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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

One for the files

The last thing I read before turning out the lights in our hotel last night:  on Lebanon and the left, by Hazem Saghieh.

Posted by Michael on 08/15 at 10:01 AM
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Monday, August 14, 2006

Packin’ up

We’re off for a few days to deposit Nick at college.  When he was a freshman, he and I did the traditional father-son knife fight.  When he was a sophomore, we bundled him into his new dorm with terrifying efficiency, and I vowed that this year, “we’re going to drop off Nick and drive back in one day, slowing down to 30 mph as we approach his dorm and throwing him out of the passenger side with a sleeping bag as he does a drop-and-roll.” Wish us luck!  Except that we’re not going to approach his dorm, because he’s not living in one.  Yes, that’s right, now that he’s a junior, Nick is living in an apartment for the first time.  Feel free to stop by and offer him apartment-cleaning tips at any point during the school year!  I know he’ll appreciate it.

People often ask if I give Nick any fatherly advice when we drop him off at college.  Well, actually no they don’t ask that.  But I do need a segue to the folk tale with which I will leave you all until we return.

“Nick,” I told him two years ago, “whatever else you do in college, watch out for right-wing attack dogs.  You mustn’t take them home, not even if they follow you down the street and beg for food.  Remember the story of what happened to the ‘liberal’ journalist in the PC wars:  one day in 1991 he came across a right-wing attack dog who was nosing around the dumpsters in the back of the offices of the Dartmouth Review, barking about all this crazy deconstruction and radical feminism that leftist professors were foisting on unsuspecting American undergraduates.  ‘Gee, I hate deconstruction and radical feminism too,’ thought the liberal journalist.  ‘This right-wing attack dog doesn’t seem so bad.’ So he brought the dog home, gave him a big, ten-thousand-word spread in the Atlantic Monthly, a regular spot on a half-hour cable opinion show, and a plate of leftover steak scraps.  ‘I’ll call him “Fluffy,”’ said the liberal journalist.  But imagine the journalist’s surprise a decade later, when his dog Fluffy began barking that liberal journalists were ‘traitors’ and ‘soft on terrorists who want to destroy America’!  ‘But I fed you and gave you a home,’ said the liberal journalist, mortally wounded.  ‘I took care of you.  I even got your picture on the cover of that national newsmagazine.’

“‘Yes, you did all that,’ replied Fluffy.  ‘But what did you expect?  You knew I was a right-wing attack dog.’”

Nick listened very carefully.  He’s a good kid.

Posted by Michael on 08/14 at 06:00 AM
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Saturday, August 12, 2006

A shorter post

Marty Peretz on Ned Lamont:

I also believe that Lieberman will probably be helped by the case of the would-be airplane terrorists arrested in Britain. This episode shows that Islamofascism is a real threat to civilized life and that it must be fought severely and wholeheartedly. I don’t know if Ned Lamont has thought seriously about this. It seems so remote from life in Greenwich. But, if he plays true to form, he might suggest taking the whole issue before the United Nations. That would be a gracious setting. After all, Lamont can no longer avail himself of the country club he quit on the eve of his primary campaign.

And Marty should know, because marrying into money makes you think seriously about threats to civilized life.  Unlike those country club liberals and their fancy-pants “United Nations.”

Posted by Michael on 08/12 at 12:15 PM
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Friday, August 11, 2006

Leftover business V

Whew!  Finally, the end of Leftover Business Week is here.  If you’ve read the whole thing—and even if you haven’t!—thanks for sticking around.  This blog will be taking a short break in the first half of next week while we pack up and drive Nick to college, but I’ll be back after that with the story of The Trip to Syracuse, in which Jamie and I encountered “facilitated communication” for the first time.  You think this left-liberal stuff is difficult and controversial?  Pah.  You ain’t seen nothin’ ‘til you’ve seen the debate in the education/ disability community over “facilitated communication.” (And I wanted to check it out for myself! Is that so wrong?)

I have to admit that I got the idea for this week’s posts partly from a friend in the Left Business Observer listserv, who informed me that my June posting on Chomsky and the Balkans had earned me the distinction (which I shared with some blogger named “Atrios") of being called a “halfwit punk.” But you know what?  I’m a grownup.  I can take it.  After all, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never . . . ow! Never mind.

What really stung me, though, was being called a “Dissent lib.” Because it’s true, you know—I have indeed written for Dissent in the past, most recently in 2003, and I identify largely with the democratic left that makes up Dissent’s left wing.  The essay I wrote for Dissent was titled “Citizenship and Disability,” and unless I’m missing something, I haven’t seen many Dissent essays on disability.  In the course of the article, I took a crack at revising Nancy Fraser’s Habermasian argument that ideally, societies should be structured toward the goal of enhancing the “participatory parity” of their citizens.  (This doesn’t mean that everybody has to participate.  It means that people should not be barred from participating to the extent of their abilities and desires.) Fraser, you might recall from one of this blog’s least fun Arbitrary But Fun Fridays ever, distinguishes between “the politics of recognition” and “the politics of distribution,” and I’ve long thought that disability issues involve these two kinds of politics so intimately as to blur the distinction:

Fraser has shown convincingly that the politics of recognition and redistribution offer a productive way to think about feminism: cultural politics with regard to body images or sexual harassment, for example, are not to be understood as distractions from “real” politics that address comparative worth or the minimum wage. Rather, recognition politics have consequences for the redistribution of social goods and resources even though they cannot be reduced to their redistributive effects. And since many left intellectuals in the 1990s were all too willing to think of politics as a zero-sum game in which any attention paid to multiculturalism had to come at the expense of democratic socialism and vice versa, Fraser’s work seems to offer a way for the left to champion a progressive tax code and an end to racial profiling at the same time.

