ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER:

The Best Dissent Has Never Been Anti-American (Michael Kazin, February 9, 2003, Washington Post)

As the U.S. military prepares for war, millions of Americans are seeking a way to stop it. Hundreds of thousands of them have attended national demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco. Local protest--on campuses, in churches and by labor union members--is broader and louder than at any time since the Vietnam War, more than three decades ago. Most Democrats running for president, eager to keep step with the party's base, have warned the White House against rushing into war.

But the American left, the natural vehicle for opponents of imperial overreach, remains a tiny persuasion -- and a sharply divided one at that. The organizers of the recent Washington and San Francisco marches refuse to say anything critical of Saddam Hussein; many belong to the Workers World Party, whose stated goal is "solidarity of all the workers and oppressed against this criminal imperialist system." That viewpoint dismays liberals such as philosopher and editor Michael Walzer, who calls for a "decent" left that would never apologize for tyrants. But whatever their views on Iraq, no one in the current peace movement has put forth a moral vision that might unite and sustain it beyond the precipice of war.

Progressives once had such a vision, and they derived it from unimpeachable sources -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They articulated American ideals -- of social equality, individual liberty and grass-roots democracy -- and accused governing elites of betraying them in practice. Through most of U.S. history, this brand of patriotism was indispensable to the cause of social change. It made the protests and rebellions of leftists comprehensible to their fellow citizens and helped inscribe those movements within a common national narrative.

Well, except that social equality and grass-roots democracy aren't actually American ideals, that they're antithetical to individual freedom, and that they're perfectly consistent with an unthinking pacifism. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2003 10:23 PM