-Caveat Lector-
>From Village Voice:
March 17 - 23, 1999
by
richard goldstein
Just Our Bill?
[INLINE] The Left Reconsiders Its Relationship to Clinton and Comes
Out Swinging— Especially at Christopher Hitchens
[INLINE] Hitch the Snitch: delighted to be despised (photo:
AP/Wideworld)
Ever since he signed an affidavit last February claiming that his
friend Sidney Blumenthal told him Monica Lewinsky was "a stalker"
thereby contradicting Blumethal's sworn testimony Christopher Hitchens
has been the scourge of the literary left. Hitch the Snitch is the
mildest of the nicknames that have been pinned on him. "A Judas,"
Alexander Cockburn snarled. "An informer," Victor Navasky railed. "I
don't think anyone would call you a feminist," Katha Pollitt wrote in
a "Dear Christopher" letter that ran in The Nation as a response to
his own apologia. Lefties who lunch have hurled even harsher charges.
The writer Edward Jay Epstein claims he once heard Hitchens deny the
Holocaust. ("A demented liar," is Hitchens's response.)
For his part, Hitchens is crying all the way to Meet the Press. Though
he staunchly denies taking a fall for fame, notoriety is the best
publicity for a brainy Brit who can't even say "Yipee-kay-yie-yay." As
a result of his sins, Hitchens's forthcoming book about Clinton which
turns on the thesis that the president's sexual proclivities are an
apt metaphor for his political corruption is likely to be taken far
more seriously than if he had confined his thoughts to The Nation and
Vanity Fair.
Hitchens's book, No One Left To Lie To, will join a pack of tell-alls
that seem destined to turn April into the cruelest month for Clinton.
There's George Stephanopoulos's $2.75 million memoir, All Too Human,
in which the author casts himself as John Doe 1, another victim of the
Great Compartmentalizer; and Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, in
which the Newsweek sleuth inserts himself into the middle of
Monicagate as every insider journalist with a clothing budget seems
compelled to do. "Clintonism poisons everything it touches," as
Hitchens writes.
Whether or not you consider him a pinko self-promoter, Hitchens has
accomplished something tangible with his telltale ways. He has thrown
into high relief a roiling debate about whether progressives are soft
on Clinton. There are no trends on the left only tendencies but an
unofficial survey of writers and activists who call themselves
radicals, socialists, or just plain progressives affirms that the
Clinton Question has become the hottest topic of debate since, well,
Israel.
Like most disputes on the left, this one has gone unnoticed by the
mainstream media, which prefer to cast the battle of Bill in neatly
dichotomous terms: liberals adore him, conservatives abhor him. In
fact, on the left, Clinton inspires feelings that are ambivalent at
best. "I don't feel any attachment to him," says Gloria Steinem, who
is widely considered a feminist Friend of Bill. "I feel an aversion to
his adversaries."
To many progs, the impeachment seemed like a clear and present danger
"a peaceful attempt to assassinate the president," in Steinem's words.
Though Hitchens dismisses the idea that the campaign against Clinton
was an attempted coup, it certainly seemed to many activists that his
removal from office would have ushered in a period of right-wing
dominance. Even a hardcore radical like Mary Lou Greenberg of the
activist group Refuse & Resist speaks of "the dire consequences for
the people" in a takeover by the Christian right. That's why
Greenberg, who is also a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party,
felt compelled to defend a president who declared that "the age of big
government is over." She took her cue from "the errors of the
Communist forces in Weimar Germany. One error was not taking fascism
seriously, and another was not uniting with a segment of the ruling
class to defeat these fascist forces."
While Clinton's appeal remains unwavering among minorities (he's the
most popular figure in the black community except for Jesse Jackson,
says Manning Marable, who recently completed a nationwide survey of
black political attitudes), in activist circles he has long been
regarded as a wolf in multiculti clothing. "I don't really get it,"
says Gwendolyn Mink, the author of Welfare's End. "The president has
added more death-penalty crimes than any of his predecessors, and you
certainly know about the racial effect of the death penalty. He's
enacted a welfare reform that not only cancels an entitlement but also
takes away rights from a certain caste of women. He pushed through
NAFTA, which undermines the position of American workers. If there's a
right-wing conspiracy, it's Bill Clinton."
Manning Marable has an explanation for the spell Clinton has cast on
the African American community. "I mean, he's one of the few white
people who knows all three stanzas of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' "
says the director of Columbia University's Institute for Research in
African American Studies. "And when he works a black audience,
everything in his behavior shows that he feels at home." Then, too,
notes Marable, "black people are not surprised by the contradictions
in Clinton's conduct. We understand the gross behavior of the white
ruling class." Finally, there's a certain realpolitik behind the song
and dance: "Clinton appears to many black people as the left of what's
possible in national politics."
A similar sense of Clinton as the lesser evil informs what many
feminist and gay activists feel about him. "I lived through Reagan and
Bush on AIDS," says Urvashi Vaid, director of the Policy Institute at
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "It was a nightmare. You had
Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer throwing up all sorts of obstacles. To me,
that's immoral so I don't see a greater moral deficiency in this
administration."
