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.

But Bérubé’s book subverts the simplistic logic according to which the enemy of my enemy is friend, a logic which the left has used to embrace genocidal strongmen and theocratic fundamentalists opposed by Western culture and power. It helps us to understand that if our leaders want to put a stop to these trigger- and bomb-happy murderers then maybe, instead of jumping to their defense, instead of painting such scenarios as further instances of cynical imperial aggression, we might want to rethink our relationship to our leaders. It’s not a matter of becoming their unconditional cheerleaders, but one of understanding that though we might naively think that the enemy of our enemy (our government, our capitalist class) is our friend, this new “friend” does not distinguish as we do, between us—private, more or less innocent bystanders—and our government and capitalist class. No matter how much we might think we can be friends, they (and by they I mean Islamist theocrats) just want to kill us. Really. Bérubé’s book is, then, audacious enough to remind us that perhaps we’re not the bad guys, and that therefore, those who oppose us might not necessarily be the good guys. Such an argument demands that we rethink what we thought we knew, that we reimagine how the world is and how it might be; it demands that instead of hewing to the rhetorical flourishes of undeniably gifted proseurs,[1] we—again—start thinking politically.

The Forever War

Bérubé’s title references not only the Left in a time of war, but also the Left at war with itself. He reports on how the Left, in producing its responses to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has once more rendered itself ineffectual, if not wholly irrelevant. Ineffectual and possibly irrelevant because the most noted—if not the  most notable—left response to the war was one which implicitly and explicitly defended the choice of radical Islam to  blow up Western cities, by invoking the logic of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend. The supporters of this perspective were not an insignificant number: they were enough to convince anyone—everyone?—else who was paying attention that the left was off its rocker, so to speak. Once more, because, though Bérubé doesn’t take up the point, the left has always been at war with itself, whether in times of peace or of violent conflict: social democrats, communists, anarchists, socialists, Trotksyists, feminists, middle-class peace activists and so on—all groupable as belonging to some sort of left—have always taken pains to demarcate their differences from one another and to paint what one would imagine to be their potential, even natural, allies as actually being agents of reaction, the bourgeoisie, the patriarchy and/or imperialism—in short, stooges of counter-revolution.

The first of the fundamental two Left factions that Bérubé sees as being at war with each other is what he calls the Manichean left, for whom “there are [only] two forces in the world, those of good and evil” (7), and since we are—or at least our government is—evil, anyone who opposes us, or whom we oppose is, ipso facto, good. Although not noted, there is something of an irony here in that the division by the Manichean left of the world into good and evil, is a division which those who supported the war were able to leverage and turn back on the left and on potentially deliberative observers: Yes, there are only two possible positions, ours or theirs, the good position or the evil one. Thus a situation which is quintessentially political is denuded of actual political thought, since discussion proceeds on the basis of axioms, preestablished certainties about the world.

But there is another left, a “democratic left,” to which Bérubé allies himself, which insists on thinking politically rather than axiomatically. By thinking politically I mean that it insists on the need for thought to somehow try to come to grips with the world and the people in it, rather than the reverse; it is a way of thinking that is not afraid to acknowledge the complexity of reality, that is not afraid to revise its positions in the face of emergent phenomena. In order to expand this left, in order to make it more effectual, Bérubé has written his latest book. He hopes that readers will align themselves with this left, which is a left committed to making the world (this world) a better one, based on the institutionalization of dynamics already present—if still only very incipient—in it. He’s talking about international bodies, courts, treaties, which would supersede the claims of national sovereignty. Utopian you say? Hardly. Difficult? Absolutely. But within the realm of possibility, if we get serious about politics. Regarding the wars, the discourse of this left—not Manichean—which proceeded from doubt rather than certainty, tended to be elided by observers and commentators, due to the fact that it was not strident, that it was nuanced and therefore constituted (was able to constitute itself, at least in principal), as a possible constraint on the forces rushing to war. Bérubé’s democratic left is a left that would reintroduce deliberative thinking into the situation. Would, were it not constantly silenced by the Manichean world-view that both the left and the right so uninhibitedly adopt, as if it were a virtue.

Though Bérubé writes forcefully and convincingly about the value of a certain style of cultural studies—that propounded by Stuart Hall in the 1970s, which understands culture in modern democratic societies as a terrain  of persuasion and contestation, rather than as a space of manipulation and stupification—for thinking about and understanding why some people seem so ready to support war and why others would seem to support terrorism and mass murder, what I  want to highlight here is the fantastic work he does criticizing the discourse of the Manichean left and the man whom he designates as its principal spokesperson, Noam Chomsky. This criticism allows us to re-understand and re-appreciate politics and the targets of so much Manichean vituperation, the West and liberalism.

Chomsky is an important figure to take on since his many interventions reach a considerable audience. His books are easily available in airport bookstores. And while some might argue that Chomsky’s words have always reflected an unalloyed anti-Americanism and thus a quite straightforward Manicheanism, 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. Indeed, when one considers Chomsky’s history it is odd that he has come to be so monomaniacal in his criticisms of the US. I imagine, for instance, that most people who browse these electronic pages are at least vaguely familiar with the debate that took place between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault in 1971. Those not familiar with the actual debate but acquainted with the debaters will, nonetheless, surely be able to divine the positions each staked out regarding the bone of contention: human nature and the possibility of justice.

Foucault talked of how any effective realization of “justice” would always be the realization of a certain justice, one that in one way or another extended the social relations of power—of inequality, of subordination and domination—out of which it grew, while Chomsky sought to articulate his commitment to a human nature which was striving to implement, against the vested interests of power, a universal justice, a real justice. The fact that Foucault insisted that any form of justice would always be partial, in fact privileging some over others, that the notion of a true or real or universal justice would always mask the fact that its actual instantiation merely signified that a certain array of social forces were provisionally ascendant and able to lay claim to embodying the universal, led Chomsky to dismiss Foucault as the most “amoral” person he had ever met. It is likely that Foucault left the encounter with the impression that Chomsky was quite naive about how the social—how the world—really works.

But Chomsky, interestingly, has become famous telling the public how naive it is in understanding how the world works.[2] In a sort of career-long paraphrasing of Foucault’s argument, he has told us in article after article, in book after book, in conference after conference, that those who promote freedom and democracy, popular sovereignty and international justice, are actually promoting not universal values, but their own radically circumscribed and parochial interests under the name of freedom, democracy, sovereignty and justice. The world, Chomsky tells us ever so bluntly, coheres in the form that it does as a result of the naked play of power. There is no sense in his interventions that the US, while—let’s say—wrong more often than we would like, due to the fact that the people who make important decisions are all-too-human and thus prone to be guided by their petty jealousies as much as by grand historical narratives, is also the place that has so-far best institutionalized the practice of freedom and that has best—given its heterogeneity—instantiated the idea of equality. There is little real sense in his work, in other words—despite his occasional/disposable protestations to the contrary—that the US and the West have actually created something laudable, if flawed.

But Chomsky is not alone in having tunnel vision with regard to the US and the West in general. While Bérubé does an excellent and necessary job in pointing up the shortcomings of that vision, in the limited space of what remains of this essay, I want to continue that critical exercise, directing it now at a couple of figures whose popularity, while paling compared to that of Chomsky, nonetheless affords them too the status of something like “rock stars” on the more restricted Manichean left of the academy, namely, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. While Chomsky’s political interventions are not generally the stuff of social science and humanities courses, the writings of Ž and B have been taken up across the curriculum, especially in that of cultural studies and English and Literature departments. The following criticism is pertinent, I hope, insofar as it allows me, if I may be so presumptuous, to join Bérubé in the necessary defense of liberal institutions, of the achievements of the West, and in the promotion of thinking politically again.

Changing the Coordinates?  Or Repeating Stalin?

Žižek and Badiou are the sort of people Lévy has in mind when he wrote in Left in Dark Times, “I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has [...] had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”[3] They are certainly among the most well-known among those pushing this unsullied, uncompromised, happy Communisim—as if the greater part of the twentieth century has not given ample proof that this was in the most literal sense a contradiction in terms. Žižek has written a great many books which invariably do little more than repeat the same ideas and denunciations of the West and its liberal and capitalist history and present. He famously convened a conference on Lenin, a scholarly celebration of the man who, despite his shortcomings, nonetheless “changed the coordinates of the possible”—the central Žižekian political idea—with his leadership and direction of the Bolshevik Party. And more recently he has made it his mission to rehabilitate Stalin and Mao. Badiou, for his part, has postulated something called the Communist Hypothesis as his contribution to politics today.

Žižek, like Badiou, longs for something other, something radically other, to the society that we enjoy today. Now, nobody need be blind to the real crimes and excesses of Western democracies—colonialism, for example—and of capitalism, which left to its own logics has indeed produced the destruction of environments and communities, while also providing the very services and technologies upon which these thinkers, and modern society, depend. But it is worth noting that capitalist democracy nonetheless continues to recover and renovate itself, to re-invent, in fact, its own different forms of collective organization, that while indeed imperfect, are always open to criticism, and thus novelty and thus, finally—and this is crucial—freedom.

Ignoring this reality, Ž and B refuse to provide their conceptual social, political other with significant content; they insist only that it be the absolute negation of the unalloyed horror that is Western liberal modernity. Žižek promotes, as we’ve seen, a politics of “changing the coordinates.” What this means is that he promotes any political activity that somehow creates the possibility for something unforeseen, something new to emerge. This is the sort of political thinking that saw in the Iranian revolution, and sees in the rise of Islamism, a good thing, a liberating challenge to Western liberal hegemony. But oddly enough, this would seem to be also the sort of thinking that led to US involvement in Iraq, both times. In each case, the big idea behind the invasions was that if we could just “change the coordinates,” something different, something better, would emerge. So far, not so good. And if one day Iraq does emerge as a constitutional democracy, the debate will turn on whether such a result was in fact in spite of the war, rather than because of it. We should note then that Žižek’s thought is hardly unique, is hardly progressive, and that it is not particularly leftist. If his politics of changing the coordinates is the same as that of the American Centurions, then his politics of violence—in his book Violence, a chapter is called “Divine Violence” and imagines such violence as necessary and as the way to introduce a really human society—seems to be no different from that of the murderous theocrats who dream of visiting a divine holocaust on Israel, and blowing to smithereens the West and modernity so as to refound the caliphate, despite his protestations to the contrary.[4] Is this radical, useful—progressive—thought?

In his attempt to salvage communism, Žižek asserts repeatedly that “at the origins of the [communist] regime, there was an ‘authentic’ revolutionary project”[5] and even writes of the “redemptive moment” of “‘totalitarian’ politics.”[6] For his part Badiou states, categorically, even after the twentieth century and the ongoing example of China in the twenty-first: “we know that communism is the right hypothesis.” Thus, in “The Communist Hypothesis”[7] we get a pretty well-articulated understanding of how Badiou sees the world. This is important because, obviously, how we see the world affects our thoughts and practices related to changing it. How does he see politics? He sees it in an abstract sense as “collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order” (31 my emphasis). But would it not be more correct to say, facilitated by the dominant order?

The point is that it depends on how you look at things. The point is to appreciate, if I may appropriate a useful trope from Žižek, the parallax view, to see not just repression but immanence as well. This is certainly what Marx saw when he looked at capitalism, not so much what it repressed—although he never lost sight of that—but what it made possible. Badiou continues, opining that, the above formulation of politics notwithstanding, this “is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive per se” (31). And we’ll thank him for that admission. Still, he goes on, the electoral-democratic system is “incorporated into a state form, that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function” (31). But even if it is incorporated into a capitalist, parliamentary system, and let us concede—because it is a truism—that said system is appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, it still bears pointing out that Badiou is blind—wilfully so?—to the other point of view, which allows us to appreciate that the system is not only appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, it is also appropriate for changing the established order. And indeed, the liberal democratic system is the only system which is appropriate for changing itself while allowing for continuity and stability. It serves, in other words, a good conservative function, not a reactionary one, by preventing personalities with “good” ideas from liberating themselves from institutional restraints and inaugurating hell on earth, again.[7] To dismiss institutionality as a reactionary impediment to a better world is only possible on the basis of a radically circumscribed conception—a binary, Manichean conception—of the world and the people in it.

Testing the Hypothesis

To get an idea of how circumscribed, how axiomatically binary or Manichean (non-political), Badiou’s world vision is, let’s look at how he understands the current military actions—okay, let’s call them wars—in the world today: “Our governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect us from it at home” (32). Okay, so far so good. I remember hearing such arguments—and I’ll even admit that I remember not being so very convinced by them. But Badiou continues parsing the bellicose logic: “If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists in Afghanistan or Chechnya [by the way, did I miss something? Is Chechnya the site of Western troops? Is Russia the West too?], they will come over here to organize the resentful rabble outcasts” (32 my emphasis). In his strange mind the war is not protecting us from terrorist attacks—an eminently arguable point, certainly—but from the organization of the resentful rabble outcasts!!! One wonders: do not said outcasts have sufficient organizers of one kind or another already in their own countries? And do not most of them choose to ignore said organizers? Badiou here seems to be telling us that he wants Islamists to come to the West (as if they’re not already here) and organize the resentful rabble outcasts. Obviously the homegrown and one imagines secular socialists and communists aren’t up to scratch, and so we need to import some religious, genocidal theocrats to come along and take down capitalism and the West. Is this not exemplary Manichean thinking?

Let us look now more closely at Badiou’s communist hypothesis. This hypothesis says that “the logic of class [...] is not inevitable; it can be overcome” (34-35). It is interesting that Badiou chooses the term hypothesis. The scientific method insists that we test hypotheses, that we attempt to falsify them. In the present case, history itself would seem to have falsified Badiou’s hypothesis many, many times over. He gives us more detail, nonetheless:

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away. (35)

Anticipating the obvious critical response, Badiou interjects: “It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion” (35). But the way we’ve seen them be actualized—up to the present—is somewhat scary, no?

At least the way that self-defined communists have tried to actualize them should give any decent person pause. On the other hand, under liberal systems, some real movement towards social equality, through taxation on income and on inheritance, is not only thinkable but practicable. Sure, such ideas have a lot of enemies, but a lot of potential sympathizers also. And in the West, while the state can be incredibly coercive, it can also be fought, restrained in court and in the legislature—and even in the streets. Sometimes it prevails anyway, but not always. On the other hand, our association—given the number of people we’re talking about—is probably as free as it’s ever going to get. Liberal immigration policies allow many—if not all—to choose where they want to live (but yes, their being able to choose does depend on them being able to produce too—it’s not a perfectly just system). And it’s highly unlikely that there will ever be, under anything resembling desirable conditions, complete elimination of inequality of wealth and the division of labor.

Nevertheless, Badiou, to support his definition of the hypothesis, then goes on to identify the “communist invariant,” that is, “mass action [that] opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice” (35). While admitting the reality of revolt throughout history, especially “since the beginnings of the state,” I ask whether it was not, more accurately, in the name of freedom or at least equally in the name of freedom, rather than only in the name of egalitarian justice. While freedom and equality need to be thought together—a point Bérubé drives home nicely throughout his book—Badiou seems to give up on freedom in favor of equality. But we’ve already seen how that goes. People can be equal and deprived of freedom. That’s a nightmare situation. But people cannot be free and not in many significant ways equal also. In other words freedom requires a good amount of formal and substantial equality, whereas wholesale substantial equality requires totalitarianism and is in fact, strictly speaking, unthinkable.

Having defined the hypothesis as our guiding idea and the invariant as our empirical history, Badiou seeks to “determine the point at which we now find ourselves in the history of the communist hypothesis” (35). He identifies a first stage from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, and a second stage from the Bolshevik to the end of the Cultural Revolution. The first stage, while long on enthusiasm was short on organization, and so succumbed to entropy and “the foreign-backed forces of counter-revolution” (35). The second stage solved the problem of organization though the “‘iron discipline’ of the communist party” (36). But this itself turned into a problem, according to Badiou. Not because it led to the killing of more people, and more communists, truth be told, than the combined forces of fascism—and exponentially more than those killed by democratic regimes—but because eventually it proved “corrupt” and ineffective,” because it “developed into a new form of authoritarianism,” because it suffered from “internal bureaucratic inertia” (36). Ah, so that was it.

What Is (Not) to Be Done?

By now we are in the present and it is here when the real poverty of Badiou’s thinking comes to the fore. He is concerned with the “eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis” (37), while being clear—thank heaven—that it “will not be—cannot be—the continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more…. [A]t the level of practical politics they have become unworkable” (37). Given this fact, “our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence by another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience,” and, “We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere” (37). There is a point to be made here, but with a little more rope it will be all the easier to hang Badiou (figuratively speaking, of course). As an example of what this re-installation might mean, Badiou offers that of “finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order,” in “formal opposition” to it, such as, “‘There is only one world’” (37-8). He elaborates: “we must affirm the existence of the single world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world,’ is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us” (38). Okay, good. Having uttered this performative statement, “it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration” (39).

And so: “A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children in a park” (39). Note that the members of Badiou’s world are those he can see. Those he can’t see are out of luck. The media—which could let him see them—have already been dismissed out of hand as a hopelessly compromised ideological state apparatus (31), even though Althusser recognized that these were in fact sites of struggle. Seeing as Badiou seems to be only concerned to include the people he can see in his world, the consequences of saying “there is only one world,” it would seem, do not include doing everything possible, up to and including air strikes, to stop genocidal fascists from killing innocent people in places you can’t see.

It would seem that said innocents are not part of Badiou’s world! In articles in Le Monde given to reflecting on the genocidal misery wrought by fascists in post-Yugoslavia, Badiou rejects intervention. Like Žižek, who for some years has been invoking Melville’s Bartleby as a political model to follow, Badiou insists that it would be best to do nothing (“La Sainte-Alliance y ses serviteurs,” Le Monde, May 20, 1999; “L’arrogance impériale dans ses oeuvres,” Le Monde, March 25, 2000. I do not read French and trust Bernard-Henri Lévy’s analysis and summary of the articles, given in Left in Dark Times, pp. 142-143).[9] “We should stay out of their business,” he insists (quoted in Lévy 143). If such are the consequences of Badiou’s performative one worldism, then count me out. And yet the consequences did not have be so. Again, it depends on how you conceive of the dominant order.

One could conceive of it as one in which countries minded their own business and let innocents beyond their borders, beyond their view, beyond their interests, suffer the whims of whatever god-awful tyrant had managed to install himself in power. One could conceive of it as an order in which the defenseless are inevitably subordinate to the dominant. Badiou’s “there is only one world” would, then, occupy a position outside that order, in formal opposition to it. The consequences would be game changing, world changing. But Badiou can’t see that. His one world is just that—his one world—in which “Nothing was more necessary than not to intervene” (quoted in Lévy, 143). Compare this to the vision outlined by Bérubé, who argues for an internationalism, a one-worldism of a sort, in which we have a duty to make good on the incipient “responsibility to protect” supra-sovereignty doctrine, which would compel able countries to come to the aid of those who are defenseless in the face of genocidal slaughter. Which one world do you want to be a part of?

We Are the World

Oddly enough for a supposedly radical anti-liberal thinker, the big consequence of his radically constrained one-worldism seems to be little more than a watered-down version of liberal multiculturalism (I say watered-down because it doesn’t, as we’ve seen, include everybody). In his one world there is no “demand that you have to be like everybody else” (39), but, rather, “an unlimited set of differences exist” (39); furthermore, each person can “invent what he is [...] not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity” (40). Badiou posits this as the eventual outcome of communism. But is he not in fact describing the already achieved reality of the liberal socio-political system? (Except for leaving no space for those whose difference is being literally expunged in not so far away places, of course.) Does he not describe the sort of society that his imaginary organizers of the resentful rabble outcasts would crush, given half the chance? Have they not repeatedly demonstrated as much? Badiou is so blinded by his Manichean lenses that he cannot see that the world he is after is in so many respects already here—and under attack.

Conclusion: The Liberal Hypothesis

I would then offer up, drawing on the political and intellectual arguments provided by Bérubé’s book, in response to Manichean thinking in general and to Ž and B more specifically, more pointedly, the liberal hypothesis and the freedom invariant. Why, in the face of the histories of liberal democracies (that are capitalist too), that have in fact (rather than only a hypothetical sense) given so much to the notion and the possibilities of the human, would we not, rather, double down on the liberal hypothesis? Why put it all on an idea that is only good in theory—and really, perhaps not even there, given how much we know about human pettiness (but that’s another story)—and not bet sensibly on an idea that has paid off in actual practice? Perfectly? Not at all! But given that liberalism institutionalizes the freedom to be different, the freedom to criticize, the freedom to say no, then it contains within itself the practical conditions for changing the coordinates of the possible, for inching ever closer to something better. Liberalism is the only political regime which is open to changing itself, a form which actually encourages the ongoing negation of its own content, or rather, its sublation, its aufheben, if you will.

The Manichean leftists, whether read in or beyond the academy, seem to be working within their own state of abjection, attempting to cast themselves off, attempting to un-understand themselves as citizens in vibrant democratic social systems which as yet have not solved all the problems of injustice at home and abroad. They want a perfect world, and they want it now. But somehow they claim to be materialists, Marxist revolutionaries, when in fact they are more idealist than Hegel himself. He worked it all out in his head, and on paper. Though these hypothesizers claim to be materialists, concerned with the real world and the real people in it, their contributions are written for people who do not exist, and for a world that does not exist. They resolve real problems in their minds and on paper—as if they were advertising copywriters (“Impossible is nothing” goes the Adidas sportswear commerical, when really, impossible is impossible)—then go back to enjoying all the luxuries offered to them by the very world they wish away in all their other waking moments.

Having studied the history of the modern world, having lived through the later part of the twentieth century and what has passed of the twenty-first, we know that the world is far from a utopia. But we are sure—we can be sure, based on study, based on evidence, based on thought, and rejecting half-formed fantasies whose attempted formulation in practice has proven to be horrific—that a good part of the answer, a good part of the solution, that will help make the world a better place, is liberalism, the idea that human beings have rights, that we are more important than History, that we can be and ought to be—yes, ought to be—free, and that these rights and this freedom can be protected and nurtured through institutions, institutions that we have been working on and improving for over two hundred years. Our origins harbored an authentic revolutionary project whose goals were rights, equality and freedom. Its name is liberalism. This is our patrimony and our legacy, our past, present and future—our politics, if we care to inherit them, if we care to struggle for them.

Notes

[1]I hope the reader will indulge this neologism, by which I mean to allude to prose writers (prosers) who are also poseurs, that is, not what they purport to be: political, radical, materialist.

[2]On this point and the “antipolitical” nature of Chomsky’s rhetoric and thought in general, see Gabriel Brahm: “Understanding Noam Chomsky: a Reconsideration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23:5 (December 2006), 453-461.

[3]Lévy, Bernhard-Henri. Left in Dark Times. A Stand Against the New Barbarism. Random House, 2008, 52.

[4] See Paul Hollander’s review of two recent Žižek books, Violence (Picador, 2008) and In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), “Slavoj Žižek and the Rise of the Celebrity Intellectual”, Society July-August, 2010, pp. 358-360.

[5]Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006, 286.

[6] See Paul Hollander’s review, note 4.

[7] Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis”, New Left Review January-February 2008, pp. 29-42.

[8] On this note it is worth pointing to the recent politics of Colombia where, for the last eight years (2002-2010), an immensely popular president (according to opinion polls that may well have employed questionable methodologies in gathering their information), saw fit to transgress the institutions that would limit his apparently immensely popular policies, while presiding over social dynamics that included forced displacements, extrajudicial killings, only minor improvements in poverty statistics, the corruption of the national congress, spying by the secret police on constitutional court justices, and other calamities. It was only this same constitutional court, in its defense of the country’s quite immature institutionality, that was able to rule out his ongoing occupation of the president’s office—a ruling which leftists and many not remotely on the left applauded enthusiastically and gratefully. Why? Because the conservative function of the instititutions is not ipso facto a bad thing.

[9]The question begged by such a position is, of course, why then to do both authors, but most egregiously Žižek, keep on writing. Why don’t they just, like Bartleby, prefer not to?

Writing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can be a frustrating experience. On the one hand, the boundaries of “reasonable debate” are so narrowly construed within the popular media as to make the discussion of any genuine alternative points of view virtually impossible; on the other, the polarized and polarizing orthodoxies of American political discourse require that any criticism of the wars be accompanied by so many qualifications and caveats as to render genuine argument meaningless. On the political right, this requires creedal affirmations of the goodness and justice of the American cause, full-throated avowals of American exceptionalism, and unqualified statements of support for the troops. In some environs of the left, it requires condemnations of American empire, coupled with declarations of our complicity in every dastardly deed of international malfeasance since the sinking of the Maine.

Constructive analysis of our military adventures is, of course, a much more difficult animal to wrangle than one would be led to believe on the basis of whatever one’s preferred mode of political discourse – left, right, or “center” – might happen to be. And so it is that Michael Bérubé’s The Left At War performs an important service in clearing away much of the intellectual dead wood in discussions about the morality and politics of the Iraq and Afghan wars. At the same time, he stakes out and defines a position that no doubt describes where many of us on the left actually see ourselves: Opposed to the immoral and illegal militarism of the Bush administration, but at the same time troubled by the dualistic reductionism of many of our fellow critics on the left. Bérubé defines these critics as representatives of the “Manichean left” in contrast to the more pragmatic and reality-based “democratic left.”[1]

As the fog of war descended after September 11^th, 2001, many leftists attempted to articulate grounds for opposition to the administration’s emerging brand of foreign policy chauvinism, first in Afghanistan – which was as Bérubé notes a very difficult case for many of us – and then in Iraq. It is difficult to look back from the vantage point of 2010 and not believe that much, though not all, of the left wing anti-war case of 2001-2003 has been vindicated. And yet within the realm of mainstream political opinion we are still viewed, in Bérubé’s phrase, as “dirty fucking hippies” (130). Meanwhile, the “liberal hawks” who championed the Iraq war (of whom Berube singles out George Packer for particular criticism), have maintained a high degree of public respectability despite being astoundingly wrong about just about everything.

In the first instance of course, they were wrong in their advocacy of Iraq as a “war of choice” as opposed to a “war of necessity.” The phrase “war of choice” is an oxymoron from a moral point of view. Just wars are not “optional.” As admirable as the liberal hawks’ intentions may have been, there were no morally or legally credible grounds upon which to view an invasion of Iraq as fulfilling the criteria of a “humanitarian intervention” (Bérubé, 149-151), let alone for seeing in the invocations of Iraqi WMD or ties to Al Qaeda any real threat to the United States. While it was undoubtedly true that Saddam Hussein was in many ways a monstrous figure, whom it was easy to transform into a villain of Hitleresque stature, nothing in international law or the literature of humanitarian intervention justified the calls for war.

And then, of course, the liberal hawks were wrong in their estimation of the likelihood of successfully transforming Iraq into a stable, pluralistic, and democratic regime in the aftermath of deposing Saddam. They, no more than the Bush administration, were willing to take realistic stock of the internal tensions within Iraq that were bound to snap in the aftermath of an invasion.[2] As a result, instead of the beautiful visions of a free Iraq promoted by liberals such as Kanan Makiya, a tyrannical regime was replaced by abject chaos.[3] Perhaps worse, by turning our attention away from Afghanistan, the war in Iraq has allowed the Taliban to retrench and seriously set back the attempt to stabilize that country as well.[4]

And finally, of course, the liberal hawks were wrong to place their faith in the ability and prudence of the Bush administration. Irrespective of whether there was a genuine casus belli for war in Iraq, irrespective of the likelihood that Saddam Hussein’s fall would flower forth in a free and democratic Iraq, it should have been apparent from the beginning that the Bush administration was uniquely ill-equipped to successfully prosecute the war.[5] Led by a man who combined hubris and ignorance into a particularly volatile elixir of bellicose confidence, backed by a band of neo-conservative intellectuals and spoon fed information by sycophantic aides and a vice president whom “Machiavellian” does not adequately begin to describe, there was nothing about the Bush administration that ought to have inspired the least confidence in the liberal hawks that any war plan, let alone one as clearly difficult as Iraq, would be carried out with any degree of competence.

By now, of course, all of this is so well known as to be considered conventional wisdom. Much of it was clear at the time. Many of the Bush administration’s advisors in the Pentagon and the State Department sounded alarm bells about the difficulty of an invasion only to be rewarded with ridicule and demotion. Foreign policy realists were far more skeptical than the administration about the possibility of refashioning Iraq in our own preferred image. And those who knew of the ethnic and religious tensions in the region warned that any brand of liberal reasonable pluralism would be very difficult to achieve under any circumstances, let alone in the aftermath of a destructive military campaign. Why then, is it that those on the left who recognized these things in 2003, and who didn’t need the better part of a decade to understand either the realities of the situation in Iraq or the gross incompetence of the Bush administration seem to have been punished for being right?

Bérubé’s answer to that question lies in his analysis of the role of the Manichean left, and particularly the contributions, such as they were, of Noam Chomsky in defining the terms of debate for the left. Chomsky stands in as the most well-respected and widely known figure on the Manichean left, but the arguments made by him not only in the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but throughout the 1990s as well, were echoed by many others, and served to create a very visible target both for the political right and the liberal hawks, enabling them to tar the whole of the anti-war movement as representatives of a left-wing political fringe. At the same time, the highjacking of the anti-war protests by ANSWER provided red meat for Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to paint the political left as the antithesis of everything American. As opposed to the “Very Serious” pundits for whom the necessity of war was a foregone conclusion, everyone to the left of Paul Berman was cast as utterly beyond the pale of serious public discourse.

The Left at War offers up a withering critique of role that the Manichean left played in creating these circumstances. By becoming the caricature of leftwing radicalism that the proponents of war needed them to be, the Manichean left served to marginalize justifiable critique of the Bush-Cheney administration in general, and of its plans for perpetual war and the expansion U. S. hegemony in particular. They provided a distraction, which enabled the media to focus on how extreme Michael Perenti or George Galloway were, rather than how absurd the idea of invading Iraq was. After all, how seriously could one take the opponents of war, if they ran in the company of the Workers World Party or the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic?

However, not all of Bérubé’s blows strike home. For example, he rightly notes that Islamic radicalism has a much longer history than proponents of the “blowback” theory of U.S. middle east involvement are often willing to admit (16). But even so, 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.[6]

Clearly, Bérubé (via Ellen Willis) is correct that 9/11 cannot simply be laid at the feet of the United States. Islamic radicals are not deprived of judgment and agency as a result of American policy, deterministically constrained to follow only one path of resistance. Yet I believe this misreads the point of the blowback argument, which is not that we set dominoes in motion, only to watch them fall along a predetermined path. Rather, our policies produce unintended consequences that often cannot be known until years, or even decades after the fact.[7] 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.

The real question for pragmatic leftists is what alternative they offers to the forms of apocalyptic dualism shared in common by the Manichaeisms of all stripes.

Cosmic Wars

The problem with the Manichean left, as Bérubé articulates in great detail, is its insistence, as the name implies, on breaking all political discourse down into a set of binary oppositions: left/right, good/evil, oppressed/oppressor, resistance/empire. The difficulty with these kinds of oppositions is that they provoke the drawing of narrower and narrower lines in the sand. It is not enough to be against the war; you must be against the war for the right reasons. According to this position, of course, any war that the United States may be involved in is by definition an aggressive war of imperial expansion, and therefore has to be opposed in principle. The attempt by some pragmatic leftists to articulate a rationale for supporting the invasion of Afghanistan results in nothing but rebuke from the Manichean left, and serves as evidence of their complicity with the American imperialist project. The result is a form of metaphysical dualism that prevents any possibility of principled disagreement between the Manichean leftists and their opponents. Any support of any kind for anything that they oppose is the result of either false consciousness or a desire to curry favor with the powerful in media and government.

