1982...
...We argue that no progressive effort to improve our urban areas can be successful unless it gives suburbanites-especially those who live in working- and lower-middleclass suburbs--a stake in the outcome...
...And why not in a whole generation of Vietnamese...
...This article uncannily reflects many of my thoughts and feelings since 9/11...
...is indeed what is required...
...I never doubted that there have been responses like that...
...Of course that number pales in comparison with the number of uncommitted observers who are simply, and rightly, disgusted or flabbergasted by this rancid purism...
...As they say here, place "exacerbates the effects of overall inequality...
...Why the heck should I be hearing it from him...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...It also disturbs me that many leftists and feminists saw this war as a fight for global capitalism...
...Sanbonmatsu provides some nice examples of decent left responses to Cuban human rights violations and to East European totalitarianism...
...it was shortened for publication here...
...How else are we take his remark that the left's "pathology . . . has already done us great damage...
...Yet it is he who can't seem to grasp the complexities of our worlde...
...PETER DREIER, JOHN MOLLENKOPF, TODD SWANSTROM The problem is not that Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom ignored social class...
...Consider alienation...
...But once again, Walzer's angry blunderbuss strikes its target indifferently...
...What Really Matters Editors: In his review of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (Dissent, Spring 2002) Elliott Sclar claims that we did not deal with class inequalities or show how to build a coalition between the poor and working class...
...How can he be so sure that we are "breeding" Afghan terrorists now...
...This was a necessary war...
...Editors: Congratulations to Michael Walzer on a perceptive analysis of the dysfunctional American left...
...You bet we're alienated—why wouldn't we be?—from a system that excludes anything to the left of the Democratic Party from political power and from access to the national media...
...Sanbonmatsu claims that he knew before 9/11 what was coming, and he knew on 9/11 what was coming next, and he knows now what will be coming...
...Robin Hahne], Panic Rule...
...What made our upset that day all the more profound and awful, in addition to our horror at the massacre and our anger at the perpetrators, was the knowledge that for years we had all been Cassandras...
...I say, nonsense...
...The very rich are getting richer, more people are being pushed into poverty, and the middle class is getting weaker...
...Walzer's final maneuver is to reiterate his position that the left hobbles itself by "not being entitled to criticize anyone else" besides the United States...
...It is as if, since the early sixties, the left has been set upon a long detour from common sense...
...I am glad of every grain...
...Here he positions himself perilously close to the CheneyLieberman axis, which is on a witch-hunt against "traitorous" American academics who do not fall into ideological lockstep with the new "patriotism...
...But isn't it a tribute to the fortitude of the lifeworld that Chomsky's books sell more copies than all the books of all the editors of Dissent taken together (this is a rough calculation...
...But it also includes nasty regimes (like Indonesia in the 1960s) that the United States supported but didn't create, which were in fact the products of local history and political culture...
...He then enumerates four "reasons" why this might be so...
...If Walzer seriously thinks that the United States intervenes anywhere in the world chiefly for "humanitarian" reasons, he has not perused Foreign Affairs in recent decades...
...There is plenty of room for good honest dissent from both the left and the right...
...Walzer slaps the left for its double standards, suggesting that leftists are unwilling, or just constitutionally unable, to criticize third world regimes...
...In that regard, I honor Château Thierry, the Argonne Forest, the St...
...Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors...
...Most cities and suburbs have neither the capacity nor the desire to fund high quality basic municipal services...
...I agree that historically, too few leftists have proved willing to criticize the human rights violations of erstwhile "allies" like Fidel's Cuba...
...Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War...
...What the decent/indecent balance is going to be in the months and years to come seems to me radically uncertain...
...Not all of them were written since the Vietnam War: one of the best, Engler's Politics of Oil, came out in 1961...
...That is a common view, I suppose, but it seems to me crazy...
...These boundaries contain small neighborhoods with differing social mixes...
...government's will on a whole range of countries...
...In my review I argued that the middle class is in trouble...
...My argument is that these polarizing institutions and incentives are not geographic, and neither are the opposing interests...
...William Greider, One World Ready or Not...
...I find it heartening that there are people on the left, like Walzer, who are prepared not only to publicly criticize the schadenfreude, but to state frankly that "the left needs to begin again...
...But what has the left been trying to do, throughout its long and desperate history, if not to communicate its ideas to a larger public...
...Let me take each of these in turn...
