Home | Away

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
(64) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages