Left Plays Survivor
Why the anti-war Left must be.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
March 7, 2002 8:45 a.m.

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.