Confessions of an 'Anti-American'
Wreszin, Michael
ARGUMENTS Confessions of an 'Anti-American' Michael Wreszin FOR THE LAST several issues, the thrust of Dissent has been increasingly hard to take. It reminds me of the early years of the...
...A decade ago, Mitchell Cohen put together an attractive anthology of great political stories entitled Rebels and Reactionaries...
...These omissions indicate sophistication of historical selection but not historical intelligence...
...Walzer, among others, decries the "indecent" left's lack of sympathy for the victims of terrorist attacks...
...Kazin sounds like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who invariably dismissed the influence of antiwar protestors...
...In the introduction he declared that "asking questions that Power prefers to avoid is perhaps one of the essential political functions that political literature can play" It's time to return to the initial vision of obligation that launched and sustained the journal...
...Perhaps Kazin, as well as several of the editors and contributors to the magazine, should return to the writings of Mark Twain, whose credentials as an American were frequently challenged because of his opposition to American and British imperialism...
...Talk about predictable, knee-jerk, ideological rigidity...
...Those pacifists and semi-pacifists, those nonviolent and peaceful demonstrators created the movement that the liberals later latched onto...
...Kazin argues that "without patriotic appeals, the great social movements that attacked inequalities of class, gender, and race . . . would never have gotten off the ground...
...To argue that the contemporary left has "abandoned patriotism" and "hates" America is not nuanced political analysis...
...ARGUMENTS Confessions of an 'Anti-American' Michael Wreszin FOR THE LAST several issues, the thrust of Dissent has been increasingly hard to take...
...While Dissent continues to smear leftist opponents as being without compassion or intelligence, its writers seem oblivious to the indirect support the journal is giving to the powers that be...
...To do so is often a ploy used by soap box orators of the left and right to legitimize their positions...
...It has absolutely no relationship to the DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 83 ARGUMENTS validity of their positions...
...T HERE IS A good deal of political pragmatism (sometimes called political realism) in the Dissent community...
...And incidentally, many think a warmongers have their way, it will...
...Chomsky has agreed with Hoffmann that the instruments of the police and counterintelligence are likely to be far more effective than military operations...
...He has voiced arguments similar to those expressed by Sir Michael Howard and Stanley Hoffmann...
...Kazin may be for a kind of intellectual populism, what he once described as Wilmore Kendall's "always virtuous American majority," but those Americans—Richard Nixon's silent majority and Pat Robinson's moral majority—are seldom allies in a war against imperialism, racism, sexism, and inequality...
...Nor can I think of any today...
...But why are Kazin, Cohen, Walzer, and an articulate and intelligent contributor like Jeffrey Isaac so obsessed with those critics on the left who stress the hypocrisy of governmental rhetoric and point out the gap between creed and deed...
...Is this the position of Michael Kazin...
...King was not trying to cozy up to the "overwhelming majority" Nor should we...
...She, too, speaks out for cosmopolitanism...
...Surely the "anti-American" left, as it is so frequently described in Dissent's pages, is not the real menace facing the country...
...Because I think much of what is going on in this country at the moment is criminal, does that make me hate my country...
...Surely these are times that call for outrage...
...He even feared that Walzer would see his criticism of American foreign policy as appeasement...
...As for patriotism, Twain referred to it in 1908 as that "grotesque and laughable word...
...Is she, in Cohen's words, one of those "leftists who never learn" ("Empire of Cant," Summer 2002...
...It's "most leftists" this and "left academics" that...
...He is the biographer of Dwight Macdonald...
...change in American foreign policy, particularly concerning the unqualified support of the Israeli THE PROBLEM is not a matter of patriotism, it is a question of what constitutes the best way to defend the nation against terrorist attacks...
...There is something drastically wrong with a political analysis that judges whether one has shown enough concern for the victims...
...Must one display the flag before criticizing one's country or engaging in a protest...
...Kazin, along with Walzer and other Dissent editors, parades an army of straw men to denounce an unidentified and undefined "left...
...At one point he admits that "there has been much to criticize in the policies of every U.S...
...Spring 2002...
...86 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...
...If you "fight like hell" to change this country, you are not likely to find that the "overwhelming majority" of Americans is with you...
...It reminds me of the early years of the Vietnam War era, when some Dissent editors apparently thought the New Left was a greater menace than the Johnson administration's war policy...
...This only further illustrates how the chorus of nationalistic hysteria is making critics of the "war on terror" appear, in the words of Randolph Bourne, "disreputable and finally almost obscene...
