IT'S ALL SO CLEAR FROM WITHIN THE IVORY TOWERS:

Leaving the Left behind: a review of What's Left--How Liberals Lost Their Way By Nick Cohen, Power and the Idealists By Paul Berman & The Good Fight By Peter Beinart (Richard King, March 07, 2007, The Australian)

[I]deas are important, and while most of the factionalism that exists on the Left can be explained by Freud's notion of the narcissism of small differences, there is one dispute that is far from small which now more than ever needs careful consideration, especially in the light of Iraq and its place in the wider war on terror.

In fact, it is less a clash on the Left, than it is a clash between two Lefts. That it is taking place, not in the Spanish Republic, but in the republic of letters, shouldn't blind us to its importance.

First, the recent background to the debate. The September 11 terrorist attacks on the US were a catalyst in the proper sense: they accelerated a reaction rather than set a reaction in train.

To those of us on the liberal Left already concerned with the nature and direction of much left-wing and liberal thought, 9/11 was the final straw. Even before the dust had settled, some on the Left had come to the conclusion that the suicide hijackers were anti-imperialists attempting to avenge the wretched of the earth, all of whose woes were self-evidently reducible to the US's support for Israel.

Bin Ladenists, it was said, were the fish that swim in the sea of Islamic discontent, while the planes that felled the twin towers were chickens coming home to roost. The metaphors were mixed but the argument was clear: the US -- the capital of capital -- only had itself to blame.

These were the usual arguments put about by the usual suspects (Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, John Pilger), but the remarkable thing was how quickly they spread from the radical Left to the Left in general.

Chomsky's pamphlet, 9/11, (published with unseemly haste) was largely ignored in the serious journals, but proved a bestseller nonetheless. A new genre of books emerged, many of them peddling inane conspiracies.

From the claim that the CIA created al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden, to the idea that the attacks on New York and Washington were carried out by Israeli intelligence, 9/11 and the war on terror have proven a happy hunting ground for those who would seek to cast America as at best incompetent and at worst malevolent.

The low point came in 2004 with the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, a polished feature-length documentary written and directed by Michael Moore. An exploration of the political machinations that led the US from 9/11 to the war in Afghanistan to the war in Iraq, this film was the shabbiest propaganda.

To the extent that it has a central thesis, it is that 9/11 provided the pretext for the Bush family and its business associates to begin rearranging the Middle East in such a way as would benefit their interests. This became, if not the party line, then certainly a very popular view.

Never mind that Moore's main points didn't seem to hang together, nor even to stand up in isolation. Suddenly, you couldn't move in the pub for people anxious to tell you, loudly, that the war on terror was all about oil.

Such conspicuous masochism in the face of sadism was, for many, depressing to witness, and some on the Left began to demur. In 2003, Washington-based journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens resigned from The Nation magazine, for which he had written for 20 years, claiming that it had become an echo chamber for those who believed the US attorney-general was a greater threat than bin Laden.

George Packer, whose brilliant The Assassins' Gate brought home the full horror of life in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, still found time to criticise the Democrats for their provincial isolationism, while Peter Beinart, in The New Republic, argued for a revival of Cold War liberalism.

The most comprehensive and coherent statement of this anti-totalitarian Left was advanced in April 2006 in the form of the Euston Manifesto, a 3000-word document put together by a group of journalists and academics in Britain. Though neutral on the question of the Iraq invasion, the manifesto is nonetheless firm on the need for humanitarian intervention once "a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed".

And while its overall tone is conciliatory, its authors are not above a swipe at the kind of leftist who regards Islamic fascism as a form of resistance from within the imperium: "We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently 'understand', reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy -- regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those Left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces."

One of the authors was British political journalist Nick Cohen, whose new book, What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, is an exploration of the intellectual conditions that allowed such apologetic explanations to take a hold of the liberal mind.

One of the significant factors, he suggests, was the disappearance of the 1960s Left into the universities, where a politics of difference came to replace an emphasis on class and social justice. This led to a form of multiculturalism in which movements in other parts of the world are regarded as hopelessly and wonderfully exotic and not to be judged or analysed. Suddenly, to criticise other cultures was to be guilty of a kind of cultural imperialism.

"If the dictatorial leaders of a foreign state or radical movement, or the usually unelected leaders of a 'community' or religious group said that their culture demanded the oppression of women and homosexuals, for example, 21st-century liberals were tripped over by the thought that it was racist to oppose them," Cohen writes.

The flip-side of this debased coinage, he argues, is that democrats, feminists and socialists in the poor world get no support from their Western comrades.

This is particularly and most painfully evident in the Left's inability to support those Iraqis attempting to build a civil society and to condemn in a more than perfunctory way the wicked campaign of terror and mayhem being waged by the so-called insurgency.

For Cohen, this is the clinching disgrace: "For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the Left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more."

Cohen echoes Hannah Arendt's theory that terror is the essence of totalitarianism and this is the pivotal insight of the anti-totalitarian Left. Indeed, the notion of a war on terror only makes sense when set within a liberal context.

One curious thing you can't help notice is that the Right never abandoned the fight against Communism despite a string of alternately inept and despicable Democratic presidents. Yet the Left packs it in every time a Republican is elected. Makes it hard, as does so much else, to take them seriously.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2007 8:08 PM