I. An Inter-Jewish Schism

Have Jews gone right-wing? Even as the question may seem simplistic or politically incorrect, it presupposes agreement concerning the meaning of “left” and “right” in our post-cold war world of ideological disorientation. The French political commentator Daniel Lindenberg, in his Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Call to Order: An Inquiry into the New Reactionaries) includes a chapter entitled in English “When Jews Turn Right.”[2] His analysis of the situation is categorical. Preferring to err on the side of caution, I have turned his assertion into a question.

But why in a French text does Lindenberg announce his foregone conclusion in English? A preliminary response may be that to have said the same thing in French, in a work essentially critical in nature, would have been as unacceptable as calling the Jews, as de Gaulle did in an infamous 1967 press conference, “an elite, arrogant, and dominating people.” Indeed, in the past thirty years of French intellectual and literary life, and in its media culture, it has become almost unthinkable to label oneself as a partisan of the right. If in France today one speaks of a droite décomplexée—a right wing that has gotten rid of its complexes—it is precisely because all sectors of the right have long been identified, fairly or not, with Vichy and Pétain. Thus if you announced you were on the right, you were immediately suspected of harboring xenophobia, of tending toward fascism—or of simply being an outright fascist. As René Rémond put it in his massive study of the right in France, “identification with the tragic Vichy years has led to a long-term discrediting of the right wing in the eyes of public opinion—a discredit from which it has taken the right decades to recover.”[3] Rémond adds that “Collaboration with the Nazis was far from being the sole prerogative of the political right. . . . One could find a great number of trade-union activists and socialists who rallied to the cause for a variety of reasons and motivations: pacifism, anticommunism, anticapitalism, etc.” And, on the other hand, “not everyone on the right was pro-Vichy” (232.).

The fact remains that in an ideological climate where that sector of the political spectrum has so long been associated with the wartime collaboration, claiming that Jews have shifted to the right comes down to insinuating they have accomplished their own conservative, “nationalist” revolution; it suggests that, after having been fervent partisans of internationalism and of universalism, they have turned away from the world and inward upon themselves, that they have immured themselves within a petty, fearful community. According to Jean Daniel, a progressive Jewish intellectual of the same stripe as Lindenberg, Jews have in the last decade descended into a “Jewish prison” (such is the title of this book)—a ghetto of their own construction.[4]

This brings us to a second possible response to why Lindenberg resorts to English. Putting the sentence that way ties French Jews to the post-9/11 American neoconservatives who, before switching ideological sides, had been active in the 1960s New Left. In this scheme of things, not only did French Jews en masse allegedly support U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make matters worse, they have allowed themselves to be Americanized, that is, sectarian. Indeed, in Lindenberg’s view, which presupposed a French national unity that spurns community particularisms, the American social model is characterized by fragmentation, balkanization. Such so-called American “communitarianism” is inevitably condemned as reactionary when placed next to the French republic’s model of assimilation—a progressive concept in Lindenberg’s judgment. French Jews—unlike their American counterparts who stem from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires—are divided half and half between those of Eastern European extraction and those whose forbears came from the Mediterranean basin. Thus Lindenberg, who is Ashkenazic, has a ready-made culprit on hand: Shmuel Trigano, a Sephardic intellectual whom he accuses of being guilty of no less than “Sephardist [sic] populism.”

But none of this should really come as a surprise. Beginning with their immigration to France when North Africa was decolonized in the 1950s, Sephardim have been perceived as the noisy, visible Jews, as opposed to the more discreet Ashkenazim already on French soil. Mutatis mutandis, they are the equivalent of the Ostjuden arriving in France starting in the 1880s: an embarrassing reminder of Jewishness that resisted dissolution into European modernity, civility, and plain old good taste à la française. In sum, they represented the disintegration of the identity elaborated by the native French Jew, who preferred the appellation “Israelite.”

However, when Lindenberg puts “Sephardist populism” (not to say separatism) on trial, the indictment is hardly limited to a denunciation of some terrifying “identity politics.” Indeed, it is not enough to accuse French Jews of “turning right,” of becoming sectarian, or of betraying the Republic, secularism, and traditionally muted Franco-Jewishness. Lindenberg suggests that French Jews have actually been exploiting a wave of antisemitism that first erupted around 2000-2001 (and largely attributable to Muslim youth). But that’s not all. Lindenberg’s charges are aggravated by the fact that this swell of antisemitism (and here his argument intersects with that of Guillaume Weill-Raynal, another Jewish polemicist) would in fact be nothing other than a more or less imaginary, ideological construction of Sephardic Jews, the ultimate aim of which is to justify baser, chauvinistic political penchants like those celebrated by the early 20th-century French nationalist writer Charles Maurras.

So how is one to make heads or tails out of such ideological hodgepodge? How do we resolve the paradoxes? After all, Maurras’s doctrine—calling for defense of Western, and French, cultural and racial purity—is explicitly shot through with antisemitism and xenophobia. And indeed, according to certain self-proclaimed “leftist” Jewish journalists and intellectuals, French Jews have somehow become fascinated by and attracted to a Jewish remake of the Maurrassian doctrine, a version in which Zionism figures as an “Occidentocentric” ideology that is vaguely fascist and frankly racist. Thus Jean Birnbaum also supports, in his cleverly-titled pamphlet Les Maoccidents,[5] the hypothesis of a 180-degree turn among French Jews: from the extreme left to the extreme right; from the Red East to the West; from Maoist political activism in the ’60s to the Maurassian Action Française.

Here is Birnbaum’s argument in a nutshell: in the mindset of pre-World War II antisemites, the Jews embodied cosmopolitanism, a borderlessness that posed a threat to the integrity of the French nation. Jews—hard-line partisans of a doctrine of belonging everywhere and nowhere, of unaffiliation—represented transgression of boundaries and limits. They were fantasmatic figures of excess, of the inassimilable as such. Indeed, according to Birnbaum, present-day intellectuals—such as Jean-Claude Milner, a Chomskyan linguist and former Maoist who has disavowed his commitment to what he now sees as revolutionary “easy universalism”—have quite simply converted to a kind of philosemitic and Zionist ideology of the superiority of Western culture. According to Birnbaum, when Milner denounced shortly after September 11 the principle of borderlessness embodied in the post-World War II expansion of Europe, he was reactualizing the metaphysics of identity dear to the Action Française—minus the antisemitism, of course.[6] Milner would thus have invented a kind of a Judeo-Maurrassianism.

For Milner, the Jews who in 1948 set up a political entity circumscribed within the boundaries of the traditional nation-state pose ipso facto an ideological challenge to the limitless expansion that is at the heart of the postnational European democracy, basking in the postwar Pax europea. This Europe without borders finds its dialectical counterpart in the limitlessness of jihad and the expansion of Islam. This expansionism is a detriment to the Jewish people, caught between the rock of European decline and the hard place of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Milner allows himself, then, to draw a paradoxical equivalence between peace and jihad. Pacifist and postnational ideologies would thus also find their counterpart in a terrorism that is every bit as transnational. Hence, for Milner, contemporary anti-Zionism in Europe and support for the Palestinians would somehow bear witness to the constitutive limitlessness of Enlightenment Europe—a limitlessness that is the direct heir to the genocidal expansionism of the Third Reich. In Milner’s hyperbolic vision, there’s no essential interruption between Nazi anti-Semitism and contemporary European anti-Zionism; no hiatus separating the exalted celebration of war by the Third Reich from the kratos without a demos of the seemingly unreal, polemophobic, anonymous bureaucracy that present-day Europe is, run by eurocrats in Brussels.[7] As the abhorred conveyors of a biblical “difficult universalism” (as opposed to the “easy universalism” of Saint Paul, Marx, or Mao—the distinction is Milner’s), the Jews somehow constitute an obstacle to the spread of European Enlightenment, somehow obstruct the bulimic pacifism of democratic Europe.

Even if Milner’s argument has its limits, Birnbaum’s hypothesis, infinitely more superficial on a theoretical level, fails to convince. If he is to be believed, the defense of Israel articulated by certain current French philosemitic intellectuals must be understood as a direct continuation of the pro-Western ideologies of the past—formations that were also, of course, antisemitic! Pro-Israel Jews and non-Jews in Europe today (Shmuel Trigano, Daniel Sibony, Éric Marty, Jean-Claude Milner, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Alain Finkielkraut, to name a few) would be mere puppets moved by the strings of an antisemitic and racist Western unconscious, and their philosemitism nothing more than the ugly mask of Occidentocentric racism. And the “real” Jews—the underdogs—would be the Arabs, or, rather, the second and third-generation immigrant youths living in the suburbs of France. The inassimilable Other for these philosemites is apparently Islam itself. Here, Birnbaum singles out Benny Lévy as the very exemplification of his hypothesis. Lévy (a.k.a. Pierre Victor, the nom de guerre by which he was known during his involvement with the Proletarian Left—before his “return” to Jewish orthodoxy) declared at the end of his life in 2003 that in order to mobilize and revolutionize the immigrant lumpenproletariat back in the ’60s, one would have to settle the nationalist squabbles dividing the Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians (Birnbaum, 62). Lévy can thus—and not without a sense of humor—brag that he invented the Palestinians to this effect.

Are we supposed to understand, then, that the Palestinian cause was the brainchild of a Jewish Maoist seeking to channel the revolutionary potential of Arab immigrants? Would Pierre Victor be none other than a little-red-book-carrying progenitor of the Palestinians in the same way that Moses the Egyptian created the Jews, according to the historical romance contained in Moses and Monotheism? If this Freudian Witz were true, then it would be one of the many dirty tricks history has played on the Jews. The Judeo-Maoists—i.e., yesterday’s de-Judaized revolutionary Jews—would have thus created the very conditions of possibility of the ideological about-face that was awaiting them a couple of decades down the line. That is, of course, provided (a) that this about-face has in fact taken place, and (b) that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has indeed been the determining factor in this ideological shift. (All the same, it is difficult to see how Benny Lévy’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism has anything to do at all with pro-Westernism or Maurrassianism.)

All things being equal, that pro-Israel intellectuals have fundamentally become political reactionaries is also the hypothesis put forth by a young French Jewish philosopher, Ivan Segré.[8] Contrary to Birnbaum or Lindenberg, Segré (who is close to Benny Lévy’s son, René Lévy) styles himself as a juif de l’Étude, “Jew of [Torah] study.” This inter-Jewish conflict—upon whose attendant Latin Quarter skirmishes I am merely attempting to cast some light—is thus complicated by overlapping biographical, personal, and indeed Oedipal dimensions. It’s a veritable family affair. Shmuel Trigano taught rudiments of Hebrew to none other than Benny Lévy. In 2000, the latter founded, along with Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Institut d’Études Levinassiennes (Institute of Levinassian Studies) in Jerusalem. This is the very Finkielkraut whom Ivan Segré denounced as a pro-Western hack in his doctoral thesis—a thesis directed by Benny’s son René, the Marxist anti-Zionist philosopher Alain Badiou, and the late Trotskyite philosopher Daniel Bensaïd.

Indeed, as an acolyte of Badiou, who wrote a preface for one of the two volumes of his published dissertation,[9] Segré represents the synthesis of Benny Lévy’s two lives: involvement in the Proletarian Left, and conversion to Orthodox Judaism.[10] In The Philosemitic Reaction (La Réaction philosémite), Segré takes aim at Jewish and non-Jewish, French and other European intellectuals alike (he includes Oriana Fallaci on his list of offenders), for whom, in his view, Islamophobia and defense of Israel are two sides of the same coin. According to Segré, the intellectuals Lindenberg condemns as “communitarians” imprisoned in Jewish tradition are anything but that: on the contrary, they are traitors to an “authentic” Judaism insofar as they regard Western values as sacred, and to the extent that this very gesture of sanctifying Western values partakes of the history of anti-Semitism in France. It is thus in the name of this supposedly authentic Judaism that Segré lambasts these “communitarian” French intellectuals who, under the guise of denouncing anti-Semitism, revive Maurras’s nationalist doctrine.

We find ourselves, then, confronted with a constellation of texts and authors who all posit some kind of Judeo-Maurrassian conspiracy, or at the very least detect a Judeo-Maurrassian tropism among certain French and European intellectual defenders of Israel. As divergent as may be the textual and epistemological approaches of Lindenberg, Segré, Weill-Raynal, and Jean Daniel (one could add to this list the historian Esther Benbassa and the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco), they all come, more or less, to the same conclusion: French Jews, taken in by Zionism, have veered right.[11] They’ve been Westernized.

Yet little consensus exists concerning what the term “right” could possibly mean in this context. Does being on the right entail rejection of the European Enlightenment (following the counter-revolutionary, antimodern posture of the early 19th-century ideologue Joseph de Maistre)? Or on the contrary, does it mean rallying to the cause of Western modernity in order to defend it from “Oriental obscurantism”? (This latter alternative identifies the right wing with the European colonists’ supposedly civilizing mission, placing it on the side of the arrogance of the Enlightenment.) Does being on the right mean seeing in the values of the West (which here includes Israel) a rampart against obscurantism?

Among the authors discussed here favorable to Israel, two contradictory possibilities emerge. (1) European Enlightenment thinkers are in their very essence hostile to the Jews; this is the position of Milner, Benny Lévy, and Trigano. (2) Inversely, the Jews and Israel are the guardians protecting the West and its Enlightenment legacy from being overwhelmed by a new wave of totalitarian obscurantism; Finkielkraut, for example, sees in advocacy of Israel a defense of France in both real and ideal terms, as an ethnically indivisible republic. Indeed, in Finkielkraut’s estimation, neo-antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric are the corollaries of a new kind of Francophobia accompanying the rejection of Western civilization.[12] Jean Birnbaum neatly sums up this division among those who defend Israel: “Some affirm that the West has built itself on the ruins of Israel; others assure us that Israel is the sentinel of the West” (Birnbaum, 84). The title of Segré’s text, The Philosemitic Reaction­ is disconcerting. Is he implying that love of Jews is reactionary? And if philosemitism is reactionary, would it not then follow that antisemitism is progressive? Or, simply, are we to hear in “reaction” the fact that certain intellectuals “react” (in a purely physical or mechanical, rather than ideological sense) to antisemitism by developing excessive fondness for Jews? The title is at the very least ambiguous. Reading Segré’s book, one gleans that “philosemitic” here means pro-Zionist, or pro-Israel. But we have to ask if the defense of Israel and of the Zionist project is in and of itself reactionary. Can such defense only be articulated from an anti-progressive stance? To put it bluntly: does being pro-Israel mean being on the right?

II. Israel, the Jews, & the Left: Primal Scene

Not content with analyzing current developments in this inter-Jewish conflict ravaging the cafés of the Latin Quarter, I’d like to trace our way back to the source of all these paradoxes and misunderstandings. For what is taking place today on the Parisian literary and intellectual scene is simply an acting-out, the manifestation of the turbulence gripping French Jewish consciousness ever since the creation of Israel.

We don’t have to start from the Six-Day War—and even less from the two Intifadas—to observe Israel’s being assigned to the reactionary camp. From its very inception, any defense of the Jewish state as a utopia-come-true aroused suspicion; and as soon as the left began identifying with anticolonial struggles in the 1950s, it distanced itself from Israel. Up until then, the new Jewish homeland had not only been perceived as the fruit born out of the struggle against the British Empire, it was also supposed to be the solution to the alienation of European Jewry. In other words, Israel could be seen as a manifestation of political progress within the terms of class warfare, or indeed along the lines of the various struggles for national liberation. Throughout the 1950s, however, the left construed Israel more and more as a henchman of political reaction. By 1965—two years before Israel’s territorial gains in the Six-Day War—Emmanuel Levinas had the following to say concerning the watershed events of 1948: “Founders of the state found themselves suddenly on the side of the colonizers. Israel’s independence was immediately called imperialism, oppression of the natives, racism. Reality didn’t measure up to utopia. . . . For perhaps the first time in their history, the Jews found themselves thrown in with all that was reactionary, and their hearts were torn between an instinctive sense of belonging and a progressivism just as unshakeable.”[13]

Let us turn our attention, then, to the primal scene of this alienated French-Jewish either-or, this split between trueness to oneself and fidelity to an ideal of progress. The division is not so much between the Jewish community and the republic (rehashing that tired accusation of constituting a “nation within the nation,” of harboring dual loyalties), as it is between attachment to Israel and identification with the left; between attraction to the social (even somewhat socialist) democracy which the Jewish state was at its inception and sympathy for the anticolonialist Arab nationalism that became a touchstone of the French left during the struggles for independence in North Africa.

Claude Lanzmann, in a recent larger-than-life memoir entitled Le Lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare), recalls: On the eve of the Six-Day War, Les Temps Modernes—the journal founded by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—launched an issue on the Arab-Israeli conflict that would ultimately clock in at some one thousand pages. Just before its appearance, Lanzmann, le Castor (i.e. “the Beaver,” Sartre’s hardly translatable nickname for de Beauvoir), and Sartre himself went to Egypt; they were invited there by Mohamed Hassanein Heykal, editor of Al-Ahram, an important national daily, as well as a personal friend of Nasser. We thus find our ambassadors of the Left Bank off on a mission to the Orient, visiting Cairo’s museums, the City of the Dead, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings. To top it all off, they took in the tantalizing spectacle of a belly-dance. The description of it treats us to an avatar of Flaubert’s courtesan Kuchuk Hanem—or perhaps a new Salomé. In any event, we are so privileged as to witness the death spasms of the French literary eroticization of the Orient, before the heavy hand of political correctness suffocated it altogether: “The most famous belly-dancer in all Egypt was whirling around the table. . . She took my hand and pulled me center stage, where I stood perfectly still, quite like a totem pole, under the eyes of Sartre, the Beaver, Ali. All the while, the gyration of her hips, the audacious thrusting and sudden withdrawing of her pubis, offered the latter to me and took it from me, unbearably.”[14]

Despite these very official distractions, Sartre—strangely preoccupied, overwhelmed by his various commitments—drowned in alcohol worries that revealed themselves to be more political than existential. On one occasion, the great writer, having unwound a bit more than may have been advisable, let it all out. “During our Egyptian trip, Sartre was visibly prey to tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions. His schedule was frenetic. . . and he let himself go at night by drinking excessively. . . . More than once, Ali and I had to lead him staggering back to his hotel suite. . . . One night, drunker than usual, as we were holding him up, he began to insult us in slurring voice, calling us ‘faggots’ and insinuating that we were the best example of a solution to the conflict” (Lanzmann 400).

So Judeo-Arabic homoeroticism was the solution to a conflict already two decades old! Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that before? Some fifteen years earlier, in his 1952 Saint Genet, to Jean Genet’s avowal that he could never have sex with a Jew, Sartre amusingly quipped: “Israel can sleep in peace.”[15] And yet, what comes out in the final analysis from these inebriated and sarcastic Sartrian ramblings is that if only the Jews and the Arabs would sleep together, everyone could sleep peacefully at night.

As demanded by the punctilious impartiality of an issue of the Temps Modernes, the Egyptian stay would be followed up with a trip to Israel, a country Lanzmann had already visited in 1952, four years after its independence. It was over the course of this first stay that Lanzmann, an assimilated Jew, had the following epiphany, which he later shared with Sartre and which led Sartre to revise the central argument of his Anti-Semite and Jew, which had it that Jewish existence itself was a dialectical response to their adversaries’ actions. Lanzmann realized “the Jews didn’t have to wait for antisemites to appear in order to exist” (248), thus discovering the particularity of being Jewish.

At this point in narrating their Egyptian epic, Lanzmann sketches the portrait of a Sartre flattered by Nasser’s invitation and drawn to the cause of Arab nationalism. But what about the “visible tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions” that he could calm only by emptying a bottle of booze every night? For Lanzmann, the problem was that Sartre was dragging his feet. He dreaded the idea of the trip to Israel: “Sartre was torn between his preference for the charming and splendid Egyptians who were our hosts, for the Arab cause in general, and unconscious anxiety at the idea of departure for Israel. I understood that for him I was a constant reminder of the impending journey, a kind of statue of the Commander for Don Giovanni, a guardian of Israel keeping watch lest we fail to maintain a minimum degree of impartiality. Thus I was preventing him from fully enjoying Arabic seductions” (Lanzmann 401).

Let us pause to consider the richness of these remarks that constitute, provided we pay sufficient attention to the actual signifiers, a political psychoanalysis of Sartre; perhaps even more forcefully, they adumbrate a metaphysical psychoanalysis of the ambiguities inherent in the left’s position vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Note the anxiety that attaches itself to Israel; the charm of Egypt and of the Arab cause; and the statue of the Commander. Lanzmann, or, as Milner would put it, “le nom juif” (the Jewish name or signifier), functions here as the incarnation of the Law, the “guardian of Israel,” the brake on, or obstacle to, the plenitude of jouissance, sexual enjoyment. Israel, in other words, figures as a super-ego reminding France, and Europe, of their guilt. We have already encountered these problematics in the marvelous, and now classic, study by Éric Marty of l’angoisse du bien [the anxiety of goodness] in Jean Genet’s oeuvre. However, though Sartre justified the recourse to terrorism (he condoned in particular the Munich attacks on Israeli athletes during the Olympics), unlike Genet he remained prey to an inner split with respect to what he termed—well before Jean-François Lyotard introduced the term into the philosophical lexicon—the “Judeo-Arabic différend.”[16] Concerning Sartre’s pangs of conscience, Lanzmann’s testimony is invaluable: despite his support of Algerian, and then Palestinian terrorism, France of the 1970s owes Sartre “a debt for not having known violence perpetrated by small extremist cells ready to imitate their Italian or German counterparts” (Lanzmann 416).[17] However, there is no better synthesis of the moral, or indeed metaphysical, dilemma confronting Sartre, and perhaps the left in its general posture towards Jews and Israel, than the following exhortation from his introduction to the special issue of Les Temps Modernes, articulated in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict that had exploded in the region, and in the context of Israel’s abandonment by de Gaulle: “Let us not forget that these Israelis are also Jews” (Lanzmann 406).

Israel, a mere slit of earth and sand, indifferent to the lavish splendor of the Orient, where a great man, even if he is Jean-Paul Sartre, is only—to use Sartre’s own phrase from his autobiographical Les Mots—“a man made of the same stuff as all other men, equal to other men and to whom any one at all is equal” (Lanzmann 215). “Upon our arrival, we were welcomed,” Lanzmann writes, “in the midst of a jovial, genial, and democratic chaos. The Israelis who invited us had done their best, but their means couldn’t possibly rival those of the Egyptian head of state” (Lanzmann 403). These lines contain a bitter assessment: to the egalitarian disorder of the young Israeli social democracy, Sartre would have preferred the sumptuous order of Nasserian power. To the egalitarian Jewish demos, the French Communist Party’s fellow traveler would have preferred the pomp and circumstance of an Arab autocrat.

The stay in Israel was a fiasco, or at least that’s the impression one gets reading Lanzmann’s memoirs.[17] Sartre refused to meet any Israelis wearing army uniforms (including women, laments Lanzmann, ever the ladies’ man, and who in this respect proves to be a bit more Don Juan than statue of the Commander), on the pretext that they were objective allies of American imperialism. Lanzmann retorted that to disavow the very raison d’être of the Israeli nation, i.e., “the reappropriation of power and violence by Jews,” amounted to willful misapprehension of Israel’s historical significance. In the end, the future director of the documentary Israel, Why returned to Paris, leaving Sartre and the Castor behind him.[18]

To conclude, I would like to ruffle the feathers of these Jewish leftist intellectuals, pamphleteers and ideologues, who attribute to their pro-Israel homologues racist, “Occidentalist,” “communitarian,” or Maurassian tendencies. To do so, I shall call to my aid Caroline Fourest, a feminist commentator who can hardly be suspected of harboring right-wing sympathies; she is a critic of the alliance between the far left and Muslim fundamentalism, and author of a study, Brother Tariq, that prefigures Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals by carefully picking apart the double-speak practiced by the all-too-groovy Muslim cleric Tariq Ramadan, as well as delving into his links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.[19] In La Tentation obscurantiste (The Temptation of Obscurantism), in turn, Fourest identifies an obscurantist tendency presently operating at the very heart of the left, a tendency that had earlier produced the fellow travelers, the “useful idiots,” of communist totalitarianism.[20] Fourest’s conclusion is that the left suffers from a structural split into an anti-totalitarian movement on the one hand, and on the other a “third-worldism” that is the legacy of the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryear and that today manifests itself as an antiracism, antiglobalism, multiculturalism. In her view, nothing suggests that the objectives of these two factions necessarily coincide. Anti-totalitarian leftists would logically take a dim view of their third-worldist fellows who flirt with totalitarian, autocratic, or theocratic regimes and ideologies—all in the name of defense against neo-colonialism and Western racism. The anti-totalitarian left Fourest claims as her own ought to be dismayed by the support the other left brings to fundamentalist ideologues, on the pretext of combating the arrogance of Western civilization. This support, for example, sacrifices feminist principles on the holy altar of multiculturalism, as one sees in the strange tolerance third-worldists lavish upon the veil or the burqa. Yet condemning the various regimes that trample on the rights of man and woman suffices to have one immediately branded a party to West’s essential racism or a dupe of its colonial unconscious. At base, what Fourest laments in her attack on the third-worldist left is simply the latest avatar of the “treason of the intellectuals”—of the elite’s dalliance with a new form of totalitarianism.[21] Contrary to Ivan Segré’s hypothesis, the traitors here are not the so-called Judeo-Maurrassians, but the leftists accommodating Islamic fundamentalism, who write off the values of liberty and equality as collateral losses presumably made up for by advances towards a new equitable world order.

I’ll conclude, then, on a note that is only partially tongue in cheek. I began by asking if French Jews have veered off to the right. I described the assault by certain French Jewish polemicists on defenders and supporters of Israel. Then I interpreted the violence of these attacks as a symptom of the continuing shock undergone by Jewish consciousness starting in the 1960s, when Jews found themselves torn between faithfulness to Israel and loyalty to progressivism. Let us, then, consider the following: in his book, La gauche et l’égalité (The Left and Equality), Jean-Michel Salanskis defines the left as structured by a “critique of power taking the form of a critique of man’s humiliation at the hands of transcendence.”[22] From this definition, Salanskis derives a paradoxical postulate: it is necessary “to eliminate entirely the communist episode from the left,” for this episode partakes of the crushing of the people by one man who can “become the keystone of the world, restoring the attributes and the aura of royalty” (Salanskis 37). If Salanskis is right, wouldn’t it be just as legitimate to ask our difficult question of the left—in its third-worldist, multicultural, antiglobalist and antiracist iteration, i.e, the left that has cast lovesick glances at Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Nasser, Arafat, Khomeini, and more recently at Chávez and Ramadan? Wouldn’t we be as justified in asking if it isn’t that left that has veered to the right?

Notes

[1]The French version of this essay will appear in the French Jewish monthly L’Arche, 633, February 2011. Special thanks go to my friend Alan Astro for his invaluable suggestions and collaboration in making this essay easier to read for an English-speaking readership.

[2]Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002).

[3]René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982) 231.

[4]Jean Daniel, La Prison juive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).

[5]Jean Birnbaum, Les Maoccidents: un néoconservatisme à la française (Paris: Stock, 2009).