It is striking, nonetheless, that so few leftists have understood disability in these terms. Disability is not the only area of social life in which the politics of recognition are inseparable from the politics of redistribution; other matters central to citizenship, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice, are every bit as complex. Nonetheless, our society’s representations of disability are intricately tied to, and sometimes the very basis for, our public policies for “administering” disability. And when we contemplate, in these terms, the history of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, we find a history in which “representation” takes on a double valence: first, in that people who were deemed incapable of representing themselves were therefore represented by a socio-medical apparatus that defined—or, in a social-constructionist sense, created—the category of “feeblemindedness”; and second, in the sense that the visual and rhetorical representations of “feebleminded” persons then set the terms for public policy. One cannot plausibly narrate a comprehensive history of ideas and practices of national citizenship in the post-Civil War United States without examining public policy regarding disability, especially mental disability, all the more especially when mental disability was then mapped onto certain immigrant populations who scored poorly on intelligence tests and were thereby pseudo-scientifically linked to criminality. And what of reproductive rights? By 1927, the spurious but powerful linkages among disability, immigration, poverty, and criminality provided the Supreme Court with sufficient justification for declaring involuntary sterilization legal under the Constitution.

With that argument on board, I then insisted that disability is (or should be) central to any theory of “participatory parity”:

First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty in Fraser’s work, in the sense that it names both the state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge whether we’re getting there. For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in which all citizens participate as legal and moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies enhance equal participation in democratic processes. Yet at the same time, the state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in order to determine what its democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is central to the practical workings of any democratic polity. One of the tasks required of democrats is precisely this: to extend the promise of democracy to previously excluded individuals and groups some of whom might have a substantially different understanding of “participatory parity” than that held by previously dominant groups and individuals.

Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability? Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating the value and the purpose of participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it’s a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what “participatory parity” itself means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal design.

Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with university humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even after September 11) why one society might be “better” than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I think there’s a very good reason to extend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity. As Jamie reminds me daily, both deliberately and unwittingly, most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we’d passed and implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human dignity and human rights, and I can also say this: Without a sufficient theoretical and practical account of disability, we can have no account of democracy worthy of the name.

Do pardon me for all the self-citation, but I’m summing up a big long week here and I have to unload all my cards.

So, then, in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (which should be out real soon), I argue that even though I don’t see the utility of arguing for “innate” rights, I do agree that the idea of universal human rights, as Gandhi once said of Western civilization, would be a good idea; and I write that all humans born should be considered to have equal claim to basic rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation, and that we should endow each other with these rights, knowing full well that they are alienable and that we must work to interpret and to sustain them.  And that none of the above is self-evident, and never has been.  My proposal, then, is that these human rights, as enshrined in the 1948 United Nations Declaration, should accrue to every human born, such that our entitlement to food, shelter, education, health care and political representation is not contingent on our ability to pay for such things.  And that every form of discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability constitutes a violation of the principle of participatory parity. 

Now, I know that I don’t live in such a society myself.  No society that lacks universal health care can plausibly be said to consider medical treatment a human right.  But this framework is a useful regulative ideal, I think, shaky and contingent as it is.  It entails a defense of progressive taxation of income and investments, of course, both to prevent the accumulation of great wealth in few hands (and the consequent degeneration of democracy into plutocracy, ahem) and to create a social welfare state whose task it is to ensure that the life chances of individuals are not radically dependent on mere accidents of birth.  On foreign policy, it entails a liberal internationalism—including the kinds of liberal internationalist thinking about war that brought you the Geneva Convention and “just war” theory, and the liberal internationalist thinking about peace that brought you “The Responsibility to Protect.” But here’s where things get difficult (really! they’ve been easy up to this point), because it’s one thing to oppose violent, fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and theocratic forces abroad as at home, and it’s quite another to try to figure out what to do in parts of the world, like Iraq, where all the available options seem to be bad ones. As Harold Meyerson notes, after shredding Peter Beinart’s A Fighting Faith into little teeny bits in the most recent issue of Dissent,

But as with Vietnam, the question of how to end the war doesn’t just divide liberals. It divides liberal internationalists, because liberal internationalism doesn’t guarantee a common set of responses, because liberal internationalism is an incomplete guide at best to how the United States should conduct itself in the world. I have liberal internationalist comrades of long standing at both this magazine and at the New Republic who, swept along by the moral claims of Kanan Makiya or the moral repulsiveness of Saddam Hussein, abandoned their political judgment to back a war that has led to predictable catastrophe. (I say “predictable” because a number of liberal internationalists predicted it.) We agree, my liberal warhawk friends and I, on the importance of liberal internationalism. Apparently, we don’t always agree on what it means, or even, at times, what it is.

