For many liberals, September 11 has had a clarifying effect. They now know that many people on the far left — people they had considered allies, at least on some issues — in fact have nothing in common with them.
Leftist scholars and writers such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Susan Sontag have responded to the terrorist attacks mainly to decry American aggression abroad, and to suggest that it’s more important to acknowledge our own misdeeds than to punish those of the terrorists.
The US, of course, has committed terrible mistakes in the Middle East and elsewhere: propping up repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, imposing sanctions on Iraq that starve children without touching Saddam Hussein, and supporting the Afghan guerrillas who later became the Taliban. Those mistakes should be revisited and rectified — and surely it is liberals, rather than conservatives, who are more likely to take up that task. (Of course, the policy that enrages Islamic fundamentalists more than any other is our unstinting support for Israel, and that policy is surely no mistake.) But liberals, and some leftists, understand that we were attacked not because of any specific policy stands, but because fundamentalist Islamic terrorists have declared war against us in order to bring the entire Muslim world under their sway.
Sontag’s short piece in the New Yorker of September 24 has attracted withering criticism. But she appeared to say more than she actually did; she offered mainly rage and questions. "The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy," she wrote, adding: "A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what happened, and what may continue to happen." In an interview with Salon this past Tuesday, Sontag attempts to clarify, saying she thinks the Taliban must go, but that she opposes the US bombing campaign. In fairness, her views turn out to be more measured than the tone of her New Yorker piece would suggest, although they are also muddled and contradictory.
Chomsky, on the other hand, has gone so far as to declare the attacks of September 11 to be comparable to the US raid on Sudan in 1998 — a raid that Bill Clinton described as an attack on bin Laden’s chemical-weapons factory, but which turned out to hit a pharmaceutical plant. Such a comparison is not only morally obtuse, but absurd in its implicit suggestion that the attacks of September 11 should be seen as retaliation for some specific US action. As leftist journalist Christopher Hitchens — who’s been debating Chomsky at TheNation.com — has written, "This is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life."
Conservative Michael Barone, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report and author of The Almanac of American Politics (National Journal Group), told me, "Liberals who had thought Noam Chomsky was just an ally who was a little bit far out on the left are now realizing what the truth is. There is a huge gap between America and the putrid corners and backwaters of universities, where you see lots of professors taking positions that Democratic politicians don’t take in a million years."
Well, now. That’s putting it a bit strongly. But to see the anti-globalization protests of the past several years morph into antiwar demonstrations is sobering, given that the terrorists have already declared war on us. As conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in OpinionJournal.com, "Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very long while, many liberals are reassessing — quietly for the most part — their alliance with the anti-American, anticapitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or supported." I think Sullivan is wrong when he says that these forces are or were "powerful." But it’s true that whatever romance there was between mainstream liberals and the dreadlocked kids who marched for Mumia Abu-Jamal and against Starbucks is now over.
Not that there was necessarily all that much of a romance to begin with. Conservatives such as Barone, Sullivan, and Noemie Emery (who inveighed in the Weekly Standard against the "chattering asses" of the left) may be enjoying the supposed divergence of liberals from leftists. But it’s hard to see what even the most left-leaning members of Congress — a group that includes several members of the Massachusetts delegation, such as Ted Kennedy and Representative Barney Frank — ever had in common with, say, Howard Zinn.
"I’m not sure this one is breaking down on traditional ideology," says journalist and author David Halberstam, whose new book, War in a Time of Peace (Simon & Schuster), traces the trajectory of American interventionism in the ’90s. Halberstam flatly rejects the notion that the war on terrorism has somehow altered the role of liberalism. "This is a very interesting time. One phase of history ends, another begins. The challenge is enormously complicated. I wouldn’t jump to those definitions before we are there."
In a recent piece for the New York Times’ Week in Review section, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin — himself a New Left activist in the 1960s — laments that the terrorist attacks have destroyed "the prospects of a unified left," with liberals and labor leaders signing up for the war on terrorism even as "radical foes of global capital on college campuses and the streets talk of peace."
But that alliance was never more than an idle dream, born of peace and prosperity. Neither of those preconditions now exists.
For those whose knowledge of history starts with the Vietnam War, it must be startling to see liberals align themselves with the president and against the antiwar elements of the left. In fact, what we may be witnessing is a return, at long last, to the natural order of the political world — an order that arose during the second decade of the last century, as World War I was drawing to a close.