[6]Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (Paris: Verdier, 2003).

[7]Pierre Manent, La Raison des nations: Réflexions sur la démocratie en Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

[8]Ivan Segré, La Réaction philosémite, ou la trahison des clercs (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes), 2009.

[9]Segré, op. cit.

[10]On the singular path followed by Benny Lévy, see Milner, L’Arrogance du présent: Regard sur une décennie 1965-1975 (Paris: Grasset, 2009).

[11]Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Les Juifs ont-ils un avenir? (Paris: Hachette, 2002) (see in particular the postface); and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Retour sur la question juive (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009). See also Esther Benbassa, “How One Becomes a Traitor” in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, ed. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller (London: Routledge, 2009).

[12]Amongst his many writings on this topic, see Finkielkraut’s Au nom de l’autre: Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[13]Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté : Essais sur le judaïsme, 2d ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 287.

[14]Claude Lanzmann, Le Lièvre de Patagonie (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 399.

[15]Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (London: Heinemann, 1988), 203. For a critique of Sartre’s reading of Genet and the Jews, see Éric Marty, Bref séjour à Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[16]On Sartre and the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). One finds in this study some of the most elucidating and comprehensive analyses of Sartre’s and the French left’s ambivalences with respect to this conflict, torn as they are between commitment to anticolonial politics and a sense of historical responsibility to the Jewish people; consider the difficulty for them of construing Zionism and the creation of Israel as both a national liberation movement and a “colonialist” phenomenon.

[17]The account Judaken offers of the stay in Israel is more positive. We should note that Lanzmann praises Sartre’s prudence with respect to terrorism and regrets his reticence vis-à-vis his time spent in Israel, whereas Judaken, who is a historian, paints a picture of Sartre as a supporter, unlike the revolutionary left, of Palestinian terrorism, but who is all the same rather enthusiastic during his trip to Israel.

[18]Claude Lanzmann, dir., Pourquoi Israel (Israel, Why), Cinéart, 1973.

[19]Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

[20]Caroline Fourest, La Tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset, 2005).

[21]Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1928).

[22]Jean-Michel Salanskis, La gauche et l’égalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).

Russell Berman (“Cultural Studies & the ‘Cold War’ on the Left”) is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.  He received his B.A. from Harvard (1972) and his Ph.D. from Washington University (1979) in German Literature. He joined the faculty of Stanford in the same year. His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Recent books include Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his other books and articles he has written widely on German literary and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-atlantic relations.  He has served in numerous administrative capacities at Stanford, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the editor of Telos, and he will become the President of the Modern Language Association in 2011.

Michael  Bérubé (“The Left at Bay”) is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of several books, including What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, The Employment of the English, Life as We know It (which was a New York Times notable book and NPR book of the year), and The Left at War.  He has contributed to numerous magazines and writes a popular blog, Airspace, at michaelburube.com.

Gabriel Noah Brahm (“The Post-Left at War & the Cultural Studies Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy & International Relations”) is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in the History of Criticism and Theory, at Northern Michigan University, and a Schusterman Research Fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University.  His published work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Democratiya, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetics Today, Rethinking History, The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Wiley-Blackwell 2011), and elsewhere.

Jeff Bloodworth (“The [Heterodox] Left at Peace: Or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do”) is an assistant professor of history at Gannon University. His articles have appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Journal of the Historical Society, and The Chronicles of Oklahoma. He is currently completing a manuscript detailing the history of American liberalism from 1968-1992.

Bruno Chaouat (“Have French Jews Veered to the Right?”) is Associate Professor of French and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has edited one volume of essays on shame, and another volume on terror. He has published a book on the 19^th-century French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, as well as numerous articles on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought. His articles have appeared in France and the U.S. in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Diacritics, Critique, L’Esprit Créateur, L’Arche, and Yale French Studies. He has reflected on French debates concerning Jews in France, the memory and the representation of the Holocaust, and the impact of the Middle-East conflict in literature and theory. He has a book forthcoming on the different literary and philosophical responses to what he perceives as a malaise in liberal democracy in the aftermath of the Cold War. And he is finishing another book on Jews as a trope in French thought from literary theory in the1960s to contemporary debates about the Middle East conflict and the “new antisemitism.”

Nick Cohen (“The New ‘Manichean’ Left & the Old Right: Tolerating the Intolerable”) is a columnist for the London Observer. He is the author of several books including What’s Left? (2007) and Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009).

Elizabeth Faucett (reviewing Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel) is an M.A. student in English at Northern Michigan University, where she is completing a thesis on the post-9/11 novel.

Paul Hollander (“Toward a More Rational Left?”)  is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University.  He is the author or editor of fourteen books, the latest one entitled The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness and Anti-Americanism (2009).  His next book, Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America, will be published in Spring of 2011.

Gregory J. Lobo (“For Liberalism & Thinking Politically Again: Reflections Inspired by Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War“) is Associate Professor in the department of Lenguajes y Estudios Socioculturales at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He teaches courses in cultural theory and studies in the department’s pre- and post-graduate programs, and his research attempts to unravel the nexus of culture and power both in Latin America and beyond. He has been invited to speak on his work by universities in both Colombia and the United States, and was recently named International Visiting Scholar by the Northern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in various international venues and in 2009 he published the book Colombia: algo diferente de una nación (Bogotá: Uniandes, CESO). He is currently working on an expanded, updated English version.

Ted McAllister (“Can the Left Govern?”) holds the Edward L. Gaylord Chair of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and is an intellectual historian specializing in modernity and its critics.  His published works include Revolt Against Modernity:  Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order (Kansas 1995).  He writes widely on the history and philosophy of American conservatism, on the philosophy of history, and the historicity of human culture and identity.  A regular contributor to the online magazine, Front Porch Republic, his current projects include a book on Walter Lippmann and, subsequently, a history of the Baby-boomers.

Scott R. Paeth (“The Need for an Augustianian Left”) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School. He is the author or editor of five books, including Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse (Eerdmans 2010); Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology and Social Theory in the Work of Jurgen Moltmann (Ashgate 2008); Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ (United Church Press 2006); Religious Perspectives on Business Ethics (Sheed & Ward 2006); and The Local Church in a Global Era: Reflections for a New Century (Eerdmans 2000).

Luke Thominet (“Operation New Dawn: The Iraq War Debate Seven Years Later”) earned his BA in International Relations and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and is currently an MFA student in English at Northern Michigan University, working on his fiction thesis entitled, Falls.

Elhanan Yakira (“Whose Left, Which War? A Comment from Jerusalem”) is currently Schulman Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of Philosophy, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in France.  He is author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel (Cambridge 2010).  He is working on a book about Spinoza.

Jonathan Franzen’s position in the contemporary American literary landscape is a curious one. His two latest novels – The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) – have been more or less universally lauded by literary critics. Freedom was thus proclaimed a “masterpiece of American fiction” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, and in the Guardian it was hailed as nothing less than “the novel of the century.” And last fall The Corrections was chosen as the best novel of the past decade in a widely publicized poll involving several prominent authors and literary critics. Despite this lavish praise, Franzen’s novels have been largely neglected by literary scholars, at least compared to contemporaries like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who have both had entire books and special issues of journals devoted to their work.

As the first book devoted entirely to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Stephen J. Burn’s excellent study goes a long way toward filling this critical lacuna. His book has a double aim: to provide a study of Franzen’s work (with particular emphasis on the novels), and to situate Franzen in a larger group of contemporary authors who can be loosely defined as the successors to literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and John Barth. These successors, whom Burn tentatively labels as “post-postmodernists,” include David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who are also amply treated in the book.

In his preface Burn discusses Franzen’s critical neglect and he speculates that this neglect to a large extent stems from factors that are external to the author’s novels. Franzen has always been very vocal in his hostility toward the academy and this agonistic attitude may have discouraged scholars from venturing further into Franzen’s fictional woods. Furthermore, Franzen’s clumsy behavior when The Corrections was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club in the fall of 2001 has drawn a lot of attention away from the work itself. (Oprah has apparently forgiven Franzen, since she promptly chose Freedom for her book club just after the novel’s publication. This time around, Franzen gracefully accepted the honor). Such external factors have without a doubt contributed to Franzen’s being passed over by many critics, and Stephen Burn therefore wisely chooses to bypass such distractions in order to focus on Franzen’s novels.

Before his analyses of the three novels (the study was published before the release of Freedom), Burn provides a valuable overview of Franzen’s early writing, much of which has so far remained unidentified. This overview is supplemented by an excellent bibliography at the end of the book, which includes Franzen’s juvenilia from high school and college, as well as his coauthored scientific articles on seismicity. After the chapter on Franzen’s early career, Burn moves on to Franzen’s novels which are treated in separate chapters. In all three chapters, Burn fully demonstrates what was also apparent in his book on Wallace’s Infinite Jest: that he is a very skillful close reader with a knack for detecting intricate patterns, digging up hidden allusions and parsing out complex chronologies. The three chapters confidently pin down the central themes of Franzen’s novels, and at the same time they draw thoughtful parallels to contemporary novels by Wallace and Powers. The analysis of Franzen’s debut The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) convincingly traces the novel’s elaborate intertextual dialogue with T. S. Eliot, while the chapter on Strong Motion (1992) focuses on Franzen’s innovative use of what Burn aptly terms “temporal form.”

The most comprehensive and convincing of the three readings, however, is Burn’s analysis of what remains Franzen’s most important novel, The Corrections. In this chapter Burn successfully shows how intricately patterned, densely interconnected and discreetly experimenting Franzen’s novel of the dysfunctional Lambert family really is, and his analysis constitutes a resounding answer to those critics who considered the novel a retrograde exercise in conventional realism. The most pertinent part of the analysis is Burn’s discussion of the novel’s different ideas of the self. In interviews, Franzen has stated that The Corrections is very much a novel about the self, and Burn demonstrates how different characters in the novel are refracted through different conceptions of the self: Chip’s Foucauldian idea of the self as shaped by institutional power structures, Gary’s materialist account of subjectivity as the inevitable outcome of certain chemical and electrical impulses, Alfred’s philosophical notions of identity, etc. Franzen doesn’t privilege any of these conceptions but stages an ongoing discussion between them, Burn argues.

The readings of the three novels draw a multifaceted portrait of Jonathan Franzen’s achievement, and at the end of the final chapter, I found myself hankering for a chapter on Freedom, which is both a logical extension of Franzen’s first three novels and a step in a new direction. That chapter will have to wait for the paperback edition of Burn’s study which will hopefully be published eventually. Such a subsequent edition could also benefit from a more elaborate discussion of Franzen’s non-fiction. Throughout the book, Burn exhibits a marked impatience with Franzen’s essays, where thorny contradictions are often glibly resolved through “rhetorical flourishes” (in Burn’s words). Burn rightly argues that such contradictions are held in tension in Franzen’s novels, which he therefore holds in much higher esteem than the essays, but his book could nevertheless profitably have included a chapter on the essays collected in How to Be Alone and on Franzen’s memoirs The Discomfort Zone, both of which remain integral parts of Franzen’s collected work.

As stated in the beginning, the purpose of Stephen Burn’s book is two-fold, and even though his introduction to Franzen’s work is very valuable in itself, the most important part of the study probably lies in its ongoing discussion of Franzen’s position in a larger American literary landscape. This position is primarily outlined in the first chapter of the book, where Burn draws a map of American fiction at the millennium, with particular emphasis on literary postmodernism and what came after. While postmodernism has gradually grown weary throughout the 1990s, a new generation of authors have come of age; a generation that attempts to move beyond the pervasive irony and self-reflection of postmodernism. This movement, which in addition to Franzen includes figures such as the late David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, is tentatively labeled post-postmodernism by Burn, who outlines three major characteristics of post-postmodern literature: 1) Post-postmodernism explicitly looks back to its roots in postmodernism. 2) It is informed by the postmodernist critique of the realist belief in language as a mere mirror of reality, but at the same time it is characterized by a greater urge to represent something real than its postmodern predecessors. 3) It is much more concerned with notions of character than postmodernism.

Burn apologetically admits that the term post-postmodernism is an ungainly one, but he rightly points out that the term has already been widely employed by e.g. David Foster Wallace and the critic Robert L. McLaughlin. Nevertheless, in its awkward accumulation of prefixes the term seems to be one of the more unfortunate names for a movement that has elsewhere been called for instance “postironic literature” or “the new sincerity.” Neither of these alternatives are perfect, but with their implications of the movement’s specific aesthetic and ethical aims, they seem preferable to Burn’s (and Wallace’s and McLaughlin’s) term, which mainly implies a purely chronological succession. And if we accept the label post-postmodernism, then what are we to call the literature of the 2030s: postpostpostmodernism? Maybe we should simply take our cue from Mark Nechtr, a character in David Foster Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, who like Wallace and Franzen wishes to move beyond the trappings of postmodernism:

Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. (Westward, 332-33)

Gfhrytytu really seems to be as good a name as any…

In addition to the name of the beast, one could also discuss the specific traits Burn includes under his post-postmodern heading. The three major characteristics outlined by Burn are a very good starting point, but the list could easily be extended to include for instance a fiercely ambivalent relationship to the electronic mass media, a critique of postmodern irony and a corresponding emphasis on sincerity, a marked interest in materiality and the body, a preference for the suburbs as a setting, a strong emphasis on family – all of which would add to the discussion of post-postmodernism’s corrections of the postmodern patriarchs and help bring the movement into clearer focus. Still, it must be emphasized that Burn’s lucid, sober and well-argued study of Jonathan Franzen and his post-postmodern peers marks an inspiring and indispensable opening of a discussion which will hopefully continue in the years to follow, as we try to plot a meaningful route through the tangled topography of contemporary American fiction.

Three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo wrote in an essay titled, “In the Ruins of the Future”: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted…The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately.”[1] DeLillo asks, as many have and continue to do in the time since that awful day, whether it is possible for literature to reconstruct what happened, to provide a medium for making meaning, and thus move beyond the traumatic. Kristiaan Versluys, in his critical examination of “9/11 fiction,” argues that while the great September 11 novel has not been written and maybe never will, there have been genuine attempts made to “affirm and counteract the impact of trauma” (13).

Versluys’s book is primarily, though not consistently, structured around this idea of the 9/11 novel as a means of, “wrenching trauma out of the realm of the inarticulate and nudging it toward expression [as the] first step in the healing process” (70). In the two strongest chapters, he examines the process of both national and self-recovery in the wake of September 11, as depicted in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a graphic representation, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Spiegelman’s depiction is worth noting in part, Versluys states, because he was a direct witness to the event. As such, he experienced the trauma in a way incomprehensible to those authors who have written about it from a remove and experienced it indirectly through the filter of the media, which Spiegelman charges with having “cheapened [the] trauma into mere sensationalism” (75).  His direct experience is said to allow Spiegelman to approach the subject matter with the authenticity necessary to ensure that the trauma of the day, and the difficult process of recovery that followed, is relayed appropriately–something that, in one of the few political discussions in Versluys’s text, it is charged the Bush administration failed to do when it, “hijacked September 11 and ‘reduced it all to a war recruitment poster’” (74).

Versluys is also keenly interested in Spiegelman’s work because of his role as an indirect witness to the Holocaust. As the child of Auschwitz survivors who, through the recording of the story of his father’s experience in Maus, also functions as a secondary witness to that tragedy, Spiegelman’s debilitating reaction to September 11 was, in part, a product of the history of trauma in the 20^th century. Spiegelman had, as he states in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers, stumbled upon “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide” (qtd. on 51). Through his engagement with Spiegleman’s “faultline,” Versluys is able to demonstrate the dangers posed by the continued “transmission of trauma” and the need for a means through which to come to terms with great shocks, something Spiegelman credits the writing of In the Shadow of No Towers with having done for him. The discussion regarding the role of trauma in 9/11 fiction continues fairly straightforwardly in regards to Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, which also provides an important examination of the role of language and the paradoxical inability of words to replicate the experience of trauma while remaining necessary for the working through of trauma.

Continuing the question of the resolution of trauma, Versluys discusses the continued reenactment of trauma in his critical reading of DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). DeLillo’s work, however, is not credited with reaching the same cathartic outcome as Spiegelman or Foer’s. Instead, Versluys states that Falling Man “is, without a doubt, the darkest and the starkest” of 9/11 narratives because it “allows for no accommodation or resolution” (20). Situating his criticism of the novel within the context of the post-modern condition of drift, Versluys charts the novel’s apparent lack of central narrative structure. The characters experience little growth or development, plot lines are rarely, if ever, resolved, and the literal and figurative fall of man is a repeated theme. The explanation given for DeLillo’s choice of structure is that the novel is intended to serve as “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (23). Versluys further suggests that the novel, “in stressing the paralyzing effects of September 11…is a novel contrary to the national trend” (30), and could “serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration” (48). What remains unclear from Versluys’s argument, however, is to what extent he believes that rather than imagining a pessimistic outcome, DeLillo is simply reflecting in literature a very real and significant current that exists in society in the wake of September 11, and that the novel lacks resolution precisely because society has yet to find one.

The strength of these three opening chapters makes it difficult to fully understand Versluys’s decision to switch gears and refocus his discussion in the next chapter on the representation of hyperrealism in the critically panned, French novel Windows on the World (2004) by Frédéric Beigbeder.  The choice of Windows on the World is especially confusing, as Versluys himself admits the book to be a “shallow” examination in which “the cliché wins out” (121). The novel is characterized by what Beigbeder terms “hyperrealism,” taken in this context to mean a “departure from the strictures of conventional realism” (125). However, the technique, in this case, seems to be less a way of adding depth to the narrative, as DeLillo’s unconventional narrative techniques do in Falling Man, and more a way of justifying poor writing. Versluys tries to excuse Beigbeder’s technique by stating that it reflects the notion that, “there is no narrative ploy strong enough to deflect the event, no trope or stylistic device capable of stopping the irreversible progress of time” (144). Even if there were such an argument to be made here, however, the chapter, like Beigbeder’s book itself, meanders too much away from this line of thought and focuses instead on arguing that September 11 was a globally experienced event that had as much of an impact on those outside the United States as it did for individuals who directly experienced the event in New York. Versluys even tries to justify his inclusion of Beigbeder by stating that it is an important representation of the “international dimension [of] this discussion” (121). There is no denying that September 11 had global repercussions; but this argument by Versluys seems to only prove Spiegelman’s assertion that the trauma of that day has been hijacked (74).

Versluys’s final chapter lacks an obvious connection to the rest of the book, but it has merit. In the epilogue to the book, in which he briefly discusses Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) and Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December (2006), two novels that only indirectly deal with September 11, Versluys admits that as time continues to pass, “the concerns expressed [in 9/11 fiction] will be less directly related to the experience of trauma” (183). Instead, he recognizes that the literature is already shifting toward the aftermath of the event, dealing instead with, “the confrontation with the Other” (183). In this respect, the inclusion of the final chapter of the book, which focuses on the concept of the Other and the process of “othering” makes sense. Interestingly, Versluys chooses to frame his remarks using the concept of the Other proposed by Emmanuel Levinas, which “locates [signification] in responsibility for the Other”–meaning that “everyone is essentially and before anything else interpellated by the face of the Other” and “we are preordained to be touched by what happens to the Other, in particular the suffering Other” (149). Using this theoretical framework proves particularly illuminating in his reading of Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), both of which have as their main character a terrorist. Though Versluys ultimately, falling in line with much of the critical response to these works, finds both Amis and Updike’s portrayals of the terrorist to be limited by their role as projections of the ideologies of the authors, he is also right in pointing out their success as exercises in coming “face to face with the Other” (182).

Overall, Versluys presents an important, engaging text that deals thoroughly and expertly with the role of trauma and post-9/11 fiction. It would interesting to see what, if anything, he does with further investigations into the trend toward a more indirect treatment of September 11 as its role changes in the “collective imagination,” especially considering the critical success of novels not touched on in the book, including Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) and Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland (2008).[2]

Notes

[1]DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian. 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 6 Mar. 2010.

[2]Versluys, Kristiaan. Interview by Mark Athitakis. “Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue.” Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes. 29 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Dec. 2010.

Gabriel Noah Brahm: In early 2009, when The Left at War had just come out, Barack Obama was inaugurated and George W. Bush was finally out of office.  Those were heady days.  The right seemed to be on the run, as you put it in the “Introduction” to your book, which you subtitled “On Time.”  Was the feeling that things were looking up for the left, after eight long years, part of why you there called your book “untimely”?  And if so, have times changed again already, so soon and so quickly?  The book seems very timely, with war still raging and the left still in disarray.[1]

Michael Berube: I will confess to a bit of optimism in early 2009 (more on this below, when I get to the question about disappointment), but first, I want to point out that the heady days of early 2009 take up all of two paragraphs of the introduction.  I wasn’t basing any of my book’s argument on the election of Obama.  OK, granted, those two paragraphs are the first two in the book.  But the larger premise was this:  if things are now looking up for the left, however temporarily, then who wants to bother with a book of political analysis that consists almost entirely of left self-criticism?  Isn’t it better, or at least more “timely,” to celebrate the end of the Bush-Cheney era?  That’s what a “timely” book on American politics would do:  it would tell the story of Bush’s post-Katrina plunge in public opinion, growing public disillusionment with the war in Iraq, the Democrats’ victories in Congress in 2006 and in the historic election of 2008.  It would sell a bunch of copies in 2009-10, and it would be out of print by 2011.  But this book is not about Obama, not about Democrats, not about elections.  That’s the sense in which it is “untimely.”

There’s a more obscure meaning there, as well.  All through 2002-03, I was told that “now is not the time” for my criticisms of the Manichean left.  I usually replied, “no, the time to complain that an antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group is right now, when the antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group.”  But I took the point nonetheless, in another sense: if one is opposing the war in Iraq, one should make clear that one opposes the war in Iraq more strongly and emphatically than one opposes the “leading” opponents of the war in Iraq.  Fine.  So, I decided, I will wait, do more research, fine-tune my arguments, and publish my critique of the Manichean left at a time when they cannot say, “but the real enemy is Bush/ Cheney/ Rove/ Rumsfeld!  Focus on them!”

I am glad to hear that you find the book very timely.  I would prefer to say that it might be valuable even though it does not speak immediately to recent developments.  About those recent developments:  have times changed again, so soon and so quickly?  Yes and no.

Gregory J. Lobo: After the gathering in Washington, D.C., orchestrated recently by Comedy Central, one of the participants was quoted as saying that in the U.S. politics is being contested by the talk-show hosts and comedians. Is there something important happening there in terms of what you call (following Gramsci and Stuart Hall) “hegemony,” in terms of the struggle over consent? Or is it merely the banalization and trivialization of politics?

MB: Let’s put it this way.  If not for Jon Stewart, the Zadroga Bill—the health care bill for 9/11 first responders—would have died in the Senate, yet another victim of the all-purpose Republican filibuster of everything.  In the words of Bill Ramoka of the Uniformed Firefighter’s Association of Greater New York:  “it’s a shame that it had to come from someone on a comedy channel to make this an issue.”  Yes, yes it is.

It’s not surprising that American politics would be contested by talk-show hosts and comedians.  Better them than a half-term governor from Alaska with a Twitter feed!  But for the left (by which I mean everyone to the left of Ben Nelson of Nebraska), it is a giddy and unfamiliar feeling.  We are used to having standard-bearers from the ranks of documentarians, journalists, activists, and scholars—Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky.  The fact that the most audible voices of “left” opinion in the US in the 2000s were Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is very unsettling, not least for serious left journalists/activists who found Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” speech an exercise in false equivalence.  Then again, the most prominent person criticizing Stewart’s speech on those grounds was libertarian/centrist comic Bill Maher, so go figure.

I’m not sure yet whether the presence of “the left” on Comedy Central/ MSNBC constitutes an important move in the war of position.  One is tempted to point out that The Onion, for all its snarky, satiric brilliance, has not changed the practices of mainstream journalism in the US.  On the other hand, victories like Stewart’s with the Zadroga Bill are real victories, legislative and public-advocacy initiatives that improve the lives of people who desperately need help.  So I’m not willing to call that banal or trivial.

GNB/GJL: How do you see the results of the mid-term elections and the subsequent work of the lame-duck Congress? Is the Tea Party an example, formally speaking, of the kind of hegemony-work you advocate (despite differences in terms of ideology/content, of course)?  Is the right just better at hegemony in this country, and if so why?

MB: The last of these questions is matter for a good dissertation or two.  For most of my adult life, I’ve been inclined to say yes:  the right’s slogan, since the ascendancy of the New Right in 1980, might as well be “hegemony—we just do it better.”  Liberal and Democratic strategists have been waiting for three decades now for the Reagan Coalition to fracture:  surely the white rural poor will realize they have no common interests with the Club for Growth, and the evangelical Christians will realize they have no common interests with the media moguls who befoul their airwaves, their Internets, and their children’s minds (the latter hope was one of the more poignant delusions of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?)  But Godot never shows up!  Amazing!  And then, when he fails to show up, liberals and Democrats resort to cynicism:  sure, they say, the Right manages to keep its ducks in order by throwing a little red meat to the base on cultural issues while keeping the tax cuts and wealth transfers flowing upwards.  We liberals and Democrats won’t play that shell game because we’re just too honest, too dedicated to the real common good.

I think this is an elaborate form of self-deception on the part of liberals and Democrats—the idea that they could conduct a war of position with cunning and savoir-faire, but are just too principled to do so.  The truth is that they don’t have the faintest idea of how to motivate people, and when the right does motivate people by way of lies and demagoguery—as they did to remarkable effect in 2009, taking a relatively tepid universal health-insurance bill and getting its would-be beneficiaries to denounce it for “socialism” and “death panels”—then liberals are confirmed (unfortunately) in their belief that motivating people is the job of knaves and mountebanks.  So yes, the Tea Party is an example of hegemony in action, and a powerful reminder that liberals and Democrats simply do not know how to play the game.

As for the left:  as I argue in the book, the mainstream U.S. left never took on Stuart Hall’s arguments about Thatcherism, and never took seriously the Gramscian project.  It is now a stale, too-often-reheated version of the New Left, devoted to precisely the kind of “countercultural” politics I criticize in The Left at War.

And as for the midterm elections:  the news is not good.  Obama attempted a very weak, multiply-watered-down expansion of the public sector.  He was met with charges of socialism and a 63-seat loss in the House of Representatives.  There will be no second attempt at a Keynesian solution to the financial crisis, and the budget shortfalls in the states will be severe.  The GOP has no answer at all—just more tax cuts.  And tax cuts there will be.

GNB: Some thoughtful critics, such as David Bromwich for example, have eloquently expressed a poignant sense of disappointment with President Obama.  Do you share that feeling?

MB: Yes and no.  On the one hand, I want to say that I was so prepared to be disappointed in Obama—not only because of long experience with elected Democrats but also because of my wariness about his record in the Senate—that the first two years of the Obama Administration have thrown the very idea of “disappointment” into epistemic crisis.  What does it mean, after all, to say, “aha, I am disappointed in precisely the way I expected to be?”   Or to say, as Tariq Ali’s most recent book seems to say, “I am so pleased with myself that I predicted precisely this degree of disappointment”?  And then there are the leftists who are actively looking for reasons to be disappointed—the ones who believed that Obama would withdraw from Afghanistan even though he campaigned on intensifying US military operations in Afghanistan, and who now feel betrayed that Obama has broken secret campaign promises that only they could hear.

