The Labor Movement and the Eustonite Left

A constant refrain of the Eustonite Left is that, despite the mistake the invasion initailly was, we’re obligated to stay in Iraq because otherwise, Iraqi trade unionists would be slaughtered by religious fascists. Although, on face, it’s a highly admirable position reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War or some other great, principled stand in left-wing history, it’s also a highly odd position to take. After all, there are a huge number of factors and costs involved in the war besides the well-being of trade unionists, and despite their overall goodness, it makes little sense to elevate their interests above all others.

It’s also representative of the somewhat myopic view that many British Eustonites take about Iraq. After all, it’s in England where the soi-disant anti-totalitarian left is the strongest and people like Nick Cohen or Oliver Kamm think that the Iraq War is the most important liberationist struggle of our time. I’d chalk this up to two things. In England, much of the “mainstream” left - or at least the type that has a strong voice in the public sphere - is much more anti-American, anti-West, soft-on-Islamism etc than anything comparable in the United States. And so Nick Cohen et al actually have a coherent, strongly represented worldview to argue against. But it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that England doesn’t bear the great costs of the Iraq War. It’s not England that’s spending 1 trillion dollars on the war, that’s lost 4,000 men and women, that’s had its international reputation trashed, in short, advocating for continued war carries considerably fewer costs across the pond.

But what’s even odder about the almost-deontological stance that Eustonites take with respect to trade unions and the war is that it isn’t at all clear that Iraqi unions support the occupation. This Sami Ramadani piece references some trade union opposition to the occupation, and this May Day declaration against the occupation by trade unionists seems to indicate that, at the very least, it’s hardly a unanimous opinion among the Iraqi labor movement that the occupation is right and just.

Via Spackerman

What Should Phoebe Do?

While it is indeed shocking that a New York born Jew who is currently a graduate student at NYU has more Democratic-than-not political views, I think we should still help Phoebe Maltz realize that she is probably a Democrat, and if she isn’t, that she should be. The core problem for her, it seems, is that she recognizes that the social backwardness of the GOP makes a vote for them untenable, but she has some trouble identifying herself as one of “the left.” I guess I don’t really see why this is all that important a concern.

There are all sorts of people in America who may generally vote for Democrats or for Republicans, but aren’t well represented by either side. My dad, for instance, has exclusively voted for Democrats his entire life (except when voting for Schwarzenegger), but he constantly rails against how liberals hate businesses, want to raise taxes and strangle the economy. He is not, certainly, “of the left”, but he votes Democratic because on a few key issues — namely ones like abortion and the War in Iraq, he agrees with Democrats. And in America, unlike Israel, there are two political parties, so a lot of people get shoehorned into one of them, without really being fully on board with their hole program. Just look at how libertarians held their nose and voted for Republicans all these years, and how some of them may have to vote for Democrats.

The second large issue she has with realizing that she is, in fact, a liberal is the perceived animosity or issues between liberalism and Jews. While she’s correct that, if you look at it a certain way, some populist anti-corporate and anti-foreign rhetoric could be interpreted as having a familiar resemblance to anti-Semitism, she is just wrong to say that there is some deep connection between American left-liberalism and animosity towards Jews.

I’m sure she knows the old Milton Himmelfarb line, “Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans”, and while the language he used may not be particularly fashionable today, it is still true. 58% of Jews identify as Democrats, while only 15% say they are Republicans. The AJC released an survey which, among other things, concludes that generally Jews hold moderate-to-liberal policy views on just about everything — including the war in Iraq and war on terrorism. For instance, 59% of American Jews disapprove of how the government is handling the war on terror and 67% think we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. So Maltz’s opinion that being fully Jewish and being fully American-liberal is somehow opposed is pretty isolated within the Jewish community.