But if this sounds like wrestling a fog bank, well, welcome to the world: liberal internationalism is no more or less stable a term than liberal democracy.  It has to be argued over.  (Among other things, at the moment this requires liberal internationalists to argue, as Meyerson does, that the war in Iraq did great damage to, among other things, the ideals of liberal internationalism.) As I write in Liberal Arts about my universal-rights state,

We have not yet devised the political means to realize this utopian vision, and perhaps we never will:  utopia, to date, is a place we know only by way of speculative fiction.  But over the years, as we’ve developed family/clan relations, city-states, empires, kingdoms, caliphates, constitutional monarchies, theocracies, military dictatorships, communist autocracies and liberal democracies, we’ve come to learn that liberal democracies stand the best chance of realizing some approximation of that ideal, and—just as importantly—the best chance of changing their collective minds, so to speak, about how to approximate the ideal as they go along.  Because they allow for plural, disparate, multiply competing political constituencies and modes of advancing political argument, liberal democracies seem best suited to realizing the kind of social self-reflexivity necessary for any significant political—or personal—change of understanding with regard to human rights.

But universalism with regard to rights and liberal internationalism with regard to foreign policy will perform a very useful function for any useful left: they will absolutely prevent you from expressing even the slightest degree of “solidarity” with Hezbollah, or the Iraqi resistance, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, simply on the grounds that they are opposing the Hegemon, the Empire.  And it will save you from the contortions involved in blanket defenses of guys with very mixed records, like Castro: you don’t have to say, “Castro improved the quality of life for the poor and for racial minorities, so I defend Cuban political repression and homophobia as revolutionary anti-imperialist political repression and homophobia as opposed to reactionary imperialist political repression and homophobia.” You can simply use the single universal-rights standard and apply it everywhere—even (or especially!) at home, wherever your home may be.  Societies in which women are educated are that much better than societies in which women are barred from attending school.  Societies that repress (or execute) gay men are that much worse than societies that do not.  You get the idea.

And you can apply it to all the multiple orthogonal axes you like: employment and labor law, transportation policy, taxation, education, and of course disability in all its many guises.  For environmental protection, you have also to consider our obligations to future human generations as well as nonhuman entities, but I’ll turn that one over to Chris Clarke.

And so, friends, Romans, countrymen, just to tie off one last loose end, this is why I got upset with that Mr. Chomsky last June, even though I’m well aware that he’s OK with things like participatory parity.  In his June 19 New Statesman interview, he’d said, in re the massacre of thousands of civilians at Srebrenica,

not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it.

Lately I’ve been reading a great deal of Chomsky’s recent work, so this little item came across the transom at just the wrong time, and I went after it with all the frustration and sense of dismay with which I’d been perusing his writings on the Balkans (this time, with the help of some real live experts on the Balkans).  For someone like me who just loved the way Chomsky would take down apologists for U.S.-supported death squads and proxy fascists in Central America twenty years ago, reading the Balkans stuff has been a depressing experience.  And yet, the myth persists that people like me take exception to Chomsky at such moments only because, as one of my commenters suggested in June, we’re missing some internal organs:

A lot of faux lefties hate Chomsky, because Chomsky says the things they want to say, but are too gutless to.

Well, as I hope I made clear on Wednesday, I don’t hate Chomsky.  Not at all.  I just think he’s been wrong about the Balkans, being mortal and all, and that he’s lately fallen into a curious habit of exaggerating U.S. actions, from the 1998 bombing of al-Shifa (a crime for which there should have been a U.N. investigation and U.S. reparations, as Ken Roth argued, but not really far worse than 9/11, as Chomsky repeatedly insists) to the brief interruption of Pakistani aid convoys to Afghanistan, beyond the point at which a serious moral accounting of such things is possible.

And now that this week is over, I hope there isn’t anyone out there who thinks that somewhere inside my progressive-left body there is a hidden Bérubé yearning to breathe free and say, “Milosevic never knew about Srebrenica, and he was horrified when he heard about it,” and all that’s preventing his emergence is my candy-assed faux-left superego.  Because to date, I have refrained from saying such things not because I am too timid to do so but because I have absolutely no desire to do so.

It really is that simple.

Chomsky, I will note, is not a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.  However, when Chomsky says, “Milosevic didn’t know about Srebrenica, and was horrified when he heard about it,” I do object, and I think you should too.  Quite apart from the fact that this is a speculative remark that takes Milosevic’s report at face value (something we would never do with Bush or Cheney, I would hope), it is completely gratuitous.  As many readers pointed out to me, Chomsky was making the larger point that if Milosevic can be tried for war crimes, so too can recent U.S. presidents.  Very well, then!  There are lots of good ways to make that point.  You can, for instance, say

if Milosevic can be tried for war crimes, so too can recent U.S. presidents.

That’s straightforward and to the point, and it doesn’t involve any poor-innocent-Slobodan noises. 