So let me be more specific.  I never expected much from Obama on the economic front.  I expected neoliberalism, more or less, and I got more:  a bailout of the financial industry, but no jobs program, no WPA, no restoration of the tax code status quo ante Bush, no “cramdown” on personal bankruptcies following from the home-mortgage meltdown.  But I am genuinely surprised, and therefore genuinely disappointed, by Obama’s record on civil liberties.  I knew he would escalate in Afghanistan, but I believed him when he said he would close Guantanamo.

That said, I should add that when UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said, this past October, that “there is a major difference between the Bush and the Obama administration,” and that Obama had stopped the Bush-era practices of torture, the response on the keen-to-be-disappointed left was underwhelming.  The U.S. is still nowhere near the ideals of international law—witness our punitive detention of accused Wikileaker (a.k.a. patriotic whistleblower) Bradley Manning—but I cannot let severe disappointment devolve into despair.

And speaking of matters of hope and despair:  who, on the left, did not feel some small measure of optimism, however guarded, in early 2009?   Who did not entertain the thought, “perhaps now things might get a bit better for ordinary people?” Two groups, so far as I can tell:  one consisted of people who were patiently waiting to enjoy their own faux-disappointment when things went sour, and the other consisted of the remnants of the heighten-the-contradictions crew, who sincerely did not want things to get better for the average person.  Perhaps some people in both groups now congratulate themselves for their “realism”:  they were not fooled, by gum!  But I am not talking about expectations, I am talking about hope.  It was reasonable to expect that Obama would not combine the Presidential cojones of FDR and LBJ with the vision of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman.  But what did it mean not to wish for better?  What does it mean now, should someone say, “as for me, I never gave in to hope—I never wanted things to be better than they are?”

GNB: Ted McAllister argues, in his response to your book, that the left in the U.S. can’t rule because it hasn’t got a narrative palatable to citizens: “Because the left cannot tell a story of America, they cannot govern,” he asserts.  “Howard Zinn,” for example, “has nothing to offer Americans,” he claims.  Does he have a point?  Richard Rorty used to also complain about what he called “the unpatriotic left,” insisting in his own way that a left without a good story wasn’t going anywhere—but then he also tried himself to offer one.  Is there one?

MB: The funny thing is that in a way, Howard Zinn has much to offer:  that’s why A People’s History, for all its faults, has sold almost two million copies.  The dissemination of Zinn’s work has helped, I hope, to make some Americans less self-congratulatory, more aware of the intellectual careers of Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller, and more willing to look at the unpleasant features of the historical record.  The problem, as Michael Kazin pointed out some years ago (and McAllister would probably agree with Kazin on this), is that Zinn’s narrative is a story of defeat after defeat; and even on the rare occasions when The People, United, Manage Not To Be Defeated, Zinn insists that their apparent victories are ultimately Pyrrhic insofar as they allow the system to perpetuate itself—the system that prevents 99 percent of Americans from realizing that they have common interests and a common enemy. A People’s History thus becomes, as Kazin puts it, “a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.”

That narrative is clearly very attractive to people who need a good strong dose of demystification; that’s why Zinn’s readers, like Chomsky’s, speak as if the scales have fallen from their eyes.  My guess is that those readers tend not to focus on the defeat-upon-defeat, and are moved instead by the accounts of ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society; it’s a version of what Gregory Lobo meant when he credited Chomsky with having a vague kind of “people-based hope.”  But it’s not a guide to good governance, to be sure.  Rorty, by contrast, asked us—by way of Whitman and Dewey—to see the United States as an unfinished project, a great poem that we are still writing.  I take Achieving Our Country to task in my book, but I have no doubt that Rorty had the big picture well in view:  an American left that trades primarily in cynicism and demystification will be precisely the kind of left I critique in my book, a left that appeals to two or three percent of the public.  Zinn has only one way to explain why ordinary Americans kept trying to achieve their country:  they were duped by the elites.  Rorty, by contrast, had something like Ralph Ellison’s agenda:  affirm the ideals while exposing the traducers.  Or, as Alan Ryan put it in his review of Achieving Our Country, “the point of invoking James Baldwin … is that he was entirely unforgiving of his country’s sins and still looked forward with hope to a better future. A left that fights for the political and economic changes that will ‘achieve our country’ is the left that the United States once possessed and needs as much as ever, but is hardly to be seen.”

The story to be told, then, is probably something like the story Thurgood Marshall told in his speech commemorating the bicentennial of the Constitution—a story of how an idealistic but flawed nation and its idealistic but flawed founding principles were transformed over the centuries by “momentous events” and the creation of “new constitutional principles.”  “The progress has been dramatic,” Marshall insisted, “and it will continue.”  Imagine that—faith in progress.

Part II/Islamophobia, Neoliberalism, & the Hitch

GNB: In your essay, “The Left at Bay,” you express a frightening sense of urgency about the ostensibly growing threat of Islamophobia. You write that, unlike Europe, “We don’t have many outspoken supporters of Islamism in the U.S. . . . [but] we are beginning to cultivate a culture of Islamophobic demagoguery that may yet match that of the European far right.”  You worry about “absurd degrees of Islamophobia” in the world today and marvel at “Islamophobic nuttiness.”  But is there such a thing as Islamophobia, or are we talking about people—human beings, after all, who find themselves under threat of attack and may even be prone to feeling a little nutty as such—coping with what British author Martin Amis once called “Islamismophobia,” or wariness of Islamism, as distinct from Islam the religion, a violent totalitarian political movement associated with it?  What do you say to those who assert that there is no deep-seated animus toward the Islamic faith in the U.S. that would warrant a reifying label comparable to terms designating well-documented maladies of longstanding, such as homophobia, anti-Semitism of the European/Muslim variety, or anti-Black racism?  Granted that we as a nation must protect everyone’s safety, civil rights, and freedom of religion, and given that ethnic or religious prejudice is always a bad thing (an evil the U.S. among other places has long had to cope with), what do you say to those who regard the effect of the neologism “Islamophobe” as that of a propagandistic brickbat deployed to intimidate and censor critics of Islamist reactionary politics?  By which—just to be clear—we mean of course a politics that is avowedly theocratic, not only avails itself of terrorism but celebrates it, and includes virulent anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia in its discourse; a bid for “hegemony” that is generally illiberal/fascistic in form, content, means, and ends.  There were more hate-crimes reported against Jews last year than Muslims in America, but there’s no widespread discourse about an efflorescence of anti-Semitism in this country.  Nothing on the cover of Time.  Maybe they call it “terrorism” for a reason—because it terrifies.

MB: A most complicated question!  Every term in this lexicon, of course, is a potentially propagandistic brickbat.  But to take your last suggestion first, the fact that Time has not devoted a cover to anti-Semitism in the U.S. does not seem to me to be compelling evidence that Islamist terrorism has terrorized the American media.

Let me be clear about what I consider “nuttiness,” because I realize that this is a technical term.  Banning minarets, in a country with precisely four minarets, is (to put it mildly) silly.  The construction of minarets does not impinge on anyone’s human rights or anyone’s quality of life.  Likewise, demonstrating against the Park51 project—a project once praised by conservative culture warrior Laura Ingraham, of all people—does nothing whatsoever about Islamist reactionary politics.  The people organizing those demonstrations are not protesting against radical Islamism.  They are provoking needless and potentially dangerous public outrage about an Islamic cultural center, the political equivalent of an Islamic YMCA.

To repeat my original point:  on the left, there is no one in American political life who is the equivalent of George Galloway, and there is no American political party that has adopted the “we are all Hezbollah now” slogans of the SWP.  We simply do not have the level of Islamist apologism to which people like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis are responding, partly because we do not have (and for obvious reasons will not have) the British far left’s level of resentment and bile directed at the U.S.  Instead, we have widespread outrage (and a suspicious fire) at an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; we have Debbie Almontaser being forced to resign as the principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn; we have Martin Peretz, the former editor-in-chief of a major newsweekly, writing that he wonders whether he needs to “pretend” that American Muslims “are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.” (Though the fact that Peretz has faced such a firestorm of criticism over his “Muslim lives are cheap” blog post indicates that they will not, after all, be tolerated in public discourse, any more than would the remarks of someone who said, “gay lives are cheap, most notably to gays.”) So no, it is not “Islamophobic” to oppose murderous groups like the Hofstad Network (to take but one example).  But it does make sense to use the term, I believe, when dealing with people whose fear and loathing of Muslims is based not on anything certain Muslims have done or said but on the very fact that they are Muslim.

GNB: I agree with you that bigoted remarks ought not be tolerated in public discourse.  And that they are not, in fact, in America, seems well attested, as you suggest, by the sorts of brief but intense “firestorms” of righteous indignation that routinely ignite to engulf anyone in the media who makes an untoward comment, whether out of awkwardness and insensitivity or genuinely racist sentiments—from beloved actors/comedians like Michael Richards, to talk-show hosts, sportscasters, candidates for office…and now gruff liberal magazine editors.  But is the “gay” analogy really fair/accurate in Peretz’s case?  After all, there is no gay-on-gay factional violence, no “Queerist” terrorism, no blowing up each others’ holy places, and no predominantly gay countries that poll anti-Semitism upwards of 90% spewing the most hateful and disgusting anti-Jewish propaganda every day.  That most victims of Islamist violence/terrorism are Muslims is a fact, and one that should concern all of those who do not think Muslim life is any less precious than anyone else’s.  So, without at all defending the way he said it–for which he deserved criticism—wasn’t something like that the real import of his statement?  And isn’t that something that should concern us at least as much as labeling a longstanding supporter of liberal causes a “racist rat” (as a protester at Harvard had it on a sign)?  If this is an example of “Islamophobia,” in other words, then it’s the kind of bigotry that does not prevent somebody from marching regularly, at the age of 70-something, in protests in East Jerusalem on the side of the Palestinians, in solidarity with Muslims seeking to block Jewish expansion there (as Peretz does).  Forgive me if this seems like a lengthy quibble over one unpleasant recent incident (leading to Peretz’s stepping aside after decades as editor-in-chief of The New Republic), but it seems to me there’s more at stake here.  It’s true we don’t have George Galloway or the SWP.  But we have ANSWER.  We have the likes of Imam Abdul Malik, giving talks on college campuses all the time, and an accompanying atmosphere of intimidation (at some of the UCs in particular) that has led to serious investigation of a growing problem of anti-Semitism in higher education in this country.  In another league, granted, we have the shocking phenomenon of ongoing suicide attacks–the Shoe Bomber, the Underpants Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and who knows what–by Islamists.  Islamism is not Islam, but it overlaps with it, and people who ought to be concerned about the former might not always know where the line is drawn.

MB: You’re right, the gay analogy isn’t a good one.  I should have said “black lives are cheap, most notably to blacks“—because racists say this all the time about black-on-black crime.  They have to use code words these days, of course, but still.  The point remains that if Peretz had been a bit more careful, or a bit more thoughtful, he would never have written the line about Muslims not being worthy of the First Amendment, and he would have said “Muslim lives are cheap to Islamists, who hold all life cheap.”  The fact that he conflated violent Islamist extremists with Muslims in general—that was precisely the problem.  Nor was it an isolated instance of intolerance and imprudence; it was part of a pattern that marked Peretz’s blog.  That said, I was stunned (pleasantly) to read in that New York profile that Peretz participates in the vigils and protests in Sheikh Jarrah.  Good on him for that!

As for ANSWER and the campuses:  about the former, I really do think we’re talking about the fringe of the fringe, a small handful of people who ordinarily couldn’t fill a seminar room’s worth of followers even if they offered free food and an open bar.  How in the world they got to be the organizer of the antiwar demonstrations remains a mystery.  Was every other left organization in the US asleep at the switch?  And yes, we have people like Ramsey Clark and Lynne Stewart.  My point is that they’re nowhere near the levers of state power or public influence.  About the latter, it is a matter of real concern to me that the supporters of boycotts against Israel appear to be drawn chiefly from the ranks of the academic left.  This is yet another argument the left needs to have out in the open, with plenty of light and air—because otherwise, I think you’ll find some degree (minimal, I hope, but I fear worse) of eliminationism masquerading as humanitarian concern for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.  I take some comfort, though, in the fact that even as the British AUT and UCU have passed resolutions in favor of various boycotts of Israeli academics and universities, the AAUP has firmly opposed all academic boycotts.  As do I.

GNB/GJL: At the end of “The Left at Bay,” you bring up the fact that among the responses to the book we gathered there was no representative of what, in The Left at War, you call the “Manichean Left,” and that you would have liked to reply to one.  But is not your whole book a response to that position?  Though this might be a bit of deck stacking, perhaps you could respond briefly here to what you, who have spent so much time immersed in Manichean Left thought, would imagine to be an ML critique of you.  What would be an interesting challenge by an ML reader, and how would you respond?  You write, for instance, that it would have been nice had we included, “Someone who could properly take me to task for not having an adequate response to neoliberalism or a compelling account of how a Walzerian defense of the social welfare state can avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.”

MB: You’re right, the Manichean Left is well represented in my book, sometimes in long block quotes.  So in some sense it has already spoken.  But I would like to hear a further response from the Manichean Left precisely because it is the object of my criticism.  I want to hear their best critique, as opposed to the effusions of people like Louis Proyect.  I would like to hear something that’s not boilerplate about U.S. imperialism in Kosovo and silent genocide in Afghanistan—something that takes seriously the question of how to think about failed states, mass murders, and terrorist networks.  I hesitate to ventriloquize a Manichean Left reader here, for fear of getting the hypothetical argument wrong and being accused of dealing in strawmen.  I mean, I can churn out the usual Ed Herman-quality stuff about my being a dupe of American empire, an apologist for U.S./NATO militarism, and (worst of all) a “liberal,” but I’d rather see someone get down to cases.  For instance, I can imagine someone to my left suggesting that my faith in internationalism is misplaced, and that the International Criminal Court will be worthy of the name on the day someone of Kissinger’s stature is hauled before it.  All I could say in return is that it makes more sense to build structures that might eventually bring people like Kissinger to some form of justice than to tear them down at the outset on the grounds that they have not yet done so.

As for neoliberalism and the Walzerian welfare state, these are much more complicated questions.  Someone suggested to me, in the course of an email exchange, that I gave the Eustonians a pass on the question of neoliberalism; it may not have seemed pressing at the time, but now that deregulation and austerity policies have done so much catastrophic damage to the world economy—and to ordinary working people—it should be much higher on the agenda.  The question of how to imagine a social welfare state without nationalism is probably above my pay grade.  There was a time when I hoped that the European Union would point the way; now I do not know where to turn.  But I have to say how sharply I was struck, upon rereading The Hard Road to Renewal, by the way Stuart Hall acknowledged and tried to grapple with the contradictions of the welfare state.  At the risk of repeating myself again and again and again, I don’t think he has received anything like the recognition he deserves in the U.S., on this count and on many others.

GNB: Your book is very much a carefully reasoned, patiently, painstakingly, admirably balanced, well-informed and even good-natured examination of the often fractious arguments for and against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and of the problem of how progressives in particular should think about terrorism post-9/11.  So where’s Christopher Hitchens?  As you acknowledge in the book, he was responsible for an amazing barrage of “searing critiques of the Manichean left.” Yet he receives no sustained attention.  Why is that—given his prominence as the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war” while you were conceiving and writing the book?  Can you say anything more about how you regard his significance?  As you know, he makes some comrades on the left apoplectic. . . .  Do you share their feelings of betrayal?

MB: Last question first, no.  I was surprised by his support of the Iraq War, even more surprised by his support of Bush, but I did not feel betrayed.  I did not take it personally.  I mentioned Hitchens favorably in my first post-9/11 essay, because I thought his initial responses to the Manichean left were smart and necessary—though, as I remarked even then, I could not share his sense of “exhilaration” at the conflict.  Likewise, when I covered his debate with Tariq Ali in April 2002, I remained sympathetic to many of his arguments, but was beginning to get the sense that he was going to ride them much further than I was willing to go.  So the reason I now mention his crack at the Dixie Chicks in The Left at War is not that I regard that regrettable remark as symptomatic of his thought; rather, I am trying to indicate that by 2003, he had become radioactive.  In many ways he gave the Manicheans exactly what they wanted:  see, they could say, the people who criticize Chomsky wind up leaving The Nation and voting for Bush; the people who supported war in Afghanistan are now leading the pundits’ charge into Iraq.

There’s a tactical question at stake here as well.  A lot of what passed for “debate” in those days—and now I’m talking about face-to-face stuff, not books and essays and blogs—now looks to me like the workings of our lizard brains.  It was not a question of assessing arguments so much as lining up friends and foes:  if X said it, it must be wrong, and if Y said it, its total and complete rightness could not be questioned.  I had one colleague back then who practically spat on the ground every time Todd Gitlin’s name was mentioned.  It didn’t matter what the context was.  If Todd Gitlin came out against gum disease, my friend would promptly march under the banner “we are all gingivitis now.”  I was trying to forestall that response as much as possible, even though I know I’ll get it anyway.  So I don’t deal with Hitchens at great length, precisely because Hitchens himself made it so difficult to deal with his work with the degree of care I wanted to bring to this book.

You’re right that Hitchens was and is the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war.”  And he remains, at his best, a compelling and fascinating writer.  But he’s not the only person whose absence from the book has drawn questions.  One reader asked me why I didn’t say more about Edward Said; another wanted to see some treatment of David Rieff (who would most surely remind me that Kissinger will never appear in The Hague); still another wanted a discussion of Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power.  Each of these figures would merit a chapter of his or her own, no question.  I just want somebody else to write those chapters.

Part III/Propaganda, Ideology, & Hegemony

GJL: You talk about the necessity to study how the American public, or a good portion of it, has been “won over” rather than deceived or manipulated.  While you have dealt with this distinction at length in your book, is it possible to say a few words about it here, for readers perhaps not wholly familiar with the details of your argument?  And could you also say something about this idea in terms of understanding international or global political dynamics?

MB: My point isn’t that people are never duped or deceived; on the contrary, it happens every day.  My point is simply that when you start from the premise that popular consent is always “manufactured” rather than won, you wind up with one version or another of “false consciousness.”  And when that happens, you conclude that the masses (which, as Raymond Williams said, are always other people) have been hornswoggled by the elites, by ideology, by the mass media—whereas you and those fortunate few of like mind have managed to escape The System unharmed.  As I suggest in my book, The Matrix is the most popular and accessible version of this theory:  we have been fed an elaborate delusion that keeps us from realizing the truth, and we can see reality for what it is only if we take the right pill.

Now, there is indeed such a thing as hegemony, but it doesn’t work quite so simply as this.  Let me turn things over to Raymond Williams—this from the essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”:

“The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends.  If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow.”

As I admit in the book, it’s not easy to apply this idea to international or global political dynamics.  And as I point out in my reply to McAllister, when Stuart Hall tried to grapple with the popularity of the Falklands War, he more or less tossed out his Gramsci and reverted to the language of false consciousness; he was therefore uncharacteristically unconvincing when it came down to devising antiwar arguments that wouldn’t send the man in the pub (and his family) marching off into the sunset.  But what I’m trying to ask—and this is as ambitious and as utopian as I get—is how we can take the lessons of Gramsci, how we can start from the premise that consent is won rather than coerced, and build support for supranational structures that can check the system of perpetual war and eventual despoliation of the planet.  Suggestions are welcome.

GJL: Chomsky and Herman and like-minded thinkers will argue that their positions are supported by evidence; you, of course, make the same claim.  How does one decide?  Is it a question of better evidence?  Is it a matter of ethics and pragmatics—in other words, is it question of how we should conduct ourselves with others and how we actually can conduct ourselves with others, given the “nature” of this world?  Without expecting a complete answer: To what degree are we talking about reason and evidence, and to what degree are we talking about emotion, affect, or identification?

Allow me, if you will, to combine this question with the next, and answer them as one.

GNB: You (justly, many would say) criticize Slavoj Zizek for his Stalinoid politics, at the start of your book, making him into a poster-child for a Manichean Left that’s all total critique and no pragmatic vision.  Is that your whole view of him, though, or do you find anything valid, of use, or of genuine interest in his method of interpreting culture and human behavior?  For example, his notion of jouissance as a political factor, maybe?  Can we understand politics (or anything else) without taking into account the unconscious ways people “enjoy” their own “symptoms”?  Moreover, doesn’t such consideration in fact allow Zizek to present a sophisticated “ideology” model that is really very sophisticated (i.e., not a matter of false consciousness but of fantasy), as well as very far from Chomskian rationalism?

MB: Zizek has this part right, I think, so my answer to the final question here is simply yes.  Less simply:  no, it’s not just a matter of evidence.  People believe what they believe for all kinds of reasons, including reasons that are not properly “reasons” at all.  That’s why I’m not willing to throw out the enjoy-your-symptom baby with the Stalinoid bathwater, so to speak, and why I am willing to insist that Zizek can be a thrilling, illuminating, useful writer despite the whole totalitarianism thing.

I feel the same way about Foucault and Heidegger:  the fact that they had terrible political judgment does not invalidate Foucault’s work on the history of madness or of sexuality, or Heidegger’s readings of Plato, Sophocles, or Holderlin.  “I’m not going to take Foucault seriously on anything, because he was so foolish as to support Islamists in Iran during the revolution” is just a more sophisticated form of lizard-brain activity.  Surely it’s possible to acknowledge that someone is an interesting thinker even if s/he has poor political judgment.

GJL: Apart from Ellen Willis and Stuart Hall, whom you lionize as avatars of the “democratic left,” are there other thinkers out there who seem to be really grappling with reality and relations of power in the sorts of ways you find useful and necessary?  If there are, can you point to some of them and say a few words about what you find valuable in their thinking?

MB: Here’s an idiosyncratic list for you:  I liked John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy very much, and I always learn from the work of Bruce Robbins and John McGowan, because their work is always so careful and thoughtful.  Ramesh Thakur’s The United Nations, Peace and Security is a terrific book on the UN.  I’ve admired Michelle Goldberg’s journalism for some time, and can recommend The Means of Reproduction; I’m hoping that she’ll become the Ellen Willis of her generation.  And I’ll read pretty much anything Ian Williams or Laura Rozen write on international affairs; they’re always smart and unhoodwinkable.  Lastly, though he went further on Israel than I would, Tony Judt will be sorely missed by everyone who cares about the fate of social democracy.

Part IV/The Left @ Politicsandculture.org

GNB/GJL: What surprised you about participating in this special issue of Politics & Culture devoted to evaluating your book?  What did you learn or were you moved to rethink?

MB: I was surprised that this was not an exchange confined to paid-up, card-carrying leftists.  (I was a little surprised that it was all guys, but c’est la vie et c’est la gauche à la guerre.)  So I had to spend some time trying to figure out how to address people who don’t share my basic political assumptions; as I say in “The Left at Bay,” I was mildly amused that conservative readers noted that the book isn’t about them, but they were right to suggest that I pitched the book explicitly as an in-house debate.  Notably, I found myself having to take inventory of my beliefs about Israel, since I was no longer dealing exclusively with critiques from my left; and I had to put the question of Islamism (and Islamist apologism) front and center in a way that my book does not.  Very useful exercises, all.

Part V/At it Again

GNB/GJL: What is your next project?

MB: Narrative and Disability, about the implications of cognitive disability for understanding narrative theory and experimental fiction—and about the undertheorization of intellectual disability in disability studies.  Should be fun: I’m looking forward to writing it at some point in the next couple of years.  It will be something of a relief to write about literature again.

Note

[1]Interview conducted December 27-29, 2010.

Some people have remarked, justly, that The Left at War is really two books (though I do not see why this should be cause for complaint in a bad economy: two hardcovers for $30, $19.97 at Amazon!): the first half lays out my positions on Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and my responses to the left’s opposition to each of these wars; the second half explains how I got to the positions I hold, even though this explanation takes us through territory that has very little to do with international relations and just war theory.  In the course of writing the book (sometimes a very unpleasant experience, as my friends and family can attest), I worried that the first three chapters would close down any engagement with the second three: surely, I thought, leftists who saw Kosovo as an exercise in NATO militarism and Afghanistan as the distillation of US imperialism are not going to stick around to find out why my reading of Stuart Hall and cultural studies has led me to disagree with them.  Conversely, I worried that leftists who largely agreed with me about Kosovo and Afghanistan, and who sought to disentangle Iraq (and our opposition to war in Iraq) from those debates, would not be terribly interested in the fact that I agree with them for reasons that differ markedly from their own, and are based in a tradition of independent British leftism that has no truck with (for example) the current SWP’s apologetics for Islamism as a form of anti-imperialism.  Kevin Mattson’s sympathetic review in Bookforum confirmed the latter fear, remarking that the second half amounted to a long footnote in which I repay an intellectual debt.  He was right about that.  So I am deeply grateful that so many of my readers in this forum have taken my intellectual debts seriously, and have acknowledged that I have tried to behave, even in a bad economy, like a good debtor.

Jeff  Bloodworth suggests that The Left at War is not so much a long footnote as a “really, really long breakup note,” and I suppose that’s also true, in a way– though for me the break started in 2002-03, when I began to lose a category of friends I called “friends I finally realized I never really had.”  After 9/11, I did not change my beliefs about American history or American foreign policy, and I remain baffled by and disdainful of former liberals who did; indeed, the one phrase for which I am most often cited in the liberal blogosphere is the line “I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m really outraged by Chappaquiddick.”  What distinguishes me from the “yoostabee” liberals is that nothing that happened on 9/11 compelled me to revisit my opposition to war in Vietnam or US support for death squads in Central America.  But surely, I thought at the time, 9/11 was qualitatively different; surely it made sense to try to destroy whatever base of operations its planners and enablers were working from, and to disrupt their terrorist network by both diplomatic and military means.  I was genuinely surprised– perhaps naively so– to learn from my not-really-friends on the left that this was precisely the wrong thing to believe, and that even military actions that could be reasonably seen as self-defense-after-the-fact, like the destruction of Tora Bora, were to be denounced in precisely the same terms as the anti-imperialist denunciations of the Vietnam War and support for Central American death squads.  A few months later, when ANSWER seized control of the antiwar demonstrations (and, therefore, of their agendas and their lists of speakers), I was genuinely surprised– perhaps naively so– to learn from my not-really-friends on the left that this was no real cause for concern, and that anyone who made it a cause for concern was a traitor or a dupe.  (Two of the most addled leftists, Ed Herman and Alexander Cockburn, actually accused me of working with David Horowitz to discredit the antiwar movement.  Because, you see, I had taken part in a debate with Horowitz– in which I disagreed strenuously with Horowitz’s claim that the leadership of the antiwar movement discredited the entire movement.)  Time and again I found myself in the strangest conversations, two of which are worth recalling now: the first involved my asking a fierce critic of Israeli behavior in the Occupied Territories, after making it clear that I agreed with many (though not all) of his fierce criticisms, what he thought of suicide bombing as a mode of “resistance.”  He replied that he did not feel he had the moral authority to condemn such a thing when it is employed by the powerless.  I was stupefied by the response, chiefly because it came from someone who clearly felt, on all other occasions, that he had the moral authority to condemn as many as six deplorable things before breakfast.  A year later, after I had drafted a petition criticizing ANSWER for preventing Michael Lerner from speaking at the San Francisco antiwar rally in February 2003 (really, for creating neo-Stalinist rules barring anyone from speaking at a rally if they had criticized ANSWER in the past), I was told that I should not have tried to divide the antiwar movement at a critical time.  I replied that I had done no such thing, that the people who created that controversy were ANSWER themselves– largely because of their position on Israel/ Palestine.