One of her finals points is that among “the left” (which she never really defines, largely because it may be impossible to do so), “it’s far more startling to hear someone on the left grudgingly accept rather than enthusiastically embrace the officially leftist stance on an issue than it is to witness someone on the right doing the same.” I think she is taking a snapshot of the last four or so years, and drawing a conclusion about left wingers in America that hasn’t always been true. There is a long and proud tradition of left contrarianism, even within the Democratic party. Not only have leftists always attacked mainstream Democrats for not being left enough, but from about 1980 to 1992, there were entire magazines and an intellectual movement devoted to bring the Democratic party and the American left closer to the center. Michael Kinsley of The New Republic and Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly delighted in attacking their fellow left wingers and Democrats, as well as core constituencies like unions. Bill Clinton issued the New Orleans Declaration in 1990, which was mostly an attack on the left wing elements of the Democratic Party for being too far to the left. It’s just that as the Bush administration and the GOP is currently going up in flames, it’s easy for the American left to unite against a force that they all agree is malevolent. The only reason that there has been any flourishing of contrarian opinion among Republicans is because they are quickly trying to disassociate themselves from the Bush administration. Another reason why being contrarian could be more accepted on the right than on the left is that, in standard historical terms, the left is a movement, while the right is a reaction. In America, for reasons I’ll explain very soon, I think the opposite is true, but it’s still something to consider.

I take issue with how Maltz implicitly defines “left.” I assume that because she is an academic, and one that studies Europe, she takes “left” to mean the genuine European left that has existed since 1848.The American left, in so much as there is one, is not the European left, which is a more proper left. Socialism or Social Democracy, except for a brief period in the 1910s, has never had a remotely comparable following in America as it has in Europe, and so it’s incorrect to say that the European left and what she calls the American left are equivalent.

Another oddity in Maltz’s discussion of what it means to be “left” is that she, like those who write for Dissent or Democratiya, implies that thinking that democracy isn’t always superior to theocracy or that horrible human rights abuses in Muslim countries aren’t all that bad compared to the evil that is America is a genuine left wing sentiment. And many academic and British leftists, I agree, are horribly soft on terrorists and theocrats and really hate America more than anything else; but that does not mean that any sort of real-existing-left in America holds those views to be mainstream or even acceptable.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that politics and political identification are about choices. And in this upcoming election, there will be a choice between a Democrat and a Republican. And Maltz can easily choose to vote for a Democrat, without identifying with a left, which I think doesn’t really exist, she doesn’t want to be aligned with. And that’s just fine.

On a final note…Holy crap, I just wrote nearly 1000 words trying to tell a woman I don’t even know how she should identify politically. Blogger narcissism knows no bounds…

My Super Duper Hyper Qualified Defense of Jonah Goldberg

I’ve seen the pictures from Liberal Fascism, and yes, the idea “The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore” is almost too mockable, especially considering you can’t really get a education degree from Swarthmore. But, oddly enough, it’s rather uncontroversial among historians, namely Sheri Berman, that fascism was, in fact, a creature of the left. Henry Farrell, in his summary of Berman’s The Primacy of Politics, explicated the direct link between Euorpean Social Democratic movements and Fascism:

In Berman’s narrative, as in Polanyi’s, there were two antidotes on offer to “economic collapse and social chaos” - social democracy and fascism. Social democracy and fascism were both the result, according to Berman, of long standing intellectual debates within the left over the relationship between economics and politics. Both were movements created by socialists who had grown weary of the passivity of traditional socialism as set out by Engels, and explicated by Kautsky. The reigning orthodoxy emphasized the primacy of economics – economic progress would ineluctably lead to the victory of socialists, who merely had to bide their time… those who advocated active politics had a difficult time doing it within mainstream socialism. On the one hand, social democrats, who wanted socialists to get involved in electoral politics and take power through non-revolutionary means such as getting involved in coalition government, weren’t able to bring other socialists along with them…some socialists embraced a more radical notion of politics and of revolution that had little time for bourgeois democracy… This helped create the conditions for a synthesis between the nationalist movement and elements of the socialist movement in Italy and Germany. National Socialists retained many of the aspirations of social democrats, and made many of the same promises. Like social democrats, their main appeal was that they offered economic stability and security to the masses. Hence the first part of Berman’s argument – that fascism was, in a sense, social democracy’s dark twin. They shared common ancestry in internal debates among socialists. There was crossover between the two, as erstwhile social democrats became fascists. Finally, there were substantial similarities in their economic policies, and in the ways that they tried to appeal to mass publics. Both represented revolts against a kind of ideational orthodoxy, in which the economic base determined the limits of politics.