As I tried to make clear in my initial post, I don’t think Chomsky himself has gone around the bend on this one, the way Michael Parenti, Diana Johnstone, and Ed Herman have.  But because of Chomsky’s iconic status on one wing of the left, I worry that over the next couple of years, we’re going to hear thousands of good-hearted, well-meaning people saying, “As Chomsky pointed out, Milosevic didn’t even know about Srebrenica, and was horrified when he heard about it,” in the belief that this constitutes the One True Left position on the matter.  And you know what?  I have good reason to worry about that.  I have, in fact, already come across people on blogs saying, “turns out they never did have any evidence with which to prosecute Milosevic.” That’s just how these things tend to work.

And yet, I have to admit that I am not a very good Chomsky critic.  I just keep messing things up.  I keep thinking that people will see what’s wrong with trying to clear Milosevic’s name here and there—or, more accurately, with merely quoting sources that try to clear Milosevic’s name here and there—and I proceed accordingly, sometimes too breezily.  Personally, I just don’t see the point of the Milosevic-never-knew argument at all.  There are all kinds of reasons, procedural and practical, why people on the left might have opposed NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, none of which involve any attempt to downplay or deny Serbian atrocities in the 1990s.  (It did, after all, lead one set of liberal internationalists to try to make a “humanitarian intervention” argument for war in Iraq, and even though Ken Roth smacked that one down hard, it must be factored into, cough, any serious moral accounting of the consequences of Kosovo.) And I thought Ian Williams covered most of those reasons quite well (and quite fairly, given his own qualified support for the intervention) in the review I cited in June.

But when I came upon those remarks of Chomsky’s that seemed to downplay or deny Serbian atrocities in the 1990s, I charged that he was peddling “a pack of lies.” This was an especially stupid mistake on my part, rhetorically speaking, because it pretty well insured that some people wouldn’t read any further, or that they would place me squarely in the Obsessive Chomsky-Bashers Camp alongside all manner of foul right-wing apologists for thugs as bad as Milosevic or worse (David Horowitz the Pinochet apologist included).  I’ve been around this block once or twice before, and I should have known better.  For the record, then, for “a pack of lies” I will substitute “a series of misleading claims that leave a very mistaken impression of the conflict in the Balkans since the breakup of Yugoslavia” (other language can be found here), and I’ll refer those of you who are interested in such things to a detailed and thoughtful review to which Chomsky has never really responded adequately, except to note its author’s “depravity” and “really impressive level of vulgarity and disciplined subordination to power.”

In the meantime, I’ll repeat what I said six weeks ago: I would be so much happier if Chomsky were to take a moment to criticize the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.  I think that would be just great.  Because, in my humble opinion, the left should have no part in such an enterprise, any more than we would take part in the International Committee to Defend Augusto Pinochet.

Or the International Committee to Defend Henry Kissinger.

Or the International Committee to Promote the Triumph of the Iraqi Maquis.

Or the International Committee to Point Out that Osama Bin Laden is Higher on the Moral Scale than Bush/Cheney.

Or the International Committee to Assert That We Are All Hezbollah Now.

Because that’s not the kind of thing a universal-rights, liberal-internationalist left does.  For people who think that “the left” consists of opposing the Empire and supporting anyone or anything who does likewise, the argument of this week’s series has been just this: another left is possible.

_____________

Postscript

I promised in Monday’s comments that I would end this series with an example of a time when someone to my left was right and I was entirely wrong.  It’s a small example, but a telling one.  Because the occupational hazard of democratic lefties like me is that sometimes, we hop on the bandwagon of potentially charismatic Democrats before we know where they’re taking us.

Barack Obama, for example.

People who’ve been reading this blog ever since it was a young newsie yelling “extra!” on the corner of Main and Elm will remember that it once dreamed of the Obama / Bérubé Democratic ticket, so intently that at one point in 2004, some blog entries consisted of nothing but “Obama + Bérubé” written over and over again in different styles of handwriting.  (This is before they discovered “kerning” and proportional spacing on blogs.)

Well, after Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Paul Street at Z was kind of skeptical about the guy, and just over two years ago, I got all huffy at Mr. Street, largely because he said things like “the world view enunciated in Obama’s address comes from a very different, bourgeois-individualist and national-narcissist moral and ideological space.” At the time, I said I would have preferred something more like “Obama’s speech had its moments, and was clearly meant to represent the progressive wing of the Democratic party, but before everybody swoons too hard, let’s remind ourselves that there were a few passages in there that merit criticism from the left,” and I thought Street’s response smacked of lefty purism.  I think the “bourgeois-individualist” line got me.

But you know what?  Paul Street was right to be skeptical about Obama, and I was wrong to give him grief.  If he’ll accept my apology, great.  If not, so be it, but I offer it sincerely nonetheless.

Posted by Michael on 08/11 at 09:33 AM
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Thursday, August 10, 2006

Leftover business IV

Today it’s Ed Herman Day on Leftover Business Week, and, as they say, this time it’s personal.  From Herman’s April 2003 essay, “Cruise Missile Left, Part 2: The Anti-ANSWER Crusade,” there’s this little bit of nonsense about ANSWER’s refusal to let Michael Lerner speak at the San Francisco antiwar rally on February 16, 2003:

The Corn-Cooper-Berube phalanx posted a column on The Nation’s web site reiterating Lerner’s charges, and got up an Internet petition doing the same.  This petition was quickly featured on David Horowitz’s web site, and Berube participated in a debate on Horowitz’s site on the crimes of ANSWER. As Horowitz is a far-right fanatic, doing business with him doesn’t seem like a means of constructive discussion of the problems of the protest movement, although the same may be said of Corn’s exchanges on the subject with Bill O’Reilly on Fox. Berube has reacted strongly against the charge of being in league with Horowitz, but as Alexander Cockburn points out, “We find it pretty ripe that Berube should whine about guilt by association after he and Cooper and Corn have spent months smearing the peace movement because the Workers World Party and ANSWER have been organizing demonstrations.”

