Narrowing it down this way makes it fairly easy to answer the questions posed at the start of the article:
"First, how is it that few liberals and no leftists in 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the most progressive President in American history, would or could airlift democracy to Vietnam, while many liberals and not a few leftists in 2003 believed that the most reactionary President since William McKinley could and would export democracy to Iraq?"
My answer would be that as the the government (not the culture) moves ever-rightward under the direction of the mainstream political parties, and the apparatus for flakking dissent has gotten more and more relentless and sophisticated, the stakes for remaining a high-status career liberal have just gotten really huge. It now requires that you say black is white in public, and at least seem to believe it deep in your soul, as Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens now do. When a high-status monkey jumps through this hoop, the rest follow, however inane the arguments are for doing so.
"Second, why did certain liberals who opposed the war in Iraq refuse to march against it . . .The reason they gave was that left-wing groups like ANSWER, which helped organize the antiwar rallies, failed to denounce Saddam's regime. Yet many of those who could not abide an alliance with ANSWER endorsed the war in Afghanistan--even though it was waged by a government that recently invaded three Caribbean countries"
By 'certain' here, I think the writer means a group whose number probably didn't exceed 3 digits nationwide in protests that attracted hundreds of thousands. Be that as it may, I appreciate the article pointing out the nauseating hypocrisy and contradictions with which the establishment left's preferences in tactical coaltions are fraught. But it then goes on to overtalk the whys and wherefores, as if it has some thing to do with the waxing and waning of idealism over the years. The whole ANSWER thing was about PR. The establishment left regards the general public as blindly patriotic, ignorant, fearful and mostly stupid and therefore assumed that if the anti-war movement was to gain traction it would have to sever its ties to anything radical. It's about as politically and historically meaningful as the suit and tie types who used to afflict gay politics with endless worry over drag queens at parades.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [this is an interesting piece, though I'm not
> sure I'm convinced - comments welcome]
>
> The Nation - September 26, 2005
> <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/robin>
>
>
> The Fear of the Liberals
> by COREY ROBIN
>
> [from the issue]
>
> It's the fourth anniversary of September 11, and
> Americans are getting restless about the war in
> Iraq. Republicans are challenging the President,
> activists and bloggers are pressing the Democrats
> and liberal hawks are reconsidering their support
> for the war. Everyone, it seems, is asking
> questions.
>
> Two questions, however, have not been asked,
> perhaps because they might actually help us move
> beyond where we are and where we've been. First,
> how is it that few liberals and no leftists in
> 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the
> most progressive President in American history,
> would or could airlift democracy to Vietnam,
> while many liberals and not a few leftists in
> 2003 believed that the most reactionary President
> since William McKinley could and would export
> democracy to Iraq?
>
> Second, why did certain liberals who opposed the
> war in Iraq refuse to march against it? The
> reason they gave was that left-wing groups like
> ANSWER, which helped organize the antiwar
> rallies, failed to denounce Saddam's regime. Yet
> many of those who could not abide an alliance
> with ANSWER endorsed the war in Afghanistan--even
> though it was waged by a government that recently
> invaded three Caribbean countries, funded dirty
> wars in Latin America and backed the government
> of Guatemala, the only regime in the Western
> Hemisphere condemned by a UN-sponsored truth
> commission for committing acts of genocide.
> Politics, of course, often entails an unhappy
> choice of associations. But if the deeds of the
> US government need not stop liberals from
> supporting the war in Afghanistan, why should the
> words--words, mind you, not deeds--of leftists
> deprive the antiwar movement of these very same
> liberals' support?
>
> Both questions register a fundamental shift among
> liberals, and on the left, since the 1960s: from
> skepticism of to faith in US power, and from
> faith in to skepticism of popular movements.
> During the Vietnam era, liberals and leftists
> believed not only in social justice but also in
> mass protest. Whether the cause was democracy at
> home or liberation abroad, men and women
> afflicted by oppression had to organize
> themselves for freedom. Yes, some of yesterday's
> activists were blind to coercion within these
> movements, and others joined elite cadres bombing
> their way to liberation. Still, the animating
> faith of the 1960s was in the democratic
> capacities of ordinary men and women, making it
> difficult for liberals and leftists to believe in
> conquering armies from abroad or shock troops
> from on high.
>
> Many liberals, and some leftists, no longer hold
> these views. Their faith is guided not by the
> light of justice but by the darkness of evil: by
> the tyranny of dictators, the genocide of ethnic
> cleansers and the terrorism of Islamist radicals.
