THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES for the American left. As my friend Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute recently noted in a terrific piece for National Review Online, leftist intellectuals have become increasingly paranoid, and liberal politicians have resorted to foolish and desperate criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war (all the whining about “exit strategies,” etc.). The reason? The necessarily open-ended nature of the war on terror is “cutting off the cultural and political oxygen of the Left,” because a “near-constant state of mobilization against terror may permanently cripple the politics of multiculturalism at home and anti-globalization abroad.”
But while some on the left seem to be losing their heads, others are beginning a long-overdue process of critical self-examination. Several courageous leftist thinkers have attempted in recent months to describe and condemn the knee-jerk, anti-American reaction of many of their fellow travelers to the September 11 attacks and our war in Afghanistan: Christopher Hitchens and Todd Gitlin immediately come to mind, and Michael H. Shuman recently wrote a fine piece in The Weekly Standard taking his fellow leftists to task.
Over the weekend I read perhaps the most detailed and extensive leftist brief yet against the antiwar left. Michael Walzer’s Can There Be a Decent Left?, which will appear in the Spring 2002 issue of the leftist magazine Dissent, has already garnered much attention. With eloquence, clarity, and brutal honesty, Walzer examines why the left has “lost its bearings”–why, since the Vietnam era, its standard-issue critique of America “has been stupid, overwrought, [and] grossly inaccurate.” His article deserves to be read and pondered by serious persons across the political spectrum.
Rather than summarize Walzer’s argument here, I’ll let you enjoy it for yourself. For the most part, I think his critique is accurate, but the more important question is whether his larger project is tenable. One can fairly assume that his article is an attempt to begin rallying and reinvigorating a “decent left”–which I take to mean an “oppositionist politics” (Walzer’s term) that can still be patriotic and politically and morally responsible. It’s a noble goal. The American left needs its own version of William F. Buckley: Just as Buckley expelled the anti-Semites and John Birchers from the conservative movement long ago, the left needs leaders who will rid their movement of the mindless anti-Americanism–the “negative faith in America the ugly,” as Gitlin has described it–that dooms it to perpetual marginalization.
I suspect, however, that the valiant efforts of Walzer, Gitlin et al. are ultimately bound to fail. Walzer rightly recognizes that a “decent left” must jettison the sense of alienation embraced by most leftists today. But he is not the first thinker on the left to say something like this, and a look back at similar attempts to rid the left of the alienated mindset reveals how difficult recovering a “decent left” will be.
In recent years, some shrewd leftists have grudgingly recognized the impossibility of a viable political movement that disdains simple American patriotism, and thus have sought to reconcile leftist politics with something resembling a patriotic impulse. A prominent example of this was the 1998 book “Achieving Our Country” by Richard Rorty, the influential postmodern philosopher. Rorty argued that the American left needed to end its obsessive theorizing, come down from the ivory tower, and renew the fight for social justice– and along the way, restore its sense of patriotism, the kind present in the 1930s during the glory days of the Popular Front, for example. But the patriotism that Rorty wanted the left to recapture, harking back specifically to John Dewey and Walt Whitman, is a rather peculiar breed of patriotism, as this passage from his book suggests:
“Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That civic religion centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country’s principal goal. We were supposed to love our country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. . . . This was a counsel of perfection rather than a description of fact. But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. . . . You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming the actual.”
This idea–of being “loyal to a dream country,” of feeling patriotism only for America seen as a disembodied “experiment,” “conversation,” or a perpetually “unfinished nation” (to quote the title of one popular American history textbook)–is bizarre, to say the least, and is not likely to restore the political fortunes of the left in America. Most Americans will not support a political movement whose patriotism and loyalty is based on viewing our country as merely the geopolitical equivalent of a dorm-room bull session. (For a brilliant discussion of the pernicious effect of thinking of America solely in this amorphous, open-ended fashion, read Wilfred M. McClay’s wonderful essay, Is America an Experiment?)
The challenge for well-meaning lefties like Walzer and Gitlin is to convince their fellow “progressives” that loyalty to the real America they wake up to every morning–the one most leftists find so horrible and disgusting, and so deserving of their utter contempt–is compatible with true leftist politics. I have my doubts. Still, the mere presence of courageous thinkers like Walzer inspires me to hope that I’ll be proven wrong.
Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.