Now Goldberg’s argument, that social democracy/American left-liberalism is a species of fascism is incredibly wrong. First of all, we don’t have any social democratic party or movement in the United States, and the claims of national or ethnic solidarity are generally creatures of the right, not the left. More importantly, what made fascism, well bad, was not that it represented a third way between revolutionary Marxism and market liberalism, or that it promised all sorts of social programs and national solidarity, but the chauvinistic nationalism, the excess power and worship of the state, the destruction of individual freedoms, and oh yeah, genocide and expansionist war.

While we should denounce Goldberg, or really just let him denounce himself by putting his book out, there is a very serious, thoughtful, argument to be made that after World War I, Social Democrats and Fascism were movements with a great deal of similarity. Of course, Goldberg isn’t the one to make it.

Artificially Narrow Margins

Did anyone think it was odd that A) Chavez’s referendum failed so narrowly and B) just how sanguine he was at accepting the results?  Well, if Jorge Castañeda is right, then those suspicious were probably justified:

But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world

Hmm, this is obviously unconfirmed and no doubt Chavez and his allies in both Venezuela and the American press will deny this, but it does have an air of plausibility about it.  The involvement of Baduel, Chavez’s former Defense Minister, is interesting.  He has become something of a lodestar for the opposition to gather around.  He effectively symbolizes the anti-Chavez forces move from a collection of disenfranchised plutocrats who either tried to actively subvert the democratic process or refused to engage in it to a more broad based group who doesn’t want the inegalitarian Venezuela of the past and instead insists on the maintenance of democratic norms in the face of Chavez’s increasing power.

It’s also heartening to see that within the Venezuelan government, there are those who are willing to stand up to Chavez and refuse to enable his worst instincts.  While I’m sure some contributors to the Nation would see the military’s prevention of Chavez disregarding the referendum defeat as just reactionaries subverting the people’s will , there has to be some sort of institutional countervailing power to the executive.  Of course, Chavez and his supporters don’t have much ground to stand on, seeing as he first came into prominence in a failed military coup.

Via Dan Drezner

Overcoming Bias: Hugo Chavez and The Nation

What follow are my thoughts on Venezuela, Chavez and the referendum. They are poorly organized, hastily written and may be self contradictory. All the fun is below the fold.

Herf’s Poor Timing

Jeffrey Herf has written yet another one of those tiresome “Ahmadinejad is a Nazi, so why isn’t the Left more active in opposing him” pieces, entitled “Where Are the Anti-Fascists?” for TNR.  He goes through all the usual motions — Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad hates Jews and wants to wipe Israel off the map and that Iran can’t be deterred through normal means.  While he does acknowledge the NIE briefly, he seems to ignore why its important.  He complains that Germany isn’t doing enough to oppose Iran and their nuclear weapons, but that all assumes that Iran is in fact pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity.

He also blithely ignores very real arguments that Ahmadinejad isn’t the main source of power in Iran and that most of his blustery anti-Israel rhetoric and is for domestic consumption.  He doesn’t even attempt to refute these arguments, and instead just asserts that “While I have heard such arguments from political scientists in the United States, many of whom tend to dismiss the causal significance of ideological fanaticism in international affairs, such reassuring tones sound particularly peculiar when voiced in this country. To put it mildly, German politics and intellectual life is not famous for sunny optimism.”  This just makes no sense  If we accept as true that 1) Iran isn’t pursuing nuclear weapons 2)Ahmadinejad isn’t serious about this threats 3) Ahmadinejad isn’t the most powerful figure in Iran and 4) Iran can be deterred like a normal country then it really doesn’t matter if Germany, or the European left in general, isn’t reacting to Iran as Jeffrey Herf wishes they were.  The NIE itself says that Iran can be deterred, and there is really no evidence to suggest that it is controlled by “mad mullahs.”

What’s even more bizarre about the piece is the cherry picked nature of the evidence Herf cites.  His evidence seems to be that there aren’t enough media expose about German companies assisting Iran’s nuclear program.  But, as he points out, a Brandenburg prosecutor “has been conducting an ongoing investigation into the role of German firms in the building of the Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr.”  And that “Angela Merkel has denounced his threat with great analytical and moral clarity. She has called for U.N. economic sanctions against Iran.”  So it turns out that the German political system is responding to Iran as Herf would like them to.

