|
 he
anti-war Left is back, and I don't blame them. The attacks on the
president and his conduct of the war on terrorism are groundless
and foolish, of course. But the surprisingly frank objections to
the war being raised by Democratic senators and leftist intellectuals
alike stem from a profound and entirely justified sense of foreboding
about the open-ended nature of this conflict.
The problem
for the Left is that Sept. 11 really may have changed everything
— that a near-constant state of mobilization against terror
may permanently cripple the politics of multiculturalism at home
and anti-globalization abroad. That is why Senator Daschle and a
rising chorus of pundits and intellectuals on the Left keep pressing
the president to come up with an "exit strategy." It's
not simply that they're puffing up a bogus problem to gain a lever
of criticism against the president. No, the Left understands that
this really is a different, and potentially permanent, sort of war.
So for sake of their own political survival, they are desperate
to define the conditions that might somehow bring this conflict
to an end.
If you want
to understand what's really going on in the mind of the anti-war
Left, pick up the March issue of Harper's. There you will
find an extraordinary article by novelist and University of Massachusetts
English Professor John Edgar Wideman called, "Whose War: The
Color of Terror," along with a shorter critique of the war
by Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham.
The Wideman
article, although penned with skill and subtlety, is as jaundiced
and tendentious as anything yet written about this war. Susan Sontag's
got nothing on John Edgar Wideman. But rather than simply give him
an "idiocy award" and let it go at that, Wideman's piece
deserves to be taken seriously, if only for what it reveals about
the nature of the Left's dilemma at this moment.
Wideman begins
with the fact that he is an African American living at the "ground
zero" of pervasive American racism:
I'm sorry.
I'm an American of African descent, and I can't applaud my president
for doing unto foreign others what he's inflicted on me and mine....I've
felt his pointy boots in my butt before. But this time I can't
be Tonto to his Lone Ranger...Stepin to his Fetchit.
Wideman isn't
just deflecting criticism by establishing his victim credentials.
His point is that Bush has cooked up a fraudulent war abroad "to
upstage and camouflage the real war at home" (i.e. the "war"
of a racist white American society against blacks). Wideman has
next to nothing to say about Islamic terrorism. He's preoccupied
instead with the cultural and political effects on America of a
war with "alarmingly open-ended goals." Bush's "phony
war," says Wideman is being waged not "to defend America
from an external foe but to homogenize and coerce its citizens under
a flag of rabid nationalism."
That is the
point. And however false and malicious it might be as an account
of the president's motives for prosecuting this war, Wideman's calumny
is built upon a genuine fear. The president is in fact defending
us from an external foe, but that urgently necessary defense really
does have the effect of cutting off the cultural and political oxygen
of the Left.
Wideman is
desperate to disallow the reality of the terrorist threat. He can't
do it through an analysis of Islamic society, the technology of
mass destruction, or homeland defense, so instead he tries to conjure
away the terrorist threat with standard-issue techniques of deconstruction.
We use the word "terrorist," Wideman says, to deny the
possibility of "reasoned exchange" with our foes, to project
the evil in ourselves onto a despised "Other." Funny,
I thought it was the terrorists themselves who'd traded in reasoned
exchange for murderous scapegoating.
Maybe an idiocy
award would have been enough after all. It's hard to take someone
seriously who's more concerned about the use of the word "terrorism"
than the act of terror itself. But Wideman's no anomaly. Not only
has he made it into Harper's, he's echoing the line of the
editor who put him there.
Lewis Lapham's
own assault on the war in the latest issue of Harper's shares
Wideman's tone of mordant superiority. Lapham likes looking down
on America's ineradicable stupidity. We have been inventing phony
wars for nigh on 60 years, says Lapham, all because of our need
to prove to ourselves that we're the good guys. Islamic terrorism,
the Cold War balance of terror — it's all the same to Lapham,
all a ridiculous and self-fulfilling fantasy of national endangerment
in the service of America's utopian quest for omnipotence. Lapham
thinks that if the United States had forborne to develop the Hydrogen
bomb, Stalin and the Soviets might have avoided an arms race. Trouble
is, Lapham's silly fantasies about Stalin's reasonableness don't
square well with his own vision of a half-mad human race —
of our seemingly ineradicable capacity to warmonger, even as we
convince ourselves of our peace-loving intentions.
Wideman and
Lapham have certainly fooled themselves into believing in their
own peace-loving intentions, while nonetheless attributing to mankind
(especially American mankind) enough covert madness and aggression
to make even the most hardened realist blush. Why on earth should
we trust the intentions of a human race half as evil and irrational
as Wideman and Lapham makes us out to be — even as they claim
to be putting their faith in human reason and good intentions?
Human beings,
it is true, are a fragile lot, prone to rage, irrationality, and
dreams of omnipotence and superiority. And yes, we share a remarkable
capacity to attribute what is evil in ourselves to others. Yet pity
(and fear) those who seek to overcome these foibles by disguising
their vanity in claims to superior faith in the reasonableness of
humankind. Pity (and fear) those so ashamed of their capacity for
rage that they can no longer turn even a righteous anger against
some foreign foe, but must vent their rage instead in an attack
on their own country.
We arrive at
the nub of the problem. The cultural politics of the Left is essentially
an attempt to "one up" democracy by being "more egalitarian
than thou." The sense of superiority; the demand for control;
anger against a hated foe — all of these forms of human irrationality
are abundantly present in leftist politics. Yet a right-thinking,
well-brought-up, hyper-egalitarian fellow can only enjoy these guilty
pleasures if they're buried inside of an attack against America
itself for some imagined sin against democracy. To feel angry at,
or superior to, some benighted foreign foe is just too obvious —
too embarrassing — a way for a sophisticated modern
leftist to gratify all of those nasty but ineradicable human longings
for supremacy. So how to run a leftist political crusade when America
really is under threat from a foreign and undemocratic foe? It cannot
be done.
That's why
left-leaning intellectuals have retreated into a stance of tortured
isolation and superiority, while still suggesting to anyone who
will listen that the threat of terrorism and the war itself are
nothing but mass delusions. More practical men, like Senators Daschle,
Kerry, and Byrd, are trying to press for some scenario that might
give them a way out of a politically untenable situation —
some way to mark a formal end-point to the war, and thereby divert
the country's attention back to the home front.
But the timing
is off. The Democrats and the Left are panicking — speaking
out against the war too sharply, too soon, and with too little justification
— all because they cannot control their fear that an "open-ended"
war against terrorism will permanently shift the cultural politics
of the country to the right. Their fears are well taken. This war
will not have a definitive ending. Because of that, the Left now
has a very serious long-term problem on its hands. That definitely
does not mean that the culture war is over. The sources of America's
post-sixties cultural revolution are far too broad and deep for
the culture war to fade. But in ways that may last for a very long
time to come, our political and cultural center of gravity has shifted
several degrees to the right.
|