...But did Kazin expect King to communicate with the average white citizen in racist Mississippi and Cicero, Illinois...
...He has embraced a patriotism loyal to the principles of justice and democracy, a patriotism that requires us to disobey our government when it violates those principles...
...Walzer has already claimed that a good portion of the critical anti-war left is "indecent" ("Can There Be a Decent Left...
...Terrorism should be fought as a crime against the innocent, just as organized crime is at home...
...Chomsky has referred to "the horrifying criminal assault," he has identified with the "unanimous sympathy for the victims...
...There are plenty of people ready to do that...
...Most of them opposed the Vietnam War long before the editors of Dissent...
...That's OK — but not in Dissent...
...I want a regime change at home...
...Kazin wants the left to communicate with the average American in a politically tactical matter...
...King was attacked then as a traitor, as hating America...
...In his survey of patriotic statements by dissenting Americans, Kazin omits both Twain and Henry David Thoreau, who asked rhetorically, in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today...
...Surely Chomsky's is a sensible observation...
...And, he has repeatedly argued that the hijackers of 9/11 should be treated as criminals and hunted down as such...
...We need what Dwight Macdonald termed, "specialists in abuse, technicians in vilification, expert mud slingers" who speak out against the "rationalized lunacy" of the governmental war party...
...The point of Cockburn's critique was to attack the dangerous simplicity of Bush & Company, who think that calling the enemy "evil" relieves Americans of responsibility for analyzing the event and even of having to think...
...Who cares...
...I have been a subscriber to Dissent on and off since its beginning, and I can still recall Irving Howe's piece in the Partisan Review in the winter of 1954 on the "Age of Conformity" It was a lament for the acquiescence of intellectuals in accepting much of the rampant nationalism, even patriotism of that time...
...Surely we don't need instructions from Michael Kazin, Mitchell Cohen, and Michael Walzer on how to be a "decent left...
...Apparently the decent one is Walzer's and the indecent his opponents...
...What does he mean by "holding a privileged place in one's heart...
...Is he suggesting that Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said, or Howard Zinn have renounced our democratic ideals...
...There must be two lefts here...
...We don't need a "patriotic" wing of the so-called "left" attacking another more critical wing as lacking in moral intelligence...
...What we need to do now is stop a war from starting...
...Anyone seriously engaged in activist politics wants to develop a constituency and see it grow...
...They would do well to read one of the journal's most articulate contributors, Ellen Willis, who points to the "problematic" aspect of patriotism that demands an a priori loyalty to the nation...
...I love New York, and my city was attacked, and I was shocked and saddened...
...If Kazin believes demanding that the American deed live up to the American creed is patriotism, then who does he think fails to qualify as patriotic...
...We don't need the argument that true change can come only from patriotic moderates such as those writing for Dissent...
...The United States has DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 85 ARGUMENTS a hell of a lot more capability to wreak havoc that it should bring criminals before an internathan the 9/11 hijackers...
...Kazin himself appears to have been intimidated by the increasingly strident nationalism in the country...
...politics...
...And if the current tional court...
...Because Kazin and others do not see a global community on the horizon, they characterize those who hope and work for one as deluded in their refusal to face up to the real world of power and join the "overwhelming majority" of the nationalist community...
...Major bookstores are flooded with patriotic Americanism from Daniel J. Flynn's Why the Left Hates America, Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism, Chris Matthews's America Beyond Our Grandest Dreams to Stephen Ambrose's To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian...
...Walzer is defending the 84 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 ARGUMENTS sorry history of Dissent's weaseling on the Vietnam War and smearing the anti–Vietnam War movement by summoning up the Vietcong flag wavers...
...If that should happen, all is lost...
...Muste, Staughton Lynd, and even Norman Thomas...
...But then, he remarks that the "leftist critique . . . 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...
...Did he think King had abandoned patriotism or hated America when he said that the American government was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and that the government "had no honorable intentions...
...He denounces her as ignorant of American history because she insists on a global vision rather than a chauvinistic one...
...Most serious critics of American society do just what he demands...
...They offer little evidence of such a repudiation...
...David Corn, the Washington editor of the Nation, attacks the organizers of the October 26, 2002, march on Washington as kooky sectarians and seems unimpressed that they managed to mobilize more than a hundred thousand antiwar protesters across the spectrum...
...Howard Zinn, a representative of what is often described in Dissent's pages as the unthinking, knee-jerk left, has disavowed a patriotism that demands conformity and acceptance...
...Certainly they understand that King needed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Malcolm X to make his own position persuasive...
