Reappraisals (62 page)

CHAPTER XXII

The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about recent reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so. Back on October 26, 1988, the
New York Times
carried a full-page advertisement for Liberalism. Headed “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” it openly rebuked then-President Ronald Reagan for deriding “the dreaded L-word” and treating “liberals” and “liberalism” as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are “timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.”

The advertisement was signed by sixty-three prominent intellectuals, writers, and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Irving Howe, and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories—the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren—were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral center of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dare not speak its name. And those who style themselves “liberal intellectuals” are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favors, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely subsumed by an admirable cohort of muckraking investigative journalists—notably Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing, and Mark Danner, writing in the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary USA can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the sixties generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the
New York Times
advertisement were born, in most cases, many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the thirties above all.
Their
commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal center in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government, and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a long-standing commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.

This process was well under way before September 11, 2001—and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy “triangulations” must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the mainstream liberal center—e.g., the
New Yorker
, the
New Republic
, the
Washington Post
, and the
New York Times
itself—fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.

Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguished the worldview of George Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neoconservative allies is that they do not look upon the “War on Terror,” or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the reestablishment of American martial dominance. They see them rather as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their cold war liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided. As before, we must take our stand on
the
issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: They are at war with “Islamo-Fascism.”

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to
Dissent
, the
New Yorker
, and other liberal journals and hitherto better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic Fascism (itself a newly minted term of art), publishing a book on the subject (
Terror & Liberalism
, 2003) just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the
New Republic
, followed in his wake with
The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again
(2006), where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the war on terror and the early cold war. Neither author had hitherto evinced any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other erstwhile left-liberal pundits now expert in “Islamo-Fascism,” Beinart and Berman and their ilk really
are
familiar—and comfortable—with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. A world thus divided is familiar to them from their parents’ time; in some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism, when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s “fight” (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles, and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal foe whose ideas we can study, theorize, and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, just like its twentieth-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy vs. Totalitarianism, Freedom vs. Fascism, Them vs. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticizing Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture, and above all the sheer ineptitude of the President’s war in Iraq. But here, too, the cold war offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism; so intellectual supporters of the Iraq war—among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment—have focused their regrets not upon the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but rather on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving “preventive war” a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq war—readers may recall the
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman demanding that France be voted “off the island” (i.e., out of the UN Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war—are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. Thus the same Friedman now (August 16, 2006) sneers at “anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.” To be sure, Friedman’s portentous, Pulitzer-winning pieties are always carefully road tested for middle-brow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.