Indeed, Clinton has been better on AIDS funding than his predecessors,
just as he has staunchly defended abortion rights, two areas along
with education in which his case can be made on substantial grounds.
"The first thing he did on entering the White House was to end the
policy forbidding abortion in any country receiving foreign aid,"
Steinem recalls.
Yet, even as the A-list of the women's movement took to the airwaves
in Clinton's defense during the impeachment, a less celebrated group
of feminists hammered away at both his behavior and his policies. "I
wish, at times, that Pat Ireland [of the National Organization for
Women] would say we like him because he's prochoice, but we think he's
a bastard," says Barbara Ehrenreich, one of Clinton's sharpest
critics. "Sure he's been good on abortion, but the biggest setback for
women in many years was welfare reform. Adults on welfare are mostly
women."
Steinem points out that she held a hunger strike in front of the White
House when the welfare bill was passed, but she maintains that "in an
ultraright time, Clinton's policies are both a disappointment and a
better alternative." To which Ehrenreich replies: "Looking at it from
some remove, you can see that, on the one hand you have the Republican
right, which is rooted in nationally based capital and which has its
ferocious social campaign, and on the other hand you have the
Democrats, who are rooted in international capital and who don't have
that social agenda but who are just as bent on savaging the working
class. If that's my choice, I'd sooner go after them all."
At first glance, this may seem like a clash between the "hard" and
"soft" left, but as Ellen Willis notes, "Anyone who uses that
dichotomy gives themselves away. We all know who's hard and who's
soft, don't we?" Yet these terms hearken back 150 years to the war
between Marxists and Socialists. In the 1960s, the battle was joined
by a new tendency: identity politics. This largely middle-class
ideology has been rubbing up against the class-based left for 30 years
now, and Clinton rides this conflict like a rhinestone cowboy. He has
effectively supplanted the far left by fashioning his own coalition of
labor, women, and minorities, combining it with Silicon Valleyites and
soccer moms. It's triangulation with a vengeance, and it's undermined
a more radical politics.
"Labor and liberals have become a safe wing of the Democratic Party,"
says labor historian Stanley Aronowitz. "They feel they have such a
precarious hold on power that they can't afford to alienate him. John
Sweeney [head of the AFL-CIO] has been so soft on Clinton that he
doesn't know where his ass ends and his interests begin. Is there a
payback? In a pig's ass because they're so worried about the right
that they're not about to make any noise."
Combine the president's manipulation of the left's domestic agenda
with his outrageous military strikes and you've got a leader every bit
as martial as Lyndon Johnson and a good deal less activist. It's these
foreign adventures that the anti-Clinton left is focusing on (in part
because they're easier for radicals to deal with than the sex scandals
are). Horrified by support for the bombings by Congressional
progressives, a group of historians has been circulating a petition
to"impeach Clinton for the right reasons." So far, about 240 prominent
scholars including Noam Chomsky and Edward Said have signed the
petition. No one expects it to change history, but at least it's a
manifesto of dissent. As Sam Husseini of the left-wing Institute for
Public Accuracy puts it, "Supporting Clinton is assuring that you will
get the worst possible Clinton."
"In a political sense, I'm an anti-Clintonite," says cultural critic
Ellen Willis. But she distinguishes between those who want Clinton
removed because of Iraq and those who "essentially agree with the
right that he should be impeached because of his conduct with women. I
think this latter group has the same fundamental motivations as the
right. The bottom line is that Clinton represents someone whose sexual
persona violates their sense of traditional masculinism. Someone like
Clinton was never supposed to be elected. And that's the cultural
unconscious of some people on the left."
It's certainly true that Hitchens, like Nat Hentoff, is antichoice and
frequently critical of identity politics and the venom in their bite
can match any fanged conservative's. Historian and gay activist Martin
Duberman calls this crew "the angry white men of the left. They say
they understand our oppression, but the real issue for them is class.
What they really want is for us to drop our group identities in order
to come back under this central banner."
Just because these guys are progs doesn't mean they feel less
marginalized by the changes in American life, or less appalled by the
varieties of sexual experience. Yet, this being the left, the factions
don't quite fit the mold of sexual politics. Some men Duberman
considers angry and white such as Michael Tomasky and Todd Gitlin have
defended Clinton, if only because he echoes their consensus
liberalism, while radical feminists with militant class politics are
leaders of the disloyal opposition.
"I'm just as critical of Clinton for the so-called cultural issues,"
says Barbara Ehrenreich. "One of my favorite things about welfare
reform is the provision of money for chastity training for low-income
women, on the Republican theory that the source of female poverty is
promiscuity. I don't see how he represents personal liberty, and when
accused of being an adulterer he turned himself into a profamily
politician. So I have no brief for him on either side of that great
issue."
Yet, as the Clinton Question demonstrates, the rift between the
class-based left and its cultural cadres remains as profound as ever.
