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Dear friends,
People have been forwarding around on the Internet this article by Michael Walzer.
It's a pretty awful put-down of the American Left. If anyone feels inspired to
respond to him, you can send your comments to:
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Editor's Salon
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE WILL BE PUBLISHED IN THE SPRING 2002 ISSUE OF DISSENT
MAGAZINE.
COMMENTS FROM MEMBERS OF THE DISSENT EDITORIAL BOARD WILL BE POSTED AS WE RECEIVE
THEM
Can There Be a Decent Left?
Michael Walzer
Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last
year, not only because of the success of the
war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghanis greeted that
success. The pictures of women showing their
smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys
playing soccer in shorts: all this was no doubt a slap
in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also politically
disarming. There was (and is) still a lot to worry about:
refugees, hunger, minimal law and order. But it was suddenly clear, even to many
opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had
been the biggest obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian
crisis, and it was the American war that removed
the obstacle. It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian
intervention.
But the war was primarily neither of these things; it was a preventive war, designed
to make it impossible to train terrorists in
Afghanistan and to plan and organize attacks like that of September 11. And that war
was never really accepted, in wide sections of
the left, as either just or necessary. Recall the standard arguments against it:
that we should have turned to the UN, that we had to
prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then organize international trials,
and that the war, if it was fought at all, had to be
fought without endangering civilians. The last point was intended to make fighting
impossible. I haven’t come across any arguments
that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without
putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk
might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept
in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All
these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf
wars. But among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators,
“Stop the bombing” wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the
bombing--or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that
most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that;
they were committed to opposinf the war, and they
were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any
visible concern about preventing future terrorist
attacks.
A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in
Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible,
on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of
people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the
moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the
claim that the numbers matter in just this way,
that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It
denies one of the most basic and best understood
moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the
denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just
forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful:
unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan
counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.
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. Many people on the
left recovered their moral balance in the weeks
that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of
self-examination. But many more have still not
brought themselves to think about what really happened.
Is there any way of escaping the politics of guilt and resentment on the home ground
of a superpower? We might begin to worry
about this question by looking at oppositional politics in older imperial states. I
can’t do that in any sustained way (historians take
note), only very sketchily. The Boer War is a good place to begin, because of the
fierce opposition it aroused in England--which
wasn’t marked, despite the cruelty of the war, by the kind of self-hate that we have
seen on the American left. Nor were the “little
Englanders” hostile to English politics and culture; they managed to take a stand
against the empire without alienating themselves
from its home country. Indeed, they were more likely to regard England as the home
country of liberalism and parliamentary
democracy. After all, the values of parliamentarism (self-government, free speech,
the right of opposition) did not support imperial
rule. George Orwell’s defense of patriotism seems to me an actual description of the
feelings of many English liberals and leftists
before his time and after (even of the Marxists, some of the best of whom were
historians, like E.P. Thompson, who wrote
sympathetically, indeed romantically, about the English people). Later on, during
the Thatcher years, and particularly during the
Falklands War, the tone of the opposition was more bitter, but by then there was no
empire, only sour memories.
I think that the French story is similar. For most of the imperial years, French
leftists were as proud of their Frenchness as were
people on the right--and perhaps with more justification. For wasn’t France the
birthplace of enlightenment, universal values, and
human rights? The Algerian war gave rise to a more familiar self-hatred, most
clearly manifest in Jean-Paul Sartre’s defense of
FLN terrorism (in his preface to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth): “To shoot
down a European is to kill two birds with one
stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there
remains a dead man and a free man.” This suggests
that it is actually a good thing to kill Europeans (they were mostly French), but
Sartre did not volunteer to go himself and be killed so
that one more Algerian would be a free man. His was a generalized, not a personal,
self-hatred.
Why shouldn’t the American story be like these two, with long years of healthy
oppositionist politics, and only episodic resentment?
Wasn’t America a beacon of light to the old world, a city on a hill, an
unprecedented experiment in democratic politics? I grew up
with the Americanism of the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s; I look back on it
now and think that the Communist Party=s effort
to create a leftist pop culture, in an instant, as the party line turned, was kitchy
and manipulative--and also politically very smart. Paul
Robeson’s “Ballad for Americans,” whatever the quality of the music, provides at
least a sense of what an unalienated American
radicalism might be like. The days after September 11 would not have been a bad time
for a popular front. What had happpened that
made anything like that unthinkable?