Yep, that’s the kind of nonsense that got dished out three years ago by the “radical” “left” when some of us on the democratic left suggested that having an antiwar movement led by what Dennis Perrin calls “a Stalinoid sect that has, from what I can see, zero contact with the working people it claims to champion” wasn’t a good idea—if, that is, you wanted to broaden the antiwar movement.  Likewise, banning Lerner from the rally, on the grounds that he’d criticized ANSWER in the past (even though he’d urged people to attend the protest), wasn’t a smart move if you wanted to appeal to progressive Jews and their friends in the antiwar movement.  And so we got a little taste, back then, of what the “we are all Hezbollah now” left would look like today.

Interestingly, almost every word in Herman’s paragraph is false (or, if you prefer, highly misleading).  David Corn, Marc Cooper, and I are not a “phalanx”; we are a “troika.” And yet Corn wrote his Nation essay all by himself, which is why it carries his byline.  I read Corn’s column the day it appeared, wrote the pro-Lerner/ anti-ANSWER petition and sent it to Cooper, who knows more people than I do.  None of us, of course, had any contact with Horowitz, though a Workers World Party member passed the word to Alexander Cockburn that I had actually collaborated with Horowitz (“Berubé then enlisted the aid of arch-right-winger David Horowitz to publicize the petition on his website”), and Cockburn, vigilant as always, published a version of the charge in Counterpunch.  But how did Horowitz get wind of Corn’s column and the followup petition, you ask?  Why, with his very own computer, which he often uses to access the InterTubes!  (Back then, U.No. would steal stuff from other sites all the time, and “republish” it on FrontPage without authors’ knowledge or consent.) In my first debate with U.No., I insisted that ANSWER did not in fact speak for the antiwar movement.  Addressing my FrontPage interlocutors directly, I said:

Personally, I believe the neo-Stalinist wingnuts are your best friends (and there’s even a chance that David and Ronald [Radosh] know many of them by name, from their former lives), in the following sense: I don’t think even the FrontPage right could de-legitimate antiwar rallies quite so thoroughly as the WWP can—even though you would surely make a mighty attempt even if Miss Manners and Mister Rogers were leading the rallies.

But when we talk about the WWP we’re talking about perhaps 50-100 far-leftists who have no credibility or influence among serious people, and who have already been repudiated—even by Z Magazine and anarchist groups. . . .  So far, the vast majority of anti-war protestors have turned out despite the politics of ANSWER, not because of them—which is why opposition to ANSWER has grown so strong in so many quarters, and why so many leftists are now referring to ANSWER as International AOWCUTGDPF, or “Authoritarian Opportunists Who Cozy Up to Genocidal Dictators—for Peace.”

. . . In the larger scheme of things, there’s simply no need to take up torches and pitchforks against fifty foolish far-leftists; five years from now they will be the stuff of trivia questions, whereas our invasion of Iraq will have had all manner of repercussions throughout the world.

This is what Herman and Cockburn called “doing business with” Horowitz, folks.  Back then, if you criticized ANSWER you were charged with “smearing the peace movement.” So I’m not inviting those fellows to my big Chairman Mao Birthday Party this December, either.

And why did I debate Horowitz in FrontPage in the first place?  For precisely the same reason I debated Herman in Z, and with pretty much the same results.  I just believe in doing these things.  I’m not very bright that way.

(Oh, and just for the record: back then, it was routinely charged that the Cruise Missile Left was trying to “ban” ANSWER from the movement.  This, too, is false.  As I said repeatedly at the time, every mass movement has its fringe-y wingnuts, and we are certainly entitled to ours.  That goes for Nudists Against the War, too.  The question, instead, was whether ANSWER should lead the damn thing.  Anyway, I’m glad to see that ANSWER has now been consigned to a properly marginal position on the left, the position it actually occupies.  Corn, Cooper and I could’ve used a little help three years ago, but that’s OK.  But shame on Herman and Cockburn for stumping for the neo-Stalinist sect for so long.)

Now, it’s true that I am not a very good debater.  In Monday’s comments, Ben Alpers noted that I was being “too generous about the Euston Manifesto crowd.” Last year, Dennis Perrin said that I was “much too fucking generous to David Horowitz.” (“Even when he castigates the panhandler, a wink and a nod follow. Is this 21st century liberalism—giving domestic fascists the benefit of the doubt?”) And a colleague once complained to me that my reply to Mark Bauerlein’s boundary 2 review of The Employment of English was “way too generous.” So I see that people have finally divined my salient character flaw.