“But you can’t think about the war in Iraq by isolating it from larger questions in the region, including Israel/ Palestine,” my interlocutor said.

“I’m not trying to isolate Iraq from Israel/ Palestine,” I said.  “On the contrary, one of the reasons I opposed ANSWER, and one of the reasons I condemned them as divisive, was that they were so emphatically alienating progressive Jews from the antiwar movement.  And I really don’t see how we get anywhere on Israel/ Palestine issues without the support of progressive Jews.”

“Well, Michael,” came the reply I will never forget, “maybe we get there with them, and maybe we get there without them.”

I was far too stunned to ask who “we” were and where “there” might be.  But perhaps this was an opportunity worth missing.

I mention these anecdotes now– after deciding to keep them out of The Left at War, confining myself exclusively to print and online material so that the various targets of my critique cannot claim that I misquoted them or took them out of context– for two reasons.  The first is to indicate that the phenomenon of which I speak is not a fringe affair, confined to wheat-paste posters and the furthest reaches of the Internet.  On the contrary, it constituted part of the fabric of my life while I was writing the book, affecting my relationships with any number of friends (or not-really-friends) and colleagues.  (Those relationships, for the record, were sometimes strengthened or renewed, whenever someone told me privately I was saying aloud things that they had only thought in private, and didn’t want to bring up because of the unpleasantness to which they would probably lead.)  The second is to try and clarify just whom I’ve broken up with and why.

To take the most important example first: some readers of The Left at War, including, perhaps, some of the participants in this forum, might be surprised and/or dismayed to find that I still find much of value in the work of Noam Chomsky.[1] 1  Paul Hollander is, alas, right about his rhetorical demeanor, his habit of speaking as if even his most tenuous or controversial claims are widely accepted by those who know the material best.  That kind of argument-from-feigned-authority, I have found, is very persuasive among Chomsky’s most avid followers, because it confirms them in their sense that Chomskian claims (a) are buttressed by a broad range of informed opinion, albeit a range never represented in the US press, and (b) contested only by apostates and agents (witting or unwitting) of the US propaganda apparatus.  And as I’ve made clear in my book, I find Chomsky’s contemptuous treatment of other critics of US imperialism, such as Adrian Hastings (who had the gall to point out that Chomsky’s work on the Balkans is marked by glaring omissions), intellectually appalling.  But– and this is critical, given the tenor of some of the replies to my work in this forum– there is no sense in which Chomsky has aligned himself with, or expressed sympathy for, Islamist radicals.  The worst of which he can be accused, I maintain, is his impassive “for the first time, the guns have been directed the other way” response to 9/11– and even then, he did not fail to describe the attacks as “horrendous” before launching into the standard litany of US crimes committed between 1812 and 2001.  The same is true with regard to the Balkans: Chomsky is far too savvy to fail to condemn Milosevic and his henchmen.  The most he will do (though it is, admittedly, far too much) is to give cover and support for people like Diana Johnstone and Ed Herman, who by this point have become professional genocide deniers.  But this is not to say that Chomsky’s many critiques of the US and Israel do not have merit; indeed, I believe that people who do say such things are offering curious versions of the Manicheanism I criticize throughout The Left At War.  On one side, Chomsky is all but infallible, and criticism of his arguments is grounds for excommunication; on the other side, Chomsky is all but a fraud, and nothing he says can be trusted.  Surely there is room– or should be room– on a democratic left for people to say, as I have tried to say, “Chomsky is largely right when it gets down to cases, but his anarchist premises are problematic for any usable assessment of the actions of states, and his all-or-nothing rhetoric leaves no room for people who agree with him only some or part or most of the time.”

Like Russell Berman, I am sometimes tempted to read Chomsky’s rhetoric as evidence of “a deep-seated contempt for the listener– since public opinion, in Chomsky’s view, is never a matter of sincerely debated positions or genuine values but only and always a result of ‘manufacturing’ to manipulate the witless public.”  But whenever I am so tempted, I remind myself that Chomsky appeals again and again to the public– not disingenuously, but in the sincere belief that ordinary people, uninterpellated by the Mass Media Matrix and its Five Filters, are capable of forms of goodness and moral complexity that stand in profound contrast to the arational calculations of states.  As Gregory Lobo puts it, “he has been for many people and for many years the voice of a certain sort of people-based hope, a not terribly specific but nonetheless ardent proponent of the idea that normal people, if given access to a bit more knowledge, can and do make the world a better place.”  And then I remind myself, as this forum has reminded me, that Chomsky has a reading public many powers of ten larger than mine.  So I conclude instead that Chomsky has a deep-seated contempt for the new mandarins and the agents (witting or unwitting) of the US propaganda apparatus– and that his supporters’ conviction that that contempt is always deserved, always justified by the perfidy of elites, accounts not only for the depth of Chomskyites’ passions but also for their inability to countenance leftists who agree with Chomsky’s analyses only some or part or most of the time.

With regard to actually existing support for Islamism, the situation in Western Europe seems to me to be far more toxic than it is in the US.  Berman is right to speak of “the extent to which the far left in Europe has formed emphatic alliances with Islamist groupings”; but he might have mentioned, as well, the extent to which the right and far-right in Europe have given themselves over to absurd degrees of Islamophobia, seeing in every head scarf or Swiss minaret (all four of them!) monitory harbingers of the Eurabia to come.  The US has so far seen very few far-leftists willing to announce emphatic alliances with Islamist groupings (the very worst I can think of, which still stops short of an endorsement of Islamist extremism, was Michael Moore’s dunderheaded celebration of the Iraqi “resistance” as the equivalents of American minutemen), no doubt because there is less resentment of the US in the US than can be found in Western Europe; on the other side, the fact that the US has only recently seen Islamophobic nuttiness on the scale of Oklahoma’s ban on shari’a law or the demonstrations against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (also known as the Park51 cultural center) is poignant testimony to the initial success of George W. Bush’s attempts to tamp down outbreaks of Islamophobia on the American right.  Now that Bush is no longer the leader of his party, however, the lid is off, and (depending on whether you go by the Pew poll or the Time magazine poll) either 31 or 46 percent of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.  We don’t have many outspoken supporters of Islamism in the US, in other words, but we are beginning to cultivate a culture of Islamophobic demagoguery that may yet match that of the European far right.

It would be most gratifying (and most effective, I hope) if that culture of Islamophobic demagoguery were to be challenged by an Augustinian left, and I thank Scott Paeth for coining the term and setting forth its premises.  But I want to note for the record that the phrase “dirty fucking hippies,” and the associated claim that the American mass media generally treated Al Gore, Howard Dean, and everyone to their left as DFHs with regard to Iraq, are not mine.  They are the work of economist and blogger Duncan Black, one of the early leaders of the liberal blogosphere– who began blogging precisely because of the marginalization of liberals and leftists in public discourse between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.  And I want to acknowledge that I agree entirely with Paeth’s caveats about my argument that Islamist radicalism has roots that have little to do with US imperialism:

American actions, such as the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq, or its support of settlement expansion in the West Bank, provide a focus and catalyst for Jihadist propaganda, which has no shortage of examples of genuine American perfidy to choose from in attempting to cast us as the villains in its cosmic drama. What’s more, U.S. support for repressive regimes in the region, who for their part attempted to crush reasonable democratic reform movements, pushing dissidents toward Islamic radicalism, has been a contributing factor in the rise of those movements, as well as feeding their anti-American rhetoric.

One might add that the torture of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, or Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are providing plenty of fuel for that fire as well.  Still, I agree with Paeth’s account of the “blowback” argument:

It is the failure to recognize the possibility of blowback in our Middle East policy during the past half century that led to the sequence of events by which we now find ourselves deeply embroiled in two pointless and unwinnable wars. Although it is easy to read this argument so as to lay all blame at the feet of the United States, a better understanding of it is as a counsel of prudence and humility in international affairs, rather than the hubristic faith in our ability to control all outcomes that has been demonstrated by U.S. administrations both past and present.

Paeth has convinced me that now is a good time to go and read Neibuhr on such matters– though I suspect that the Manichean response to Paeth’s argument would be something very like Zizek’s response to Arendt, and for the same reasons.  Zizek, you will recall, opened Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism by pining for the days when “Leftist radicals dismissed her as the perpetrator of the notion of ‘totalitarianism,’ the key weapon of the West in the Cold War ideological struggle” (2), and when radicals could properly shame their colleagues for taking their distance from totalitarianism: “if, at a Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s, one was asked innocently, ‘Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?’, this was a sure sign that one was in deep trouble” (2).  I look forward to cultural studies colloquia in which people are asked innocently, “is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Neibuhr?” or, even worse, “is your line of argument not similar to that of Paeth?”  Because that will certainly shut down criticism of the Manichean left for once and for all.

In response to Gregory Lobo (and Paul Hollander, who deals with Zizek in drive-by fashion), I am not sure what to say about Zizek’s academic celebrity in literature departments.  At first I thought it involved something of a bait-and-switch: come for the dazzling Lacanian readings of Hitchcock, stay for the I’m-not-kidding-but-I’m-just-kidding-but-maybe-I’m-not-kidding defenses of the gulag.  I might remark that philosophers and theorists with broad, sweeping critiques of the intellectual and political traditions of the West since the days of (a) Kant (b) Christ (c) Socrates have often found sympathetic audiences among literary folk, and often for good reason; thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault are nothing if not ambitious, and I find people who read them energetically more intellectually engaging and interesting than people who don’t.  But then I might also remark that broad, sweeping critiques of the West can go hand in hand with, or perhaps set the table for, bizarre, noxious enthusiasms and profound political misjudgments.  I suspect that something of the sort is going on here, and I can attempt a partial explanation for why we in literary studies keep falling in love with these bad boys time and time again.  As with Lyotard’s defense of paralogy and critique of Habermasian communicative action, we feel we have a sworn obligation to protect and preserve all the variously innovative, experimental god-knows-what stuff produced by the various avant-gardes of the past 200 years, the cranks and sages speaking a language no one else understands and imagining worlds other than this one.  It’s a confusing job, but somebody’s gotta do it.  And when I have made this argument in public, suggesting that people in literary studies are especially susceptible to thinking of “be reasonable, demand the impossible” as a cogent political platform, I have been told by Zizek fans that I am engaging in precisely the “liberal blackmail” of which Zizek speaks, shutting down possible alternatives to the liberal-democratic bourgeois dispensation that exercises such hegemony over Western thought.  Not at all, I reply.  I resonate in sympathy to the argument that the liberal-democratic bourgeois hegemony tries to cast all its competitor ideologies into the outer darkness by painting them as irrational and/or totalitarianism.  I am simply pointing out that when Laclau asked Zizek, in so many words, if he wants “to replace liberal democracy by a one-party political system, to undermine the division of powers, to impose the censorship of the press,” Zizek’s reply was the old Situationist slogan.  This has its charm for some, I know, but as for me, I am much more willing to consider alternatives to liberal-democratic bourgeois hegemony when I am told what they actually consist of.

In response to Luke Thominet’s thoughtful and eloquent essay on the Iraq war debates, I have only one thing to say:  I wish, in retrospect, that in 2002-03 I had written at least one of my critiques of the antiwar left and the liberal hawks in dialogue form– or, better yet, in dialogue with someone on the antiwar left or with one of the liberal hawks.  Because Thominet is right, as Packer is right, to insist that “the Iraq War is not an argument to be won or lost; it’s a tragedy”– or, as Thominet rephrases it, “Iraq is not a debate, it is a country; a real place with real people.”  I hope it is clear that I have great respect for The Assassin’s Gate, and for Packer’s willingness to revisit his initial, ambivalent support for the Iraq war.  But I still want to insist that Packer should have acknowledged that millions of people who opposed that war were thinking of Iraq as a real country with real people, and concluding that a post-invasion Iraq would be even worse for ordinary Iraqis than the containment of Saddam– horrible as that might sound.  The contrast with James Fallows is instructive, which is why I juxtaposed The Assassin’s Gate with Fallows’ 2002 Atlantic essay, “The Fifty-First State?”  Though Fallows, like Berman, was hesitantly pro-war, he did not fail to interview and give a fair hearing to a wide range of critics who believed that Iraq would be a moral or tactical disaster (or both).  I find it impossible to believe that Packer did not read that essay– and yet there is no evidence in The Assassin’s Gate that he did.  At the risk of repeating myself (having made this argument in the book), I will confess to being astonished that Packer would write, in 2005, that “the American people never had a chance to consider the real difficulties and costs of regime change in Iraq.”  Who knows?  Perhaps if ANSWER hadn’t been organizing the demonstrations, it would have been easier to see that the vast majority of demonstrators were (a) unaware that the rally was being organized by the neo-Stalinist fringe and (b) genuinely considering the real difficulties and costs of regime change in Iraq.

With a deep breath, I turn now to my most severe and unsympathetic respondents– first by registering my surprise and delight that Brahm managed to persuade them to read my book at all.

I begin by smiling ruefully at Paul Hollander’s suggestion that I was apparently unaware “that this book is likely to be appreciated only by a small number of readers who are familiar with the somewhat esoteric and sectarian preoccupations and disputes among the many branches of the academic left in this country and Britain.”  On the contrary, I was excruciatingly aware that this book is likely to be appreciated only by that small number of readers, which is one reason I have not bothered trying to sell the film rights.  And I will confess, as well, to being mildly amused at the apparent befuddlement of conservatives who read The Left At War only to find that it is not about them.  By contrast to Brahm, who finds The Left At War a useful (if flawed) attempt to bring the discourses of cultural studies to bear on the world of international relations, Hollander finds the second half of my book pointless or worse.  I would be very surprised otherwise; I cannot imagine a plausible universe in which I manage to convince Paul Hollander that the intellectual tradition of Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall is relevant to “practical politics and social change,” though I wish Hollander had buttressed his dismissal of the field with some practical responses to Hall’s analyses of Thatcherism.  As for Hollander’s sense that my chapter on American cultural studies constitutes “apparent support of political correctness,” all I can say is that I abhor wife-beating and stopped engaging in it quite some time ago.  I am grateful that Russell Berman read the chapter more carefully, and deftly summarized it thus: “it was the failure of the US academy to achieve a successful reception of Hall’s cultural studies that has condemned it to Chomksian dogmatism.”  You don’t have to agree with my account of cultural studies and the intellectual left in the US, of course; it is, after all, an idiosyncratic narrative, and so far as I know I’m the only one narrating it.  But it helps if you don’t misconstrue it so badly as to read it as a defense of something called “political correctness.”

Small but important matters, four in number: first, I am not, nor have I ever been, “critical of the recurring comparisons of the United States to Nazi Germany in the pages of The Nation,” largely because there are no such recurring comparisons in the pages of The Nation.  Hollander is apparently thinking of my response to Daniel Lazare’s rant on the Michael Medved radio show, in the course of which Lazare managed to compare the U.S. to Nazi Germany unfavorably; but Lazare did not submit that rant to The Nation, nor, I feel safe in saying, would they have published it if he did.  Second, in response to Hollander’s question, “sometimes Berube’s critiques of the radical left made me wonder what were their major determinant: was it his rejection of their positions on substantive moral grounds, because they were wrong, or his concern that these utterances damaged the credibility and political influence of the left in general, and the democratic left in particular ‘provide[ing] right wingers with still more fodder’” (26), I can answer simply that I’m not an either/or kind of guy.  I do not find it hard to say that substantively wrong positions can damage the credibility and political influence of the left, or that they should be debated both with regard to their wrongness and their political effects.  Third, about anticommunism, I fear that Hollander has simply missed my point.  He writes:

Elsewhere Berube writes that “the right had hung for decades the albatross of Soviet communism around the necks of anyone who suggested that people’s access to basic social goods should not be dependent on their ability to pay for them…” (187). There are several things wrong with this statement: you did not have to be a right-winger to be critical of supporters of Soviet communism or Soviet communism itself; such supporters were not criticized because they believed that access to basic social goods should not depend on the ability to pay for them, but on account of their whitewashing or ignoring the profound inhumanity of the Soviet system.

Let me try to rephrase that bit about the albatross: for most of the twentieth century, even anti-Communist, democratic American leftists and liberals who believed in things like Social Security and desegregation were tarred as Communists.  I cannot fathom why someone as distinguished as Hollander would fail to grasp this point, because it’s pretty elementary stuff.  And fourth, Hollander considers it an “overstatement” to say (as I do) “by 2003 the American press, television networks and cable channels had done a most impressive job of mainstreaming even some of the most vicious right-wing pundits and positions and marginalizing even the most tepid forms of liberal dissent” (132). Well, let’s put it this way.  Phil Donahue was fired by MSNBC in February 2003 even though his show was the highest-rated program on the channel; the following month, MSNBC hired Michael Savage.  If there is a clearer example of the marginalization of tepid liberal dissent and the mainstreaming of a vicious right-wing pundit in the history of human affairs, I am not aware of it.  Ordinarily the mainstreaming of vicious right-wing pundits is the job of Fox News, but in the runup to the Iraq War, American media underwent a spasm of Foxification from which they have still not fully recovered.  It is all right with me if Hollander wants to disagree about the exact degree of Foxification, but not all right if he wants to deny that it happened.

Ted McAllister opens by marking some boundaries, and noting (correctly) that my book was not intended to persuade him.  It is precisely for occasions such as this that I fall back on the Habermasian ideal of reciprocal recognition– but without the Habermasian insistence on orientation toward consensus.  I hope McAllister and I can understand each other without agreeing to agree.  Specifically, I think McAllister has misunderstood me on two counts, and I’d like to straighten that out if I can.  First, McAllister writes:

The least attractive bits of Berube’s book rest on an assumption that only those on the left can be morally earnest.  One fleeting reference to Laura Bush is suggestive– that her “invocation of the rights of Afghan schoolgirls” was “shallow and opportunistic” (159).  Barely a mention, this very dubious claim points to something deeper than even ideology– an unwillingness to consider opponents as people who are morally serious.  Laura Bush might have been naïve or she might have not articulated a full grasp of this particular form of patriarchal tyranny, but it is hard to fathom that she expressed her concern for the rights of these girls from any motivation except moral outrage.

This is one of only two times McAllister cites me directly, and it offers an important key to how he reads me.  Because there is another fleeting reference to Laura Bush earlier in my book, where I write that “it is intellectually dishonest to brush off the question of the fate of Afghan women under the Taliban by mocking Laura Bush’s sudden late-2001 conversion to international feminism.”  The critique, clearly, is aimed at people who dismissed Laura Bush’s invocation of the rights of Afghan schoolgirls simply because it came from Laura Bush.  I have no doubt that McAllister is morally serious, but I wish he had gotten this part of my argument right.  I also wish McAllister had not attributed to me “dozens of assumptions about Bush’s stupidity,” because my book says nothing on this score, and paraphrasing the assumptions of imaginary arguments is not conducive to serious intellectual exchange.

Second, McAllister thoroughly misunderstands my argument about “hijacking” key words and concepts.  I am not sure precisely where this misunderstanding originates, because there are no direct citations to work from, but this is what it consists of:

A righteous hatred of Bush and Cheney only reflects the deepest problem with Berube’s left, it isn’t the problem itself.  The problem is that Berube and others on the left (in the context of the argument I’m making here, George Lakoff comes to mind) do not understand what they collectively call the “right.”  The misunderstanding goes so deep that most leftists do not even attempt to understand people on the right as they understand themselves. So, when a leftist discusses the moral claims used by those on the right he begins by asserting that their key vocabulary has been “hijacked” or “stolen” from the left.  More particularly, the right stole the defining leftist ideals of freedom and equality, attached these linguistic talismans to their “reactionary” agenda and, voila, they came to power.

As a reading of my book, this is precisely wrong– but it is a powerful reminder of why the lessons of cultural studies are worth learning.  Here, the relevant lesson goes something like this. Concepts have no fixed home, no fixed meanings, no necessary correspondence to one political position or another; they are, rather (as we like to say in the cultural studies colloquia), sites of political struggle, articulated to (in Laclau’s terms) a variety of possible positions.  This is the basis of my critique of Stuart Hall for the one moment he nodded, forgetting this principle and claiming, with regard to the Falklands War, that Thatcherism had “literally stolen the slogans of national self-determination and anti-fascism out of mouths”; in reply, I said the following (I apologize for the lengthy self-citation, but McAllister’s misunderstanding of my point is so complete that it seems necessary):

It is as if the left can struggle over the meaning of the “nation,” but the right has no business adapting the language of anti-fascism and national self-determination.  And it is as if Hall is willing to admit that Thatcherism has a rational basis when it comes to popular dissatisfaction with the welfare state, but no plausible reason whatsoever to oppose Galtieri’s opportunistic seizure of the islands: here, despite everything Hall has shown us about the operations of Thatcherite hegemony, we are in the realm of false national consciousness, where the sheeple are encouraged– if not hypnotized– into repeating the ancient verities: “Mrs T is simply our most-beloved Good Housekeeper,” Hall writes.  “Children should be brought up as our parents brought us up.  Mothers should stay at home.  Tin-pot dictators should be stood up to.  These are the grand truths which history and experience teach: what she called, to the Conservative Women’s Conference on the eve of her election victory, the ‘tried and trusted values of commonsense.’  Better than ‘trendy theories’– and all that thinking” (HR 71).

One does not have to support the Falklands War (I did not and do not) to believe that this is a serious mistake on Hall’s part: to lump “tin-pot dictators should be stood up to” with “children should be brought up as our parents brought us up” and “mothers should stay at home” is precisely to leave the language of anti-fascism to the right. (194-95)

So when McAllister writes, “declaring that leftists own ‘freedom and equality’ and that conservatives have stolen these defining words of American identity is absurd to anyone who spends serious time with thoughtful conservatives,” I have to agree– with the caveat that this declaration belongs to a book that I did not write, and that I will not fail to critique when it is written.

Small but important matters, two in number: first, McAllister notes that the word “ravings” is “one of those words that Bérubé uses to mark those who are outside of the circle.”  Quite so: the full phrase is “the bloodthirsty ravings of right-wing pundits,” and one of the examples I offer of such ravings is the work of thoughtful conservative Rich Lowry, senior editor of the National Review:

We know the states that harbor our enemies. If only Osama bin Laden and his 50 closest advisers and followers die in the next couple of weeks, President Bush will have failed in a great military and moral challenge of his presidency.

The American response should be closer to something along these lines: identifying the one or two nations most closely associated with our enemies, giving them 24-hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping with our desire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically destroying every significant piece of military, financial, and political infrastructure in those cities.

If these words do not place Rich Lowry outside McAllister’s circle, so much the worse for that circle.  Second, speaking of the National Review, I was struck by McAllister’s account of American conservatism.  “A politically relevant ‘conservatism’ evolved over a span of years leading to the election of 1980.  From the beginning, as evidenced in 1950s issues of National Review, it lacked any systematic ideology.”  But the National Review of the 1950s and 1960s tells a rather different story.  On one issue, racial integration, the National Review had a thoroughly systematic ideology: they were agin’ it.  I do feel the pain of thoughtful conservatives who have to confront that legacy now, and who have to grapple with what it means that the Republican campaign of 1980 was launched in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with Reagan’s proclamation, “I believe in states’ rights…. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”  When, therefore, McAllister writes, “Conservatism 2.0 included new groups, excluded some groups previously associated with conservatism (traditionalists and isolationists, for instance), and, when wedded to the preternatural optimism of Ronald Reagan, became a future-oriented, liberationist ideology that was both nostalgic (reclaiming the real America) and progressive,” I will not reply that he is “hijacking” or “stealing” terms such as liberationist and progressive.  I will simply say he is using them in ways I do not.

Where Bloodworth read The Left At War as a breakup note, Elhanan Yakira reads it as a family squabble, as a kind of contentious yet affectionate squabble between me and Uncle Noam.  And then he goes further:

Indeed, the question of how to belong to the family, or what being of the Left means, becomes so essential that it seems to have become the central issue of Bérubé’s venture as a whole. There is thus in his book a typical reversal of the proper order of questioning: We are asked to consider not so much whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, but what should the Left– the real left that is– think about this or that matter. Once again, this is a typical orthodox way of thinking: orthodox truth precedes all discourse, and is not given to critical scrutiny. The truthfulness of what one says, or believes, is not measured against the hard facts of reality, but against what is supposed to be, in this case, the beliefs of the Left insofar as it is a left.

I am genuinely sorry to hear that someone has gotten this impression from my book.  I do not know how it is possible, given the book’s painstaking (and, for some readers, tedious) examinations of claims about the al-Shifa bombing in Khartoum, the temporary interruption of aid convoys to Afghanistan, the effects of Iraqi sanctions, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report on Srebrenica, and so forth.  But I regret it nonetheless.  Likewise, I do not see how someone can read the opening six pages of chapter two, explaining in detail my support for (as well as my reservations about) military action in Afghanistan in response to 9/11, and come away with the conclusion that “instead of the kind of war the US and its allies have waged in Afghanistan, he seems to suggest a ‘police operations’ approach or something of this kind.”  But apparently it is possible.

On one count we have a simple yet profound misunderstanding.  When I write that Kenneth Roth and Human Rights Watch “decisively slammed the door on any attempt to use the 1988 Anfal (in which 100,000 Kurds were killed) or the suppression of the 1991 Intifada as retroactive grounds for international action,” Yakira thinks I am referring to the first (or second?) Palestinian Intifada; I meant, rather, the 1991 Iraqi uprising (al-Intifada al-Shaabaniya), suppressed by Saddam with inconceivable brutality.  I am sorry for the confusion.

As for Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, I am not sure I have any way of convincing Yakira that I have anything useful to say.  I am, as he notes, safely ensconced in the placid hills of central Pennsylvania.  But I take no comfort in Yakira’s argument that all is quiet on Israel’s northern front.  I may be very far from that front, but I have heard the argument before, some years after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  Things were indeed quiet for a while after that operation, but no one will ever persuade me that the events of 1982 were good for Israel in the long run.  And that is my concern, as it is Yakira’s: what is good for Israel in the long run.  Yakira asks if I would consider Israel a rogue state, and, deciding that I have not sufficiently delegitimized the delegitimizers, indicts me for a “lack of moral courage and intellectual lucidity.”  He even challenges me (or any of my friends) to “show me one example where a military operation of Israel was justified.”  (I’ve always admired the raid on Entebbe, and I was actually OK with the initial stages of the 1982 invasion until Israel decided to go all the way to Beirut, enable and oversee the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and unwittingly plant the seeds of an organization called Hezbollah.)  I hope Yakira will now return the favor, and write about a couple of Israeli military operations that he considers to have been unjustified.