The political realm thus becomes the setting for what Reza Aslan terms a cosmic war between the powers of light and darkness (Aslan 2009). To deviate from the received doctrine under such circumstances is tantamount to betrayal, and evidence that one has gone over to the other side. It is, in short, a fundamentally religious vision of political conflict, as Bérubé acknowledges, citing Willis’s assessment of the doctrine of the Manichean left:

At the heart of the matter is an unspoken meta-argument: that America is a sinful country, and must achieve redemption through nonviolence. Violence committed against us is the wages of sin. To strike back in kind is to continue to collect the geopolitical equivalent of bad karma, inevitably provoking more blowback. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. (Ellen Willis, quoted by Bérubé, 157)

In this regard, there is an alarming convergence of ideology in the viewpoints of the Manichean left on the one hand, and that of both the American religious right and Jihadist Islam on the other. All three subscribe to the doctrine of a cleansing cosmic war through which the evil will be vanquished, the righteous vindicated, and the political institutions of society bent to the service of our preferred utopia, whether it be the Kingdom of God, the garden of the righteous, or the classless society.

Given the stakes, cosmic warriors can allow for no compromises, can brook no ambiguity, and can permit no half measures. The insistence on their own moral purity is a symptom of the absolutism with which they hold to their convictions. Compromise taints us, and the acknowledgement of uncertainty, or even of the possibility that the other side might have a point, undermines the conviction that, not only are we on the right side of the war, but our opponents are totally without redeeming qualities.

It is rather remarkable that arguments which take place solely within the realm of the secular can manage to replicate the worst qualities of religion, as reason gives way to ideology, and moral certainty becomes a self-reinforcing worldview. Remarkable, but at this point no longer surprising. As Bérubé notes throughout The Left At War, the reliance by the Manichean left on conceptions of false consciousness to explain their failure to make themselves persuasive to a mass audience both allows them to maintain its own hermetically sealed worldview, and to dismiss any forms of reality-based criticism as a manifestation of the principle that the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.

The Manichean left divides the world into categories of good and evil. As there is no middle ground, anyone who is not in their camp must be among the forces of evil. Once again, it is striking the degree to which this kind of dualistic absolutism is shared in common by the Chomskys and Hermans of the world with its George W. Bushes and Ayman al-Zwahiris. Having neatly divided the universe into the righteous and forsaken, they all arrogate to themselves the right to decide who is, and who is not, in each category. “Whoever is not for me is against me” (Luke 11:23).

Political life requires more humility than this. As easy as it is to rest comfortably in the knowledge of our own righteousness once we’ve defined its terms so as to ensure that we are included and our opponents cast out, doing so fails to take account of how difficult it can actually be to wade into the swamp of politics and discern, in the midst of conflicting ends and contradictory data, a reliable way forward. The Manichean leftist obsession with moral purity and absolute principle requires it to leave questions of consequences aside. If acting to prevent genocide leads us to sin, better to allow the genocide than to get our own hands dirty. And if getting our hands dirty means that we need to support the occasional military foray into the Balkans or Afghanistan, then it becomes incumbent on us to turn all of our rhetorical and intellectual fire, not on war criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic, but on their opponents, who in our worldview can only be agents of the evil empire.

An Augustinian Left

None of this is to suggest that there are not extremely good reasons to critique U. S. foreign policy from the left. The question is rather one of the grounds and aims of that criticism. The grounds of the Manichean left’s criticisms are quite clear – they are rooted a belief in the radical evil of American empire. Their aim, however, is far more opaque. What is it they envision as happening as a result of their critique? Better policy? It’s not clear what kinds of U.S. policy would meet with their stringent demands for moral perfection. The dismantling of American empire? That’s a vision to get behind, but what would it look like? The abolition of global U.S. hegemony? Again, a laudable goal, as long as there is an understanding of what would replace it, and how. It is often hard to escape the conclusion, in reading the work of Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill and their ilk that their critique has no objective. It exists for its own sake, as a kind of radical perpetual motion machine, content to continue churning until the end of time, irrespective of any actual events in the world.

But for those on the left who are seeking to articulate a vision of a more just, more democratic, and more peaceful world, it matters a great deal where one starts. Bérubé defines his own position throughout The Left at War as on “the democratic left,” drawing an important distinction between his own position in support of democracy against the forms of totalitarian and genocidal racism behind which many on the Manichean left have thrown their support (5-8). I will use the term “Augustinian left” to describe my own very similar position.

An “Augustinian” left makes for a nice contrast with the Manichean left, given the historical conflict between Augustine and the Manicheans over a somewhat related set of topics. Like their modern counterparts, the Manicheans of the late Roman Empire were dualists obsessed with the conflict between the pure and ennobling mind and the corrupting forces of the body. Like the King of the Moon in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, their aim was to transcend the realm of the dirty, the carnal, the physical, for the sake of the enjoyment of pure and uncorrupted thought.[8] Augustine, by contrast, did not view escape from the body as the royal road to paradise. On the contrary, he made a conscious decision to break with the Manicheans, precisely in the recognition that it was not the flesh that corrupted the mind, but precisely the mind that corrupted the body. Slaves to our passions we may be, but the seat of the passions is in the intellect (Augustine, 590).

To frame the matter somewhat differently, the contrast is between those who believe that if they can escape from the contingency and ambiguity of the world, and live solely within the realm of their own beautiful ideas, they can avoid being tainted by the sin and evil that surrounds them, and those who recognize that we live in the midst of a world over which we can never exercise complete and total control, and that life will always involve some degree of negotiation between our ideals and that which is really possible. The “city of God” of which Augustine wrote was not a world that could be created through the expulsion of all that was evil and corrupt, leaving only the pure and righteous. Rather, the city of God was built in the midst of the corruption of the world, piecemeal and partially, without guarantees of success, but in the recognition that there is that of good and evil in all of us, and nobody is capable of acting with complete moral purity.

The knowledge that all of our actions are an admixture of good and evil absolves us from the need for moral perfection, and allows us instead to seek the good in the midst of ambiguous circumstances, particularly in the realm of politics. Indeed, politics by its very nature often requires a willingness to act with dirty hands, hands perhaps even stained with blood.[9] As Max Weber saw the world of politics, it is the “strong and slow boring of hard wood,” the practice of which put one’s soul in danger.[10] Those who desire to remain pure are better off not entering into the subject at all.

Augustine was aware of these contradictions within political life, both that it was necessary, even for all of its compromises, and that it came with a cost:

It is true [he writes] that the Imperial City has imposed on subject nations not only her yoke but also her language, as a bond of peace and society, so that there should be no lack of interpreters but a great abundance of them. But how many great wars, what slaughter of men, what outpourings of human blood have been necessary to bring this about! (Augustine, 928).

For an Augustinian left, the empire is subject to critique and condemnation for its “imperial designs,” but at the same it recognizes that no political system comes into being or maintains its reign without the imposition of some form of order on society.[11] The anarchist ideal of a society with no governance and no rulers is a dream incapable of realization. In the same vein, the desire to engage in political life from a position of pristine innocence, while understandable and in many ways laudable, cannot produce a politics capable of achieving what the Manichean leftists most claim to want: Peace, justice, and equality. An Augustinian left recognizes that these goods have their price, and even then can only be partially bought.

The critique of empire, and the recognition of the merely partial morality of all human social systems, means that an Augustinian left is willing to enter into the political quagmire without any illusions of perfect outcomes. Genocide is worse than empire, and if its prevention requires the temporary alliance of leftist advocates of human rights, NATO, and the United States military, then so be it. If the alternative is pretending that no genocide occurred, or minimizing its consequences, it is very hard to see how a pragmatic, democratic, or Augustinian leftist is on the wrong side of that moral equation.

Perhaps the quintessential Augustinian leftist of the past century was Reinhold Niebuhr, and while the invocation of his name may offend the sensibilities of the disciples of Noam Chomsky, his contribution to understanding how to develop a morally grounded left-wing politics is essential for development of a modern left that is capable of offering up real solutions to political problems, and not party line platitudes.

In describing Niebuhr as an “Augustinian leftist” I want to emphasize two dimensions of Niebuhr’s thought: First, his position on the left of the political spectrum. Despite his “disputed legacy” among theologians and ethicists, the fact remains that Niebuhr was solidly on the left for virtually the entirety of his adult life. His position on the spectrum may have swung from more to less radical over the years, but he never came so close to the center as to be reasonably described as “liberal” except in the broadest sense of that term. His reputation as a cold war hawk, emerging from his (as it turns out fully justified) anti-communism led some, particularly in the 1980s, to brand themselves as “conservative Niebuhrians,” and while there is much in Niebuhr’s writing that can be borrowed for those purposes, I suspect the term would have chilled him to the bone.

Secondly, I want to emphasize that his position on the political left was not incidental to his Augustinian outlook, but was rooted in his theological and ethical point of view. It was precisely because of his recognition that all movements and ideologies were subject to taint and liable to human fallibility that he believed it was incumbent on society to ensure that justice was done on behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. His participation in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and his involvement in radical politics were grounded by his understanding that the moral risks entailed in any political movement were counterbalanced by the need of those who sought to broaden the scope of participation in democratic society to put themselves in a position to do so. His acknowledgment of the fallen nature of all human institutions does not obviate the need to contribute to those institutions, nor indeed, does it make it possible for us to avoid being touched by them.

In an essay entitled “Augustine’s Political Realism,” Niebuhr articulated an argument for an Augustinian political theory based on recognition of the moral limits of human political action. Contrasting the “realistic” and “idealistic” strands in political thought, he argues that, while both have their merits and are needed in political life, an “idealism” that is incapable of compromise is one that will be irrelevant to public discourse. Augustine’s realism is preferable, insofar as it enables us to understand how power is disseminated in political life:

This realism has the merit of describing the power realities which underlie all large scale social integrations whether in Egypt or Babylon or Rome, where a dominant city-state furnished the organizing power of the Empire. It also describes the power realities of national sates, even democratic ones, in which a group, holding the dominant form of social power, achieves oligarchic rule, no matter how much modern democracy may bring such power under social control. This realism in regard to the facts which underlie the organizing or governing power refutes the charge of modern liberals that a realistic analysis of social forces makes for state absolutism; so that a mild illusion in regard to human virtue is necessary to validate democracy. Realistic pessimism did indeed prompt both Hobbes and Luther to an unqualified endorsement of state power; but that is only because they were not realistic enough. They saw the dangers of anarchy in the egotism of the citizens but failed to perceive the dangers of tyranny in the selfishness of the ruler. Therefore they obscured the consequent necessity of placing checks upon the ruler’s self-will.[12]

Chomsky often offers up Niebuhr as an example of the “manufacture of consent” by the power elite. He even cribs the Niebuhrian phrase “necessary illusions” as the title of one of his best-known books.[13] But his critique of Niebuhr is based on a misreading of the overall theme of Niebuhr’s writing, as well of the paradoxical nature of much of Niebuhr’s rhetoric.[14] Chomsky hacks one passage from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society to pieces in order to make it sound as though Niebuhr advocates the wholesale institutional deception of the proletariat, while leaving out Niebuhr’s crucial qualifiers. The full passage reads:

It is much more rational to refrain from defining an ultimate goal and to abandon some degree of certainty in the possibility of its attainment. But moral potency is sacrificed for this higher degree of rationality. The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers. There is of course an element of illusion in the faith of the proletarian, as there is in all faith. But it is a necessary illusion, without which some truth is obscured. The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case. … These illusions are dangerous because they justify fanaticism; but their abandonment is perilous because it inclines to inertia.[15]

We are all subject to illusions, in Niebuhr’s estimation, because we all act out of faith in some higher end or goal. The “cool rationalists” whom Chomsky mocks are not Niebuhr’s version of Platonic philosopher-kings. Rather in their rationality they run the risk of moral inertia borne of their embrace of uncertainty and the decline of their sense of moral urgency, while proletarian certainty and urgency may lead, in the absence of some form of “cool rationality” to political disaster! There is some irony in Niebuhr’s declaration that proletarian faith is that of “the man of action” given its embrace by a Manichean left that is incapable of acting in any constructive way.