Herf seems to think that Germany has a special historical obligation to take the (incorrect) neoconservative on Ahmadinejad, because it’s possible that Ahmadinejad really is as bad as Herf says he is and that Germany should err on the side of thinking that every two-bit dictator is the next Hitler.  And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that Germans should be more sensitive to anti-Semitism and genocide than most countries, if Herf’s analysis of Iran and Ahmadinejad is largely incorrect, than it’s hard for me to care that Germany hasn’t adopted Herf’s views.  Can we really blame Germans — or anyone for that mattter — for not being taken in by yet another “Middle Eastern Dictator = Hitler” routine?

PS - One has to wonder about the timing of this piece.  It was originally published on Dec 2 in Germany, and the NIE came out on the  3rd, making it much of the piece obsolete.  While I imagine Herf had previously arranged with TNR to publish the piece, putting it online with the NIE so fresh in everyone’s mind is just going to encourage snarky bloggers to savage it way more so than they would have otherwise. Suspicious…

Progressive Trade

There’s something weird going on at Pandagon — support for trade liberalization and supra-national regulatory harmonization! Usually, when progressives encounter such policies, whether it be trade deals or rather innocuous proposals like the Security and Prosperity Partnership, they see them as sops to corporate interests at the expense of unions and the third world poor.  But when it comes to letting trucks into Mexico it’s easy to see how much of the right-wing populist opposition to it is rather ugly and bigoted, while the policy clearly benefits poor(er) Mexicans.

It’s easy to see how this logic could be expanded past letting Mexican trucks into America - the same logic underlies further harmonization and liberalization of regulatory policies and easing the move of goods, people and capital across national borders.  But so often the progressive left reflexively opposes these deals and sometimes implicitly uses the same rhetoric and mindset as the ugly nationalist right-populists.

As Brad DeLong put it in his debate about China trade policy with EPI head Jeff Faux , “Is there a way to interpret Jeff other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible–keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?”  This same analysis can be applied to many progressive critics of freer trade and market integration.

Why Trotsky?

Ian Williams review essay on Irving Howe’s biography of Trotsky is some really good stuff. Since I have relatives who were/are genuinely involved in the capital L left, the one that takes Marx as its lodestar, I have a special interest in these seemingly never ending debates among learned men over which blood thirsty ideologue they supported and why.

Among the big Three of the Soviet Communism — Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin — intellectuals have always found it acceptable to take Trotsky as one of their own, as a true idealist who was not corrupted by power and totalitarianism like Marx and Lenin. Of course, Trotsky, had he ever gotten in power, would have been plenty blood thirsty and repressive. But thankfully for his reputation, he was exiled from the USSR and could then pretend to be a critic of its “excesses.”

But that doesn’t fully answer our question, why are humane and democratic men like Howe still somewhat enthralled by Trotsky? Why in the 50s did you so many brilliant Jewish intellectuals fall under the spell of the Old Man? The question, I think, can be answered in two ways. First is Trotsky’s name and his glasses. His real name is Lev Davidovich Bronstein and he wore glasses. These traits signify one essential quality of Trotsky: the Jewish intellectual.

Real Jewish intellectuals could pretend that Trotsky was one of their own, more of Marx the great thinker than Lenin or Stalin the great murderers. But for bookish intellectuals who profess a love of revolution, their hero can not merely be one of them - another great mind who they meet for lunch at CCNY to discuss Sorel and Feuerbach. He instead needs to be heroic. As Williams explains, American Jewish intellectual life in the 30s and 40s was caught up in the power of ideas – the notion that these ideas of bookish men were worth fighting for and killing for:

Heroes were in demand both when Howe was growing up and when he wrote his biography. The intellectually voracious radical Jewish culture of the 1930s and 40s thought that ideas mattered and that they could change the world. Is it too far a stretch to remember that this was the milieu that gave birth to Superman and other comic-book superheroes? Lev Davidovich Bronstein, the Russian Jewish intellectual, may never have stepped into a phone booth like Clark Kent, but he did transform himself into a Colossus, bestriding the globe

But why Trotsky? Why not the legions of Marxist intellectuals who were just Marxist intellectuals and not aspiring mass murderers? Because the corollary of this fanatical love of ideas is a willingness, or even a desire, for those ideas to be implemented at the point of a gun. And if that gun can be held by someone named Bronstein who wears glasses, then all the better. Trotsky was not just the famous Soviet dissident or the theorist of Permanent Revolution; he rode his train around Russia during the Civil War, leading the Proletariat against the capitalist and imperialist forces, actually killing people in the name and defense of his vaunted ideas. The Marxist Jewish intellectual was too sophisticated to worship a bureaucratic savage like Stalin, but too insecure in his own bookishness to be enchanted by a Luxemberg. Trotsky was the perfect compromise.