It seems to me that Yakira’s various litmus tests are diagnostic of the toxicity of so many debates about Israel and Palestine: where Michael McIntyre fulminated against my belief that Israel has the right to defend itself, Yakira fulminates against my inadequate defense of Israel to defend itself.  So be it.  For the record, then: no, Israel is not a rogue state, and I oppose all academic and cultural boycotts of Israel.  But it is increasingly behaving as a garrison state.  Its response to criticism of its war in Gaza, continuing through the release of the Goldstone Report and the attack on the Gaza flotilla, suggests that Israel sees all criticism of its conduct as illegitimate.  Yakira himself almost goes so far in his response to my reading of Ellen Willis’s essay, “Is There Still a Jewish Question?  Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist.”  I had written that Willis “does not shy from the question of anti-Semitism in her discussion of the ‘root causes’ of 9/11″; Yakira adds, “although, as he adds immediately– in her ‘criticism of global anti-Semitism [she] did not mute her criticism of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.’  It is in fact amazing that addressing the question of ‘global anti-Semitism’ is not what every honest human being should find the most natural thing in the world; and it is amazing that this question cannot be addressed without immediately and apparently unavoidably adding the excuse of ‘not muting the criticism of Israel.’” Yes, it is amazing– and depressing.  But let’s think carefully about how we came to this sorry pass, starting from a point (1967, say) at which, as Fred Halliday has noted, Israel enjoyed the broad and unquestioning support of the Western left.  In the US, the invocation of global anti-Semitism is used quite often to mute criticism of Israeli policies and practices, which is why American leftists who acknowledge the existence of global anti-Semitism need to make it very clear that they want no part of that dynamic.  Moreover, since Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories have enjoyed the support of the American government for the past 43 years, American leftists feel especially obligated to make it clear that their criticism of anti-Semitism and of Israel’s many political enemies does not commit them to support everything Israel does.  It is amazing that we have gotten to this point, yes, but here we are.  For those of us who care about what is best for Israel in the long run, it is not a good place to be.  Perhaps we can agree on that much.

Finally, I turn back to Gabriel Brahm with gratitude for his exceptionally generous reading of my book–and, for good measure, with two closing quibbles.  Perhaps my criticism of the Bush-Cheney Administration is “hyperbolic” to some ears, yes.  Though when I denounce its policies, I am not engaging in “ad hominem” argument.  Saying “Bush is a smug frat boy and Cheney has a distinct resemblance to Voldemort” is ad hominem.  Saying “the Administration instituted torture and indefinite detention as US policy, embraced a radical understanding of the executive branch that effectively undermines the separation of powers, and created a propaganda apparatus to sell its ‘War on Terror’” is not.  And it would have been nice to have the opportunity to respond to a critic more friendly to the Manichean left, too.  Someone who could properly take me to task for not having an adequate response to neoliberalism or a compelling account of how a Walzerian defense of the social welfare state can avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.  When I think of my book’s weaknesses, that’s what I think of first.  But these nine essays offer challenges and expose weaknesses that had not occurred to me, and I have learned much from them.  For that, too, I am deeply grateful.

Note

[1]For related reasons, I refuse to use the term “anti-American” to describe either Chomsky or members of the Manichean left.  No doubt some of them are motivated, to some extent, by some form of opposition to the United States.  But in the United States, the term operates chiefly to suppress debate (unsurprisingly, and regardless of whether its user intends it this way): in mass media, no “anti-American” intellectuals or activists are invited to discuss American affairs.  Outside the United States, it confuses legitimate, principled opposition to American foreign policy with legitimate, opportunistic, resentful, or fundamentalist opposition to American cultural hegemony.  And, of course, it forecloses on the question of when “anti-Americanism” is an altogether appropriate response to a state of affairs.  I know that when my government is napalming villages or helping death squads murder priests and nuns (including American clergy!), then I count myself among the ranks of the anti-Americans.  But my opposition to these things is an opposition to actions, not to entities.

[a] new European (and American) commonality for all lefts—a new litmus test of progressive politics—seems to have developed: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism (though not anti-Semitism, or at least not yet). I cannot think of two more potent wedge issues that define inclusion and exclusion on the left today. In a hierarchy of key items defining what it means to be left in contemporary Europe and the United States—pro-choice, abolition of the death penalty, equality in marital arrangements and official recognition of gay and lesbian couples by the state; progressive income tax; economic and social justice; support for third world claims against the rich first world; multilateralism as opposed to unilateralism; legalization of marijuana; and on and on—opposition to Israel and America figure at the very top. If one is not at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its government) and if one does not dismiss everything American as a priori vile and reactionary, one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called “the left.” There has not been a common issue since the Spanish Civil War that has united the left so clearly as has anti-Zionism and its twin, anti-Americanism. The left divided, and divides, over Serbia, over Chechnya, over Darfur, even over the war in Iraq. There are virtually no divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and over the essence of the United States. If one has anything positive—or even non-derogatory—to say about the United States or Israel, one always needs to qualify it with a resounding “but.”[1]

Indeed, as both conservatives and thoughtful liberals like Markovits have long recognized, there has been for half-a-century now a tendency for the left in this country to descend to the level of a largely reactive “adversary culture.”  At least since the days when Lionel Trilling first coined that phrase, in 1965, there has existed an antinomian “left” counter-culture, committed above all to an “adversarial” stance requiring initiates to profess contempt for the general character of America, while habitually protesting the specific actions of its government.

More recently, as Markovits was among the first to clearly delineate, Israel joined her chief ally as what he calls the “twin” designated devil in the melodramatic scenario of a global adversary culture.  Indeed, by 2007, Markovits was seeing not just opposition to Israel and the U.S., but indeed anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism as a pair of “twin brothers.”[2]  Thus, while perhaps not a “required” part of the left “ID check” that Markovits isolates above (“at least not yet”), anti-Semitism is by no means absent either from far-left political discourse today—as many observers agree, anti-Zionism frequently crosses over the line into anti-Semitism when double-standards that selectively demonize a nation are applied toward the end of delegitimizing the Jewish State in particular (either singled out for opprobrium alone among U.N. member-states, or first and foremost).[3]  Furthermore, concerned scholars have recently documented that anti-Semitism is indeed a serious and growing problem on some North American college campuses—which are generally cultural-left strongholds.[4]  Something about 9/11 also seemed to bring back a hoary tradition of conspiracy thinking that puts Jews at the dimly lit center of every big event: In the wake of the U.S. response to the historic attacks, as Russell Berman observes, “on both sides of the Atlantic” we heard “the highly charged accusation that ‘neocons,’ a term used increasingly as a code for politically conservative Jews, were engaged in a ‘cabal’ (another term with an innuendo of a Jewish conspiracy) to manipulate Western foreign policy.”  From a “strange new perspective,” popular throughout the years of the George W. Bush presidency, “the enemy ceased to be the perpetrators of 9/11 [and became] the advocates of a preventative strategy against future assaults.”  Chillingly, since “Islamists had attacked the West, Jews became suspect.”[5]  But neocons or no neocons, as Robert Wistrich has shown, in his most magisterial study of a most dismal subject, the hard left—and not only the far right—has its crazy, obsessive problem with Jews.[6]

September Song: the Left After 9/11

Thus, the absurdity of the crude tests of left fortitude espied by Markovits—measured by the willingness to stand mainly for standing-up against “American imperialism” and “Zionist aggression”—became even more painfully evident after the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Metaphysically committed as many were to unearthing the supposed “root causes” of every problem (with recourse to tired etymology, a part of what it means to be “radical”), some on the left could not help but automatically blame the self-evident victim of those attacks for in effect provoking them.  The same “rationalist naïvete” that was being used, for about a year by then, since late September of 2000, in order to excuse the lethal targeting of what would eventually add up to many hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians (as well as Palestinian “collaborators”) in the Second Intifada, would now apply also to Israel’s most visible and loyal supporter, in what some wished to see as a “Global Intifada.”[7]  Twins indeed!  To wit: When anyone commits a suicide-attack against you, it must be your fault for making them choose such a desperate strategy.  After all, what other logical, rational explanation could there be, to make sense of a hate that destroys its comparatively weaker bearers, just so as to strike, horrifically yet relatively feebly, at the much stronger object of its impotent obsession?  The assumption seemed to be: nobody hates destructively, for their own complex set of internal reasons/motives; or envies; or enjoys revenge; or embraces death pathologically; or systematically indoctrinates, organizes and recruits (often young) martyrs; or pays-off their families.  They must “hate us for good reasons.”[8]

The obscenity (and empirical falsity) of such shallow reasoning—at a time when others were realizing that we faced nothing less than a renewed “totalitarian” threat to democracy and human rights, in the guise of radical Islamism—had brought the left to an impasse, or perhaps turning point.  The crisis of the post-9/11 left arrived in the form of a question: Had the anti-American, anti-Israel left, in the age of mass-murder terrorism, finally discredited leftism per se, by going so far as to associate itself in various ways and to varying degrees with Islamic-fascist jihad—or could there be a more nuanced and decent left, one that stood against totalitarian reaction and murder (even when the victims were well-fed Americans, pampered Europeans, or Jewish Israelis)?  As Michael Walzer put it in 2002, also in Dissent,

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?  Or more accurately, in the only superpower?  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.  Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power.  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.[9]

Moreover, as the foremost conservative critic of anti-Americanism, Paul Hollander, likewise observed, in an essay first published in The National Interest at around the same time (also in 2002), “The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provide a new vantage point for examining the evolution and current condition of the American adversary culture” (The Only Superpower 203).  Thoughtful liberals and conservatives were in agreement.  Something was wrong with “the left” and the time had come to say so—even for those, like Bernard-Henri Levy, in France, and Michael Berube, in the U.S., who continued to think of themselves as very much “of the left.”  Any “decent” left, it seemed, would have to start by acknowledging, and distancing itself from, the “actually existing” one.

Toward this end, Markovits and I surveyed, in 2007-08, in a series of articles for the short-lived but influential British social-democratic journal, Democratiya, what we provisionally labeled then a “post-left.”[10]  We were confirmed in our sense that some sort of convenient reifying tag was necessary to mark the implosion of the postmodern (relativist, anti-Enlightenment), postcolonial (anti-Western, Third Worldist), post-Marxist (anti-Empiricist, Foucauldian), post-911 (anti-Semitic, pro-Islamist) and post-Zionist (dystopian) “left,” when around the same time none-less-than BHL himself referred at length, in a similar vein, to what he dubbed a “right-wing left” and thus an “oxymoronic Left.”  Pointing to the defense of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “and his so called secularism” by some in France and Britain, and singling out such notable examples as “Alain Badiou’s writings on Kosovo or Judaism” and “Jean Baudrillard’s text about the September 11^th attacks,” Levy announced that “the hypothesis of [his] whole book,” Left in Dark Times, was that what we finally had come to was a “progressivism without progress,” or in other words “pointless radicalism.”[11]

Versatile Complaints: The Left at War (with Itself)

Berube’s important book of 2009, The Left at War, in turn starts out pondering “what to call this left.”  Indeed, at the extreme fringe of “angry anonymous trolls” bashing out “Internet polemic” (although this contingent turns out to include also academics, who should know better), he believes “what ought to be challenged…is the claim of some of these fellows to any left at all.”  He considers the moniker “far left,” but this “leaves in place the idea that this left’s evasiveness with regard to tyranny and genocide belong ‘on the left’ in any sense whatsoever”;  neither will “radical left” do either, since he “has no desire to criticize radicalism tout court”; likewise “anti-imperialist left” won’t do, since he “has no desire to undermine anti-imperialism,” and because he—rightly, in my view—discerns that “much of this left uses the rhetoric of anti-imperialism as a cloak for something much less admirable.”  Then what about “conservative left,” “reactionary left,” or “academic left,” he ponders?  No, “none of these seems right,” the author muses, and instead “adopt[s] the term ‘Manichean left,’” for this left’s unwillingness to engage in normal processes of persuasion and conciliation aimed at winning the consent of populations—or, in his preferred Gramscian vocabulary, they are resistant to participating effectively in struggles for “hegemony.”[12]

This terminology makes sense, for the crux of the matter to Berube’s eye is that these new Manicheans prefer to think in terms of stark categories such as “propaganda” (Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman) or “ideology” (Slavoj Zizek is the most sophisticated proponent of this model mentioned), with the implication being always one of some kind of “false consciousness” at work.  There are those who know and are good (they’re the “real” left, whatever you decide to call it), and then there is everyone else.  In place of this disabling “Manichean” assumption that truth and virtue can and must be separated so readily and absolutely from falsehood and evil, Berube recommends a reexamination and a return to the influential neo-Gramscian work of Stuart Hall, which allows for a more messy and impure engagement with contingency and contestation as basic to politics, understood to be a perpetual fight within civil society to define and shape public opinion.  The popularity in recent years of such notions of “agonistic democracy”—among  not only devotees of Cultural Studies but also, in political theory, followers of Hannah Arendt—should in principle at least make Berube’s argument for “hegemony” essentially palatable to many who might wish to join him on a post-Manichean, or as he calls it “democratic left” (13 and passim).  Whether or not they will do so in fact remains an open question, subject to other factors besides reasonable and convincing argument.

Hence Berube (onetime student of Richard Rorty and now, in this book, inheritor of his late teacher’s mantle, as a superbly well-informed, wide-ranging and genial left-critic of the left) joins the company of lucid left-leaning liberals (viz. social democrats) such as Walzer and Markovits—committed to most of what used to be understood as “left” values, but dismayed of late by the failures of “the left at war.”  Indeed, the book in many ways reads as both an affirmative answer to Walzer’s question about the possibility of a decent left, and at the same time an unblinkered exploration of Markovits’s astute mapping of the depressing terrain on which any such answers must be ferreted out.  As such, Berube does a double service: he both ruthlessly cleans house and, once that’s done, unapologetically takes stock.  The result is to open up a newly invigorated discussion among serious people that cuts across conventional lines of left and right.

But can there be a decent “democratic” left today?

Berube starts the search by first palpitating three key pathologies of the post-left, as I call it, or “Manichean left,” as he prefers: “postcolonial bad conscience” (what Pascal Bruckner has lately termed “Western masochism” in thrall to the “tyranny of guilt”[13]); counter-cultural trendiness (an even less serious version of what used to be called “infantile leftism”); and an irrational aversion to the institutions of modern, liberal democracy (in effect a reactionary-left conservatism, bound weirdly to ultra-vague utopian visions of “alternative” systems nobody is capable of identifying) (1-5).  In turn, each of these underlying chronic conditions presents itself in a variety of more acute symptoms.  Three deserve to be emphasized.

First, postcolonial guilt registers in the chastened epistemology of “cultural relativism” (3), according to which no mere Westerner has the right to criticize, much less condemn or take action against, what are called blandly “other cultures.”  Hence, no intervention in another sovereign country’s affairs is ever justified—no U.N. sanctioned “duty to protect,” not even to stop genocide or prevent terrorism.  Even though, when you think about the culturalist logic, we too, after all, have culture.  We too should presumably be entitled to act in keeping with our “cultural values,” shouldn’t we?  If, in other words, “it’s a part of your culture” to attack us (or to mutilate women’s bodies or set them on fire, or deny gay people human rights, or persecute Jews, or impose dictatorship), then “it’s a part of our culture” to oppose you in whatever ways we judge necessary and likely to be effective.  You want to massacre people and impose theocracy because of undiscussable “cultural differences”?  Fine, let us each follow his/her culture then! We want to stop you.[14]  But in fact, for Berube’s Manichean post(colonial) left, only other people’s cultures are cultures worthy of respect.  As he points out, Manichean reasoning leads some to the conclusion that, “the enemy of my enemy may turn out to be my friend, even if ‘my enemy’ is the American right and their enemies include radical Islamists” (3).  Here again Berube joins others who see this drift toward sympathy for Islamism as a breaking-point, if not a turning-point, for the left.

Second, the narcissistic politics of countercultural identity-formation (maintaining the fantasy of outsider status at all costs) means the post-left gets “uncomfortable whenever its ideas win the consent of more than a tiny fraction of the public.”  For these counter-elitists, therefore, there is in fact no reason to seek to persuade large numbers of one’s fellow citizens by the means that are available in our society to do so, because the Beautiful Soul by definition sees “popular politics as a game rigged by corporations and the process of winning popular consent as a form of ‘selling out.’”  Berube perceptively notes that this amounts not so much to a set of specifiable beliefs as it does a “mode of belief, a way of believing”: the form of truth is always a scandal or a conspiracy or a secret knowable only by the self-marginalized (3).  Another word for this kind of pseudo-sophisticated knowingness is cynicism: If it’s widely believed, it has to be false.  If it’s shocking, it’s at least a candidate for hidden reality or suppressed fact of the matter.  The Elect see through the “necessary illusions” that seduce the damned who surround them; that’s how they know they’re “saved.”  Which raises the question: With regards to illusions—“necessary” for whom and for what?  Perhaps beneath an apparently self-serving attitude lies the fear of being taken-in, taken advantage of, or caught in a naïve belief—the insecure attachment to a compensating image of oneself as clever and therefore “safe” from the confusion and uncertainty that attends modern life.  Or perhaps the enjoyment of this kind of exaggerated self-love is its own reward.[15]  In any case, Berube here identifies another self-defeating anti-political habit of mind visible on the problematic left, one as proof against swaying many people to one’s cause as is support for radical Islam’s “critique” of corporate capitalism.

And third, the latter is easier to entertain when one rejects a priori as oppressive and worthless the institutions of liberal democracy that so-far accompany capitalism in the West.  Moreover, being “against” liberalism/capitalism as we know it is, in Berube’s words,

a supple and versatile complaint: on the one hand it can be launched from anywhere, because the complaint never has to specify just what kind of society should replace the boring, procedural liberal democracy that constrains us; on the other, it can be mobilized to any end, even—at an extreme—to provide cover for profoundly anti-liberal forms of government in the Islamic states or in the developing world.  (4)

Taken together with Western masochism and the need to feel a part of an isolated “in” group, the very unempirical presumption (replacement for religious faith?) that ours has simply got to be the worst-of-all-possible worlds (or an inverted American exceptionalism?) feeds what Berube calls “Manichean habits of mind,” stark good-versus-evil thinking that has some strange results.

For example, as Berube reminds: The post-left argued that Bush was worse than Bin Laden and those murdered on 9/11 deserved their fates.  It compared Bush—unfavorably!—with Hitler, and lauded Ba’athist factions killing American servicemen and women as “Iraqi maquis” (supposedly similar to French resistance fighters in WW II).  It voiced support for Saddam, Ahmadinejad, Milosevic, and denounced both Israel and (in the words of a Monthly Review editor, cited by Berube) “establishment Jews.”  It entertained the most daft conspiracy theories (26-34).

Getting the Conversation Going: Cult Studs Meets IR & FP

In response to these and other travesties, Berube aspires “to bring the history of cultural studies to bear on questions of U.S. foreign policy and international relations” (9).  It’s a tough thing to do, so it’s rarely done.  It requires competence outside one’s discipline, and curiosity about the world.  But it’s also necessary and important, so that discussions about the state of the actual world we share are not allowed to become so narrowly specialized that the disciplines do not talk to one another and the “big picture” (or what we might call the ultimate “referent,” the reality of our lives) is lost.  In this rare feat of recovering the life-world for students of the humanities, he undoubtedly succeeds.  Though some members of the English department might balk at the intrusion of “real” politics—actual events, death tolls, geography, names and dates, proposals for action and counterproposals—into their sanitized world of the “rhetoric” and “representations” of the political, Berube insists on giving equal weight to both signifier and signified.  He not only argues about methodology, in other words, or for his preferred model of Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall’s early work).  He also argues—with Paul Berman, Tony Blair, Nick Cohen, Bill Clinton, Thomas Frank, George Galloway, Todd Gitlin, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Alan Johnson, Robert McChesney, George Packer, Daniel Pipes, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, Ronald Reagan, Edward Said, Amartya Sen, Michael Walzer, Ellen Willis (with whom he mostly agrees), and many others—about states of affairs and the values we should risk our lives for.  While such combining of methodological rigor and genuine philosophical interest with real-world contemporary politics is not unheard of in the humanities, this kind of well-informed “political criticism” is yet rare enough (sadly), and rarely done as well.

Moreover, if there can be a “decent left” in the “only superpower,” Berube is it.  For his values are our values: “equality and freedom” (as the conclusion to his book is titled).  We can of course, and must, disagree about how to interpret these terms in specific situations; but we must never abandon them, nor give up on civil society’s endless debate.  Toward this goal, there are no sacred cows, everything is up for discussion in Berube’s writing.  True, he expresses freely, and even sometimes loosely airs, his own exaggerated dislike of the “Bush-Cheney administration,” calling it “vile” and glibly categorizing its mistakes as “atrocities” and mislabeling its constitutional outlook (defended in print by no less reputable a political-philosopher than Harvey Mansfield) “totalitarian.”  Their “crimes” reportedly “beggar description” and render them “the worst president and vice president in U.S. history” (5-6).  But such hyperbolic ad hominems are uncharacteristic of him; atypical of his generous, reasonable, sane and balanced mind; and not to be taken too seriously in the scheme of things (compared to what’s distinctively important about his work), in my opinion.

At his best—and he is most often at his best, in his latest, extraordinary book—Berube’s The Left at War challenges all of us, by example, to make careful arguments (even in response to those we disagree with!), examine evidence, and weigh alternatives without either fear of stigmatization as “un-PC” or giving up on principle either.  It is an exercise in “connected criticism,” by a gifted critic—connected both to the academic field of Cultural Studies and his country and the world community of which the latter is a part.[16]  Unlike purists and fanatics of all stripes, he’s willing to talk—or, as Rorty would have put it, committed to “keeping the conversation going.”  In so doing, missteps are unavoidable: Berube’s mainly judicious colloquy occasionally veers off toward melodramatic partisan fancy, as when we are informed—in the spirit of those heady days of Barack Obama’s historic election victory—that not only are Republican policies being “decisively repudiated” but that “the tide has finally turned throughout the hemisphere, and the right is now on the defensive” (1).  For the most part, however—the vast majority of an erudite, timely, courageous and inventive exercise in the genuinely interdisciplinary study of politics and culture—Berube admirably sticks to his own maxim, announced in a previous book, of 2006, What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?

Because I cannot have and do not seek unanimity in political and cultural matters…, I believe that the liberal ideal consists in engaging my most stringent interlocutors, so long as we share an underlying commitment to open-ended rational debate.  This means that I am open to all manner of reasonable challenges to my beliefs with regards to abortion, affirmative action, taxation and public-sector spending, stem-cell research, disability law, feminism, international relations, nationalism and citizenship, love, hate, war, and peace.[17]

Amen, brother!  And two cheers for the decent, democratic left.  For what better answer could there be to the “litmus testers” and ID-checkers, of the Manichean left—or right?

Notes

I wish to thank Gregory Lobo and Forrest Robinson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.  Any mistakes they didn’t catch are mine.

[1]Markovits, Andrei S.  “The European and American Left Since 1945.”  Dissent (Winter 2005).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

[2]Markovits, Andrei S.  Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.  See especially the chapter “‘Twin Brothers’: European Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism” (150-200).

[3]The so-called “3-D Test” is Natan Sharansky’s.  See his “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” in Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4 (Fall 2004).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

[4]See “Contemporary Antisemitism in Higher Education: Manifestations, Sources, and Responses,” a statement by the participants of “Contemporary Antisemitism in Higher Education,” a workshop convened at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, July 26 – August 6, 2010.  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.  See also Kenneth L. Marcus, “A Blind Eye to Campus Anti-Semitism?” Commentary (September 2010).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

[5]Berman, Russell A.  Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad.  Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2009.  70.

[6]Wistrich, Robert.  A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.  New York: Random House, 2010.  Left-wing “progressive” anti-Semitism, as Wistrich observes, is a growing problem: “The same radical Left that foams at the mouth at the very mention of Israel/Palestine has had little difficulty in closing its eyes to the religious and gender apartheid in Islam, the murderous crimes of such Communist leaders as Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot, not to mention the mass murders in Africa from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s to Rwanda over a decade ago, and Sudan today.  While real massacres are ignored, a huge propaganda effort continues to be invested globally in pillorying Israel as a perpetrator of genocide.  This far transcends the Left since it also involves the United Nations, the Arab states, the Muslim world, nongovernment organizations, and parts of the Western media who black out Israeli victims of suicide bombers, even as they rationalize Islamist and Palestinian terrorism.  To the extent that anti-Semitism is even acknowledged as a problem, its intensity in the Muslim and Arab world is played down or completely ignored.  The prevailing concept of anti-Semitism as the exclusive property of the fascist Right, a notion especially popular on the Far Left, seems permanently stuck in a seventy-year-old time warp.  No less outdated is the liberal assumption that victims of racist discrimination (including Palestinians, North African Arabs, blacks, and other immigrants) can never be anti-Semitic.  This is manifestly contradicted on a daily basis by the evidence of streets” (57-8 emphasis added).

[7]The term “rationalist naïvete” is Paul Berman’s.  See his Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton), 2004.  152.

[8]Hollander, Paul.  The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism.  New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2009.  206.  Subsequent reference to this edition appears cited in the text.

[9]Walzer, Michael.  “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Dissent (Spring 2002).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

[10]See Andrei Markovits and Gabriel Brahm, “Cosmopolitanism vs. the Post-Left,” Democratiya (Spring 2008).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.  See also my “The Odyssey of the Post-Left,”  Democratiya (Summer 2008).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.  And see my “The Concept of the ‘Post-Left’: a Defense,” Democratiya (Winter 2008).  Web.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

[11]Levy, Bernard-Henri.  Left in Dark Times: a Stand Against the New Barbarism.  New York: Random House, 2008.  81.

[12]Berube, Michael.  The Left at War.  New York: New York UP.  6-7, 25.  Subsequent references to this edition appear cited in the text.  Incidentally, Berube thanks, in the book’s “Acknowledgments,” Professor Matt Burstein (of University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown’s Philosophy Department) for suggesting the term “Manichean left” (vii).

[13]Bruckner, Pascal.  The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010.

[14]Here I paraphrase Peter L. Berger’s reply to the Cultural Relativist (his example is sati in India under British rule).  See Berger’s “Between Fundamentalism and Relativism,” The American Interest (September/October 2006), 9-17.

[15]I explore some of these questions, in an examination of one notable instance of Manichean left psychology, in my “Understanding Noam Chomsky: a Reconsideration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23:5 (December 2006), 453-461.

[16]The term “connected critic” is Michael Walzer’s.  See his The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books), 2002.  Xviii and passim.

[17]Berube, Michael.  What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?  Classroom Politics and ‘Bias’ in Higher Education.  New York: Norton, 2006.  22.

In fact, I tend to agree with much of what Bérubé says. I don’t know what to say about the messianic vision of the Internationalist-Democratic world that the “democratic left” in the name of which he speaks envisions, or of the disappointment that he and some other leftists feel in the face of a world that does not live up to their expectations–especially as these appear at the very end of the book. I am afraid that the message articulated in the last pages of the book – a plea for a world governed by some kind of international or universal jurisprudence – is utopian and unrealistic; and utopias are not only naïve but also dangerous. Yet I have a lot of sympathy for what seems to me to be the basic, perhaps pre-theoretical, moral-political agenda the book speaks for: freedom, equality, justice, institutionalized solidarity, care for the weak, etc. But since The Left at War does not contain anything that can be regarded as a concrete political program, there is not much more to say about this aspect of the book. I also have much sympathy for the polemical side of the book, which is its main content. I can even appreciate, I think, at least to some degree, much of the irony his criticism contains, and I respect the courage that writing it must have needed.