Niebuhr’s social analysis bears more than a passing family resemblance to the Gramscian analysis that Bérubé (via Stuart Hall) employs in the latter chapters of The Left at War. Niebuhr’s analysis of political power grounded in the collective egoism of social groups, who act out of a sense of their own interest, intersects in interesting ways with the Gramscian analysis of hegemony and civil society. Both Niebuhr and Gramsci see a role for intellectuals in the formation and development of the capacity of the proletariat for political action. Indeed, much of what Bérubé finds of value in the Gramscian approach, I see in Niebuhr. His Augustinian leftism offers a basis for social analysis that recognizes the necessity of the struggle for justice, our capacity for moral action in the midst of the ambiguities of social life, and the limitations that all ideologies and worldviews place on our ability to see the path in front of us clearly.

It is no accident that Niebuhr’s social analysis has sprung back into the public consciousness in the wake of the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. While his brand of “Christian realism” has often been appealing (if misunderstood) among the plain vanilla “realists” in the foreign policy realm, it has also proved attractive to those on both the political left and right who see in his embrace of the need for moral action in the public realm something that is at the same time cognizant of the fallibility of all human projects, and the limitations of all human perspectives.[16] And yet, for the sake of greater peace, fuller justice, and broader equality, he represents a form of Augustinian leftism that recognizes the need to act, even in the absence of assurances of our own purity, or of the ultimate achievement of our goals.

Notes

[1]Berube, Michael. The Left At War. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 7. Subsequent citations in text.

[2]Ricks, Thomas. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003-2005. New York: Penguin, 2007.

[3] Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Knopf, 2006.

[4]Jones, Seth. In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009.

[5] Isikoff, Michael. Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scanal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. New York: Crown Publishing Co., 2006.

[6]Aslan, Reza. How To Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror. New York: Random House, 2009.  Subsequent citations in text.

[7]Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000.

[8]Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 589. Subsequent citations in text.

[9] Walzer, Michael. “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2:2, 1973. 160–180.

[10]Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology. Oxford: Routledge, 1948. 128.

[11] Dorrien, Gary. Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. New York: Routledge, 2004.

[12]Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Augustine’s Political Realism” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 128.

[13]Chomsky, Noam. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. 17.

[14]In a 1987 article, Chomsky uses the publication of a questionable biography of Neibuhr as the occasion for an analysis of a number of Niebuhr’s writings. In some cases, his points are well taken, but in the main he misunderstands both Niebuhr’s rhetorical style and his underlying argument. See Noam Chomsky. “Reinhold Niebuhr,” Grand Street 6:2 (Winter, 1987), 197-212.

[15]Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932. 211. Italics added.

[16]Lieven, Anatol and John Hulsman. Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World. New York: Pantheon, 2006, to take but one of many examples.

Let me first admire—and here I feel very much like the voyeur.  First, this book is, in part, an effort to push out the boundaries of an intellectual (I want to say ideological) circle.  Berube’s forceful (but still too soft) criticisms of what he calls the “Manichean left” represents well his desire to expose the self-serving and yet self-defeating ideology of people like Noam Chomsky.  Self-serving is this ideology because Chomsky and allies occupy a sort of Gnostic (secret knowledge) redoubt that allows them to be always right and be morally above reproach. No evidence or exercise of logic is required when they pass moral judgments against the various devils of this world, beginning with the United States.  Surrounded by ideological walls made impregnable by the very circularity of his thinking (every conclusion is built into every premise), Chomsky finds in every difficult choice, every messy international reality, every action taken by a bewildered leader, an opportunity to reaffirm his own moral superiority, his deep Gnostic grasp of reality, and to enjoy the distinct pleasure that comes from reaffirming with bold words a reality that he cannot imagine doubting.

Berube wonderfully teases out how the very posturing, the very insularity of the Manichean left, isolates them from those who might be open to persuasion with evidence.  Perhaps more important to making their ideology self-defeating, their attraction to wild moral declarations make them symbols that opponents can all-too-easily use to tar a more generalized and amorphous “left.”  One of the results is that, from Berube’s point of view, the truths contained in Chomsky’s ravings (oops, this is one of those words that Berube uses to mark those who are outside of the circle) are lost to what otherwise might be a listening world—or at least a listening public.

I admire Berube’s effort to expand the circle, but I am more impressed with the means by which he does this.  Distinctions matter to this leftist.  Frustrated with reductive logic, circular thinking, and improper analogies, Berube offers an admirably differentiated vocabulary, he exposes distinctions that matter, and he insists that the left cannot excuse its political failings on self-serving shibboleths like false-consciousness.  To return to a previous image, Berube wants to breach the ideological redoubt so that the left can engage more meaningfully—if with less ideological purity—in the larger political world.

The Manichean left operates with a woefully inadequate grasp of the complexity of human choices, beliefs, fears, and political action.  “Chomsky’s mode of address to American readers,” Berube perceptively noted, “…makes sense if, and only if, one starts from the assumption that one’s fellow Americans are Matrix dwellers” (84).  One doesn’t seek to persuade such an audience because they are spiritual captives of a system that they do not know exists. One might pity them (though often one cannot help indulging in disgust) but one cannot help by telling them the truth or by seeking to persuade them.  Normal political action is unhelpful, perhaps even complicity with the delusion.

Berube rejects the “all-purpose excuse” of false consciousness insofar as it prevents leftists from working within the political system to persuade some people, to modify some policies, to nudge political action toward the social-democratic left.  In a rather complex, perhaps even confusing, defense of cultural studies, Berube stresses the intricate power networks of any modern hegemony, the constant interplay of cultural, social, political, and intellectual forces that contour beliefs, morals, and ideologies.  Escaping the straightjacket ideology that divides us into exploiters and victims, Berube visualizes a left that can participate with much greater sophistication in the formation or re-formation of public opinion and of the structures—economic and otherwise—that powerfully, if indirectly, form hegemonic ideologies such as the neoliberalism that so unpredictably altered the trajectory of modern history.

As a voyeur, reading The Left at War excited me—as a spy it persuaded me that the left for which Berube advocates cannot govern in America.  The heart of the problem, as I see it, is that as far as Berube pushes the left to reject overly-simplistic theories of power and mind control, he still does not understand the peculiar and seductive power of a right-wing liberalism that crystallized in the late 1970s.   For all the complexity of the argument, reading The Left at War exposes very specific places where the author operates with blind assumptions and astonishingly reductive claims about motivation.  In almost all the sections about a reified “right,” the reader must endure declarations rather than arguments and assertions that routinely foreclose any possibility that the other side engages in serious moral reflection.  In several places the enlightened or leftist reader is clued in to Berube’s appropriate loathing of an ill-defined right that traffics in “bloodthirsty ravings” (in this case of right-wing pundits) and expresses the entire panoply of the moral failings of a reactionary power elite.

The “right” is not Berube’s focus and, in many ways it is incidental to his project of creating a left that can engage meaningfully in politics.  His goal is to reform the left, but in the process he resorts to reifications that stand in for any serious analysis of the composition of the right.  Whether the author has the historical and empirical knowledge to offer a subtle analysis of this “right” or not, it is instructive that Berube either believes his reified characterization of this political “other” or he accepts that such characterizations are required before one can be heard in the intellectual circles of the left.  Either way, it exposes a huge blind spot—really two blind spots—about the nature of the wide middle of American society and about the nature and motives of the opinion leaders of this ascendant form of liberalism (i.e., right wing liberalism).

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.

Berube’s most persistent shibboleth is the “Bush-Cheney” administration, the two headed monster that he wants hauled before an international tribunal.  Bundled in this one coded label are dozens of assumptions about Bush’s stupidity, about nefarious motives for both domestic and foreign policy, about, in short, a deeply evil project that killed thousands, undermined social justice, and created something approaching a police state.  “Bush-Cheney” turned America into a rogue nation.  Well!  The passion behind these beliefs not only persuade those who hold them to be absolutely certain of their judgments, but such passionate beliefs produce a moral gulf so great between people who disagree about the evils of this administration that communication is impossible.  Forget about persuasion.

I stress here that we cannot communicate because we already “know” the other.  Our certainty has made us want to protect our moral purity as though understanding those who disagree profoundly will make us unclean.  Persuasion, or its elegant cousin, deliberation, requires understanding and some level of empathy with those with whom we converse.  In other words, we cannot hope to participate meaningfully in deliberation with people whom we believe would soil us if we recognized them as partners in moral inquiry. We have many reasons, therefore, to want to traffic in crude stereotypes that keep those “others” from getting close enough to make us dirty.  We can only remain truly moral, truly clean, we fear, if we live without doubt about our own moral probity.  Alas, we cannot be certain of our moral superiority if we communicate with the other.  Perhaps a soft form of Manicheanism afflicts us all—but with too many of us it provides an all-too-handy excuse for not communicating.  But here is the rub:  in a democracy, communication is essential.  Moral purity is dangerous to the good of fostering a healthy and dynamic form of self-rule.

As a traditionalist, I’ve developed my own critiques of Bush and his policies.  The difference is that I am critical because Bush was too morally earnest.  His deep belief in abstract rights and his unshakable faith that all humans wish to be free and to live in democracies (or at least should live in democracies) appalls me.  I have never doubted that Bush labored over the choices he made and suffered from the moral conundrums that he faced.  But through it all, I’ve found both his ontological and moral commitments to be so clear that they allowed him to act out of moral clarity when he ought to have been acting out of a more realistic calculus of costs and benefits to the American people.  And so Berube and I could agree on some critiques of the administration’s choices, but because Berube finds the fault in his amorality or his immorality, he is forced to condemn Bush to a place of special moral reproach well outside of his circle.  I critiqued mildly Bush’s moral commitments, Berube can only condemn him for not having any moral commitments.  I could, as it were, talk with Bush about the differences that separate us—perhaps even persuade—while Berube is duty-bound to rhetorically spit on him.

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, viola, they came to power.