...The Kasarda data that they now substitute for the Massey data in their book highlights this problem...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...I cannot but wonder: is Chalmers Johnson, who knows a great deal more about American foreign policy than Walzer, a "moral purist" when he shows, empirically (in Blowback), just why so many Japanese and Italians and Puerto Ricans, and, yes, Pakistanis and Egyptians resent the United States as much as they do...
...Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal...
...Progressives I know accept what is good about our political economy—the Bill of Rights, the openness, due process— when it's accorded—and so on...
...I assume that this is capitalism at work: the booksellers wouldn't agree with Chomsky if they read him, but they don't have to read him, just sell him...
...106 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 First, Walzer suggests that the left's immoral or "indecent" condition is owed to the fact it persists in clinging to an outmoded Marxist and anti-imperialist ideology...
...But clearly we have many deep disagreements, and I can only pursue a few...
...What did this theory tell him...
...I have rarely visited a bookstore that doesn't stock his books...
...GARY PETERSON Arlington, Va...
...That our realpolitik policies "had helped sow a killing rage in a whole generation of militant Muslims...
...That manifests itself in more poor people living in poorer neighborhoods, but place is not the cause of the problem...
...Editors: I thought I was a feminist, but now I have discovered that I am a male-identified bloodthirsty racist, all because I supported the Afghan War...
...With especial venom, Walzer accuses progressives of being unwilling "to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks...
...Walzer seems to have mistaken some leftists' lack of surprise at news of the 9/11 attacks for an ugly indifference or, far worse, a secret joy, rather than for what it really was—nausea and rage over the irresponsible policies that have endangered our nation's people...
...this is a willful misreading of my article...
...Editors: Readers of Michael Walzer's "Can There Be a Decent Left...
...I don't believe that, but let's leave the facts aside...
...No matter...
...Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network...
...Walzer's reasons as to why the left has lost its bearings make sense...
...I and many others work to make the United States more like the social democracies of Europe...
...A few exceptions aside, the city and town boundaries of metropolitan America are poor proxies for economic class distinctions...
...That makes him, I think, a national resource—if only he gave some evidence of all this knowledge...
...Anzio, Normandy, and Berlin...
...Oh, bother...
...this argument will be a long one...
...We do not ignore class analysis...
...We act, the world endures...
...He and I can agree in our respect for a consistent and conscientious pacifism...
...Sclar's hontention that our political strategy is "based on attacking the middle class"--or that we blame urban problems on "attempts by middle-class suburbanites to protect their turf from the poor"--is simply wrong...
...bombing campaign in Bosnia not because it reflected some "materialist" or capitalist maneuver (for example, for oil), but because of the likely intention behind the campaign (that is, the rather transparent agenda to reaffirm and solidify American dominance in NATO...
...Stay the course...
...Here, again, I grant Walzer a grain of truth...
...Surely Bush's invention of an evil axis of terrorism embracing a number of countries that oppose U.S...
...he thinks it is enough that he is against what the response has been and what (he is sure) it will be...
...Because we on the left have indeed been cut out of power and have been forced for so many years to bear witness to the senseless and immoral policies of the power elite, many of us are indeed desperate and embittered...
...PETER MURPHY Wellington, New Zealand ED...
...Where does he stand...
...What American liberalism needs most now is voices of reason and sanity, such as yours, so that perhaps we can forge a new, viable left not based on an ideology of reflexive hatred of America...
...Perhaps Walzer does not recall the courageous efforts of groups like Joanne Landy's Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which, in the 1980s, forged links with dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who wanted neither totalitarian communism nor American capitalism...
...Editors: This is a powerful piece of opinion writing that cuts through so much of the muck that has become so embarrassing to me...
...Thompson, et al., Exterminism and Cold War...
...In other words, many on the left felt that U.S...
...NOTE: Peter Murphy is a co-editor of Thesis Eleven...
...ASHBY BEAL Washington, D.C...
...Among the supporters, I will only respond to Gary Peterson: I suppose that I have been "hounded" a bit by the institutional left, but it won't be difficult to "stay the course" because there is a lot of sympathy and agreement out there...
...I know from the e-mails that I received that there are a good number of decent leftists who are fed up with the "purist" public positions being taken by so many leftliberal notables...
...And Sanbonmatsu knows that there have been indecent responses too (my "grains of DISSENT / Summer 2002 109 truth...
...The country is undamaged...