Thus I share Bérubé’s negative opinion of what he calls the “Manichean Left,” and I can add that much of his analysis of Chomsky’s positions or of his followers, disciples and collaborators applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Israeli version of the same phenomenon. Like him, I don’t have much respect for reductionist-paternalist explanations, typically endemic in a leftist kind of thinking about, for instance, the “ordinary people’s” support for Thatcher in England, Reagan or Bush in the US (which are the main topics of the last two chapters of The Left at War) and—one could add here perhaps—for the Likkud, or Netanyahu in Israel. I could not avoid thinking, however, while I was reading the non-reductionist attempt to understand the “ordinary people’s” rejection of the Left, that Bérubé was doing himself after all a relatively easy job: not less important and sometimes more intellectually challenging than the “ordinary people” is what the “non-ordinary” adversary of the Left, the intellectual on the right for example, has to say. Bérubé typically ignores this kind of being. There are thus limits to my agreement or sympathy with what the book expresses, and I shall try in what follows to specify and explain what these are.

Marginal & Central: the View From Israel

The book’s five chapters (plus an “Introduction” and “Conclusion”) deal with two main topics: the internal quarrels of the American Left after 9/11; and the theoretical, or ideological-theoretical, disputes within the field of Cultural Studies, mainly in American academe, but with constant reference to the English school of Cultural Studies, and in particular to the work of Stuart Hall. It is written from an explicitly avowed leftist ideological position, and so it is not exactly an academic book, at least if this last notion is taken in its good old sense—the one which poses an ideal of scientific neutrality in matters of opinion and of the need to parenthesize ideological commitments or presuppositions when one is involved in an attempt to understand reality, whether physical or social. I was thus necessarily reading this book as an outsider: not only am I not very familiar with either one of the two “discursive spaces,” as these things are called in up-to-date language but, moreover, the stakes of the political-ideological, let alone personal, wars in question do not concern me directly. I would even dare say that insofar as the issues discussed by Bérubé belong mainly to internal American debates, it is not only lack of competence which dictates caution on my part here, but also some democratic modesty and prudence: it is not for me to take part in such debates.

I was reading it, to be more exact, as an Israeli citizen and academic, living and working in Jerusalem, and watching with increasing amazement—perhaps bewilderment would describe it more accurately—the intensifying anti-Israeli feeling and the growing anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist literature which characterizes lately the Western, including American, “left.”  In the end, what convinced me that there was a point in putting in writing some of the thoughts that reading The Left at War evoked in me, were the several, mostly incidental, references to Israel that it contains. I shall come to it at the end of the present review; let me say though already that despite the marginal place discussion of Israel occupies in the book, this will be the only topic on which I shall have something more substantive to say. This more or less secondary issue for Bérubé is, alas, very important for me; it also informs—or so I believe—the general moral stature of the book as a whole.

Outside & Inside Bérubé’s Discursive Space: Radical Orthodoxies?

The core of The Left at War, then, is an ideological settling of accounts with two currents of the American left: the “Manichean Left,” criticized mainly for its attitudes toward American politics after 9/11; and the critics of cultural studies. I am not quite sure that I can fully understand the rationale of linking these two issues in one book and under the same title but, as mentioned above, I agree with much of what Bérubé says about his two adversaries. To be fully frank, I took particular pleasure in reading what he has to say about Noam Chomsky. In a recent book of my own, I too discussed Chomsky’s political-moral acumen. I wrote about his involvement in an older affaire (the so-called Faurisson affaire) and, as could be expected, Chomsky’s Israeli partisans did not particularly like what I had to say about it. Some of them expressed their feeling in ways which are more than reminiscent of what Bérubé says about the reactions of Chomsky’s American advocates to the less-than-enthusiast readers of Chomsky’s political-ideological production.[1]

Faurisson, a French ex-professor of literature, is one of the world’s leading Holocaust Deniers. In the early 1980s, Chomsky stood up in defense of Faurisson’s freedom of speech, in (as Chomsky saw it) a Voltarian gesture of civil courage. He even wrote a short text—I warmly recommend reading it—that was added as a preface to Faurisson’s main book. The primary thesis of the book was that a systematic gassing of Jews and others had never taken place during what some of us call the “Holocaust” or “Shoah” and that these latter terms are names not of an unprecedented crime (as Hannah Arendt, for one, thought) but of a huge hoax. Although Bérubé does dig out some older skeletons from Chomsky’s political closet (such as his stance on the Cambodian genocide), he passes over the Faurisson matter in absolute silence.[2] This omission is comprehensible, because it does not concern directly American imperialism or involvement in post-colonial wars, but it is interesting to note here, since the same ideological pattern of which Bérubé speaks is recognizable there too: the burning need to denounce American politics which leads to the defense of the most despicable deeds or people. And just as in the cases Bérubé mentions, so too in this one, Chomsky would explain afterward that it was nothing more than an innocent defense of the universal freedom of expression. Yet as Bérubé implies, one suspects that there was at least a certain measure of bad faith in Chomsky’s claim of innocence. So, it was reassuring to be reminded that I am not the only one, who is not a right-wing conservative, with some reservations about Chomsky’s political perspicacity and intellectual honesty.

The feeling of being an outsider, however, is perhaps not just a result of my intellectual, geographic and institutional distance from the theaters in which Bérubé’s wars take place, or of my very partial acquaintance with the people who participate in them, but also of something else. The book wholly confines itself to the debates it talks about. Not only does it seem to lack the reflexive distance needed in order to make the stakes of the wars he refers to more salient to outsiders like me, but it also seems to be surrounded by some sort of a sanitizing ideological barrier: in order to be able to fully understand the stakes of the positions defended or attacked in this book—or so at least was my feeling when I was reading it—one has to be among the initiated. I had often the impression that the potential reader which the author of this book had in mind when he was writing was mainly a fellow-leftist, sharing with him some fundamental assumptions and ideological commitments. These are not spelled out beyond a very general presentation, and seem to be supposed beyond critical evaluation. There is a credo and its acceptance is the condition of any possible discussion.

One general comment I have is thus the following: the term “left” means quite different things in America and in Israel, for example. It also means very different things in America and in most European countries. But there are a few traits common to some lefts on both continents, mainly to the more ideologically oriented ones (and less in social-democratic discourse for example), traits which in one way or another are what make the left Left. One of them is the tendency to create a sort of inner circle of the initiated, more or less inaccessible to more ordinary mortals, and also immune to their criticism. The languages spoken inside and outside the borders of ideological camp are incommensurable. Not unlike different forms of theologically based religions, the ideological left has its own orthodoxy, or orthodoxies (since like religions in general, divisions and sub-divisions and deep controversies over very minute matters of doctrine are often the name of the game), and as with all orthodoxies since the beginning of time, leftist orthodoxy also does what orthodoxies know how to do best: consolidate itself. A sort of spiral-like movement is created here, turning around an infinite and never-ending quest to reach the “true” or “pure” belief. In order not to let anything disrupt this movement, orthodoxies also tend to build effective lines of defense and draw steep barriers between themselves and ordinary believing or thinking people. For the ideological discourses we tend to identify as “left,” whether in the US, Europe or, for that matter, Israel, turn within more or less clearly drawn frontlines—one either belongs, or he/she does not belong, in which case he/she is a priori in the wrong. One of the more effective ways the Left has of keeping the uninitiated off-limits is via the creation of a jargon. Certain terms tend to lose their more colloquial sense and, without always being fully redefined, serve as trademarks for the initiated.

Although he himself employs some of this jargon (especially of Gramscian origin), Bérubé regards with welcome irony a number of such strategies. Thus, he seems to be unappreciative (rightly so, in my view) of the ways his adversaries on the “Manichean Left” prefer to consider themselves a lonely avant-garde—rather than having any significant following among the “ordinary people,” or even among less ordinary people. As Bérubé nicely says, there is an interesting mechanism of self-deception at work here: once an opinion or a political-ideological position gains some support, it ceases to be a vanguard opinion. Hence the considerable efforts invested by certain forms of the Left to remain always on the margin.

Bérubé &“Post-Zionism”: Family Squabbles?

We in Israel know too this kind of self-serving left: the more marginal it is within the Israeli society, the more certain it is that it really occupies the high moral ground. The irony is that this Israeli left (sometimes referred to as “post-Zionist,” and, incidentally, more narcissistic in fact than “self-hating”) is very much welcome by the Left, Manichean or not, outside of Israel—on American campuses, for example. Thus I suspect that Professor Bérubé, would tend to see these so-called Post-Zionists in a better light than he does the “Manichean Left.”  If he could see them the way I see them though—with an intimate knowledge of the Israeli reality and some indifference as to whether the Left outside Israel considers me one of the courageous minority who dares to question the “hegemonic” political ethos of the State of Israel—he might realize how similar they are, at least on this one point, and in fact on many others, to the vanguard-left in his own country.

Paradoxically, though—and for all its criticism of the “Manichean Left”—Bérubé’s book remains very much immersed in the culture of the Left, and is written in its language. In fact, he does not say otherwise and, on the contrary, explicitly and proudly locates himself within the Left too—not the “Manichean Left,” but what he calls the “democratic left.” Once again on many issues I could agree with him, although sometimes the need to distance himself from the “Right”—from the conduct of Bush’s wars in particular—makes him fall into what seem to me to be oversimplifications and platitudes. He is not against the war on the Taliban and Islamist terrorism, yet he criticizes Paul Berman (to name just one) for being too hawkish on the same matters. Instead of the kind of war the US and its allies have waged in Afghanistan, he seems to suggest a “police operations” approach or something of this kind. All this is very ambiguous. We know this kind of attitude here in Israel too—some people support the fundamental justice of, say, the war in Gaza, but are unwilling to accept the consequences. Some very good friends of mine, who are not “post-Zionists” at all, did not like what Israel was doing in Gaza during that war. Asked to offer an alternative, they usually come out with some such vague propositions of “police” or “commando” operations. But this is not serious. For if one accepts the jus ad bellum justification of operations like the one the US conducts in Afghanistan, or the one Israel fought in 2008-9 in Gaza—given the great difficulty of fighting these kinds of wars—the question of jus in bello becomes a very tricky question indeed.

Belonging/not belonging thus tends to become the crucial matter: What does it mean to be of the Left, that’s the question the book seems very concerned with. For alongside the rather explicit demarcation from those on the “Right” or the “ordinary people,” or, more generally still, all those not belonging to the Left, Bérubé clearly considers himself to be of the same political and ideological family as, say, Chomsky. He criticizes him and derides him deliciously, but he seems to feel closer to him than to some more or less enlightened conservatives or even “liberals” (in the American sense) who would be of his opinion about the wars in Iraq or in Afghanistan, in Kosovo or in Mogadishu. Family squabbles, as everyone knows, are often very bitter. But the family remains a unit.

Indeed, the question of how to belong to the family, or what being of the Left means, becomes so essential that it seems to have become the central issue of Bérubé’s venture as a whole. There is thus in his book a typical reversal of the proper order of questioning: We are asked to consider not so much whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, but what should the Left—the real left that is—think about this or that matter. Once again, this is a typical orthodox way of thinking: orthodox truth precedes all discourse, and is not given to critical scrutiny. The truthfulness of what one says, or believes, is not measured against the hard facts of reality, but against what is supposed to be, in this case, the beliefs of the Left insofar as it is a left. It becomes all a matter of hermeneutics: what does it mean to be Left? Who is the true interpreter? The question of truth, or the question of what can or should be done, is implicitly, and often explicitly, contingent on the question of “how to be a good leftist.” Hence the most awesome criticism one can address to fellow leftists—they are not enough Left or not really Left; or not leftically correct. In the last analysis, more than a matter of sharing some ideas about various issues, the Left is an artifact of cultural identity. It is what distinguishes those whom one is ready to consider friends from those who are not eligible for this role. This is a cultural identity conceived as an intellectual matter, and as such built on ideas. And since it is very hard to agree on most issues, one pivotal constitutive element of this cultural identity is the attitude towards the State of Israel.  Hostile suspicion of Israel thus serves as a kind of “anchor” (or what Slavoj Zizek might call a “quilting point”) of left identity/identification today.

Israel & the Elephant: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Anti-Zionism & Global Anti-Semitism

An old and famous Jewish quip tells roughly the following story (I found this rather nice version on the Internet): A German goes to Africa, returns after ten years and composes a five-volume tome: “Forward to a general Introduction to the Origins of the African Elephant.” A Frenchman comes back after half a year and writes a slim and elegant volume: “The Love Life of Elephants.” An Englishman returns after a week and produces a booklet: “How to Hunt Elephants.” A Jew stays at home and writes an essay about “The Elephant and the Jewish Question.”

Another citation I would like to give here is from Leo Strauss’s famous introduction to his classic Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. On page 6 of this text one can read this outstanding phrase: “From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people in the sense, at least, that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem as a social or political problem.” Bérubé says somewhere in his book that the situation in Israel, or the Israeli-Palestinian, conflict is one of the three major issues the Left confronts. It seems however that its importance is indeed due to its symbolic weight more than to anything else. It also seems that it is mainly Israel (more than the Jewish people as such) that carries today the heavy burden of being the symbol of the human problem as a political problem.  One thing that catches the eye immediately is the importance given to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other international conflicts in which the US is not involved directly—Rwanda, Darfur or the Congo for example, or Tibet and China in general—are either not mentioned at all or get referred to in a very cursory way. Israel has become a central issue on the public scene, in large parts of the world, far beyond its objective importance, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drawing much more attention than it merits. For the Left, I dare say, the symbolic value of the Israeli Problem is even more important than for other sections of Western public opinion. Without entering into the question of the reasons, causes or origins of this, it seems to me safe to say that a “critical” attitude towards Israel has become one of the identifying elements of the Left. It is hard to find many more issues on which the Left agrees in the way it agrees about Israel.

So, one way or another, I am indeed at home and I am writing a short essay. It’s on Bérubé’s book and I want to terminate it with some brief remarks on the place Israel occupies in it. Is it more like the writer of the essay on the “Elephant and the Jewish Question,” or is it more in line with what Strauss said? Is it an example of the famous Israeli paranoia which sees behind every critic of Israel a Nazi or at least an Antisemite, or is there some foundation to the worries I felt while reading Bérubé’s references to Israel. I leave the decision to the reader, but here are my observations.

The question seems to be easily answerable, because Bérubé explicitly opposes anti-Zionism, and does not question Israel’s right to exist. There are about five references to Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the book, including one long and very critical discussion of “anti-Zionism”(17-25).  Bérubé is then explicitly against calls for the annihilation of Israel as a Jewish state, or even (I am paraphrasing a memorable suggestion of Judith Butler) for the transformation of the grounds of its legitimacy. Given the current anti-Israeli sentiments so endemic in progressive circles, this undoubtedly takes courage – both moral and intellectual. But Bérubé is still part of the family of the Left; his culture is determined by this pedigree; and this is a culture of deep reservation concerning Israel and Zionism.

In the last pages of chapter three of his book (“Iraq: the Hard Road to Debacle”), and before passing on to his second major theme: Cultural Studies and how they relate to the crisis within the left, Bérubé sums up his discussion of the war in Iraq and the left, with some thoughts on the question of the “still-emerging ideal of liberal internationalism” and of the idea of “humanitarian intervention.” The issue here is how to distinguish between a justifiable and unjustifiable (on humanitarian grounds) military intervention or, put differently, the difference between Kosovo and Iraq. Bérubé cites here approvingly from a report published in 2004 by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, titled “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention,” in which he says, among other things, that military intervention should be ruled out completely. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia are such cases. Bérubé then adds that Roth “decisively slammed the door on any attempt to use the 1988 Anfal (in which 100,000 Kurds were killed) or the suppression of the 1991 Intifada as retroactive grounds for international action” (149).  This is an accurate statement as far as it goes, but also somewhat misleading. Roth says the following in his article:

There were times in the past when the killing was so intense that humanitarian intervention would have been justified—for example, during the 1988 Anfal Genocide, in which the Iraqi government slaughtered more than 100,000 Kurds. Indeed, Human Rights watch, though still in its infancy and not yet working in the Middle East in 1988, did advocate a form of military intervention in 1991after we had begun addressing Iraq. As Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression of the Post-Gulf war uprising were stranded and dying in harsh winter weather on Turkey’s mountainous border, we advocated the creation of a non-fly zone in northern Iraq…[4]

Even more interesting, there is no mention whatsoever of Israel, Palestine or the Intifada, first or second, in Roth’s report. The idea of bringing together the Anfal massacre and the Intifada seems to be entirely Bérubé’s. It remains unclear though whether Bérubé would take the Intifada, if not as a retroactively valid justification for intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, then a justification for such an intervention in real time. Given what Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights watch has recently said and written about his former organization’s (and other HR organization’s) attitude toward Israel, which he describes as a moral failure, it is not altogether impossible that Roth would have endorsed such an idea.

It is also perhaps worth mentioning that indeed between 60,000 to 100,000 Kurds—men, women and children—died in the Anfal repression campaign. Thousands were killed by gas. The first Intifada begun in 1988 and ended at 1991 (so Bérubé is not altogether cautious with the dates here; the second began in 2000 and lasted until, more or less, 2006). During the first Intifada approximately 450 Palestinians died in each of the four years or so it lasted (and 25 Israelis). According to Be’Tselem, an Israeli Human Rights organization, a total of 1,593 Palestinians and 84 Israelis lost their lives. One can get a somewhat better perspective on the soundness of comparing Anfal and Intifada from a quick look at the journalist Ben Dror Yemini’s article “A Homemade Genocide” in his blog (accessible through the website of the Israeli journal Maariv, www.nrg.co.il). Just one or two examples from a very long and appalling list of statistics: during the more than a hundred years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict approximately 60,000 Arabs (Palestinians and others) have died. Some 23,000 to 24,000 Israelis were killed during this time by Arab military or paramilitary actions. In less than 60 years of civil wars in Sudan, there are between one million and one million and a half dead. The civil war in Lebanon cost the lives of some 130,000 people. In the Srebrenica massacre alone died more people than in both Palestinians Intifadas.

In a recent encounter of a small Arab-Jewish group of academics, one of the many discussion groups that bring together Jews and Arabs in Israel, to discuss diverse aspects of the difficult coexistence of Arabs and Jews in one (Jewish) state, one of the participants—an Arab, incidentally—admitted that despite appearances, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been much less bloody than most other similar conflicts. Another participant—a Jew this time—suggested that the reason might be that, unlike other conflicts, in this particular one, the winning side is also the less brutal. There was no general disagreement to this remark.

So how come Bérubé—no enemy of Israel—can bring together in one breath Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds and Israeli suppression of the Intifada? On a couple of other occasions he speaks, again without blinking, of Israeli atrocities or allegedly unacceptable conduct of Israel in its struggle against the Palestinians or Hezbollah. Paradoxically though, more disturbing still is Bérubé’s attack on the “Manichean Left’s” attitude to Israel, in what amounts to a real defense of some crucial issues concerning Israel—its right to exist and its right of self-defense. He begins with a long quote from a 2006 article by Moishe Postone, criticizing the responses of the “Manichean Left” to 9/11. Seeing the attack on the U.S. as an “immediate reaction to American policies and Israeli policies,” thinks Postone, is too narrow.

Bérubé approves, and adds that Postone is “right to take up the question of anti-Semitism and to distinguish it from legitimate criticism of Israel” (16): Despite the degree (this is Postone again) “to which the charge of anti-Semitism has been used as an ideology of legitimation by Israeli regimes in order to discredit all serious criticism of Israeli policies.”  So anti-Semitism is a real issue, especially in the Arab/Muslim world, and it should be addressed despite the dangers of addressing it, namely that “it can … further Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” (17).  However, Postone’s article was published in 2006, and Berube’s book in 2009. In the summer of 2005 Israel withdrew its army from Gaza, evacuated some 8000 civilians and dismantled all the settlements there. If after this one still speaks of “occupation,” then one wonders what should be done in the West Bank that would be considered an end to occupation?

There are other things that could be said about anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and the “legitimate” criticism of Israel, but this is becoming too long and tedious. So I shall finish with two brief remarks: on pages 23-6, Bérubé recounts an exchange he had with “one Professor Michael McIntyre,” who disliked his very relative indulgence toward Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war. Israel, thinks Bérubé “has the right to respond to armed attacks.” Within reason, of course. But in a blog he condemned Israel’s bombing of Lebanon. It was, he wrote, “disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive” and then that it was “morally illegitimate.” McIntyre still thought that this was “like labeling the Nazi response to the Reichstag fire ‘German’s [sic] disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive response.’”  Bérubé goes on to give some of the exchange between him and McIntyre, and I shall not bother the reader with it. I have no business with McIntyre and his ilk, what bothers me is Bérubé.

As he says, ironically to be sure, what he learned from this incident was that his condemnation of Israel was not nearly enough for some of the “Manichean Left.” Now just imagine what would have happened to him if he had shown more courage (and more intellectual perspicacity) and actually defended Israel! For, first of all, it is not so clear that the operation in Lebanon was so counterproductive. Although it was disastrously conducted, the fact is the northern border of Israel has been (almost) totally quiet since this war. This is a very long period of calm in Israeli terms. Since I spent an  amazingly calm, happy and eventless (but for one shooting on the main street) year as a visiting professor at Penn State, I know how difficult it is to understand there – where Bérube works — the reality in Israel: five or six years of calm on the northern border in Israel is quite an achievement.

But was Israel’s bombing disproportionate? The Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets on the northern half of Israel. Given the real capacity of Israel to harm and destroy, Lebanon got out of this war fairly cheap. But the real question here is—how to measure proportionality? When does a legitimate riposte become “disproportionate”? What are the criteria? The notion of “proportionality” is a principle of international law. It has become one of the more effective arms of the “law-fare” recently conducted against Israel and indeed a kind of catchword in all kinds of denunciations of it. The recent experience shows that no matter what Israel does, it is always “disproportionate.” And I challenge Michael Bérubé, or any of his friends, to show me one example where a military operation of Israel was justified (in his view). It is always easy to use abstract principles, such as this legal principle, to serve agendas such as the agenda of the Left with regard to Israel; especially if one does not have to say how the “right to response” can be applied—within reason, of course.

The real question, however, is not one of “response,” but of defense. Not even an abstract right of “self-defense,” but the very concrete question of defending the lives of Israeli citizens. These were the stakes of the Lebanon war and these are the stakes in Israel’s struggle against Hezbollah, Hamas, a few other Palestinian organizations, not to speak of Iran. This is not, alas, an abstract question here.

In the last analysis it is not Israel’s war against Hezbollah that was “morally illegitimate,” but the use by Bérubé of these very words to qualify it. For the stakes of the current debates about Israel are its right to exist or its legitimacy as a Jewish state. Contesting this legitimacy is done on more than one front and more than one way. What is questioned is not only whether the fundamental claim of the Jews to have a state of their own on the land many of them think was the land of their ancestors is morally, politically and historically sound, but also the moral quality of the State of Israel as a concretely existent political entity. “Is it a rogue state?” was the subject lately at the debating club of Oxford (or was it Cambridge—I am not sure). What would be Bérubé’s answer to this question? I know not. But the fact that I am not sure that it would be in the negative, is enough to make his book if not altogether part of the delegitimizing campaign, at least an insufficiently courageous, lucid and—most importantly—effective response to it.

What explains in the last analysis this lack of moral courage and intellectual lucidity–what is also the most disturbing thing–can be seen best in what looks the most like a defense of Israel as a Jewish State, or at least the most straightforward rejection of anti-Zionism in the book. As he often does, Bérubé cites here at length one of his favorite writers – in this case Ellen Willis – in what seems to be full agreement (17-18). Willis’s article cited is entitled, “Is there Still a Jewish Question? Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist?” Willis, says Bérubé, “does not shy from the question of anti-Semitism in her discussion of the ‘root causes’ of 9/11″; although, as he adds immediately – in her “criticism of Global anti-Semitism [she] did not mute her criticism of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.” It is in fact amazing that addressing the question of “global anti-Semitism” is not what every honest human being should find the most natural thing in the world; and it is amazing that this question cannot be addressed without immediately and apparently unavoidably adding the excuse of “not muting the criticism of Israel.” It is also interesting to note that the best way Willis found to describe her position, is to define it as “anti-anti-Zionism.”

The end of his quotation of her is most revealing, and perhaps also the most perplexing: “I reject the idea that Israel is a colonial state that should not exist. I reject the villainization of Israel as the sole or main source of the mess in the Middle East. And I contend that Israel needs to maintain its ‘right of return’ for Jews arounds the world.” The problem is that Israel is not about “right of return”; the problem is that Israel is about Jewish sovereignty.

Notes

[1]Yakira, Elhanan.  Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

[2]Berube, Michael. The Left At War. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 258-9, n. 3. Subsequent citations in text.

[3]Strauss, Leo. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.

[4]I found this text on www.unchr.org/refword/pdfid/402ba99f4.pdf.  Accessed December 10, 2010.

War divides public opinion in a way that few things can (apparently with the exception of universal health care).  Western liberal countries (e.g., USA, UK, France, Canada, etc.) have founded their societies on a belief in freedoms and rights that puts a very high value on individual life.  This creates the need for a complex rationale for war.  If life is valued, and war has the express purpose of ending many lives, then there has to be something of even greater value being created.  This difficulty of justifying or not justifying war can and is approached in many different ways.  However, the most productive way is to admit to some level of uncertainty and remain humble.  No one can know everything, particularly in situations as complex as wars, so avoiding overconfident statements and remaining open to rational debate is essential, even at the cost of struggling to create a forceful rhetoric.

To demonstrate this point, I want to look at the debate over the Iraq War among American and British Leftists.  It would certainly be possible to include some writers outside this group, but Leftists traditionally purport to value human life and equality more so than any other political mindset.  Additionally, writers outside this designation become superfluous simply due to the range of opinion within the Left.

In no way would I suggest that I knew then or even know now what the right course of action was in 2003.  At the time of the invasion, I was seventeen years old and was opposed to the war.  Now, after seven years, I’m just less certain than I was then.  This is not an argument about what was the correct route to take with reference to the invasion.  In it, I only hope to illustrate the proper way to approach the debate, and therefore also in future debates.

A Case against Blind Pacifism: Chomsky and Eagleton

A good place to begin is with those who were strongly against the Iraq War in part because they are against (any) use of American military power.  This opinion is typically attributed to the “Manichean” Left and the prominent figure of Noam Chomsky.

In a collection of essays published in 2007 as the book Interventions, Chomsky sets out his argument against the invasion of Iraq.  Despite how many in the Left have made it a point to reject Chomsky as part of the process of situating themselves within a group willing to debate [1], it cannot be said that his analysis is without merit.  He seems to understand the debate and even ostensibly agrees with the humanitarian defense for the war, namely that “an end to Saddam’s rule would lift a horrible burden from the people of Iraq.” [2]

But Chomsky also is prone to statements of conjecture and conspiracy that are unproductive in advancing the discussion.  In “The Hidden Agenda in the Iraq War,” he says that the U.S. attacked Iraq primarily for the strategic advantage of controlling the country’s oil. [3]  It is not worth getting into a long debate over why exactly the U.S. government decided to invade Iraq, but it is clear that many supported the invasion for reasons other than the control of oil resources.  Declaring oil to be the primary rationale only serves to belittle and demonize his opponents.

