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 ifty
years ago a few of the leading intellectuals on the left, such as
Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, began to perceive growing
weaknesses in the dominant liberal ideology of the time, and began
to look hopefully for the emergence of a reasonable, responsible
conservatism. Today, the shoe is on the other foot, as conservatives
wonder whether a reasonable, responsible Left is possible. As David
Brooks has pointed out, being on the left in recent years has meant
being for freeing Mumia and cheering infantile leftists when they
throw bricks through windows to protest globalization.
September 11
made the position of the radical Left even more acute, and brought
out the worst instincts in many Leftists. It has also provided a
clear dividing line between two kinds of Leftists: those who genuinely
love America but who are confused, and those who resolutely hate
America; between those who now fly the flag (some for the first
time in their lives), and those who still want only to burn it.
A number of prominent Leftists, such as Christopher Hitchens and
Paul Berman, have responded splendidly and correctly in the aftermath
of September 11, while many of the usual suspects — Susan Sontag,
Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, etc. — have reacted according
to script.
Which brings
us to Michael Walzer's immensely important article in the spring
issue of Dissent magazine, entitled "Can There Be a
Decent Left?" It might well be thought of as "Walzer's
Razor," providing a cutting divide between the serious pro-American
Left from the frivolous anti-American Left. (The article appears
here.)
Walzer, a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study,
is the author of numerous books, including Just and Unjust Wars
and Spheres of Justice, and thus is a serious man of the
Left. His chief complaint about his fellow Leftists is that they
are not serious. The Leftist critique of American power, Walzer
says, "has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate."
Walzer suggests that his fellow Leftists begin to acknowledge that
not all uses of American power are evil. The Left conducts itself
on this point with "willful irresponsibility" that Walzer
thinks is "pathological." David Horowitz would be hard
pressed to exceed this critical vocabulary.
"The radical
failure of the left's response to the events of last fall raises
a disturbing question," Walzer writes; "Can there be a
decent left in a superpower?" Walzer thinks there can, but
only if the Left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances
and emotional extravagances. Patriotism is not politically incorrect,
as an earlier generation of Leftists (George Orwell and Mary McCarthy,
for example) understood. The Leftists of earlier generations understood
that it was possible to lend Western democracies their "critical
support." Mary McCarthy famously remarked that she began to
set aside her contempt for "bourgeois society" during
World War II when she realized that she cared about the outcome
of the war, and hoped the Allies would win. Too many of today's
Leftists are embarrassed by, if not opposed to, America's success
to date in Afghanistan.
More fundamentally,
Walzer calls on the Left to find "something better than the
rag-tag Marxism with which some much of the left operates today
— whose chief effect is to turn world politics into a cheap
melodrama." Egalitarianism — the cornerstone of Leftist
social thought — is one thing; in recent decades the Left has
been overtaken with elaborate theories of imperialism that give
off an air of paranoia worthy of the black helicopter crowd. Walzer
notes that many leftists revel in their self-marginalization and
irrelevance. Walzer calls for the Left, in essence, to grow up,
and "begin again."
This may turn
out to be the most difficult step for the Left. Consider that the
hottest book on the left today is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
Empire, which argues, among other risible ideas, that terrorism
is merely "a crude conception and terminological reduction
that is rooted in a police mentality." (Worse: Hardt and Negri
write that the Soviet Union was "a society criss-crossed by
extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom.") Empire
has been selling out at bookstores and is being translated into
10 languages. It has received the blessing of the New York Times,
which commented on the "buzz" surrounding the book (thereby
adding to the buzz). So long as Empire is a guiding light
for the intellectual Left, Walzer's noble project has little chance
of success.
Walzer is not
an isolated voice on the left, however. The left-leaning sociologist
Alan Wolfe took square aim at Empire in The New Republic
just three weeks after the World Trade Center attack (it appeared
in the October 1, 2001 issue of TNR), which means that his
review did not receive the attention it deserved. Calling the book
"shabby" and "a lazy person's guide to revolution,"
Wolfe writes that "Empire is to social and political
criticism what pornography is to literature. . . Empire is
a thoroughly non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously
irresponsible tour through questions of power and violence."
So Walzer has
one ally, at least. Responses to Walzer's article will be posted
on Dissent's website as they arrive. Their tone and substance
will reveal whether the Left is participating in the post-September
11 sobriety that has swept much of the rest of the country.
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