APPOINTMENT WITH WAR Unpatriotic opposition
by DANIEL LAZARE * ____________________________________________________________________ WAVES of radicalism come every 30 or 40 years in the United States. Now that a new one is upon us, thanks to President George Bush's threatened invasion of Iraq, observers are comparing it to the last. During the Vietnam war, it took three years, until 1968, of massive US military intervention before large-scale national protests got underway. This time, 200,000 people descended on Washington and surrounded the White House on 26 October while 80,000 more marched in San Francisco. ____________________________________________________________________
They were protesting against a war still in its talking stages. Where college members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were the driving force in the 1960s, when conscription was still in force, today's antiwar movement is far more broadly based. Opponents of the Vietnam war were a beleaguered minority until the early 1970s. But now opposition is running at 37%, according to a recent poll, and could go higher should the US encounter more trouble in the Gulf than the Pentagon anticipates (1).
Bush may seem strong, but he is actually starting out weaker than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon during the Vietnam era. His Iraqi adventure is a high-stakes gamble in which many things could go wrong. Iraq could put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance, the entire region could rise in revolt, post-invasion Iraq could descend into anarchy and, crucially, the US economy could take a steep dive.
If these things happen, today's minority could easily turn into tomorrow's majority, and Bush's (unelected) presidency could crash as his father's did in 1992.
There is one similarity between the 1960s antiwar movement and today's: its shaking-out of the liberal intelligentsia. During the Vietnam war, ageing social democrats like Irving Howe lambasted students for violating cold war anti-communism by enthusing for Ho Chi Minh. Today, ageing veterans of the 1960s are lambasting the new antiwar movement for similar ideological sins.
Hardly a week goes by without a prominent liberal blasting the movement for its lack of patriotism, its hostility to mainstream American values, or its blanket opposition to US military power. If the ex-Trotskyist writer Christopher Hitchens is to be believed, America is torn between those who favour a showdown with Saddam and those who "truly believe that [US Attorney General] John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden" (2).
Either you're with the United States or you're with al-Qaida, as both Hitchens and George Bush see it, and Hitchens is determined to be with the US.
Others who have attacked America's nascent antiwar movement include the leftwing feminist, Ellen Willis, and Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, author of a highly regarded study of rural populism, who accused the antiwar movement for failing to recognise that in the US the masses are patriotic and the globe-trotting bourgeoisie is not. As far as the US is concerned, Kazin wrote, "Karl Marx's dictum that the workers have no country has been refuted time and again" (3). If antiwar activists wish to connect with ordinary Americans, they must prove themselves more patriotic than the president.
Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president turned New York University sociologist, recently warned that the antiwar forces were heading for "a gigantic ruination" because they had allowed radicals to take control, and if such elements were not purged, the leadership would atrophy - this warning came days before the massive October turnout.
David Corn and Marc Cooper, staff writers for the liberal weekly The Nation, have criticised the movement's "far left" leadership for, among other things, defending Cuba and denouncing UN sanctions that are conservatively estimated to have caused the death of 500,000 Iraqi children.
Why is there so much hostility? The liberal-social democratic outburst is best understood as yet another stage in the Democratic party's disintegration. The process began around November 2000 when the Republicans used strong-arm tactics to gain control of the White House, and then accelerated after 11 September, when congressional liberals, terrified of being labelled unpatriotic, closed ranks behind Bush's policy of "ceaseless warfare to rid the world of the evil-doers".
Now the Democratic party's liberal and social democratic wings are collapsing as well. The process is the culmination of ideological trends over many years. A generation ago student radicals believed with Herbert Marcuse that the American working class had become hopelessly bourgeois. Today, those radicals, now greyer and paunchier, still believe the working class to be hopelessly bourgeois; but now, instead of condemning that, they see it as a good thing
Since there is no alternative to bourgeois society, the left's job is to support it while seeking to smooth out the rougher edges. This has meant reinventing the left as a loyal patriotic opposition and never inveighing against US imperialism, even though that it is now more open and unabashed than at any time since the invasion of Cuba in 1898.
But if anti-imperialism is forbidden, it is nonetheless what a significant segment of the US population feels, thanks to the enormous human toll caused by UN sanctions, Washington's outrageous manipulation of the UN Security Council and the Bush administration's cynical attempts to blame Saddam Hussein for 11 September. The result is an enormous contradiction that many Marxist and semi-Marxist organisations and parties are hastening to exploit.
One such group is the Workers World Party, a ex-Trotskyist splinter group that was the main force behind the October demonstrations; another is the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist sect chiefly responsible for the Not In Our Name campaign, an attempt to prevent Bush from using popular outrage over September 11 to fuel his anti-terrorism campaign.
The most important radical in the US today, however, is Bush, whose war on terrorism is roiling global politics and propelling the US far to the right. In revolutionising international relations Bush is also revolutionising the opposition, forcing the antiwar movement to become as radical as he is. ____________________________________________________
* Journalist and author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralysing Democracy, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1996
(1) "Poll: Most support war as a last resort," USA Today, 26 November 26 2002.
(2) Christopher Hitchens, "Taking Sides", The Nation, 14 October 2002. Since then he has stopped writing for The Nation.
(3) See Ellen Willis, "Why I'm Not for Peace", Radical Society, April 2002; also Michael Kazin, "A Patriotic Left," Dissent, autumn 2002.