If the right gained power because its opinion leaders used leftist moral claims and then framed the right-wing agenda in light of these morally rich words, then the task before a leftist is to reclaim the words, to frame properly the issues so that the American people recognize their natural affinity with the left.  These assumptions foreclose a serious examination of the moral universe of self-proclaimed conservatives.  Even if they have a real moral code, leftists aver, they could not win power without stealing the moral words of the left.  This belief makes analysis easy, but at the expense of the most important knowledge for participating meaningfully in American politics.

If leftists believe that the key to gaining political power and then ruling with the support of Kansas depends on becoming more sophisticated than conservative operatives (from here to the end of the essay I will use the label “conservative” to stand in for what I mean by right-wing liberal and what most on the left call the “right”) in linguistically framing their policies, then they cannot govern.  Rather than relying on cognitive linguistics, they would do well to reflect on myth and history.  Those on the left have no mythos that can compete with the conservative mythos of American history, nature, and purpose.  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. (It seems absurd on the face of it to me to claim that such rich words belong to any one group.  Freedom is intoxicating and comes in more forms than any of us can name.)  However effective spin-masters are at framing political platforms, developing code during campaigns, and using fear to drive voters to one candidate, those who crafted or who now comfortably inhabit the moral universe of American conservatism are motivated out of deep, often sophisticated, understandings of freedom and equality in the American story.  It would be healthy for a leftist to disagree with the conservative account of history, and to challenge conservative moral assumptions, but it is political stupidity to accept that these conservatives are manipulators rather than believers.

The real question is why are their beliefs so powerful. American conservatism, properly understood, has been a sober, even melancholy, disposition.  Not any more.  Devotion to inherited ways, a belief that the individual develops his real person-hood in the context of deep and historically rooted associations, and a distrust of abstract moral claims—these are not easily assimilated into an American political agenda.  Henry Adams, as Berube surely would say, offers no agenda for such a forward-looking people.  No, any powerful “conservative” political agenda must be formed out of the liberal raw material of the American experiment—it must be individualist, it must be optimistic, it must be emancipatory, and it must tether teleology and progress. (I hope I haven’t stolen the word “progress.”)

A politically relevant “conservatism” evolved over a span of thirty years leading to the election of 1980.  From the beginning, as evidenced in the 1950s issues of National Review, it lacked any systematic ideology.  Indeed, if you look close enough, it was philosophically incoherent.  But in the early years, in reaction (and what a beautiful word is “reaction”) to communism and a certain species of New Deal liberalism, these new conservatives developed and articulated a powerful defense for freedom as central to the human spirit.  This freedom was both the product of thousands of years of human struggle (through the West) AND the fullest expression of human potential.  This blending of history and nature allowed conservatives to think of the American cause to be the final product of History—the rich fruit handed down from ancestors.  America is special (exceptional) because it is the guardian or protector of the highest outcome of historical development.  But this historical accomplishment is fragile—totalitarianism and creeping socialism both, in their own ways, threaten to send America, and therefore the world, into a new dark age.

These conservatives fought so tenaciously because they believed that they stood between Western civilization and barbarism.  For believers, this was intoxicating, and it is no accident that so many of the early conservatives had been previously intoxicated by the moral beauty of communism.  But so long as conservatism was narrowly focused on freedom, their political influence would be substantial but limited to a supporting role to cold war liberals.  In the late 1960s, and through the 1970s, a new generation of thinkers and activists re-formed conservatism to become an equality movement—Conservatism 2.0.  In due course, through a process of persuasion, of new experiences (new generations), of re-thinking, a mythos of American progress emerged.  The opening part of the Declaration of Independence expressed the defining principle of this nation, founded in accord with the deepest of moral principles, natural rights.  The story since the founding, then, has been a struggle to live up to these ideals.  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.

The complex details, tensions, and even contradictions of Conservatism 2.0 are not important in this context.  People like myself, who lament the emergence of equality as a defining moral principle, or who prefer a more historicist understanding of human nature, might disagree with the conservative label or with the obsessive focus on liberation from all non-chosen constraints, but we do not fool ourselves into believing that the mythos is not powerful, seductive, and wonderfully well-suited to the America of the last several decades.  Understanding the moral claims that conservatives believe deeply, and express with admirable ambiguity, is a necessary condition for coming to grips with the political reality of contemporary America.

Berube sketches a moral outline for his version of the social-democratic left.  He makes his case in normative language and wants the left to work toward a wide variety of policies that improve the nation and the world relative to these moral ideals.  But serious progress on this policy agenda, seemingly possible after the election of 2008, requires connecting with the people of Kansas.  Berube wants a politically savvy left to take this opportunity and persuade the broad middle of America that the left’s policies are the best expressions of the American self.  Drawing from Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, Berube believes that a caring social democracy that protects the vulnerable and that moves closer to international governance rooted in these moral principles is a reasonable expectation.

For Berube’s high moral agenda of a world made just, I detect NOTHING that approaches a story.  Conservatism 2.0, however historically thin, nonetheless tells a story of America that allows citizens to play a role in a comprehendible reality.  Being American matters to them because it situates them in a particular, understandable, laudable narrative.  Who could love something as abstract as humanity—cold, faceless, and, one has to assume, eventually bland?  I may not find a story about natural rights and a city on a hill to be sufficiently rich with historical texture to satisfy my needs for roots, but this “conservative” story is amazingly attractive to people who want to believe that their nation’s story has cosmic purpose, and that its flaws are not so much a result of evil as of a well-meaning but naïve people.  The problem with the left is not that they critique this story—it is that they have no story of their own that allows the people of Kansas to find a role to play.  For this purpose (to say nothing of his great many failings as a historian), Howard Zinn has nothing to offer Americans. Because the left cannot tell a story of America, they cannot govern.

If Berube allows me into his circle, we can talk seriously about freedom from want and from fear, about the dangers of statism, about the way that our competing conceptions of freedom and equality emerge from different conceptions of the human condition.  But for now, I am thankful that I could watch a thoughtful leftist appeal for more restrained and more tolerant discussion.   Perhaps I would be less thankful if I believed that this more savvy form of leftism could truly engage with the moral imagination of the American middle class.  As an outsider to both, I prefer the mythos of Conservatism 2.0 to the moralism of socialist internationalism.  At least when the conservative mythos of freedom and equality reigns in the heart of Americans, they will tolerate the likes of Berube and me.  That is something.

This is a remarkable book. Bérubé has the rare ability to think cultural-theoretical discussions in relation to political developments, just as he can trace resonances across the political spectrum: how ideas move from right to left and back to right, as well as how the left has responded to conceptual shifts on the right. He reconstructs intricate debates in admirable detail. The narrative includes a big swath of the academic intellectual history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, from the Gulf War through 9/11 to subsequent events: the introduction opens with reference to the Obama election. How have the two sides of the left responded in this period, and how have their debates pervaded cultural theory? Bérubé offers an elaborate accounting, but he offers more as well, since the book involves another binary—it is not only about the “cold war” within the US left; it is also about a trans-Atlantic dialectic, contrasting the American left’s response to conservative hegemony with Stuart Hall’s analyses of Thatcherism, out of which “cultural studies” developed. For Bérubé, the insufficiencies of the US left—the prominence of its mechanical, Manichean wing—stand in direct relation to an inadequate internalization of the lessons of “cultural studies” and Hall’s anti-dogmatic political analyses. Hall figures as the left intellectual willing to break with Communist orthodoxy, to loosen the grip of economistic determinism, and to articulate a post-Gramscian account of politics as hegemony supple enough to appeal to multiple cohorts within society—and potentially to achieve majority support. In Bérubé’s argument, Hall’s antipode is Noam Chomsky, emblematic of the narrow-mindedness of American left discourse. Where Hall laid the foundation for the British left to overcome the Thatcher-Major era, paving the way for New Labor and the Blair government, Chomsky stands for the virtuous marginality of the left that cherishes its outsider status as a badge of honor, therefore guaranteeing conservative domination of the political field.

The Left at War links a political project (the left, broadly defined) to an academic project (cultural studies). Bérubé might not accept that distinction—is there intellectual work outside of the political? I would think so, but others might disagree—but here the issue has another dimension. The distance between the academic and the political is part of the problem in a very specific historical sense, as Bérubé notes in one of his many important insights: “The truly appalling thing about the 1980s and 1990s, from the perspective of American liberal intellectuals, was that the rise of an academic left seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the Reagan-Bush ascendancy; gradually, over two decades, left perspectives became common (and sometimes de rigeur) in much of the humanities and social sciences, and yet New Right conservatism still remained hegemonic in the culture at large” (213). From this trenchant observation, Bérubé goes off in another direction, recording how some liberals subsequently blamed academic theory for this failure to exercise political influence, an important story, to be sure. Yet something else is at stake as well: a longer term divide between much of the academy and political power—what seemed close in the Kennedy administration rapidly fell apart under Johnson amidst the Vietnam turmoil and that wound has never really healed. The academy, especially in the humanities, has been at odds with political power, certainly resistant to any sense of national identification, and generally intellectually dismissive of the political leadership. The more scholars denounce politicians as unintellectual, the more we scholars in fact—via a kind of cultural Freudian slip—announce our own exclusion from political power. Obama’s election seemed to change this for a year or two, as he was recognized as an academic, but within two years, the divide between Washington and the universities has reopened. However, that development postdates Bérubé’s book. What is pertinent is that his claim that the Manichean left cultivates its own counter-cultural distance from institutional power and public recognition is probably cut from the same cloth as much of university culture: we scholars see ourselves as better than the politicians—not only smarter but also morally superior. This sense of superiority is the form that the alienation of scholarship from power has assumed.

This alienation is nowhere clearer than in the rhetoric of Chomsky’s political writings. While Bérubé accomplishes much in this book, nothing is more powerful, nothing is of greater significance than his exposé of Chomsky’s rhetoric, where the arrogance and self-satisfaction of the Manichean left—the academic Manichean left—become most apparent. He shows Chomsky’s “leftism of style” (84), making maximalist claims about the destructiveness of American policy by way of citations—and when confronted with their erroneousness, retreating to the assertion that he was merely reporting. Bérubé does a brilliant job in following through on a close reading of Chomsky’s irresponsibility after 9/11, the untenability and extremism of his statements. Yet the point is not simply to catch Chomsky in gotcha moments but to recognize the implications of his style altogether: a hectoring harangue, posing as “the lone truth-telling intellectual in a crowd of casual mass murderers” (76), and 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. It is hardly a surprise then that he is most popular in circles that similarly define themselves in opposition to the mainstream: “not only among radical leftists but among young anarchists and post-punks, for the logic at work here is very much the logic of the alternative music scene: Chomsky’s value is partly a function of his marginality to mainstream political commentary” (85). Outside the mainstream to be sure: but Chomsky is, for Bérubé, the emblematic figure of the Manichean left, which remains the defining left in the United States, and his self-marginalizing rhetoric is the source of the marginality of the left. Bérubé works on the basis of the assumption that a left could speak differently and could present alternative narratives to the public in an effort to achieve what the Manichean left systematically avoids: political success. To find that alternative strategy, Bérubé’s answer is: learning from Hall.