Because, I admit, I was way too generous to Ed Herman in the Z debate.  I never dreamed that people would cite that debate, years later, as the definitive moment in which Herman pwned Bérubé, and if I had, well . . . let’s just say that all of this would have been much easier four years ago (and much more fun!) if I’d had a blog.  Talking back to people on their own home websites inevitably entails letting ‘em have the last word.

This would all be of merely personal interest, except that Herman opened his initial salvo against the “Cruise Missile Left” by likening me and a bunch of other people to opponents of abolitionism in the 1850s:

One problem with the CMLs is that, not really being on the left, they have lost sight of what the left is all about. The left’s criterion of success is not the extent to which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its success in getting a left message across (and on some issues, like “free trade,” and the merits of overseas military ventures [except in the heat of battle and under a furious elite propaganda barrage], the “radical left” is far closer to mainstream opinion than is the “decent left,” and it is listened to on those issues by ordinary citizens when they can be reached). On issues where it is in a minority position, a real left does not abandon its position in order to be acceptable. Marc Cooper objects to the left’s “scold mold” and its “alienation from its own national institutions,” and Gitlin calls on the left to be “practical—the stakes are too great for the luxury of any fundamentalism.” One can readily imagine the Cooper, Gitlin, Walzer, Berube, and Hitchens equivalents of the 1850s explaining to the abolitionists that they must tone down their message and alter or even drop their anti-racist and anti-slavery message given the “political realities” and public sentiment.

There are two notable things here.  The first is the ludicrous idea that the radical left is closer to mainstream opinion than the people who supported a military response in Afghanistan—or that they would be, if not for the Matrix Mass Media, which, as we all know, manufactures consent and keeps people from realizing that they are lying in a pod of pink goo.  (Actually, before you get to the standard “media dupe people with elite propaganda” line, try to make sense of Herman’s proposition that “the left’s criterion of success is not the extent to which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its success in getting a left message across, and it is listened to by ordinary citizens when they can be reached.” So the important thing isn’t whether the left is being listened to, it’s whether it’s being listened to, which it is, except when it’s not.  OK, back to Leftover Business.)

The other thing is what I’ve been talking about since Monday: the reflexive belief that the leftmost position is the most betterest—and all the potential mischief this belief makes possible.  Herman’s use of slavery and abolition here is tendentious, to put it nicely.  While it’s true that abolitionism was one of the causes on which the radicals of their day were unquestionably in the right (and I could cite much of labor history since the eighteenth century as well, or the Diggers and Levellers in the mid-seventeenth), it’s not true that all radical-liberal splits map onto the political landscape of the 1850s.  To take a more recent and more appropriate historical analogy, I could, for example, suggest that in the runup to war in Iraq, Marc Cooper, Michael Walzer, Todd Gitlin, David Corn, and I represented the McCarthy/RFK left of 1968, and Herman represented the Maoist fringe that would shortly send the New Left down in flames.  That too would be a tendentious (though, as I say, more appropriate) analogy, but I hope it serves to make the elementary and entirely necessary point that when liberals and progressives split with radicals, the radicals aren’t always on the side of the angels.  On the contrary, as with the “we are all Hezbollah now” left, sometimes the liberals and progressives have the good sense to stop the car before it goes straight over the cliff.

As for Herman’s little fantasy that he would have been fightin’ for black folk in 1852 while I was writing campaign biographies for Franklin Pierce, well, you never know about those things.  It’s just as likely that I would have been campaigning for Lincoln in 1860 while Ed Herman lectured us all on how the fight to save the Union was really just a campaign to expand federal power and prepare the way for the U.S.’ entry into the Global Imperialist Sweepstakes.  It’s hard to say, because that mean Sean Carroll won’t let us have access to the Time Machine he’s working on.

The funny thing about Herman’s “Cruise Missile Left” is that only one person in the group—Christopher Hitchens, who’d actually praised the cruise missile and would soon decline to the point at which he was calling the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags”—supported war in Iraq.  That posed a bit of a problem for Herman, who proceeded to insist to me that my opposition to war in Iraq was in fact a form of support for war in Iraq:

Tapping Berube’s article on “Toward An Ideal Antiwar Movement,” let me enumerate the reasons why it is entirely reasonable to describe Berube as a supporter of the imminent war against Iraq. First, he denounces the statement that “We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny free from military coercion by great powers.” Berube says that the “antiwar faction crafted a new ‘sovereignty’ rationale...that turned its back on decades of left internationalism...” This is complete nonsense, as the “sovereignty rationale” goes back many years and is the basis of international law and the UN (Article 2.1 of the UN Charter says “The organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.") By “left internationalism” he means cruise missile left and imperial state rejection of that nonintervention principle. Given this rejection, the imperial powers and cruise missile leftists are not disturbed by blatant disregard for the UN Charter and international law in these interventions.

Second, Berube has great faith in the imperial powers engaging in intervention for benevolent purposes. He says that “I would prefer to see great powers exercising coercion to prevent such nations [that kill their own people] from determining their own destiny...” And so he is prepared to thrust aside the basis of international law and leave it to George Bush and other humanitarians to straighten things out by violence at their own discretion.