A class-conscious scholar like Gwendolyn Mink worries about what the
left has lost in capitulating to Clinton: "We've always been
consistent in our claims, and now we've entered into this realm of
relativism in which we just sort of like the guy, or feel safer with
him. This is going to have very negative consequences. For example,
it's going to be very hard, the next time a woman comes forward in a
sexual harassment case, to insist that her complaint be fairly heard."
To Mink, the Juanita Broaddrick rape charge proves the point about
Clinton: "This isn't about social conservatism, it's about civil
rights law."
But to a cultural radical like critic Greil Marcus, Clinton's sexual
sins are less disturbing than the impact his impeachment would have
had on the entire political structure. "We're talking about preserving
a weird and tricky system that has kept government relatively fluid
and kept alive a spirit of self- invention over a long period of time.
Somebody like Hitchens doesn't give a damn about all that. The world
he operates in is one where people will continue to service each
other, shall we say, no matter who is president."
For his part, Hitchens gives as good as he gets. Earlier this month,
he fended off a roundtable of angry Nation staffers, and by now his
rap against Clinton is a well-honed saber aimed at everyone from
Gabriel García Márquez ("the stupidest stuff ever written about
Clinton") and Jesse Jackson ("There's some log rolling going on
there") to the entire "soft left" that phrase again.
"It starts with lesser-evilism, which is the advertised willingness to
be fooled. Then there's political correctness, the bogus surrogate for
politics. Clinton is a genius at this. If you take the Chinese
soft-money scandal, his reaction was to say it's Asian bashing. Then
there's the strong woman by his side, who fucked up health care and
seems to be the bodyguard of a serial rapist." (Hitchens says he knows
of three other women who are ready to make the same allegation as
Broaddrick.)
Are Clinton's crimes greater than his predecessors'? "I don't think we
know yet. Suppose there's a crisis in North Korea, which would also be
a crisis with China. Suppose, on that day, Kathleen Willey comes to
trial and Clinton has to weigh whether a certain action would be
precipitous. I don't want to be around for that. When I point this
out, people say, 'Didn't Reagan invade Grenada?' Yes, but he didn't do
it to distract attention from the fact that he couldn't get it up with
Nancy."
Hitchens does admit that the rage against Clinton is "something of a
male preserve. It's true, he's the sort of guy who irritates you if
you're straight, because you can see that he has success with women
that he doesn't deserve. There's a certain kind of woman most women
dislike but many men like girls thought to let down their side by
being too easy and there's a corollary: a certain kind of man most men
don't like, a cold charmer." Here one glimpses the personality Katha
Pollitt described in her "Dear Christopher" letter, when she wrote,
"the complexity and erudition that characterize your writing, even at
its most polemical, go out the window when women are the subject."
Hitchens's response to that charge was to invoke the S-word. Stalinism
is the ultimate imprecation for a leftie, and Hitchens throws it like
a sucker punch. It even comes up when he explains why liberals seem
paralyzed when it comes to dealing with Clinton: "I think a lot of
people are mesmerized with fear by the extreme right. I describe it as
Medusa's Head Syndrome: just produce it if you want to stop an
argument. It's a Stalinist trick to say there is a crisis and anyone
who can't get on board is a traitor."
As for the clear and present danger of being banished from certain
dinner parties, Hitchens professes to be "delighted at being
despised." Besides, he's convinced that, as Clinton's crimes are fully
revealed, "people will be more open-minded about what I did, and maybe
even understand it." But sympathy is scant solace to an avenger: "All
of these extraordinary betrayals inflicted on masochists I wouldn't be
interested in them protesting now."
It's tempting to see l'affaire Hitchens as the latest example of
sectarianism run amok. After all, who really cares about the bad faith
of social democrats or the opportunism of Marxists with a hard-on for
prime time? But something much bigger than anyone's ideological dong
is at stake. This dispute is not just about misplaced loyalties; it's
about the future of progressive politics.
Already, the right is rubbing its hands over what The Weekly Standard
calls "the silence of the Dems." As Noemie Emery declared in its
latest issue, "Every feminist Democrat . . . who ever backed the
Violence Against Women Act and then either defended Bill Clinton or
has said nothing about him, is now fair game." This may be whistling
in the wind, but the prospect of being saddled with Clinton's sins is
something the left can't ignore.
"There's been a certain duplicity on the part of many progressives,"
says Barbara Ehrenreich. "It has to do with the feeling of being part
of the majority. It's interesting that the right likes to feel it's a
tiny beleaguered minority, whereas the left loves the opposite
delusion, which is that it's part of some vast groundswell that's not
getting through to the media. You have to get beyond that and live
with being a minority, and make the best possible attempt to change
that status by arguing your case, not muffling it."
After all, what if we had put up with Vietnam to preserve the War on
Poverty? What if we'd let Reagan's popularity push us into a permanent
retreat from politics? And what if, after 20 years in the wilderness,
we settle for coffee with Bill and Hill as a surrogate for speaking
truth to power? Then we have met the enemy, and he is us.
Research: Steph Watts
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