The cold war, imperial adventures in Central America, Vietnam above all, and then
the experience of globalization under American
leadership: all these, for good reasons and bad, produced a pervasive leftist view
of the United States as global bully, rich, privileged,
selfish, hedonistic, and corrupt beyond remedy. The sense of a civilizing mission,
which must have sustained parts of the British and
French left in a more fully imperial setting (read John Stuart Mill on British
India), never got off the ground here. Foreign aid, the
Peace Corps, and nation-building never took on the dimensions of a “mission”; they
were mostly sidelines of U.S. foreign policy:
underfunded, frequently in the shade of military operations. Certainly, there has
been much to criticize in the policies of every U.S.
government since World War II (see virtually any back issue of Dissent). And yet,
the leftist critique--most clearly, I think, from the
Vietnam years forward (from the time of “Amerika,” Viet Cong flags, and breathless
trips to the North)--has been stupid,
overwrought, grossly inaccurate. It is the product of what Philip Roth, in his novel
I Married a Communist, aptly described as “the
combination of embitterment and not thinking.” The left has lost its bearings. Why?
I will suggest four reasons, without claiming that this is an exhaustive list. It is
nothing more than a rough argument, an attempt to
begin a debate.
1) Ideology: the lingering effects of the Marxist theory of imperialism and of the
third worldist doctrines of the 1960s
and 1970s. We may think that we live in a post-ideological age, and maybe most of us
do, but the traces of old ideologies can be
found everywhere in the discourse of the left. Perhaps the most striking consequence
is the inability of leftists to recognize or
acknowledge the power of religion in the modern world. Whenever writers on the left
say that the root cause of terror is global
inequality or human poverty, the assertion is in fact a denial that religious
motives really count. Theology, on this view, is just the
temporary, colloquial idiom in which the legitimate rage of oppressed men and women
is expressed.
A few brave leftists described the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda movement as
examples of “clerical fascism,” which at least gets
the adjective right. And maybe “fascist” is close enough, even if this new politics
doesn’t look like the product of late capitalist
degeneration. It gives the left a reason for opposing Islamic terror, which is an
important achievement. But it would be better to find
a reason in the realities of terrorism itself, in the idea of a holy war against the
infidels, which is not the same thing as a war against
inferior races or alien nations. In fact, Islamic radicalism is not, as fascism is,
a racist or ultra-nationalist doctrine. Something else is
going on, which we need to understand.
But ideologically primed leftists were likely to think that they already understood
whatever needed to be understood. Any group that
attacks the imperial power must be a representative of the oppressed, and its agenda
must be the agenda of the left. It isn't
necessary to listen to its spokesmen. What else can they want except...the
redistribution of resources across the globe, the
withdrawal of American soldiers from wherever they are, the closing down of aid
programs for repressive governments, the end of
the blockade of Iraq, and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel?
I don’t doubt that there is some overlap between
this program and the dreams of al-Qaeda leaders--though al-Qaeda is not an
egalitarian movement, and the idea that it supports a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is crazy. The overlap is
circumstantial and convenient, nothing more. A holy war
against infidels is not, even unintentionally, unconsciously, or “objectively,” a
left politics. But how many leftists can even imagine a
holy war against infidels?
2. Powerlessness and alienation: leftists have no power in the United States and
most of us don't expect to exercise
power, ever. Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing
to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any
hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That’s why they had such
difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of
September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed. Equally
important, that’s why their participation in the policy
debate after the attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to the UN, collect
evidence against bin Laden, and so on) seem to have
been developed with no concern for effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They
talked and wrote as if they could not imagine
themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow-citizens. That was someone
else’s business; the business of the left was...what?
To oppose the authorities, whatever they did. The good result of this opposition was
a spirited defense of civil liberties. But even this
defense displayed a certain willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so
many leftists rushed to the defense of civil liberties
while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers--as if there was
no need at all to balance security and freedom.
Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously from the clash of rightwing
authoritarianism and leftwing absolutism, but it would
be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance for itself, on its
own; the effort would suggest a responsible politics and a
real desire to exercise power, some day.
But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes
with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is
radical. How else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all,
live here, and whose children and grandchildren live
here, to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future
terrorist attacks? There is a pathology in this
unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage.
3. The moral purism of blaming America first: many leftists seem to believe that
this is like blaming oneself, taking
responsibility for the crimes of the imperial state. In fact, when we blame America,
we also lift ourselves above the
blameworthy (other) Americans. The left sets itself apart. Whatever America is doing
in the world isn’t our doing. In some sense, of
course, that is true. The defeat of facism in the middle years of the twentieth
century and of communism in the last years were not
our doing. Some of us, at least, thought that these efforts merited our support--or
our “critical support.” But this is a complicated and
difficult politics, and it doesn’t allow for the favorite posture of many American
leftists: standing as a righteous minority, brave and
determined, among the timid, the corrupt, and the wicked. A posture like that
ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its
political failure.