This is a strange response to my essay, but it has the benefit of bringing Herman’s position clearly into the open.  (And foolishly, I thought that his position was so self-undermining that I didn’t need to reply to the heart of it.  Well, live and learn!  As I say, I’m really not a very good debater.) Here’s what I actually said in the essay to which Herman refers:

And yet I find that, even as I have deep respect for all the tens of thousands of people who have signed a September “Statement of Conscience,” put out by Not in Our Name to oppose war in Iraq, I cannot quite join them, even though I, too, oppose the war (and endorse most of the statement). Partly that’s because the statement condemns the U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, which (yes, I know) killed civilians and failed to capture Osama bin Laden, but which also destroyed the Al Qaeda terror camps, brought down the Taliban, and (even more important) slowed down the growing radicalization of Pakistan—a radicalization that, ideally, should be opposed by all secular democrats. It’s on the latter grounds that I supported the war in Afghanistan.

But mostly I cannot sign Not in Our Name’s statement because it declares, in its third sentence, “We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers.” It’s a euphonious phrase, to some ears, but what happens, may I ask, when a “nation” decides that its “destiny” lies in the extermination of a “people”? The sentence reads like a leftover shibboleth from Kosovo, when one wing of the antiwar left devised the argument that the United States and NATO had no business intervening in a matter internal to Serbian affairs. That antiwar faction crafted a new “sovereignty” rationale that, in my opinion, turned its back on decades of left internationalism in order to oppose U.S. military action in Kosovo in whatever terms came most readily to hand.

The appeal to “sovereignty” sounds fine to many leftists when it’s a question of defending developing nations from the United States (nations that should be “free from military coercion by great powers”). But should that principle be applied when Saddam Hussein kills Iraqi Kurds? Or when Milosevic kills Kosovar Albanians? Or when Suharto kills the East Timorese, or Rios Montt the indigenous Guatemalan Indians, or Hitler the Jews? Nazi Germany saw the killing of Jews as absolutely central to its “destiny,” but one would not want to have seen a sane and serious left defending the enterprise on those grounds. I would prefer to see great powers exercising military coercion to prevent such nations from determining their own destiny (especially in cases like Suharto and Montt, whose regimes the United States had supported), and I would be all the happier if the great powers did so in my name.

So when Herman says “By ‘left internationalism’ [Bérubé] means cruise missile left and imperial state rejection of that nonintervention principle,” I have to reply, no, by “left internationalism” I meant the left-internationalist rejection of the idea that what happens in Franco’s Spain is entirely Franco’s business.  And that’s why Herman’s recent apologetics for Milosevic are so important: he is not, in the end, “on the left” in any recognizable sense when it comes to figures like Milosevic.  His position on the Balkans was and is, quite clearly, “let Milosevic be Milosevic,” just as his position on Iraq was “let Saddam be Saddam (except back in the 1980s when he was a U.S. client—we opposed him then, but we oppose those who oppose him now).” Not many people, back in 2002-03, realized what kind of a litmus test the Ed Hermans of the world were setting for the antiwar movement: they weren’t simply against the war in Iraq.  They were also against weapons inspections and no-fly zones, on the grounds that these constituted illegitimate imperial violations of Iraqi sovereignty.  And, as Herman and Not In My Name made clear, the only correct opposition to war in Iraq consisted of people who would defend Iraqi sovereignty and who opposed war in Afghanistan.

There’s much more to Herman’s reply, but I’ll single out two key items that, at the time, I thought were decisive.  The first is a simple falsehood:

It should be noted that Berube’s warm feelings about the enlarged capacity of “great powers exercising coercion” in the New World Order has [sic] not been impaired by the coup d’etat, rule, and plans of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld business administration. Nowhere in his “Ideal Antiwar Movement” does he suggest that they pose a very serious threat of imperial violence and that curbing them is an urgent global task. Only curbing Saddam Hussein seems to strike him as worthy of attention.

In my reply, I wrote: 

Actually, this should not be noted, because it is not true. I argued, in response to the Not in Our Name statement, that “great powers” should intervene whenever a nation is systemically exterminating a group of people within its borders, and that I would have supported such international intervention “especially in cases like [those of] Suharto and Montt, whose regimes the United States had supported.” As for the Bush junta, leaving aside everything else I’ve said about Bush since the stolen election, here’s what I wrote in the Chronicle: the antiwar movement I advocate “would distrust US claims to be acting on behalf of oppressed Iraqis, on the grounds that the Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Perle axis showed no interest in oppressed Iraqis before now and has already demonstrated its remarkable indifference to nation-building on behalf of oppressed Afghans in Afghanistan.”

This, by the way, is why there is such an intense debate between me and Marc Cooper as to whether Herman is a “third-rate” or a “fourth-rate” hack.  I go with the former, but then, as you know, I am way too generous in situations like this.  (Although if someone shows me that Herman has made contributions to the field of finance on a scale with Chomsky’s contributions to the field of linguistics, I’ll be happy to revise my opinion accordingly.)

And now, finally, for the grand conclusion.  Ed Herman counsels defeatism and despair as the centerpiece of the “radical” agenda:

In the November article on the cruise missile leftists I quoted Berube’s statement that “the United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself like an empire.” That is, he believes acting like an empire is a matter of choice; that the U.S. leadership can “say no,” and is not obliged to carry out a foreign policy that serves the interests of its dominant corporate elite. If it did establish a system of National Security States in Latin America, supported Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu (etc.), and has pressed Structural Adjustment Policies on dozens of poor countries, it didn’t have to do that. It could dedicate itself to doing good. This is not only silly, it is plain imperial state ideology, and wonderfully suited for apologetics for imperial interventionism.