Because this sort of argument is particularly damaging to productive debate, and as a bit of an aside, I want to delve into how one might respond to Chomsky’s assertion.  The logical place to start would be asking the questions that arise from the Bush administration’s intent to leave Iraq in August 2003 and to avoid nation-building. [4]  Wouldn’t the control of oil resources be better protected by the continued presence of the American military?  One could easily see Chomsky’s rejoinder to such a question: the American military has been in Iraq now for seven years.  Of course, that logic leads us down another path.  Namely, we would have to look at the tens of billions of dollars it has cost America to rebuild Iraq. [5]   What purpose is there to controlling oil resources if those resources cost more money than they provide?

Chomsky would certainly have an answer for this question as well.  It might be something about Halliburton contracts or the $9 billion of reconstruction money that “got lost”, [6] but the content of his response is immaterial.  What matters is that we started discussing the purpose of the war in Iraq and have been diverted to talking about American greed.

The end of Chomsky’s essay “The Hidden Agenda in the Iraq War” demonstrates what is really at stake: Waging war to control Iraqi oil reserves “is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth.” [7]  This is, in fact, how Chomsky sees America.  It is a place obsessed with short-term gains and unconcerned about its stated objective of democratic freedom.

While no critique of the “anti-war” opinion would be complete without Chomsky, it seems pertinent to expand beyond the tired game of Chomsky-bashing to include another figure on the Left who is sympathetic to Chomsky’s stance.

Terry Eagleton is, perhaps, even more aggressive in his statements about the Iraq War.  In the conclusion to his book After Theory, he lashes out at the United States for its post September 11 foreign policy: “[The world was] that assortment of foreign nations who are to be bullied, bribed and blackmailed into abandoning their own supremely trivial interests and falling docilely into line behind the self-appointed Messianic saviour of the globe.” [8]  This is a simplistic overstatement of America’s relationship to the world.  Certainly, the United States looks out for its own self-interest and purports to stand for certain values, sometimes at the cost of other nations, but this is far from saying that its sole purpose is to bully other countries.  Eagleton acknowledges this by ending his book with a message of friendship for like like-minded writers in the U.S. [9]  Who then does Eagleton attribute this disdain for the world to?

Perhaps, he is only referring to the neoconservative portion of the government which seemed to be influencing the United States’ foreign policy in 2003 and who had “devoted their careers to restoring American military power and its projection around the world.” [10]  Certainly, Eagleton’s criticism does have some legitimacy if it is directed towards these people.

Perhaps, though, his target is a much larger group of Americans.  In fact, it seems, Eagleton’s target is the United States as a whole:

Not everyone, either relishes being lectured about freedom by an American political establishment for which such freedom means lending military and material support to a whole range of squalid right-wing dictatorships throughout the world, while maiming and destroying the citizens of other regimes which dare to threaten its own geopolitical dominance, and thus its profits.

He doesn’t stop there though.  He continues his tirade against the U.S. on the topics of human rights and anti-imperialism.

The connection between Chomsky and Eagleton is this: neither trusts the United States.  Both seem to view the U.S. as a corrupt, and even evil, state that seeks to impart misery and destruction on the rest of the world in order to gain power and money.  These statements are made by people who make no attempt to hide their disdain for America and American foreign policy.  They also drive right to their opposition to the Iraq War.  In his essay, “A Case Against the War in Iraq,” Chomsky builds a list of the possible calamities from the war and concludes his essay by saying:

The potential disasters are among the many reasons why decent human beings do not contemplate the threat or use of violence, whether in personal life or international affairs, unless reasons have been offered that have overwhelming force.  And surely nothing remotely like that justification has come forward.

Surely, any reasonable commentator would agree that the “threat or use of violence” ought to be avoided whenever possible.  But that is not the actual statement being made: by demanding the requirement of reasons with “overwhelming force,” Chomsky in effect negates any possibility of using force as a part of foreign policy.  Who in the end is to say what overwhelming force is?  The answer of course is decent human beings such as Chomsky himself and those who, like him, vehemently distrust the United States.  Others might say that the Iraq War had compelling reasons, but Chomsky denies this outright.

The Manichean Left is, though, entitled to its opinion.  And, on a personal level, I feel some sympathy for its cause:  I certainly have no wish to see innocent people killed in a preventable war.  However, both Chomsky and Eagleton seek to make an a priori case against all American military intervention.  This method is an attempt to avoid debate and therefore cannot be accepted.  If we are to develop a logical and informed decision about foreign policy and intervention, we cannot shut down the debate before it has ever begun.

A Case against Blind Aggression: Hitchens

It is not enough, though, to simply argue against those on one extremity of the issue.  A similar argument needs to be made against the “liberal hawks” whose support for the war became so bellicose at times that it seemed to be an attempt to drown out any real debate.  It would be possible to look at conservative or neoconservative support for the war instead, but a stronger case is made by the liberal hawks who are not necessarily closed off to intelligent insight or to some level of understanding of the opposition.  Yet, their very certitude in the correctness of the Iraq War remains their weakness.

Before continuing, it is important to take a moment to identify exactly who is being referred to as a liberal hawk.  Those who oppose the war often use the label to identify anyone who shows even the slightest support for the war.  This is misguided.  It is not necessary to condemn all supporters of the war in order to oppose it.  Doing so works towards the same undesirable aim of discouraging debate as Chomsky’s rhetoric does.  Instead of such an overarching classification, it is pertinent to direct this term at those who patently fit its critique: namely those who support an aggressive American stance and clearly contribute to building a public case for war.

Christopher Hitchens is probably the most obvious fit for this classification.  His essays from that time are collected in a volume title A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.  In the introduction to his book, he clearly states his opinion: “I decided some time ago that I was, brain and heart, on the side of the ‘regime change’ position. [13][14]  In a way, it is refreshing to see how he emphatically states his convictions throughout the book.

On the other hand, his style often transcends conviction and approaches propaganda.  Conviction is fine if it is based on logical argumentation and a respectful stance towards the debate and those involved.  Hitchens, at the very least, transgresses against this second requirement: he describes the anti-war protests as “following some blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist through the streets.” [15]  This is not the only time that Hitchens lowers himself to ad hominem attacks.  He repeatedly characterizes those who oppose the war as weak-willed, fearful, or even friends and supporters of tyranny.  There is a case, when referring to the French opposition to the war, that Hitchens admits his tactics:

In a way, I regret having to argue at this ad hominem level with a supposedly sophisticated European diplomatist.  But what choice do I have, when he says that the ‘grave consequences’ stipulated by U.N. Resolution 1442 should indeed be grave – and should consist of further inspections? [16]

There is no need to debate the merits of further sanctions at this point in time, but it should be noted that many thoughtful people (some of whom will be discussed later) supported continued inspections and “smart sanctions” against Iraq in order to contain Saddam.

The root of this flaw, as I stated earlier, is Hitchens’ inability to doubt the need to invade Iraq.  This is evident in the way that he provides his justifications: “The third [reason to invade Iraq] is the continuous involvement by the Iraqi secret police in the international underworld of terror and destruction.  I could write a separate essay on … this; at the moment I’ll just say that it’s extremely rash for anybody to discount the evidence….” [17]  The problem is that Hitchens never provides such evidence.  He makes some veiled remarks about his “suspicions” about certain “coincidences”, but he never actually gives empirical evidence to support his theory because there is no solid proof that Saddam was working with al-Qaeda.

For example, one way that Hitchens tries to connect the two groups is by denying the secularism of Saddam’s regime by citing “the jihad speeches that he makes every week, the mosques that he builds – often profanely in his own name – and the money he proudly offers to Islamic suicide-murderers in Palestine.”  Each of these can be explained by means other than the existence of an Islamist government in league with al-Qaeda.   The mosques and jihad speeches could be a way that Saddam was “[co-opting] conservative Sunni imams in Iraq only to use them as window dressing.” [19]  This is not necessarily for the purpose of connecting with Islamist terrorist groups, but because Saddam used the Sunni elite in Iraq as his base of control.  Likewise, with regards to the funding of Palestinian suicide-murderers, it is no secret that Iraq was hostile towards Israel: it took part in both the 1948 and 1967 wars against Israel and never technically declared an armistice.  In fact, despite all of Hitchens’ claims to the contrary, it could be argued that “Saddam had always kept a wary distance from Islamist terrorist groups.” [20]  In Hitchens’ estimation, however, the suspicions to the contrary that he had were enough.

To continue arguing this point is only to get bogged down and forget the real purpose of this study.  Hitchens very well may be correct about Saddam.  The problem is that he rejects any possibility that he is not correct.  Like the anti-war side, Hitchens is so convinced of his opinion on the Iraq War that he does not even admit to the possibility of an alternative: “Fight them now or fight them later? These two choices are the only ones.” [21]  There is no debate in his mind; there is no discussion of what alternatives there might be to war.  This sort of stance is useful for generals ordering their troops into combat.  They need to say with absolute conviction that there was no other option.  For academics debating the value of the war and trying to find a logical consensus, this argument is poison.  It has no place in productive debate.

The Possibility of Death-Obsessed Mass Movements: Berman

After having whittled away the extreme positions that are unproductive in debate, there remains a core of thinkers who still strongly disagree with one another on both the purpose and the appropriateness of invading Iraq.

It seems reasonable to begin with Paul Berman, who agrees on many levels with Hitchens.  Berman’s support for the war was based on the belief that the U.S. is at war with a system of Islamofascism, which includes a wide network of groups in addition to al-Qaeda and those directly at fault for the September 11 attacks. When looking at the historical rise of Islamist groups, Berman’s argument has some real evidence to back it up: with Qutb’s writing in support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt influencing the goals of Islamist parties in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among others.

But Berman takes it a step beyond drawing historical connections.  In his 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism, he states his opposition to those who search for meaning behind terrorist attacks.  He says that their error is “an unwillingness, sometimes an outright refusal, to accept that, from time to time, mass political movements do get drunk on the idea of slaughter.” [22]  Therefore, a type of mass pathos and governing ideology connects Islamists groups even in the cases where historical events did not.

While this concept contains a useful observation about the connections between Islamist terrorists in various countries, it also contains a dangerous oversimplification of the real situation in the Middle East.  There are, in fact, distinct Islamist groups with particular goals and grievances.  Berman asks us to ignore these differences and causes because “radical Islamists were slaughtering people in one country after another for the purpose of slaughtering them.” [23]  If we follow Berman’s advice at face value, our options are limited to a war against all these groups, which does not allow us to attempt other, more place-specific solutions.

Even Hitchens recognizes the general value of differentiating between the groups: “It’s quite feasible to imagine Hezbollah or Hamas leaders at a conference table, and one has seen many previously ‘intransigent’ forces of undemocratic violence … make precisely this transition.” [24]  One group that Hitchens clearly does not make this allowance for is al-Qaeda. [25]  This suggests a certain realm of nuance that Berman’s original conceptualization does not allow for – namely that certain groups with localized political ambitions may be influenced by the “death-obsessed mass movement” [26] of Islamism, but are not necessarily incapable of diplomacy.  This opens the door for localized action instead of the universal war on terrorism that is required by the belief as Berman states it.

But how does this all relate to the Iraq War?  The answer lies in a simple equation.  Like Hitchens, Berman believed that the U.S. had fought the war against Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda.  But why?  Not because there were necessarily direct relations between the two, but “because Baathism was one of the ‘Muslim totalitarianisms,’ the other being Islamism. … Like the war against fascism and the Cold War, it was an ideological war, a ‘mental war.’” [27]  This is where Berman’s belief in mass insanity really becomes problematic: the war is ever widening to include any groups that can be made to fit the classification he desires.

While Berman gives six specific reasons for his support of the war in a 2004 Dissent Magazine article titled, “A Friendly Drink in a Time of War,” it is notable that all of them return to his concept that intelligent, charitable people were misreading the situation: “Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn’t do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!” [28]  In effect, the values of anti-colonialism, multiculturalism, and support of the oppressed that makes the Left fail to recognize its traditional foes.

If it were only an argument that reasonable people do need to remember that not all acts are rational, then Berman’s statements would be hard to find fault with.  However, he likens to Nazi sympathizers any who try to understand the possible grievances of these diverse groups. [29]  Resorting to such effects brings to mind Hitchens’ ad hominem attacks.  Berman doesn’t quite go as far with it, but he still creates a bit of a straw man out of those who would disagree with him.

With the aforementioned exception Berman makes a marked departure from the presumptuous nature of Hitchens’ argument.  Instead, Berman clearly states his misgivings about the coming war: “To endorse the war filled me with unspeakable horror and fear.” [30]  Even if his case for war occasionally appears to over generalize, Berman clearly understands that there are real costs involved and feels an appropriate misgiving about the reality of war.  This, of course, does not actually force him to change his position, but it opens him to certain points of debate.

A common complaint by those who opposed the war is the unilateral nature of the U.S. invasion.  Hitchens, in an effort to avoid debate, brushes the complaint aside: “Simply support the U.S. position against the Iraqi or Russian or French one and – presto – the U.S. position would no longer be unilateral.” [31]  Berman, however, when asked a similar question about internationalism, recognizes the real dilemma for concerned thinkers:

We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it – supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately. [32]

Thus, Berman is able to stick to his argument without discounting and deriding the opposition.  It is an important point to make that this is the very aim of intelligent debate.  One must be able to recognize the intelligence of one’s opposition and still make a clear choice.

Wrong War: Amis and Bérubé

Turning back to the side of those who oppose the Iraq War, it is possible to see how the debate actually begins to function.  People can enter arguments based on very similar starting points, but a slight adjustment in focus can have them reach opposing conclusions.

This is clearly the case with Martin Amis, whose essays on September 11 and the Iraq War are collected in The Second Plane.  Early on, he states his sympathetic agreement with Berman’s “death-obsessed mass movement” theory:

It is impossible to read [Terror and Liberalism] without a cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace.  … Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, “What are the reasons for this?” … It is time to move on.  We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason. [33]

But while enthusiastically supporting this starting point in the argument, Amis does not reach the same conclusion as Berman.  Instead, as he says at the end of his book, Amis believed that “the West should have spent the last five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan, while in the meantime merely containing Iraq.” [34]  Clearly, Amis is able to feel disgrace about his search for reason without declaring this disgrace a fait accompli for all possible wars against despotism in the Middle East.

All of this returns to the way in which debate allows parties to weigh different values.  Amis’ disagreement with Berman’s strongly stated support for the Iraq War is based on a simple equation:

There are two rules of war that have not yet been rescinded by the new world order.  The first rule is that the belligerent nation must be fairly sure that its actions will make things better; the second rule is that the belligerent nation must be more or less certain that its actions won’t make things worse.  America could perhaps claim to be satisfying the first rule (while admitting that the improvement may only be local and short term).  It cannot begin to satisfy the second. [35]

It is worthwhile to take some time to consider this lengthy quote as it drives to the heart of the debate over the Iraq War.  First it is important to consider the validity of Amis’ “rules.”  One might ask the question “to whom must the belligerent nation justify itself?”  Nations are not individual identities.  Conservatives and those primarily concerned with national self-defense would certainly have a different understanding of the answer to this question than most thinkers on the Left.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume these statements be taken on their intended, humanistic level.  Hopefully, the war will make the world a better place not only for the belligerent nation, but in some general, international way as well.  In modern warfare, which is typically against governments perceived as illegitimate, the hope is often that the war will make things better for the citizens of the country.

The notable diversion between Berman and Amis comes from their relative focus on each of the two aforementioned rules.  Berman focuses his argument almost solely on the first rule.  His concept of fighting fascism is based on the idea that fascism is an inherently negative thing.  By ridding the world of fascism, Western democracies can reasonably expect to improve the world.

Amis, on the other hand, focuses his analysis on the second rule, saying, “We contemplate a kaleidoscope of terrible eventualities.” [36]  Most of the eventualities that Amis names (such as the possibility of an invasion leading to nuclear war in the Middle East) never came to fruition.  One, though, very nearly did: namely, civil war in Iraq.  The continual violence in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad was largely the work of sectarian groups who were all clamoring for power in the vacuum left by the collapse of the regime.  Added to this, there were real, historical injustices that turned one religious or cultural identity against another in the search for redress. [37]  Because of all the violence, the debate is still open on whether the war did improve things for the people of Iraq.

Michael Bérubé picks up where Amis’ argument leaves off.  Throughout the majority of his book, The Left at War, Bérubé chronicles the various stances on the Left during the aftermath of September 11.  In the chapter titled “Iraq: The Hard Road to Debacle,” however, Bérubé focuses solely on the problems of various Left responses to the Iraq War.

Bérubé, for his part, opposes the war with perhaps a bit more conviction than Amis.  Perhaps this is because he was writing a few years after Amis and could talk of real consequences rather than eventualities, but it isn’t the sole reason.   Bérubé rejects Berman’s argument about Muslim totalitarianisms: “Berman’s formulation would leave the United States … fighting a wave, an image that neatly manages to evoke an endless, futile war.” [38]  But regardless of this difference between Bérubé and Amis, they still ground their statements of opposition to the Iraq War in a similar place.  Like Amis, Bérubé can’t be said to hold any idealistic notions about the Baathists, but he recognizes that other issues might hold greater importance: “While we acknowledge the importance of Saddam’s capture, we believe that the invasion that made it possible did terrible and unnecessary damage both to international law and to Iraq itself, and that the war has not, on balance, made the Middle East or the world a better and safer place.” [39]  This clearly ties back to Amis’ “rules.”  Bérubé has done the math and, to him, the Iraq War is clearly a negative.

Earlier in the chapter, Bérubé sets out a number of arguments against the Iraq War.  He separates these into two general fields: principles and pragmatic reasons.  The principles include such things as “war in Iraq represented a disastrous diversion from al-Qaeda and Afghanistan” and “it would clearly violate international law.” [40]  The pragmatic reasons were generally just the economic and human tolls that the war would cost.

Put together, these two forms of reasoning allow for a unique formulation of arguments.  In addition to Amis’ two rules we might add a qualifier: namely, that both ideological and pragmatic reasons need to be taken into account.  No war can therefore be fought simply because it reflects solid moral reasoning.  Instead, it must be vetted in the world of real consequences and costs.  This finally, is why Bérubé supported smart sanctions and containment of Saddam over war: the pragmatic consequences were too overwhelming.

Barely in Favor: George Packer

Perhaps this last point seemed too obvious.  Certainly all writers and thinkers do not disregard pragmatic reasons.  Nor do they write without purpose founded in the principles they ascribe to.  But this differentiation becomes particularly interesting when looking at this last author.

Unlike the other writers discussed here, George Packer seems to aim towards impartiality in his book The Assassin’s Gate, [41] in which he chronicles his own experiences from the lead-up to the Iraq War until January of 2006.  It is a very personal record in which Packer recalls friends and acquaintances killed during the war and spends long passages describing people who played no role in the war other than experiencing it.  This book has the feel of a journalistic intent to record the actual events as they unfolded.

This does not prevent Packer from admitting his own stance on occasion.  The way that he declares his stance is unlike any of the others who wrote long treatises on exactly why they believed what they did.  Instead, Packer puts it in as almost an afterthought: “To give my position a label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals.” [42]  The key word in this phrase is “ambivalently,” as Packer states in the surrounding discussion, he saw clear positives and negatives to the war and “never found the questions about it easy to answer.” [43]  More than anyone else discussed here, Packer was trying to stay open-minded.  He felt that he had to take a position, but also seemed unsure if his position was correct.

His opinion on the war became much clearer after he had been to Iraq and seen the war first hand.  One statement best captures his stance on the debate: “War is too blunt an instrument to be used when the chance for success is so slight.” [44]  Through the course of his experiences in Iraq, it is possible to see Packer move from his initially confused, optimistic view to a much more defeated and negative stance.  The initial openness allowed Packer to filter the real, not estimated pragmatic consequences of the war.

It is now four years after he published that book, and perhaps Packer might have something to feel positive about once again.  It seems that the situation in Iraq is getting slowly better and we can’t help but hope the recent elections result in a stable state of affairs.  But in saying all of this, I have perhaps not given Packer his due.  There is an even more haunting message in the final pages of his book, one that seems truer than anything else being said:

I came to feel that the most appropriate response to the events of the past few years was neither justification nor reproach, but simple grief for the hopes and sacrifices of Iraqis and Americans alike.  The Iraq War is not an argument to be won or lost; it’s a tragedy. [45]

Lasting Concerns: How We Debate

The wisdom of Packer’s final words is hard to get past.  Iraq is not a debate, it is a country: a real place with real people.  Now, more than ever, arguing about whether or not it was right to invade Iraq is useless.  That was a debate for eight years ago, before the invasion, before the momentum to invade had grown to be too much.  Now, all we can do is reflect back.

For this reason, I have made my best attempt throughout this essay not to speak substantively about whether we should have invaded Iraq or not, but instead about the way in which we address our debate.  Of course, there have been times when I’ve allowed myself to become bogged down in particular arguments and reasons, but the purpose throughout was to demonstrate, through detail, a lesson we might learn for future arguments.

Conviction has its place in today’s world, but it is the tool of generals, not of commentators.  We must allow ourselves to remain open to a range of possibilities.  Of course, within this range, there will be strong disagreement, but that is the point.  Once we know the substantive positions, we can begin to look into the pragmatic positives and negatives of the situation.

Hopefully, Iraq will become a stable and prosperous country in the coming years.  Perhaps this will mark Berman (and Hitchens) on the right side of history.  But this would not detract from the statements made by Amis and Bérubé in the least.  Their concerns needed to be considered carefully because even if it all works out well, it might not have.

Wars are necessarily tragic things.  They are often met with pomposity and celebration, but they are fundamentally composed of thousands of deaths.  There are justifiable wars, but they are few and far between.  For this reason, we need to discover a better way to debate, one that doesn’t allow hard-line approaches and encourages logical discussion.

Notes

[1]See: Berman, Paul.  Terror and Liberalism.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.  Print. 144-152. and Bérubé, Michael. The Left at War. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 97-152. Print. 41-97.

[2] Chomsky, Noam. Interventions. San Francisco: Open Media Series, 2007. Print. 14.

[3] Chomsky 135.

[4] Packer, George. The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. 132.

[5] Packer 241.

[6] Packer 243.

[7] Chomsky 136.

[8] Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. 223-27. Print. 224.

[9] Eagleton 227.

[10] Packer 64.

[11] Eagleton 225.

[12] Chomsky 16.

[13] Hitchens, Christopher. A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. New York: Penguin Group, 2003. Print. 5.

[14] Hitchens’ term “brain and heart” here seems to echo the concept of “hearts and minds,” a term that was repeated  ad nauseum  in the following months, which essentially represented an attempt to win approval of the general population when faced with guerilla warfare.

[15] Hitchens 11.

[16] Hitchens 5.

[17] Hitchens 54-55.

[18] Hitchens 8.

[19] Packer 309.

[20] Packer 309.

[21] Hitchens 13.

[22] Berman, Terror and Liberalism 153.

[23] Berman, Terror and Liberalism 149.

[24] Hitchens 25.

[25] Hitchens 25.

[26] Berman, Terror and Liberalism 121.

[27] Packer 50.

[28] Berman, Paul. “A Friendly Drink in a Time of War.” Dissent Magazine Winter 2004. Web. 27 Apr. 2010.

[29] Berman, Terror and Liberalism 124-5.

[30] Berman, Terror and Liberalism 4.

[31] Hitchens 35.

[32] Berman, “A Friendly Drink in a Time of War.”

[33] Amis, Martin. The Second Plane. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Print. 67.

[34] Amis 197.

[35] Amis 28.

[36] Amis 28.

[37] Depicted vividly in Packer 296-369.

[38] Bérubé 137.

[39] Bérubé 129.

[40] Bérubé 102.

[41] For an interesting counterpoint on this, see why Bérubé labels Packer a liberal hawk 140-145.

[42] Packer 87.

[43] Packer 6.

[44] Packer 461

[45] Packer 463

Michael Bérubé and Neil Sedaka share few commonalities. For one, unlike the aging crooner, the accomplished academician-cum-public intellectual is relevant. Forgoing the narrow confines of the academic publishing world, Bérubé has followed his 2006 What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? with another work aimed at a broad audience, The Left at War. Equal parts history of cultural studies, intellectual geography, and bare-knuckled smack down; Bérubé’s book exposes the Manichean left’s shoddy intellectual underpinnings. At its root, however, The Left at War is a really, really long breakup note.

Though The Left at War’s publication has catapulted Bérubé into the dreaded “public fight” phase, leftists have been sleeping single in a double bed for quite some time. This is no “you leave the toilet seat up” sort of conflict. To Bérubé, Manicheans are guilty of postcolonial fundamentalism, countercultural paranoia, and an anti-liberal orientation. Plagued by Western guilt, convinced popular politics is a corporate-sponsored shell game, and disdainful of the Enlightenment ideals, the leftists hold Bérubé, and reality, in disdain. In breakup terms, Manicheans not only sleep with your best friend and demean your Mom; they feel morally superior about it.

Understanding 9/11 and the consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq comprise the left’s most recent relationship issues; Bérubé probes the roots of these disagreements. To him, uprooting al-Qaeda and arresting bin Laden largely legitimized NATO’s multilateral Afghanistan intervention. Fueled by a “countercultural logic” that sees the Western media “manufacture consent” and create a “false consciousness,” Manicheans, in contrast, term the entire enterprise “imperialism.” In The Left at War we are privy to Bérubé and the Manicheans final date. Unfortunately, our lovers never make it to the restaurant; they remain in the car, fighting. In this definitive argument we see the ultimate reasons for the relationship’s demise. While our author reasonably pleads his case, in a generous yet critical explication of Noam Chomsky, his beloved refuses rational entreaties. Instead, Manicheans envision themselves as Neo from The Matrix, gamely fighting an evil we just don’t understand.

If Afghanistan led to a screaming, head-shaking, and relationship-rocking scrum, then the American invasion of Iraq produced the fits, drunken rages and death rattles of a relationship gone kaput. No supporter of the war, Bérubé was, nevertheless, troubled by the left’s reaction to humanitarian intervention as a concept. Because Chomsky and Diana Johnstone, among others, regard “humanitarian intervention” as an imperialist farce, Bérubé offers an ultimatum. Accept an internationalism guided by the maxim “sovereign is he who protects the multitude” or divorce: your move, Manicheans.

The responsible leftist that he is, Bérubé, once and for all, rejects the Manicheans’ adolescent jeremiads for an adult’s sober and accountable internationalism. Offering a useful history of the left’s recent intellectual battles, the author believes cultural studies can help forge this new viable movement and attract leftists to his cause. Indeed, in his deconstruction, Bérubé hardly waged a scorched earth campaign. Generously acknowledging Chomsky’s past contributions and attacking liberal hawks, the author deftly carved an intellectually coherent middle way. In doing so, his vision for a “democratic-socialist internationalist left” surely includes “recovering Manicheans.”

