Confessions of an 'Anti-American': Responds
Kazin, Michael
ARGUMENTS Michael Kazin Responds THIS IS A DEFINING moment for the American left. As Michael Wreszin, a distinguished historian, is well aware, reform and radical movements always get...
...Wreszin forgets a basic adage of politics—study your opponents' successes...
...That would indeed be hard to take...
...This kind of left would represent only a small minority of citizens, from now until the distant future...
...In so doing, it would waste a fine opportunity to propose a serious alternative to Bush's arrogant, blundering policies—and to renew a left that, for three decades, has lacked the energy and hope that only a unifying moral vision can provide...
...If 9/11 had never happened, the regime of Bush II would resemble the second coming of the Harding administration—as an attractive, genial president with an unremarkable mind surrounded by corporate scoundrels...
...The battle against terrorism and what, at this writing, appears to be an imminent war with Iraq have already caused a serious rift on the left— which is, alas, a smaller creature than its ancestors...
...This is a matter not of obligation but of solidarity and common sense...
...To mock that belief system implies that one's fellow citizens— including those who carry placards reading "Peace is Patriotic"—are fools...
...Its only real task would be to protest against an evil empire whose sole redeeming feature is that it usually allows dissenters to speak and publish...
...On the other side sit, among others, some of the more loquacious editors of this magazine who believe the United States should battle terrorism and encourage democracy in the world but don't trust the current administration to carry out those mighty, laudable tasks...
...If the current antiwar movement fails to condemn such figures and scorns the very notion of patriotism, it will only ensure its isolation from other Americans...
...It would not choose between condemning Bush's imperial designs and Saddam's sadistic dictatorship but would make clear how each abets the other...
...its penchant for violence and contempt for democracy could never solve the problems of povDISSENT / Spring 2003 n 87 ARGUMENTS erty and injustice...
...A left that followed Wreszin's lead would continue to be essentially what it was in the months right after the minions of Osama bin Laden smashed into our lives: a movement of bitter iconoclasts and moral cynics of whom Noam Chomsky is the most prolific and popular example...
...the other believes tyrants and mass murderers must be quelled if one hopes to build a humane world...
...The alternative would be a movement of liberals and radicals who believe they can make political headway by embracing and seeking to apply ideals—democracy, civil liberties, social equality—that most Americans share...
...Doesn't he realize the latter assertion contradicts the former one...
...To me, the lessons of these events are clear...
...As Michael Wreszin, a distinguished historian, is well aware, reform and radical movements always get transformed in the crucible of war...
...MICHAEL KAzIN's latest book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s...
...Only when Bush's image switched from that of defender of ordinary Americans into the bully of the world did an antiwar movement begin to grow at home...
...To engage in politics on behalf of national ideals is to practice one's patriotism in a principled manner that most Americans can understand...
...And the ongoing crisis may further widen the split...
...The Civil War turned abolitionists into militant Republicans, World War I destroyed the dream of a unified social democracy, and the Vietnam War turned the tiny New Left into a mass insurgency—but one that few wage-earning Americans chose to follow...
...He chose not to pillory New Leftists, as did most Dissent editors at the time, for sometimes sounding like they hated the same country they wanted to change...
...Wreszin thinks it's "sensible" to dismiss love of country as a rulingclass smokescreen, yet still believes in "the American creed," although he doesn't stop to define it...
...I criticize America because I love her," explained Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke out against the Vietnam War...
...88 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...
...This movement would avoid telling one-sided truths about who, in the world, betrays those principles...
...But he agreed with Irving Howe and his colleagues that communism was only a symptom of what ailed the developing world...
...But the president's defense of "freedom" against the "evil" of terrorism instantly transformed him into a militant idealist, fighting to defend his fellow Americans...
...The enemy that American troops may now be fighting lacks any of the virtues that once led me and other young radicals into the mistake of romanticizing Vietnamese revolutionaries...
...Leftists who ridiculed this stance as nothing but self-serving cant made little headway in public opinion—and made themselves an easy target for the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Rush Limbaugh...
...The latter were at least attempting to liberate their nation from a foreign army and to gain a better lot for the poor...
...On one side are voices like Wreszin's, whose anger at George W. Bush and his fellow "warmongers" far outweighs his disgust at anything al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein have done...
...But a ruler who emulates Stalin and terrorists who long for the Caliphate traffic only in mass delusions and massive cruelty...
...One side trains all its outrage against those who rule from the White House and Capitol Hill...
...The question of patriotism is bound up with this ongoing debate...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
