Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
- Keith Thompson Sunday, May 22, 2005
<snip>
My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.
<snip>
At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."
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At one level, this is just a dull and slimy piece of work -- an attempt to slide, with a magician's sleight of hand, from applauding the work of people like M.L. King to equating unprovoked war with the continuing struggle for **human self actualization**.
And in that way it's no different from the recent work of Field Marshall Hitchens and Paul Berman who, as every school kid knows, underwent a similar 'transformation' after 9/11.
But on another level, it's actually very interesting -- a peek under the hood that shows how easy it us for a certain kind of liberal, the kind who never really soberly critiqued the US as part (indeed, the heart) of a system of domination, to fall back on religious belief in their nation's 'special mission' to democratize/civilize the globe.
It's a similar maneuver to the one performed by the anti-racist who describes blacks, in so many words, as oppressed, angelic exotics until he's mugged and swiftly becomes a firm believer in ethnic bantustans; his anti-racism was never very deep and somewhat cartoonish and so, it fell apart the first time a black person did something unpleasant to him.
Thompson shows his cards (and an odd sort of blockheadedness) at his moment:
**All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.**
This is nothing less than a smear job. Quite a few prominent figures on the left (including Chomsky, who Thompson mentions) managed to maintain more than one idea in their head at a time: yes, the elections showed the will of a segment of the Iraqi populace, no, the Bush admin shouldn't take credit because it was Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani's idea, no, it's not ideal to have elections while American bombers are destroying Iraqi cities and car bombers explode if front of recruiting stations, no, we shouldn't break open the champagne yet because the drama is very far from over.
I think Juan Cole described the situation best (paraphrasing): under the circumstances, the election wasn't a model for anything and may lead to profound trouble. The US may yet come to regret them.
This isn't **smirking** as Thompson insists but a simple acknowledgment of the diamond hard facts of the situation.
It's instructive that Thompson explicitly chooses the simpleton's happy road -- the elections were a triumph of 'people power' over fascism -- instead of the more difficult path of trying to work out the constantly changing twists and turns. After a while, for some, it becomes too difficult to maintain even the lightest of oppositional stances against the idea of American righteousness.
It would have been better if he'd just dispensed with the lengthly justifications (dragging in for full effect his civil rights CV, an almost inevitable move from these shifty graybeards who want you to know that even as they tearfully salute overflights of fighter jets, they still love 'diversity') and simply said that he's tired of debating with his neighbors and ready to settle in for a long winter's nap.
.d.