But why are the anxieties of the Jewish intellectuals of the 30s, 40s and 50s of any concern to us today? Well, because as Williams notes, the only place where Trotskyites have found a foothold in American political life is as neoconservatives. The original neoconservatives — Kristol and Podhoretz — were in fact ex socialists that came from the very milieu that bred such admiration for Trotsky. Some of their ideological descendants, like Joshua Muravchick, Elliot Abrams and Stephen Schwartz, were at one point or another avowed followers of Trotsky or Max Shactman, the erstwhile America socialist. Christopher Hitchens, of course, was once a Trotskyite, and still carries with him that revolutionary zeal in defense of intellectual notions that so shamed an entire generation of American intellectuals. Thus when Norman Podhoretz says that “this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East,” we can hear that old yearning of the Marxist intellectual who just wants blood to be spilled in pursuit of his grand ideological notions. Williams conclusion, while a little overstated, gets to the core of why we are still talking about this long dead totalitarian:

After all, once the socialism was stripped out, which was quite easily done in the face of popular indifference, what was left of Trotskyism but the failed predictions, the ability to hold a deep belief, with quasi-religious fervor, in a secular idea in the face of all advice and empirical evidence to the contrary? Having infiltrated the conservative movement, Trotsky’s heirs, still an antithesis looking for a thesis to batter, have substituted Islam, or Islamic fascism, to fill the gap in their universe left by the disappearing Soviet Union.

They have a mission to remake the world, but instead of Trotsky’s Red Army swooping to bring socialism to ungrateful Poles and Central Asians, it is now the U.S. military bringing democracy and free markets to lesser breeds hitherto without the law. And with the ruthless romanticism of the revolutionary, they think the price in blood is well worth paying, that history will absolve them.

 

Playing Halo Alone?

The Times has a fascinating article covering the debate in the Evangelical community on whether it’s appropriate for churches to sponsor Halo nights and tournaments despite the game’s direct contravention of “thou shalt not kill.”  The larger point, however, is that conservative institutions like Evangelical churches are the ones having this debate.  As Ezra Klein has argued, “[Evangelical churches] offer community, guidance, advice, charity, social capital, entertainment, and even the occasional shot at transcendence. And in return, their member’s trust their politics.”

Liberals have very few equivalent institutions.  Even while there are a large number of more liberal religious institutions (reform jews, liberal/mainline protestants) it’s hard to build a cohesive community around watered down transcendent principles.  Put simple, evangelical teens come for the Halo, but they stay for the salvation.  Liberals, because of their disavowal of transcendence and pursuance of essentially rational, veil of ignorance defined politics and ideas, do not have a coherent core to build any of these social capital maximizing institutions around.  Jonathan Haidt’s identification of liberals as those who value maximizing reciprocity and minimizing harm in their moral calculus — and do not consider purity, in group identification or hierarchy — gets at the core at why liberals are having difficulty building or maintaining any institutions comparable to the megachurch.  You can’t get a bunch of 15 year olds to play Halo, or adults to form relationships with strangers through their church, around abstract ideals like reciprocity or harm minimization.

It wasn’t always like this — when labor was a larger force in American society, there was a consideration of in group identification that was roughly on par with minimizing harm and maintaining reciprocity as well as the corresponding provision of social services around which to build cohesive bonds and solidarity.  Chris Hayes, social democrat extraordinaire, has been searching for a revival of this spirit in a resurgent labor movement, but as Andy Stern and his service workers are the most important union in the country, and since service workers are a more transitory and diverse workforce than the industrial workers of generations past, the labor movement will not be the locus of liberal community.   In Europe and parts of America, communism, which provided a near-religious eschatology as well as a distinct in-group to identify with, was able to build similar institutions — too bad they all had the hots for Stalin.

This state of affairs is ultimately quite unfortunate, but does it bring up an interesting question.  Are we liberals fated to play Halo alone?