...Robert Engler, The Politics of Oil...
...I suppose I should modify that statement and add that many of them are opposed to all violence unless the person using violence is Palestinian, then it's "understandable...
...Frances Moore Lappê, et al., Aid As Obstacle...
...It is important that they be invested wisely...
...The Russians fought for eight years in that country, and fought far more brutally than we have, and yet there has not been a single Afghan terrorist attack on Russian civilians...
...IRWIN SILBER Oakland, Calif...
...If Walzer's is indeed your new policy, you should at least have the decency to change your name...
...Stephen Shalom, Imperial Alibis...
...Please look back at his list of American crimes...
...What is most offensive—and self-serving—about Walzer's screed, however, is his repeated mantra that the left is so alienated from the American public, and from reality, that it succumbs to a blind apocalyptic rage that must forever alienate it from "our fellow citizens," as he so piously puts it...
...Richard Falk, Revolutionaries and Functionaries...
...Why did the violence come, and how did he know it would only come, from Muslims...
...Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent and The Political Economy of Human Rights...
...Americans mostly disagree with Sanbonmatsu's arguments, he says, because of "the colonization of the lifeworld," that is, the takeover of civil society by capitalist forces...
...policy and his announcement of a new approach to the use of nuclear weapons in possible pre-emptive strikes against these and (implicitly) other countries can hardly be justified by the calamity of 9/11...
...Walzer kept mentioning "the left" in his article...
...No one I know...
...George Scialabba provides a nice list of books...
...But that argument doesn't seem to fit Afghanistan, where the immediate danger is that the United States will walk away from its responsibilities, not that it will stay on and "dominate" the Afghans...
...The communists and Spartacists are few and far between these days...
...How sweetly this echoes two hundred years of rightist discourse throughout the world...
...In addition, this isolation raises barriers to cross-class coalition building...
...It includes some real crimes, which have been strongly criticized in Dissent (Hiroshima, Guatemala, Vietnam, for example...
...But then, he must also have an uncomfortable time trying to explain why, in the case of the single most urgent humanitarian disaster in fifty years, the Rwandan genocide, the Clinton administration not only refused to intervene, but in fact consciously denied that genocide was unfolding...
...John Cowan is also a man given to lists...
...Walzer might also have the heart to mention a little detail Habermas terms "the colonization of the lifeworld": the dangerous and alarming erosion of the public sphere and civil society by capitalism...
...Watching the Towers fall, my hopes fell with them, because I knew very well what would be coming next: an ineffectual, indiscriminate military campaign that would only breed more terrorists, the further militarization of our culture and economy, the further erosion of our civil liberties, the strengthening of American nativist and xenophobic sentiment...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Sclar ignores our detailed examination of how progressive activists have sought to improve conditions for the urban poor and working class in municipal politics...
...policymakers—the same ones, incidentally, who had long ignored the whole ugly problem in the Balkans precisely because it was seen as nonessential to our own interests, were finally intervening on the "right" side, but for the wrong reasons...
...We propose a political strategy that will enable lowincome, working-class, and middle-income people to coalesce around a shared policy agenda...
...I would suggest that Americans have the duty to demand nothing less than this...
...William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S...
...Alexander George, Western State Terrorism...
...The impact of federal policies has been compounded by the fiscal fragmentation among metropolitan governments...
...We find Sciar's review to be a caricature of our argument...
...And why does he think that the war in Afghanistan is sure to breed more terrorists...
...Who can tell...
...Although it is a truism that income is necessary to alleviate poverty, it does not follow that location is unimportant, especially when the concentration of poverty is an 110 DISSENT / Summer 2002 important factor limiting access to economic opportunity...
...NOTE: The editors wish to thank Robert Delboy for stepping in on five days notice and producing our cover design...
...The world is a much more complicated place than that...
...When I say that the failure of many leftists to think about how best to defend the country "has already done us much damage," the "us" refers to the left, not the country...
...In fact, we discuss in several places how federal programs and market forces have pushed poor and working-class people out of their neighborhoods to make way for more affluent residents, convention centers or sports complexes, and commercial development...
...To begin again...
...James Petras, Empire or Republic...
...otherwise it would not be possible to live on the left...
...Finally, we propose giving working people a stronger political voice by expanding voter rights and strengthening labor laws...
...they do add up...
...Why wouldn't others oppose the Afghan War and the bombing of Iraq on similar grounds...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