President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and a liberal internationalist, pushed for American membership in the League of Nations. Wilson was opposed by Senate Republicans, especially Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. US membership in the League was defeated in the Senate, with Wilson, weakened by a massive stroke, unable to campaign for it effectively. This postwar withdrawal from the world hardened into isolationism, which — even if it was not necessarily responsible for Hitler’s rise to power and Japan’s depredations in East Asia — nevertheless allowed those two phenomena to proceed unchecked. During the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt and other liberal Democrats agitated against isolationism, but the Republicans — with the help of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a fascist sympathizer — refused to engage with the world. That is, until December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor.
During the war, Roosevelt pointed the way to a new American internationalism based largely on liberal principles. It was Roosevelt, more than anyone, who promoted the United Nations, a successor to Wilson’s League of Nations. And after his death, another liberal, Harry Truman, vigorously pursued Roosevelt’s vision, rebuilding Europe and Japan as a bulwark against communism. Indeed, the Cold War itself, though bipartisan, was prosecuted most enthusiastically by liberal Democratic presidents — Harry Truman and, later, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This represented a significant break from the 1930s, when many liberals openly admired Soviet-style communism. As the truth about Stalin’s reign of terror became known, liberals split with leftists, just as they are doing today.
What put an end to Cold War liberalism was Vietnam. As the moral and human cost of our misguided intervention in a civil war became clear, what had begun as a liberal venture ended up alienating liberals. Johnson decided not to seek another term in 1968 after an antiwar Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, ran up a stunningly high vote in the New Hampshire primary. Liberal disgust culminated in 1972, when George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for president, only to lose to the incumbent, Richard Nixon, in a landslide. McGovern, a World War II fighter pilot and one of the most thoroughly decent men ever to win a presidential nomination, suffered the misfortune of being associated with a whole range of perceived liberal failures: not only an antiwar movement whose radical fringe had turned violent and revolutionary, but also skyrocketing crime, racial unrest, and an economic slide.
"The Vietnam War obviously changed everything," says Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. "With that came a disillusion with the Cold War itself. I think the Democratic Party began to have difficulties in the ’70s because it became associated with a whole range of things that had suddenly become unpopular, whether justly or not."
For years, the most effective political tactic any Republican could use was to label his opponent a "liberal." The only Democrat to win the presidency during this period, one-termer Jimmy Carter, was a quasi-conservative on domestic issues who was painted with the liberal brush for his disastrous handling of the hostage crisis in Iran. (Carter’s post-presidency has been defined by his work as a peace activist, thus turning him into the liberal he wasn’t when he was in the White House.) During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, liberals — and leftists — continued to oppose American interventionism, as the Republicans, blinded by their anti-communist zeal, pursued an unconscionable policy of supporting murderous right-wing movements in Central America.
Liberals began moving back the other way when Iraq invaded Kuwait, in August 1990. Most liberal members of Congress, troubled by the notion of fighting to protect Western oil interests, voted against the resolution that gave the first President Bush the power to do so. Nevertheless, the debate was restrained and civil, and the war’s rapid and successful conclusion kept it that way. The liberal journey back to internationalism had begun.
If the Gulf War set the stage for the transformation of liberalism, it was Bill Clinton who took the next step. Clinton, convinced that opposition to the Gulf War had been a mistake, chose Senator Al Gore as his running mate and Representative Les Aspin as his first defense secretary — two of the few Democrats who had voted in favor of the war resolution. And after several notable failures — a mission gone drastically wrong in Somalia, a humiliating retreat in Haiti, a genocide deliberately ignored in Rwanda — the Clinton administration finally seemed to find its footing in the former Yugoslavia, where it intervened in both Bosnia and Kosovo to stop renegade Serbs from carrying out their campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
It was a curious sort of intervention — planes dropping bombs from on high, with American forces safely out of reach. But it did, nevertheless, signal that the Democratic Party, the political home of mainstream liberals, was no longer unalterably opposed to the use of military force. And in a role reversal that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier, it was primarily conservative Republicans who opposed the use of force, arguing that no American interests were at stake.
The liberal counterargument was that preventing a human-rights catastrophe is an American interest, no matter where such horrors take place. It was an audacious assertion, one we will almost certainly not be able to live up to in every instance. But by casting military intervention in moral terms, liberals had reclaimed their rightful place in the political culture.