...Kazin summons up the phrases of Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as dissenters who did not eschew patriotism, but he ignores William Lloyd Garrison, who was one of the first flag burners...
...They repeatedly argue that "the leftists" don't address the crucial question of what is to be done to protect the nation against terrorism...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., always claimed that he criticized America because he loved the country and wanted it to live up to its ideals...
...A more reasonable contrast would have been with Dave Dellinger, A.J...
...He reminded his readers that the glorious vision of intellectual life was a "readiness to stand alone" and to nourish a healthy skepticism: "The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have...
...They see their critics as "leftists who can't learn," who have little appreciation of the terrible differences in the current situation as compared with the past...
...With others, Howe went on to establish Dissent...
...Kazin can't think of any radical or reformer who repudiated the national belief system and had a major impact on U.S...
...When Dwight Macdonald was described as being a "good American" he challenged the accuracy of the statement and went on to say that "patriotism [had] never been one of [his] strong suits...
...ICHAEL WALZERS essay on whether a ' "decent left" is possible in a super power is unclear as to who and what constitute his "left...
...The point of the antiwar critics is that the "campaign" against terrorism should be a multilateral operation and og the antiwar critics is that the "campaign" against terrorism should be a multilateral operation and that it should bring criminals before an international court...
...It's this misplaced focus that is so disturbing...
...I think not...
...After an initial obligatory declaration of his love of country ("I am not now and have never been . . ." ), Kazin indicts Katha Pollitt, one of our more informed writers, for her rejection of the current flag wavers...
...MICHAEL WRESZIN is professor emeritus of Queens College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York...
...My problem is to gauge how much more dedicated and lethal the terrorist plotters are than Bush & Company...
...With the Bush regime pursuing increasingly dangerous policies at home and abroad (acknowledged by Dissent), it seems a political mistake to spend time attacking the minuscule sectarian left's critique of the administration and the government's foreign policy...
...Kazin asks, "How can one seriously engage in this conversation about protecting America if America holds no privileged place in one's heart...
...I don't need political commentators to tell me what and how to feel or how to express those feelings...
...Does Kazin consider these unpatriotic statements...
...From a cultural point of view they should recall the cosmopolitanism that was so much a part of the early Dissent worldview...
...Instead, we should now be in the streets...
...He answered that he could not "without disgrace be associated with it...
...Does he mean the present government or the shore line of Cape Cod, or one's neighborhood in New York, or a diner on Route 66...
...There are plenty of privileged places in my heart, but they have little to do with an argument tolerating an American-led regime change in Iraq...
...If Walzer seldom defines "the left," neither he nor Kazin defines patriotism, and both fail to distinguish it from nationalism...
...The Old Left and the Late Left have attacked the New Left for their unreasonableness, but in fact the New Left did more than its goading critics did to end a war, much more, I might add, than Dissent...
...Is this deja vu all over again...
...With all of this going on, Dissent informs us that we should speak "patriotically to our fellow citizens...
...From the offices of the White House to the chambers of the Congress, we now hear the demands that Americans speak with one voice...
...I don't believe this is true...
...This would include patient collection of information, the silent penetration of cells, the cutting off of financial support, and the dismantling of the communications used by the networks...
...In a slippery way, Kazin contrasts the liberal, patriotic leadership of King to that of the Weathermen or Abbie Hoffman...
...Were Walzer, Cohen, Isaac, and Kazin upset because, soon after the catastrophe, Alexander Cockburn was incensed that Bush called the hijackers cowards...
...One expects these smears from the New Republic, Commentary, the New Criterion and so forth, but in Dissent...
...The co-editors and such contributors as Kazin and Isaac see themselves as sophisticated practitioners of a "morally nuanced politics" sensitive to complexity...
...I believe that this government opposes much of what I think this country represents and what I believe to be its ideals...
...And yet, Michael Kazin, an articulate liberal, feels compelled to call for "A Patriotic Left" (Fall 2002...
...He chooses them because the Weathermen were violent and self-destructive and Hoffman was seen as a high-jinx radical...
...And incidentally, many think a change in American foreign policy, particularly concerning the unqualified support to the Israeli government, is essential...
...He cites Noam Chomsky as ignorant of history because he "describes patriotic blather as simply the governing elite's way of telling its subjects, 'You shut up and be obedient, and I'll relentlessly advance my own interests...
...Kazin is obviously aware that Bush, Ashcroft, & Company represent, as he puts it "the greed and arrogance" that betray "the apotheosis of democratic strivings...
...government since the Second World War (see almost any back issue of Dissent...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