I doubt the Neos and Chomskyites will flock to Bérubé’s banner. Few would trade The Matrix’s morality play and Tom Frank’s gratifying, “Middle-Americans-sure-are-dumb” meme for the unsettling world of alliance building and compromise. Indeed, the author has penned an impassioned, reasonable, and magnanimous plea to his brother and sister leftists. Try as Bérubé might to intellectualize it, there is just no polite way to say, “You’re fucked in the head.” Get a suitcase, rent an apartment, and don’t forget your toothbrush, it’s over.

Speed Dating with Liberals: Or “You Go to War with the Army You Have”

Donald Rumsfeld, speed dating and American liberalism aren’t sexy. Breathtaking arrogance and mind-numbing incompetence tend to repel. While the latter simply lack romance and that certain za-za-zoom. But once friends, as they inevitably do, convince Bérubé “to put yourself out there,” he, and other like-minded leftists, should give American liberals the intellectual equivalent of a speed date. Indeed, since the twin crises of Suez and Hungary produced a British cultural studies predisposed to an anti-totalitarian left persuasion, and the field “take[s] lived experiences of ordinary people into account,” the two just might be compatible enough to, as they say, “make it.” [1]

Despite the Great Recession and “power moving East,” for better or for worse, America remains, in the words of Madeleine Albright, “the indispensible nation.” In this spirit, if we are to achieve Bérubé’s “democratic-socialist internationalist left,” then reviving a moribund American liberalism is a must. To do so, we must, with all apologies, paraphrase Rumsfeld and build a left upon “the liberalism we have, not the left we want.” That poverty exists in the midst plenty and income distribution remains unacceptably unequal is impossible to argue; indeed, American liberalism’s failure to fully redress social issues is abundantly and depressingly clear. Though apologists point to the two party system and play the ubiquitous race-class-&-gender card, the issue is more basic: America ain’t Europe.

For too long, American leftists have looked to Europe’s social democracies and autocratic communists, Asia’s peasant revolutionaries, and Latin America’s populists for inspiration. The reasons are understandable. In comparison to Britain’s rail system, France’s healthcare, and Emiliano Zapata’s fiery rhetoric; strip malls, HMOs, and George Washington hardly inspire a proper lefty. Manicheans, like Tom Frank, explain this reality by pointing to the corporate media, which convince dumb hayseeds, a.k.a. Middle Americans, to ignore their own interests. Though it may disappoint, and it does me, most Americans prefer their shopping bland, insurance privatized, and revolutionary’s stoic. They are, in sum, classically liberal.

If this were an ordinary time, I doubt Bérubé would tab America’s liberal political tradition for a second date. Burned by the Manicheans, and let’s be honest, jaded and a bit desperate, he just might opt for “boring-but-safe.” From republicanism to the multiculturalists, scholars have bludgeoned the Louis Hartz/Richard Hofstadter “liberal consensus” school. According to the latter, Americans so embrace property rights and economic individualism they regard “the virtues of capitalism as necessary qualities of man.” Republican and multicultural theorists reveal the multiple traditions coagulating alongside rights-based liberalism within the body politic. Nevertheless, Americans largely share an unconscious embrace of classic liberal values. In light of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and other prattling right wing wackadoodles, James Young reminder, that Americans see “human beings as essentially equal, rights bearing, interest oriented—who are entitled to have those rights defended, particularly against governmental intrusion,” carries significant explanatory weight. [2]

Liberalism’s predominance helps explain the American left’s underdevelopment. In stark contrast to Western Europe’s noblesse oblige-inspired welfare states, Americans were “born free,” or at least believe they were. Indeed, this consensus explains American Exceptionalism. Before Bérubé, and every other leftist, spit-up their collective fair trade coffee let me explain. Sara Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and conservative blowhards aside, American Exceptionalism does not now, nor has it ever, connoted “superior.” Alexis de Tocqueville coined the term to describe the ways in which the mid-nineteenth century US differed from France and Western Europe. For anyone who has ever wanted the US to mirror Western Europe’s economic equality and city planning (like me), you already understand the American “difference,” as I call it, “cuts both ways.”

Emphasizing social and political (not economic) equality, Americans are contentiously rights-bearing and interest-oriented citizens. Historically, we have starved the state, left the public sphere to private associations, and allowed the popular classes (majoritarianism) define social values. Little wonder then, that American cities, in relation to our West European cousins, are a dirty, unregulated, sprawling hot mess; a dueling, murderous, slave-owning bigamist, Andrew Jackson, rose from the rabble to the White House; and Americans lead the developed world in teen pregnancy, murder, and Jerry Springer episodes.

By now, Bérubé has figured out “we” are not totally simpatico. Instead of a “love connection” or even a one-night stand, this is more like Dallas’ Lucy Ewing & Ray Krebbs. In season one of the nighttime soap opera megahit, the hunky “Southfork” ranch foreman, Ray, enjoyed a torrid affair with Jock Ewing’s hottie of a granddaughter, Lucy. Fast forward to season three, we discover Ray is Jock’s illegitimate son; thus, two years prior Lucy had regularly, passionately, and (we now know) inappropriately smooched “Uncle Ray.” If Bérubé hopes to realize his democratic-socialist internationalist left, he would do well to follow Rays and Lucy’s annual Thanksgiving example: the Ewings are a fucked up bunch but they are, after all, family: shut up, sit down and pass the turkey.

For the American left (Lucy) to achieve its aims of greater equality and freedom, it must accept an uncomfortable truth: liberalism’s dominance (and that your uncle is “into” leather). Thus, our left will forever be distinct from its West European social democratic cousins. Consequentially, an electorally and programmatically successful American reform movement should emphasize reciprocal obligations and a multilateral foreign policy respectful of American sovereignty. In building this, we should look to a usable past—and we can find that in the most unlikely and reddest of states—Oklahoma.

At first glance, the Sooner state offers little in the way of building a liberal-left coalition. Politically, up truly might be down in Oklahoma. Democrats control the rural areas, while the GOP dominates the city. The college towns, Norman and Stillwater, are so conservative they could not help Obama win even one county in the entire state. Despite these ominous realities, Oklahoma, like much of rural “red” Middle America, is not as “conservative” or deluded as Tom Frank assumes. Though the Sooner state’s populist tradition might not be the Marxists-with-a-pitchfork many historians once breathlessly imagined, it does offer a usable past. Two Oklahomans, Carl Albert and Dave McCurdy, reveal the possibilities for building a domestic consensus on a multilateral foreign policy and a reformist agenda at home: the United Nations and national service.

Bug Tussle Liberal, World Federalism, & the United Nations

Though world federalism sounds like Ron Paul’s worst nightmare, the movement gained national and international credibility even as the Cold War dawned. Europe’s leading world federalist, Lord Boyd Orr, garnered the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize, while opinion polls in Japan, France, and Italy revealed a majority in all three nations favored world government. [3] To show grassroots American support for world federalism, activists sponsored local, state, and national resolutions advocating the transformation of the United Nations (UN) into a “world federation.” As the logical vehicle for global government, world federalists wanted to invest the UN with enough power and sovereignty to bring atomic weapons under its control and preserve the peace through “enforce[ing] world law.” Prodded by activists, the Senate and House passed non-binding resolutions favoring such an enterprise and twenty-one state legislatures endorsed the congressional decree. Eventually, six state legislatures went so far as to approve the “California Plan,” which called for a constitutional convention to “expedite” American participation in a world federation. [4]

World federalism might very well have been an elixir for all that ailed the Western world; unfortunately, most Americans, even at their most postwar shell-shocked, remained deeply attached to national sovereignty. Indeed, our liberal “rights bearing” tendencies and historic antipathy toward European alliances largely explains Americans’ obsession with “sovereignty” and skepticism of multilateral organizations. Though it is anyone’s guess why the tinfoil-hat-brigade fears the UN, Bérubé should borrow a page from a former director of the UN’s information center. After regularly fielding angry phone calls and conspiracy-tinged questions from Americans about the organization, the British official just accepted, “[we] need to understand the special American perspective on life a long way form Washington and New York.” [5]

Hailing from Bug Tussle, Oklahoma, Carl Albert implicitly understood this unique point of view. Navigating between the Scylla of unilateralism and Charbidis of world federalism, Albert helped forge a coherent, multilateral, and largely effective foreign policy consensus supporting American participation in NATO and the UN. Relegated to history’s dustbin, the very thought of world federalism surely warms the cockles of good and proper lefties. Before we get too excited and look for the movement’s revival, understand that Albert made the prudent choice in opting for the multilateral and internationalist (the good) rather than the world federalist (the perfect).

For many leftists, especially the Manicheans, the early post-1945 world spawned an ever more powerful and insidious American empire. To them, the emergent Cold War was little more than an imperial ruse supported by bumpkin nabobs who wouldn’t know a Bolshevik from bupkis. [6] It is true, presidents, the CIA, and the State Department, at times, used “communism” to advance a most noxious form of big power behavior. Recently opened Soviet and Chinese archives, however, definitely reveal Joseph Stalin’s and Mao Zedong’s revolutionary zeal and global aims. This hardly redeems every boneheaded Cold War policy; it does suggest that America’s early postwar moves were not only founded upon realistic threats but offer useful lessons.

At its root, America’s early postwar foreign policy and its primary institutions, containment, NATO, and the UN, have endured because they were built upon sound ideas and popular support. Though some lefties may scoff at NATO and the UN as products of weak-kneed liberals, American participation in those bodies was never foreordained. Rejected by many conservatives who deem multilateralism a violation of sovereignty, they were (and remain) significant multilateral institutions the left should utilize in buttressing Bérubé’s maxim, “sovereign is he who protects the multitude” and in restraining big power unilateralism.

Americans, we are told time and again, were an isolationist people, until Woodrow Wilson or thereabouts. Cleaving the history of US foreign relations into an Old Testament, isolationism, and New Testament, crusading internationalism, seemingly offers two stark policy choices. In the course of this tired narrative George Washington’s “Farewell Address” is invariably invoked as the genesis of American isolationism. Though “isolationism” generally remains what Washington Post editor Felix Morley once called, “something highly reprehensible that nobody attempts to define,” historians, nonetheless, draw a specious and poorly buttressed connection between it and the Midwest. Adding to the “Midwestern isolationism” meme is the tendency of observers to freely ascribe onto the region both the best and worst attributes of national life. From politicians extolling the Heartland’s “family values” to cultural critics terming the region a “the nesting place [for] the benign and the banal,” the Midwest regularly serves as national Rorschach test. [7]

Washington, however, and by extension Midwesterners (like Carl Albert), was no isolationist. Conditioned by economic dependence and relative military and diplomatic weakness, US foreign policy was, by necessity, global from the start. Thus, Woodrow Wilson hardly concocted internationalism, American-style. Instead, by promising to “reconstruct the world on the pattern of God’s covenant,” he wedded the American mission to redeem the world to the nation’s ascendance as a world power. [8]

Further revealing the nation’s overweening liberal consensus, Americans harbor the faith of the converted: liberal capitalist democracy as global cure-all. Imbued with a missionary zeal to redeem the world, American foreign policy still bears a decidedly seventeenth century Christian imprint. Though Catholic Spain also invested “messianic hope” into its New World ventures, New England’s Puritans believed they played a starring role in God’s plan to destroy the Antichrist and save the world.  While their Millennium never came, the Puritans’ original conceit and proselytizing ardor remained. By the late eighteenth century, the Founders had secularized the “Puritan errand” into a revolutionary quest to “begin the world over again.”[9]

Plain-and-simple, the American mission to redeem the world is downright arrogant. Moreover, it helps account for a myriad of foreign policy blunders: Vietnam and the Iraq War come to mind. More than half a century ago, Reinhold Niebuhr understood this. Realizing that self-interest blinds and power corrupts, Niebuhr emphasized multilateral organizations as a necessary rein on America’s redemptive ardor. [10] Thus, in building an American liberal-left coalition suitable and capable of joining Bérubé ’s “democratic-socialist internationalist” movement, we must not only acknowledge our messianic tendencies we have to channel and constrain this rights-based sovereignty-obsessed and redemptive zeal.

In 1946, when Carl Albert entered Congress, the rapidly changing international environment dominated the political scene. With little time for acclimation, Albert breathlessly looked on while an unpopular and unelected president proposed a revolutionary foreign policy paradigm: NATO and the UN. At first, Albert opposed Truman’s nascent foreign policy. [11] An early backer of world federalism, Albert had also embraced the “global alphabet.” Created upon the premise that international crises were born from “ignorance and illiteracy,” Oklahoman and inventor Robert Owen, gave up his U.S. Senate seat in 1924 to develop a world alphabet representing the vocal sounds of all known languages. In Owen’s mind, the global alphabet not only enabled any person “to read, write, speak, and print all languages,” it promised to foster international cooperation and eventually end war. [12]

Albert did not merely endorse the global alphabet; he served on the Advisory Council for the United World Federalists (UWF) of Oklahoma and co-sponsored the House resolution endorsing American participation in a world federation. Albert, however, was not forced to finally and completely choose between these two competing worldviews, until early 1950. At that time, the UWF had convinced the Oklahoma legislature to hold a statewide referendum on world federalism. Intended to gauge Oklahomans’ support for “the formation of a World Federal Government,” the issue sparked wide controversy. [13]

As a board member of Oklahoma’s UWF state chapter, Albert was soon under fire. Predictably, his hometown newspaper accused him of backing a world federalist plan benefiting “Russia and her satellites.” [14] With Oklahoma’s newspapers railing against the referendum, Joseph McCarthy launching his anticommunist crusade, the Korean War raging, and an election looming, Albert made his choice. While he remained keen on strengthening the UN and “building it [into] a more effective international organization,” he told local newspapers and his constituents, somewhat disingenuously, “I am not in favor of this referendum. I have never been in favor of it. I have never told anyone I was in favor of it. I intend to vote against it.” [15]

Though political heat prompted the timing of Albert’s outright rejection of world federalism, in truth, his declaration was a mere formality. Albert’s direct experience with European fascism and the Second World War had changed him. The furor over Oklahoma’s world federalist resolution simply forced him to finally acknowledge it. Like Albert, the Sooner state’s other political elites followed the popular groundswell against the issue, and Joint Resolution No. 3 fell by a 4-1 margin. [16]

Though NATO and the UN hardly yielded global peace, American participation in multilateral and international organizations was, until George W. Bush and the Iraq War, the new normal. Among the war’s many lessons is Niebuhr’s prescience. Great powers need allies and multilateral organizations to not only buttress its interests but to restrain it from ill-conceived policies. Now, more than ever, Bérubé’s “democratic left” should embrace NATO and the UN as tools to further enmesh America into the European and world fabric. By further entangling America into a more cosmopolitan and multilateral milieu, the world just might move a bit closer toward Bérubé’s internationalist vision.

Red State Liberalism & Achieving Our Country

That some redneck provincial helped sink world federalism would hardly surprise our Manicheans. To them, tornadoes, the heat, or all that church must somehow cause Oklahomans (in a paraphrase of Abba Eban’s dictum) to, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” With Senators Tom Coburn leading the anti-climate change crowd and James Inhofe defending the torture at Abu Ghraib, a bicoastal secession movement aimed at the Sooner state might seem logical. Reality, as usual, musses up the Manicheans’ dichotomous world. Educated in a one-room schoolhouse, in 1931, Carl Albert left Oklahoma on a Rhode’s Scholarship. In Europe, he dined with Russian émigrés, including Alexander Kerensky, and was literally thrown out of a Hamburg bierhaus by Brownshirts. A cosmopolitan New Dealer and liberal internationalist, if there ever was one, Albert reveals Middle America’s heartland liberal tradition.

From Tom Steed and David Boren to “Alfalfa” Bill Murray, Oklahoma used to send populist liberal giants to Washington. The state still sends them to Congress. Unfortunately, instead of economic themes, cultural populism fuels Coburn and Inhofe. To Tom Frank, Oklahoma further proves his What’s the Matter With Kansas thesis. Putatively a work about class, or how working-class Middle Americans misconstrue their interests, ironically, it is the smarty-pants, Frank, who misunderstands. Soaked in the cultural pessimism of what Richard Rorty called “detached spectatorship,” What’s the Matter With Kansas is all of a piece. [17] Lacking faith in America’s democratic promise, Frank and his leftist kin are Rorty’s alienated bystanders. Little wonder Manicheans remain estranged and irrelevant to domestic political life, they are quite literally strangers in their own country.

As America’s “dominant social philosophy,” liberal individualism’s emphasis upon self-help and equality of opportunity hardly allows for life’s bad luck and ill fate. Indeed, throughout the first half of the twentieth century the reformist left built a welfare state dedicated to ameliorating liberal individualism’s excesses. The reformist left’s very success, however, was based upon their acceptance of American individualism. The socialist Eugene Debs, for one, “never abandoned his faith in individualism,” while the Progressive Movement sought to restrain the industrial order from strangling the “individual energy of development.” Performing social welfare jujitsu, Opportunity liberals, as Gareth Davies terms them, used popular regard for self-help to build a politically viable welfare state. [18]

Franklin Roosevelt, for one, understood “a program for the poor is a poor program.” Ignoring clamors for universal old-age pensions and long-term need-based assistance, he opted for Social Security’s contributory and regressive scheme. In the late 1960s, Entitlement liberals displaced their forbearers and pushed guaranteed income plans. Eschewing liberal individualism, they sought a social democratic equality of results rather than opportunity; a distinction which made the New Deal’s welfare state politically unassailable and the Great Society vulnerable. Arguments regarding Opportunity or Entitlement liberalism’s efficacy and morality are largely irrelevant to the larger usable-history-point. In building the democratic-socialist internationalist left’s American wing, Bérubé should heed America’s “dominant social philosophy”: liberal individualism. [19]

Opportunity Liberalism & National Service

Dave McCurdy did not suffer from “false consciousness.” The great-great grandson of Oklahoma homesteaders and son of a rancher-crop-duster-turned-electrician dad, McCurdy embodied Opportunity liberalism. After working his way through college and law school, in 1979, he quit private practice for 14 months of campaigning. Running for Congress in rural Oklahoma against the Reagan Revolution’s tide, McCurdy, somehow, prevailed. During the 1980s while conservatives shellacked Mondale, Dukakis, and Democrats generally, he took a leading role in rethinking and modernizing liberalism. [20]

Though the liberal-left claimed Reagan and conservatism triumphed because Democrats were too tepid, McCurdy, and a band of likeminded centrist liberals, knew otherwise. Launching an effort to reconstruct “liberalism…as a vibrant force for achieving broad national purposes,” the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) tried to reconnect liberalism to Americans’ core values. [21] For Manicheans who deem Dennis Kucinich as too far right, the DLC is probably synonymous with the SS, while democratic leftists remain deeply suspicious of the organization. One need not embrace the DLC in its entirety, however, to appreciate its central vision: liberals need Middle America.

Rural, small town, and mid-sized interior city dwellers are not the reflexive conservatives Sarah Palin imagines or the dumb rubes of Tom Frank’s ravings. Instead, as modern liberalism became dominated by educated and urban elites, the reformist left lost touch with Middle America. The DLC, comprised, almost wholly, of officeholders hailing from the South and Midwest, implicitly understood this reality. Hardly a warmed-over Reaganite, Dave McCurdy sought an active government committed to “providing opportunity, regardless of your background, or whether or not you were privileged.” Recognizing his rural constituents supported federal activism, so long as it remained true to America’s individualist traditions, McCurdy developed a national service plan. [22]

Derided by some as crass opportunism, the DLC’s national service plan was firmly grounded in the Communitarian critique of rights-based liberalism. As detractors of classical liberalism’s endless quest for “liberation,” Communitarians questioned the value-free nature of rights-based liberalism. To academicians, Michael Sandel, William Galston, and Charles Moskos, rights-based liberalism had as much to do with the “celebration of individual cunning in the single-minded pursuit of wealth and status” as did Ronald Reagan. Sounding a Reaganite tone, Michael Sandel claimed “big government,” or in his words the “procedural republic,” had severed crucial connections between citizen’s rights and obligations. [23]

Pollsters buttressed what observers sensed. Peter Hart’s 1988 survey of 1,000 Americans, between the ages 15 and 24, revealed that three times as many valued “success in job or career” over “being involved in making the community to be a better place.” [24] More troubling, only 12 percent of respondents defined “good citizenship” as “voting or other forms of political involvement,” while 43 percent chose “generous and caring.” As a result, Communitarians worried America’s civic glue had come undone. To them, young Americans had embraced an individualist rather than civic sense of citizenship and forgotten the reciprocal duties and responsibilities of democratic societies. For Communitarians, tying responsibility (service) to entitlements (Pell Grants & loan subsidies), promised to, as Charles Moskos put it “move us beyond the sort of something-for-nothing, every-man-for-himself, me-first philosophy that has been prevalent in the American ruling groups.” [25]

Armed with a Communitarian philosophy, McCurdy championed national service to revive civic life and republican values, buttress social mobility and address vexing social issues. Exempting adults while mandating service in exchange for financial aid, McCurdy’s “Citizenship and National Service Act of 1989” offered a $10,000 tuition credit or mortgage down payment for every year served in the “Citizen Corps.” [26] Aimed at solving the nation’s “social deficit,” poor neighborhoods and the needy who were hit hardest by Reagan’s domestic cuts, national service advocates wanted volunteers to work as tutors, hospital orderlies, street cleaners, and in homeless shelters. In making education assistance an “earned benefit” rather than an entitlement, McCurdy reconfigured the liberal calculus of citizen-state relations while promoting opportunity. [27]

In the 1980s, college tuition rates soared by 40 percent while median family incomes rose by a meager 6 percent clip. As a result, low and middle-income students were either pushed out of elite institutions, saddled with student loan debt, or driven from higher education altogether. [28] Consequently, fewer poor and minority students attended college and those who did were burdened with so much student loan debt McCurdy called them a “new class of indentured servants.” For the “forgotten half” who never pursue post-secondary education, the voucher could be used as a down payment for a home. From aiding needy student to promoting the “American Dream” with the non-college bound, McCurdy’s legislation undoubtedly served social democratic ends. [29]

Carl Albert and Dave McCurdy hardly have all the answers. They do, however, remind us of liberalism at its experimental and non-ideological best. In contrast, The Left at War exposes the Manicheans for what they are, fundamentalists. From Pat Robertson, Sheik Youssef al-Ahmed to Noam Chomsky, dogmatic devotion to secular or spiritual theologies lead to intellectual cul-de-sacs and worse. In publicly breaking with them, Bérubé has offered himself up as a leader of a heterodox left. Disinterested in shibboleths, this left can best pursue domestic reform and a foreign policy committed to humanitarian ends.

Notes

[1] Bérubé, Michael. The Left at War. New York: New York UP, 2009, p. 213.

[2] Young, James P. Reconsidering American Liberalism: the Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996, p. 6.

[3] World Federation: The Idea Worked for Our Forefathers, The Southern Banker, March 1950, Series General, Folder 55, Box 3, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; Memo: Information from the Files of the Committee on Un-American Activities—United World Federalists, Inc., September 11, 1959, Series General, Folder 55, Box 3, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[4] Newsletter, World Government News: Grave Responsibility, Series Campaign, Folder 98, Box 3, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; Newsletter, The Truth about the Oklahoma Referendum to Strengthen the United Nations, Series General, Folder  56, Box 3, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[5] Crossette, Barbara. “Sinister? U.N.’s Simply in the Dark.” New York Times 9 July 1995: 1E+. Print.

[6] Bupkis: Yiddish for “something totally worthless.”

[7] Jefferson, Margo. “The American Way of Class, A Game of Self-Delusion.” New York Times, 31 March 1999: 2E

[8] Magee, Malcolm D. What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-based Foreign Policy. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2008. Print; “Sun Bursting Through Clouds Brings Bright Omen to Nation’s New Leader.” New York Times, 5 March 1913: p. 1A.

[9] Tami Davis & Sean Lynn-Jones, “Citty Upon a Hill,” Foreign Policy, spring, 1987, p.20; Gamble, Richard M. The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2003. Print. p. 8, 9, & 16-17; Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print, p. 2.

[10] Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: a Study in Ethics and Politics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Print, p. 110-111.

[11] Proposed Legislation—Foreign Loans, April 24, 1947, Legislative Series, Folder 29, Box 2, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; Platform Campaign ’46, P.1, Series Campaign, Folder 120, Box 1, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[12] Global Alphabet Guidebook, p. 3 & 4, Series General, Folder 15, Box 1, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; P.W. Wilson, “Ex-Senator Owen Absolves Germany of All War Guilt,” New York Times, July 17, 1927, p.BR3.

[13] Altus Scottish Rite Club: Resolution, Series General, Folder 56, Box 3, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[14] Letter from Albert to R.L. Crutcher, October 28, 1947, Series General, Folder 14, Box 1, Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma, Letter from Albert to Howard Conan, September 14, 1950, Series General, Folder 56, Box 3, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[15] “Sideswipes,” The MacAlester News-Capitol, Sept. 7, 1950, Series General, Folder 56, Box 3 Carl Albert Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; “Oklahoma Only,” The Daily Oklahoman, October 24, 1950, 14.

[16]“State Question 344,” The Daily Oklahoman, 8 November 1950: p.41; “How Some People Think in a Vacuum,” The Daily Oklahoman 13 March 1955: p. 34.

[17] Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print, p. 9.

[18] Davies, Gareth. From Opportunity to Entitlement the Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence (Kan.): University of Kansas, 1996. Print, p. 12

[19] Davies, Gareth. From Opportunity to Entitlement the Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence (Kan.): University of Kansas, 1996, p. 1 & 13-16.

[20] Hardin, Greg. “McCurdy’s in Washington: Congressman Finds Life’s Hard in the Capital City,” The (Sunday) Constitution (Lawton, Oklahoma), 26 April 1981: 1B.

[21] Will Marshall & Al From, “Ideas, Not Litmus Tests, Can Lift the Democrats,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1988, PPI Archives

[22] Article, “The Non-Candidate.” Series General, Folder 2, Box 48, p. 2, Dave McCurdy Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma.

[23] Walzer, Michael, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1. (Feb., 1990), pp. 23; Wilson, James. “The Rediscovery of Character.” The Public Interest, Issue 81, Fall 1985, p. 3-16; Broder, David. “Citizen Corps.” Washington Post, 11 May 1988, p. 25A.

[24] Broder, David. “Young America’s Civic Failings.” Washington Post. 29 November 1989, p 27A.

[25] Baer, Ken. Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton. Lawrence (Kan.): University of Kansas, 2000,p 112.

[26] McCurdy, Dave. “A Quid Pro Quo for Youth,” New York Times, 26 June 1989, p 19A.

[27] McCurdy, Dave. “A Quid Pro Quo for Youth,” New York Times, 26 June 1989, p 19A; Baer, p. 112-113.

[28] Citizenship and National Service: a Blueprint for Civic Enterprise. Washington, D.C.: Democratic Leadership Council, 1988.

[29] Washington Student Aid Dilemma, Box 12, Folder 17, Dave McCurdy Papers, Carl Albert Center’s Congressional Archives, Norman, Oklahoma; Vobejda, Barbara. “Competition for College Feeds Elitism.” Washington Post, 4 May 1989. 14A; Citizenship and National Service: a Blueprint for Civic Enterprise. Washington, D.C.: Democratic Leadership Council, 1988.