PS - Henry Farrel outlines the fascinating cohesive, small communities in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria that were maintained and encouraged by social democratic governance. Also Reihan Salam on Christian Democracy and “soulcraft” in post-war Germany.

Sports and the Left

Chris Hayes in his TPM Book Club contribution discussing Katha Pollit’s Learning to Drive has a rather disturbing aside about sports:

My ever-growing sports obsession, to name just one example, is a source of guilt, even shame. It feels like some secret endorsement of the patriarchy.

As a committed sports fan and a committed liberal, I find this attitude distressing.  There’s no real connection between left of center views  and a distaste for sports.  Liberals, however, are more likely to be female, which I imagine is associated with less sports fandom.  Of course, this wouldn’t explain guilt over having an intense interest in sports.  Since Chris is a committed feminist, I imagine he’s reacting to how sports tends to celebrate the most brutish masculine bravado and uses sexual exploitation to market and promote itself.  Also, professional athletes tend to be rather sundry characters from a feminist point of view.

But it needn’t be that way.  If liberals who would otherwise like professional sports feel so guilty about it that they become shy about expressing their enthusiasm, then the conservatives get to dominate an important set of cultural institutions that a large portion of America is heavily emotionally invested and interested in.  There is nothing essentially liberal or conservative about football or baseball so it makes no sense to cede the athletic sphere.

More importantly, college and professional sports promote social solidarity and equality.  Since I’m from the Bay Area, specifically the East Bay, my favorite football team is the Raiders, my favorite basketball team is the Warriors and my favorite baseball team is the A’s.  Blacks who are less wealthy than me and who also live in the East Bay support the same teams.  When I go to a Warriors or A’s game, I enter a sphere where socioeconomic status and racial identity matter much less. We’re all cheering the same team and watching the same game.  We can all discuss Baron Davis’ knee issues or Dan Haren’s fastball on roughly equal terms.

When the Warriors were making their miraculous play off run, all of Oakland — in which there is gaping educational and wealth inequality — was wearing the same “We Believe” shirt and going nuts every time we beat the Mavericks.  In the presence of Baron Davis, we were all equal. This is the best of what American progressive and leftists ideals have to offer. Should a self-identified social democrat turn his back on such solidarity?

Why Do Men Hate Identity Crusades?

I try to answer this question, in about 1460 words. This will sound self serving, but I’d really like if other bloggers read this post — especially my fellow liberals. I think about this topic quite a bit and I feel it should be discussed openly and honestly. My thoughts here are provisional and I really just want to talk about this entire issue, so please comment and blog away in response. Check it out after the flip.

Ian Buruma Gets it Right

Ian Buruma  reviews Norman Podhoretz’s screed, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” in this month’s NYRB. The first part of the essay is very satisfying, he ruthlessly catalogs the errors, deceptions and manifest extremism at the heart of Poedhortz’s world view — here’s an example.

Podhoretz is convinced that the savage murders and daily atrocities in Iraq are actually “a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in democratizing and unifying the country under a workable federal system.” He wonders why men in the “so-called ‘insurgency’” would be shedding so much blood if they didn’t think the US mission in Iraq was working. Might it be that in a broken-down state, where power is up for grabs, violence and mayhem are the inevitable results? Only a man suffering from severe ideological blindness could be so obtuse as to not even consider this.

But doing that is easy, what makes Buruma’s essay exceptional is that he shifts his focus away from the thuggish and easily mockable N-Pod and moves instead to those soi disant liberals and leftists who have made common cause with the likes of Podhoretz.  This would, of course, be the “anti-totalitarian” left.  Buruma shows how their obsession with “courage”, the desire to be wannabe Orwells has poisoned their liberalism and, like Podhoretz worships American power, they similarly worship stark, binary, “courageous” decisions and judgments — at the expense of any sort of nuance or pragmatism. Buruma sums it up thusly:

Norman Podhoretz is not [a liberal]. Ever since he turned against the left, he has detested liberals. His support of Bush’s war is of a piece with his obsession with US power and the enemies without and within who seek to undermine it. His judgments are those of a right-wing ideologue. The fact that neoleftists share his judgments is, in my view, foolish. The fact that some of them do so in the name of liberalism betrays the very principles they claim to be defending.

Sad, yet true.