4. The sense of not being entitled to criticize anyone else: how can we live here in
America, the richest, most powerful,
and most privileged country in the world, and say anything critical about people who
are poorer and weaker than we
are? This was a major issue in the 1960s, when the New Left seemed to have
discovered “oppression” for the first time, and we all
enlisted on the side of oppressed men and women and failed, again and again, to
criticize the authoritarianism and brutality that often
scars their politics. There is no deeper impulse in left politics than this
enlistment; solidarity with people in trouble seems to me the
most profound commitment that leftists make. But this solidarity includes, or should
include, a readiness to tell these people when we
think they are acting wrongly, violating the values we share. Even the oppressed
have obligations, and surely the first among these is
not to murder innocent people, not to make terrorism their politics. Leftists who
cannot insist upon this point, even to people poorer
and weaker than themselves, have abandoned both politics and morality for something
else. They are radical only in their abjection.
That was Sartre’s radicalism, face-to-face with FLN terror, and it has been imitated
by thousands since, excusing and apologizing for
acts that any decent left would begin by condemning.
What ought to be done? I have a modest agenda: put decency first, and then we will
see. So, let’s go back over my list of reasons
for the current indecency.
Ideology. We certainly need something better than the rag-tag Marxism with which so
much of the left operates today--whose chief
effect is to turn world politics into a cheap melodrama, with all the villains
dressed to look the part and one villain larger than life. A
tough materialist analysis would be fine, so long as it is sophisticated enough to
acknowledge that material interests don't exhaust the
possibilities of human motivation. The spectacle of European leftists straining to
find some economic reason for the Kosovo war (oil
in the Balkans? a possible pipeline? was NATO reaching for control of the Black
Sea?) was entertaining at the time, but it doesn=t
bear repeating. For the moment we can make do with a little humility, an openness to
heterodox ideas, a sharp eye for the real world
, and a readiness to attend to moral as well as materialist arguments. This last
point is especially important. The encounter with
Islamic radicalism, and with other versions of politicized religion, should help us
understand that high among our interests are our
values: secular enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government. Left
politics starts with the defense of these three.
Alienation and powerlessness. It is a common idea on the left that political
responsibility is something like temperance, moderation,
and cleanliness--good bourgeois values that are incompatible with radical politics
or incisive social criticism. You have to be a little
wild to be a radical. That isn’t a crazy idea, and alienated intellectuals may well
have, more than anyone else, the anger necessary to
begin the critical project and the lust for intellectual combat that sustains it.
But they don't necessarily get things right, and the angrier
they are and the more they are locked into their combative posture, the more likely
they are to get things wrong. What was
necessary after September 11, and what is necessary now, is an engagement with our
fellow citizens that recognizes the fellowship.
We can be as critical as we like, but these are people whose fate we share; we are
responsible for their safety as they are for ours,
and our politics has to reflect that mutual responsibility. When they are attacked,
so are we; and we should join willingly and
constructively in debates about how to defend the country. Once again: we should act
as if we won’t always be powerless.
Blaming America first. Not everything that goes badly in the world goes badly
because of us. The United States is not omnipotent,
and its leaders should not be taken as co-conspirators in every human disaster. The
left has little difficulty understanding the need for
distributive justice with regard to resources, but we have been practically clueless
about the just distribution of praise and blame. To
take the obvious example: in the second half of the twentieth century, the United
States fought both just and unjust wars, undertook
both just and unjust interventions. It would be a useful exercise to work through
the lists and test our capacity to make distinctions--to
recognize, say, that the US was wrong in Guatemala in 1956 and right in Kosovo in
1999. Why can’t we accept an ambivalent
relation to American power, acknowledging that it has had good and bad effects in
the world? But shouldn’t an internationalist left
demand a more egalitarian distribution of power? Well, yes, in principle; but any
actual redistribution will have to be judged by the
quality of the states that would be empowered by it. Faced with states like, say,
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I don’t think we have to
support a global redistribution of political power.
Not blaming anyone else. The world (and this includes the third world) is too full
of hatred, cruelty, and corruption for any left, even
the American left, to suspend its judgement about what’s going on. It’s not the case
that because we are privileged, we should turn
inward and focus our criticism only on ourselves. In fact, inwardness is one of our
privileges; it is often a form of political
self-indulgence. Yes, we are entitled to blame the others whenever they are
blameworthy; in fact, it is only when we do that, when
we denounce, say, the authoritarianism of third world governments, that we will find
our true comrades--the local opponents of the
maximal leaders and military juntas, who are often waiting for our recognition and
support. If we value democracy, we have to be
prepared to defend it, at home, of course, but not only there.
I would once have said that we were well along: the American left has an honorable
history, and we have certainly gotten some
things right, above all, our opposition to domestic and global inequalities. But
what the aftermath of September 11 suggests is that we
have not advanced very far--and not always in the right direction. The left needs to
begin again.
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