Bérubé provides textured description of debates on the left and within the academy, with multiple voices and competing positions. Yet in the end, he seems to come up with a melancholy retrospective view, i.e., that it has been the Manichean left that has dominated, and its mechanical epistemology combined with an unsuccessful rhetoric have contributed to the ineffectiveness of the left in the US. It has resulted in the conservative ascendancy. The underlying question becomes “why American left intellectuals remain so addicted to ‘false consciousness’ theories of political behavior” (209)—by which he means the intellectuals’ assumption that the masses are simply wrong, due to manipulation, in contrast to the intellectuals themselves, who confidently declare themselves the holders of the one and only truth. The answers are complex and pass through debates over subversive reception claims (as an alternative to manipulation theory) as well as some of the repressive consequences of post-structuralist theory, but in the end, the book’s main point is that it was the failure of the US academy to achieve a successful reception of Hall’s cultural studies that has condemned it to Chomskian dogmatism: “[…] an inattention to—or ignorance of—the work of British cultural studies on the complexity of hegemony and the contradictions of capitalism leads the American (and British) left into manifestly inadequate and incoherent readings of the relation of culture to politics” (245).

Bérubé’s goal of defining an agenda for a non-dogmatic left is certainly welcome, and drawing attention to Hall is definitely reasonable. Still, I think one can put some larger frameworks around this, with regard to two different matters:  how do we understand the genealogy of the Manichean left (for it is surely not just a matter of Chomsky’s rhetorical ticks)? And why did cultural studies fail to catch hold in America in the way that Bérubé seems to wish?

There’s an interesting passage late in the book that tells us a lot about the genealogy question: “[…] in response to the right’s hegemonic project, the Manichean left set about reinventing the same old triangular wheel that didn’t work the first eighty times it hit the road: dismissing ‘freedom’ as a bourgeois mystification, aligning it with free-market neoliberalism, and chortling over its invocation by hypocritical and opportunistic conservatives” (252). So I take the “eighty times” to mean eighty years, which points back to the era of the Bolshevik Revolution: in other words, what Bérubé designates as the Manichean left is the heir to the analytics, rhetoric and moral poverty of historical Communism. Bérubé’s critical position therefore inherits the mantle of the anti-Bolshevik left, the critics of orthodox Marxism, the advocates of democracy, or even of radical democracy, against the various repressive forms that emerged on the left. Hall, one could argue, is a relatively late member of that lineage that included the Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, the Praxis Group, and more. The right question to ask, perhaps, is why the most repressive forms of the left legacy retain an appeal—despite their lack of political effectiveness. It is true that even on the left today one would rarely find outspoken defenders of Stalin, but the words and deeds of the Manichean left show that the habitus of Stalinism remains alive.

Why the appeal of this crude economism and instrumentalist thinking? It is a pseudo-rationality (pseudo because impervious to doubt and falsifiability) that typically steers toward conspiracy thinking. The logic of the Manichean left can grow uncannily reminiscent of the obsessions of the Kennedy assassination buffs, the anxieties about Free Masons and other murky cabals (hence the antisemitism that Bérubé points out), or—the formal similarity is pretty close—alien abductions. The Manichean left’s susceptibility to strange thoughts is undeniable: think of Ward Churchill’s “little Eichmanns.” The issue then ceases to be a matter of the political judgments (since as such they are patently wrong) but of delusional thinking and how it is incubated in the double confinement of the academic left—confined within the academy and confined within a self-marginalizing political extreme.

Bérubé criticizes the Manichean left’s response to 9/11 astutely: by treating al-Qaeda as the voice of the oppressed striking back at the evil American empire, it was bound to alienate the American public. Bérubé’s Hall-inspired alternative would have involved developing a discourse of attacking “patriarchal theocrats” (199), a formula that would have allowed a left to denounce al-Qaeda as well as the left’s own opponents on the religious right (Bérubé hastens to underscore no assertion of moral equivalency). Such an alternative rhetoric could have generated a left-liberal front against repression, at home and abroad. Yet this is not what happened, since there was no room for that agenda in the playbook of the left extreme. Can the deficiency of the really-existing, aka Manichean, left be attributed to vestigial Communist anti-imperialist rhetoric? That connection is certain, but I believe that the extent to which the far left in Europe has formed emphatic alliances with Islamist groupings indicates that something more is going on. How do we explain such left groupings choosing solidarity with political and cultural tendencies replete with the most reactionary gender politics and advocating the primacy of religion (hardly a hard left desideratum)? It is not the hard left’s affinity for what it perceives to be the anti-imperialism of jihadism that allows it to enter into such alliances, out of opportunism, so to speak; rather, the cultural repression in and around Islamist politics—the male bonding, the programmatic patriarchy, the honor killings, the murderous homophobia—all of this has deep and indigenous roots on the extreme left. The Manichean left was constitutively incapable of mounting Bérubé’s secularist response—a critique of “patriarchal theocrats.” On the contrary, it has embraced those theocrats, not despite their patriarchy and homophobia but precisely because of them. There’s a long history of repressive virtue on the left, and if it’s repression that the left wants, it’s repression that al-Qaeda can provide.

So the genealogy of the Manichean left is a long one, if not particularly venerable. Conspiracy thinking and repression are hardly foreign to the left tradition. But what of Bérubé’s other agenda, returning to Hall. We need to ask why cultural studies did not succeed in the way Bérubé seems to wish.

This is a complicated story, but one which needs to be pursued. If Hall’s cultural studies was so auspicious in the United Kingdom, why did it lose its potential in the course of its reception in the US? Bérubé touches on parts of this process, but I think we are still waiting for a full accounting. In a sense it is a question about the quality and processes of American intellectual life, and it is akin to parallel queries: what happened to the Frankfurt School in the US academy? How did American scholarship transform post-structuralism? And so forth. As far as cultural studies goes, I would want to mark three points and reserve them for a full discussion elsewhere:

First, Cultural Studies underwent a slide into popular culture studies. Of course, Hall’s Cultural Studies did open up the possibility for serious attention to popular culture. Yet that turn was, from Bérubé’s point of view, embedded in a political project in pursuit of hegemony. In other words, popular culture became important as a step in a political process, not as an end in itself. A tentative hypothesis regarding the reception process in the US would be that the authorization of a turn to popular culture yielded a different result, a focus on particular objects of popular and consumer culture, treated increasingly as aesthetic objects (rather than as political fields). One might speak of an “aestheticization” of cultural studies within the American academy, and this particular turn toward the aesthetic resulted de facto in a depoliticization, which in turn might have weakened cultural studies as a political counterweight to the Manichean left.

Second, while the cultural turn can provide important insight into some political matters, it probably—this is a debatable claim—privileges domestic politics over foreign policy. It is not that a cultural inquiry into foreign policy (not the use of “cultural policy” in foreign affairs, but the culture of foreign policy itself) is impossible, but it is a less likely topic, and cultural analyses may treat local issues, identity politics or even the “domestic sphere” preferentially. If this is true—or even if there is just a contingent bias against foreign policy in cultural analyses—then the result would be for cultural studies to spend less time on international politics which, in turn, would effectively cede the ground to the standard post-Leninist, anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Manichean left.

Finally, a further complicating consequence of the cultural turn involves the problem of cultural relativism. Bérubé touches on it briefly in his introduction (2-3), but then it largely drops out of sight—he has other concerns. Yet to understand the insufficient political impact of cultural studies in the US (his main concern) we have to look at how the cultural turn quickly generated a cultural relativism that makes the internationalist human rights concerns, which are central to Bérubé’s agenda, increasingly elusive. Of course this is an old story, the resistance that an anthropological relativism has expressed vis-à-vis human rights, and parsing it would go far beyond the scope of these comments. Suffice it to say that understanding the vicissitudes of cultural studies in the US would require observing how Hall’s concept of culture was simultaneously shifted in otherwise mutually exclusive directions: toward aesthetics and toward anthropology. Neither of those transitions necessarily implied depoliticization, but in the end, the space in which a robust interaction between culture and politics could take place grew increasingly narrow. And without that cultural-political dimension, the field of left politics was largely ceded to the anti-cultural proponents of economism, purism and conspiracy theories. The urgent question that Bérubé poses to the American left is whether it can step out of that dogmatism.  Anyone concerned about the vitality of civic culture in the US will appreciate this book.

Note

[1]Berube, Michael. The Left At War. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 2. Subsequent references to this edition appear cited in the text.

Berube admits that he is not altogether happy with being a critic of the radical left:

Compiling such a list of leftist follies is no fun – and often leaves one’s readers and interlocutors wondering whether the object of the compilation is to discredit the left altogether. I cannot imagine a reasonable reader who, upon completing this book, would attribute such a motive to me, since my purpose here is to defend and elaborate a democratic international U.S. left that opposes U.S. hegemony and seeks to create and enforce supranational means of securing human rights.[1]

Early on he differentiates the Manichean from the democratic left in the following way:

The Manichean left has lately argued that the U.S. is a leading sponsor of terrorism…and uses the cover of human rights for a program of imperial conquest. The democratic left…is undeceived about U.S. crimes in the world and knows that at its worst(though not always and everywhere) the United States does indeed clothe vile foreign policies in the language of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’; but it [the democratic left, that is] insists that some forms of terrorism…have roots causes other than those associated with U.S. imperialism…. (13)

This is not a huge difference, since Berube seems to suggest that the bulk of terrorism results from U.S. misconduct while allowing that “some” of it cannot (“not always and everywhere”) be blamed on the U.S. I would reverse the proportions and suggest that much, or most of terrorism has causes independent of U.S. policies and misdeeds. Admittedly it is not always easy to disentangle the two sets of causes from one another.

Many of Berube’s strictures directed at the radical left are not particularly original but they are significant because they come from a well known leftist academic in good standing and as such strengthen similar critiques emanating from other points on the political spectrum. Doubtless, the book will anger, or has already angered many of the author’s erstwhile colleagues or comrades-in-arm.

Berube is well aware and properly critical of the longstanding reflexive leftist belief that there are “no enemies on the left” and, especially timely, that “the enemies of my enemies are my friends.” These two axiomatic beliefs taken together encompass and explain with great clarity and economy the mindset of the radical left and many specific positions it has taken.