> Despite their differences--some of these liberals
> and leftists support the war in Iraq, others do
> not; some are partial to popular movements,
> particularly those opposing anti-American
> governments, while others favor constitutional
> regimes, particularly those supporting the United
> States--theirs is a liberalism, as the late
> Harvard scholar Judith Shklar put it in a
> pioneering essay in 1989, that seeks to ward off
> the "summum malum" (worst evil) rather than to
> install a "summum bonum" (highest good).
> Reversing Augustine's dictum that there is no
> such thing as evil--evil being only the absence
> of good--today's liberal believes there is only
> evil and progress is measured by the distance we
> put between ourselves and that evil.
>
> Hostility to popular protest and indulgence of
> American power follow naturally from this
> position. Mass movements, liberals claim, are
> blind to evil or apologize for it. Sometimes they
> actively court it. In their reckless pursuit of
> utopia, they march men and women to the gulag or
> into shooting galleries of terrorism and civil
> war. Only a politics of restraint can shield us
> from the temptations of violence. While such a
> philosophy would seem to militate against George
> W. Bush's empire, many liberals have concluded
> that evil in the world is so titanic that only US
> power can deliver us from it.
>
> Straddling minimalism at home and maximalism
> abroad, many of today's liberals are inspired by
> fear. This "liberalism of fear," as Shklar called
> it, is not to be confused with the terror
> Americans felt after 9/11 or with Democratic
> timidity in the face of Republican success. No,
> today's liberal believes in fear as an idea--that
> it inflicts such suffering on men and women that
> we can assess governments by the degree to which
> they minimize it. Fear is the gold standard, the
> universal measure, of liberal morality: Whatever
> rouses fear is bad, whatever diminishes it is
> less bad. In the words of Michael Ignatieff,
> liberalism "rests less on hope than on fear, less
> on optimism about the human capacity for good
> than on dread of the human capacity for evil,
> less on a vision of man as maker of his history
> than of man the wolf toward his own kind."
>
> Though leftists in the sixties certainly spoke of
> fear, they viewed it not as a foundation but as
> an obstacle, a hindrance in the struggle for
> freedom and equality. Whites resisted civil
> rights, James Baldwin observed, because they were
> possessed by a "sleeping terror" of ceding status
> and privilege to blacks. Blacks, in turn, were
> like "the Jews in Egypt, who really wished to get
> to the Promised Land but were afraid of the
> rigors of the journey." The goal was to eliminate
> or overcome fear, to take one step closer to the
> Promised Land. This required not only courage but
> also an ideologically grounded hope for progress.
> Without an answering vision of social justice, no
> one would make the journey.
>
> Many contemporary liberals have given up that
> hope, turning what a previous generation saw as
> an impediment into a path. Fear is no longer an
> obstacle but a crutch, a negative truth from
> which liberalism derives its confidence and
> strength. "What liberalism requires," according
> to Shklar, "is the possibility of making the evil
> of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its
> political practices and prescriptions." Liberal
> values like the rule of law and democracy obtain
> their worth not from reason or rights--which many
> liberals no longer believe in as foundational
> principles--but from the cruelty and fear
> illiberal states and movements routinely inflict
> upon helpless men and women.
>
> Today's liberals are attracted to fear for many
> reasons, including revulsion at the crimes of the
> last century and the miserable state of the
> postcolonial world. But one of the main reasons
> is their belief that fear possesses an easy
> intelligibility. Fear requires no deep
> philosophy, no leap of reason, to establish its
> evil: Everyone knows what it is and that it is
> bad. "Because the fear of systematic cruelty is
> so universal," Shklar wrote, "moral claims based
> on its prohibition have an immediate appeal and
> can gain recognition without much argument." Once
> liberals realize that they are "more afraid of
> being cruel"--and of others being cruel--"than of
> anything else," Richard Rorty has argued, they
> need not worry about the grounds of their beliefs.
>
> How did a philosophy so averse to utopia and
> violence get hitched to the American empire? I
> don't just mean here the war in Iraq, about which
> liberals disagreed, but the larger project of
> using the American military to spread democracy
> and human rights. How did liberals, who've spent
> the better part of three decades attacking
> left-wing adventurism, wind up supporting the
> greatest adventure of our time?
>
> The answer is that liberals need fear: to justify
> their principles, to warn us of what happens when
> liberalism is abandoned. And so they are driven
> abroad to confront the tyrannies that make life
> miserable elsewhere, in order to derive
> confidence in their own, admittedly imperfect but
> infinitely better, regimes. A souped-up version
> of Churchill's adage that democracy is the worst
> possible government except for all the others,
> the liberalism of fear sends writers and fighters
> to foreign lands in search of themselves and
> their beleaguered faith. In the words of
> Ignatieff:
>
>
>
=== message truncated ===
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