I know this is another long post, folks, and if you’ve read this far this week, I do appreciate your patience.  But I’m going to have to ask you—I have no other choice—to read this last bit a second time, slowly and carefully.  Because to those of you who live in the United States and hope that someday it can be better than it is, Herman’s message is clear (even if he never does explain why the dominant corporate elite would have supported Milosevic before 1999 and then opposed him, supported Saddam before 1990 and then opposed him):

Give up now.  Acting like an empire is not a matter of choice.  Even President Nader would have invaded Iraq.  To believe otherwise is not only silly, it is plain imperial state ideology.

And there you have it, friends and critics, the salient difference between your progressive left and your “radical” “left” (that is neither radical nor left).  The progressive left believes that acting like an empire is a matter of choice, and that it does matter who the “decider” is.  The Herman Left applauds itself for being the equivalent of the antebellum abolitionists, but right here, right now, it lines up wholeheartedly with Milosevic in the name of “anti-imperialism” and opposition to the “dominant corporate elite” (most of whom, in the U.S., were actually opposed to any intervention in the Balkans).  And all of you who supported Lamont on Tuesday, in the hope that the United States can change direction?  Imperial state imperial corporate interventionalist apologeticists, every one.

________________

Postscript

Believe me, I do feel silly hauling these moldy old things out of the Vault of Regrettables when there are more immediate matters before us this week.  But curiously, these ancient documents from 2002-03 actually do have a bearing on the unfolding national debate over the Meaning of Lamont.  Here’s how.

After my exchange with Herman in Z, someone sent me a copy of a late-2001 missive in which Herman had written,

the idea that the Taliban is a fascist and expansionist threat, and that Islamic fundamentalism more broadly speaking is the same, doesn’t hold water. . . .  The Taliban is a nasty local authoritarian group with very modest power and capabilities—before the U.S. attack, barely able to cope with controlling its own terrain.  As I noted, proof of its “transnational designs” by reference to its infiltration of the Pakistan military is laughable—as if every country does not mess around with its neighbors. . . .

OK, now hold that remarkable thought for a second.

As Digby notes, the new Conventional Wisdom—spanning from William Kristol to Jacob Weisberg at Slate—is that a vote for Lamont was a vote for appeasement, free love, and flower power.  (Odd how this kind of meme washes over professional “liberal” pundits, isn’t it?  It’s almost as if some direct-action Republican operative put something funny in the water. . . .)

Weisberg admits that war in Iraq was not such a good idea:

the invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis.

Well, “just about everyone” didn’t include Lieberman, actually, and, uh, dude, that’s like kind of the reason he lost and all.  So Weisberg comes up with a “reason” to support Lieberman anyway:

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush’s faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.

Ah, no.  This would be “wrong,” in the sense of “not correct.” Very very very few people in the Democratic electorate are blithe and dismissive about Islamic fanaticism.  The overwhelming majority of us—despite Ed Herman’s fantasies about how the “radical” “left” is “far closer to mainstream opinion” than are progressives and liberals—believe that the fight against Islamist radicalism is real, that it cannot be won by military means alone, and that the war in Iraq has in fact been a disastrous setback in that fight.  To find people who really don’t take Islamist radicalism very seriously, you have to go all the way to the furthest reaches of Z, way over yonder to Ed Herman Land, which may actually be On Beyond Zebra.  There, you’ll find a handful of people who speak of the prospect of al-Qaeda obtaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as just a bit of ordinary border-nation jostling and “messing around,” like, you know, the way Norway messes with Sweden and Suriname messes with Brazil.  But to take the views of the “radical” “left” fringe in Ed Herman Land as representative of mainstream liberals and progressives, supporters of Ned Lamont and Howard Dean, is to repeat far-right talking points that properly should be the exclusive preserve of Ann Coulter and David Horowitz. 

Although it’s true that hippies did listen to the Grateful Dead, thereby driving the Southern states into the GOP column.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 12:20 PM
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Interlude

I’ll be back later today with Leftover Business IV (Beneath the Escape from the Return to Leftover Business), but I just couldn’t resist reproducing this fun little graphic from WorldNetDaily, via the very wonderful Pam of Pandagon:

image

I note with some surprise that “the universe doesn’t look a day over 60 but it’s so hard to tell at night” was not an option.  But I just love the fact that “I believe the Bible but it seems like the universe has to be 10,000-to-100,000 years old to make it fit with science” edged out the only two plausible choices, “this new research suggesting the universe is 15.8 billion years old has convinced me” and “I’m sticking with the scientific consensus—13.7 billion years.” Though I suppose you could say that all three answers are in a statistical three-way tie for sixth place.

Anyway, while I’m plowing through my various disagreements with the further left, I thought it might be worth taking a brief look at the further right.  You know, the people to whom “conservatives” appeal whenever they want to purge their party of RINOs and liberal Northeastern Republicans.

Posted by Michael on 08/10 at 09:28 AM
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