Berube’s main concern seems to be that the radical left is elitist, arrogant, isolated from and contemptuous of the American mainstream and not really interested in social change – as well as wrongheaded about specific issues. It is a major weakness of the radical mindset that the revulsion toward existing Western liberal institutions is not complemented by a credible vision of what should replace them. He writes:

Mere liberal democracy…is thin gruel, served up by tepid wimps who can’t imagine anything… more satisfying. This is a supple and versatile complaint…because [it] never has to specify just what kind of society should replace the boring, procedural liberal democracy that constraints us…it can be mobilized to any end, even… to provide cover for profoundly antiliberal forms of government in the Islamic states or the developing world. (3-4)

The “self-marginalization” of the radical left (241) and its propensity to attribute false-consciousness to all who see the world differently prevents it from being an effective force in America politics. The attribution of false consciousness “serves as a blanket excuse for the left’s failures to win over a significant fraction of the public …” and it is linked to “the belief in the all-encompassing power of that system” (10-11) – that is, the American political system that supposedly has succeeded in brainwashing the entire population, or, in Chomsky’s words, in “manufacturing consent.” These beliefs are derived from “seeing the United States as the primary actor in world affairs” (112) while everyone and everything else merely respond to the malign American policies and initiatives. That is to say, only American policies and actions matter and are freely chosen (prompted by disreputable motives like greed, profit-hunger, and the desire for domination) – the rest of the world, and especially the supposed underdogs merely respond, their actions determined by the U.S.

Time and again the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” mentality is apparent and determinant of partisan positions taken. The radical left is irresistibly drawn toward assorted despots and demagogues provided that they are sufficiently anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli or anti-capitalist. As Berube puts it:

…the Manichean left has lost sight of what should be the central emphasis of the left: the advocacy of equality and freedom… [it] has been willing to entertain (and sometimes even sympathize with) any ‘anti-imperialist’ who comes along to challenge the Western powers, from Milosevic to Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…the left has no business expressing ’solidarity’ with figures like Milosevic or Muqtada al-Sadr…” (11, 244)

These attitudes are further illuminated by amazing undertakings such as the “International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevich,” that was headed by Michael Parenti, an old,  sixties radical, and included Harold Pinter and Ramsey Clark (32). Another similar organization, The “Srebrenica Research Group,” founded by Ed Herman (co-author of several books with Chomsky), was “dedicated to overturning the findings of the ‘Western media’…” about the Srebrenica massacre (105), and was further dedicated “to the proposition that the massacre…at Srebrenica in 1995 never really happened in quite way reported by the mouthpieces of Western propaganda” (32). Berube is rightly dismayed by the indifference of the radical left toward human rights violations in Kosovo and its “denying Serbian atrocities outright” (202), for no other reasons than the United States’ opposition to these Serb actions and policies, and because of the bizarre elevation of Milosevich to the status of the “Last Socialist” (202). The same mindset informed the website of The Monthly Review, a venerable radical left organ, that not only contained “effusions about the anti-imperialist virtues of Ahmadinejad…” but also claimed that “antigenocide rallies for Darfur are driven by…the U.S. appetite for oil and ‘an odd alliance of evangelicals and establishment Jews’”(33).

If indeed the United States is the only real “evil empire,” as Chomsky and co. aver, then of course “all its opponents are worthy of our support” (112), and those it supports, such as the Albanians of Kosovo should be denied help. The latter, Chomsky suggested, were supported by the U.S. only because Serbia was “an annoyance, an unwelcome impediment to Washington’s efforts to complete its…take-over of Europe”(108).

Such inability or unwillingness to differentiate between disreputable and decent allies abroad has its counterpart in the radical left’s refusal to allow for qualitative differences between domestic political forces – democrats and republicans – all of whom are written off as disreputable upholders of the status quo. Berube is also critical of the recurring comparisons of the United States to Nazi Germany on the pages of The Nation (29) and in the writings of Chomsky (among other places), of the blanket attribution of moral equivalence to the United States and its enemies.

Berube examines in considerable detail the remarkable misrepresentations of Chomsky. Even among those on the radical left, Chomsky is a special case given his longstanding, unwavering hatred of the United States and Israel and his impregnable self-righteousness packaged in soothing phrases and a mask of rationality. Thus he likes to support his assertions by invoking “many who know the conditions well,” or “virtually every knowledgeable source” (74, 79).[2]  Chomsky even opined that “many who know the conditions well [their identity unspecified - P.H.] are also dubious about bin Laden’s capacity to plan that incredibly sophisticated operation [9/11] from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan” – a claim repeated by Michael Moore(74). Especially notorious has been Chomsky’s baseless charge of the “silent genocide” supposedly perpetrated by the United States in Afghanistan by preventing food deliveries (71-73). He also asserted that the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan killed more people than 9/11.

Such allegations are deeply rooted in Chomsky’s conviction that the misdeeds of the U.S. by definition invariably exceed those of its enemies, (or anyone else’s, except Israel’s). Understandably Berube is critical of Chomsky for harming the credibility of the left by “present[ing] his claims as the only legitimate ‘left’ positions… not only by portraying the Western media and ‘intellectual elites’ as a solid phalanx of propaganda spewing and propaganda swallowing apparatchiks, but also by mischaracterizing, or simply ignoring competing commentators on the democratic left” (43-44).

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 am not sure what to make of Berube’s defense of cultural studies which follows from his admiration of Stuart Hall, a founder of these studies. Given the irrelevance of these studies to practical politics and social change, and their elevation of the trivia of popular culture to the place of a significant subject of social scientific inquiry it is not self-evident why Berube he would think well of them. As I see it, cultural studies, and their popularity, reflect the decline of both academic standards and intellectual discourse in general.

More difficult to come to terms with is Berube’s apparent support of political correctness: he believes that its dangers have been greatly exaggerated even by liberals such as Jim Sleeper, Richard Bernstein, Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin. He also seems to endorse Richard Rorty’s belief that political correctness ”has made our country a far better place. American leftist academics have a lot to be proud of” (214]). One may wonder how Berube (and Rorty) managed to avert their eyes from the contribution PC has made to the lowering of academic standards (in curriculum design, requirements, student admission and evaluation, faculty hiring etc), to the imposition of very noticeable restrictions on free expression as well as to self-censorship internalized to avoid expressions of political incorrectness? Would he dispute that PC has encouraged, (paradoxically) both identity politics and cultural relativism?

Some disagreements of ours don’t involve core beliefs, such as Berube’s remark that during the 1980s and 1990s “New Right Conservativism still remained hegemonic in the culture at large,” while acknowledging that in the same period the left came to dominate the humanities and social sciences (213]). I wonder what this “culture at large” refers to, it could not be mass culture since the latter too has absorbed diluted and popularized versions of leftist values and perspectives of the 1960s.

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. It seems further implied (in the citation) that the Soviet system had in fact succeeded in making the distribution of these goods equitable. Missing from the statement is the awareness that there were excellent grounds for criticizing the Soviet system, for both the failure to distribute basic social goods in an egalitarian fashion and for being highly repressive.

Berube also observes that a portion of the left “was willing to tolerate a certain degree of tyranny [in communist states - P.H.] if it advanced the material well-being of the peasants or the proletariat” (151). This makes it sound as if these systems did in fact advance the material well being of peasants and workers albeit at the cost of their personal freedom. Unfortunately this was not the case: they caused horrendous famines and inflicted other widespread material deprivations in addition to the massive, institutionalized human rights violations. This was the case in both the Soviet Union and China as well as the smaller communist states. Nor is it correct to say that these leftists tolerated “a certain degree” of tyranny – they tolerated huge amounts of tyranny if they thought it was the means to the achieving a more egalitarian society, or if the tyrannical states were sufficiently anti-American and anti-capitalist. More often they simply denied that there was tyranny.

Was the American press “complaisant and often jingoistic” [131] as regards the Iraq war? There has been a great deal of criticism of that war from its beginning up to the present. Likewise it is an overstatement that “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). I also doubt that placing Pershing missiles in Western Europe under Reagan was “potentially provoking another Cuban missile crisis” (200).

Finally, I believe that Berube’s critique of Slavoj Zizek (4-5) is far too gentle and restrained, though on target as far as it goes. There is even a lurking, residual admiration toward this dubious intellectual celebrity shown in the questionable attribution of brilliance and “formidable theoretical sophistication” (4). This is an author who admires both Stalin and Mao and displays a mindless longing for purifying revolutionary violence and expresses his perverse views in impenetrable jargon.[3]

Berube’s own core convictions are summed up at the end of the book:

That then is my hope: for a democratic-socialist, international left that seeks not to smash the state and crush capitalism but to pursue human equality and realized the four freedoms. It would not be a fully ‘socialist’ left in the sense that it would not institute central economic planning; it would be aggressively redistributionist, and it would harbor no illusions about ‘free’ markets. It would insist that food, shelter, education and medical care are human rights, and as such, must not be contingent on anyone’s ability to pay for them; it would put workers in control of factories and companies…  It would … establish an egalitarian and closely monitored and regulated market that fosters innovations and promotes policies that bring food, clean water, housing, schooling and medicine to all as well as establishing forms of democracy that extend to every person … This would be something of disappointment to those radicals whose utopian longings led them to cry, ‘be realistic, demand the impossible…’ (253).

But perhaps Berube himself nurtures some utopian yearnings such as his belief in the capacity of human beings to devise benign as well as powerful international institutions which would bring order, justice, harmony and relative abundance to social existence and put an end to the vast amount of conflict and suffering that has been part of the human condition throughout history. His hopes include “a robust international framework that makes possible fair trade and equitable economic development – and forbids violations of women’s human rights while hauling Bush and Cheney into the Hague for trial as war criminals” (251). Elsewhere he writes that “we all bear the obligation to devise multilateral and global institutions to deter threats to peace (be they the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or the U.S. war in Vietnam) and to protect vulnerable populations everywhere… from tyranny, genocide, starvation and scorched-earth neoliberalism” (35). It is hard to imagine how and by whom such institutions, or such a “robust international framework,” would be devised to accomplish all the good things he expects from them.

My reservations notwithstanding, there many valuable and insightful observations in this study. The author articulates and highlights important differences between the Manichean, illiberal left and the democratic left. This is an important distinction that deserves emphasis and elaboration.

Notes

[1]Berube, Michael. The Left At War. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 34-5. Subsequent citations appear cited in the text.

[2]On another occasion I collected a small sampling of such soothing, self-supporting phrases, sprinkled throughout Chomsky’s writings. They include: “it is surely not in doubt..”; “assuming that facts matter”; “it is an obvious truism that…”; “for those who care to consider the factual record…”; “the available facts lead to one clear conclusion…”; “evidence from sources that seem to deserve a hearing…”; “observers of evident bias and low credibility” (those he seeks to discredit] which are “never subject to possible verification” or possess “a shred of credibility” like the author who “might have troubled to inquire into the source of his allegations.” Most memorable: “evidence is slight and informed opinion [again, unspecified - P.H.] ranges over quite a wide specturm” – the last quote referred to the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot. See my, The End of Committment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee 2006), 298.

[3]See also Paul Hollander: “Slavoj Zizek and the Rise of the Celebrity Intellectual,” Society, July-August 2010.