Iraqi Labor, The Eustonite Left and the Coalition Provisional Authority

One of the most persistent calls of the “anti-totalitarian”/Euston Manifesto left is that we have to stay in Iraq/support the war because we need to protect and show solidarity with unionists in Iraq.  Now, some of these soi disant “leftists” are honest about their support for unions – BobFromBrockley has real labor credentials — others, like Jamie Kirchick seem to only be fans of labor unions in Iraq (or Iran).  We’re also told that there “is so much the left could have done to make the aftermath of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq less destructive.”  Hitchens constantly berates the “left” for not supporting our trade unionists “allies” in Iraq.  If the plight of Iraqi trade unionists is the number one cause of the left these days, then perhaps we should look at exactly who has been worsening their situation since the invasion.  Well, via Kevin Drum, we have this Washington Monthly article entitled “Pinkertons at the CPA.”  That’s right, it was the Bush administration’s Coalition Provisional Authority that have been the pointmen for degrading and marginalizing Iraqi labor unions — here is one of the most stomach churning bits.

The U.S. government further signaled its attitude towards Iraqi labor unions in early December 2003 when coalition troops stormed the IFTU headquarters in Baghdad, ransacked their offices, arrested eight union workers, and shut down the office. Within a day, the arrested were released uncharged from Al Muthan airbase, but IFTU headquarters remained shut for seven months. The jailed men accused the United States of relying on information provided by a member of Saddam’s old regime, Abdullah Murad Ghny, who owns a major private transport company whose workers had begun to organize. While in jail, Turkey Al Lehabey, the General Secretary of the Communication and Transport Workers Union, an IFTU affiliate, said a local American commander named Kelly had told the men, “Iraq has no sovereignty and no political parties or trade unions. We do not want you to organize in either the north or south transport stations.” He added, “You can organize only after June 2004; for now, you have an American governor.”

The article also details how the occupation and the CPA especially was run like a Heritage intern’s dream — massive , indiscriminate privatization and a 15% flat tax were all implemented with greater vigor than retaining the Army. The CPA even maintained Saddam era restrictions on union activity.  So, where were Nick Cohen and Jamie Kirchick as the Bush administration’s CPA failed the Iraqi trade unions?  The way the Euston left would have it, those of us who opposed the war and continue to do so are responsible for the plight of the Iraqi trade unionists, even when their war leader (Bush) and his CPA were gutting the unions and leaving them out to dry.  Why wasn’t Nick Cohen devoting maybe 1/3 of the columns where he was otherwise bashing the left for being soft on “clerical fascists” to examining how the administration he supported was trying to implement the Thatcherite/supply side revolution in Iraq?  Michael Weiss, Oliver Kamm, Christopher Hitchens, anyone?

When we all look back on the Iraq debacle, the “leftists” who were so willingly duped and used by the most reactionary, militaristic, authoritarian president in recent memory will be seen as a sad, pathetic lot.

Kirchick’s Dishonest Labor

I really need to stop blogging every time some dishonest hawk brings up the plight of labor unions in x Middle Eastern country as a pretext to either continue a war in that country or to invade. For some reason, Jamie Kirchick just has a way with me, so I have to respond to his latest missive on behalf of organized labor:

But I still stand by my larger point, which is that whereas anti-totalitarianism used to be the animating ideology of the AFL-CIO and Cold War liberals (both domestically–when the AFL fought tooth and nail against entryist communists, and internationally, in support for higher defense budgets and beating–not living with–the Soviet Union), the AFL has now become part of the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party, calling for immediate withdrawal, and abandoning Iraqi trade unionists to their fates.
For an example of what position American labor might take on the war, they ought to look across the pond to their British comrades, particularly Labour Friends of Iraq, a group composed of Labour MPs which supported the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds and that opposes a coalition withdrawal

If Kirchick really cared about labor unions, you would think that he would write about ones that weren’t in Iraq. Maybe he would write about card check legislation or how Columbia’s labor leaders are getting killed with alarming frequency even as the Bush administration wants to sign a free trade deal with Columbia. But no, for Jamie organized labor is just a way to beat up on liberals for supposedly not living up to values he doesn’t even believe in. A brief look at the Kirchick catalog brings two mentions of labor unions. One is a Yale Daily News column where he criticizes GESO, the graduate students union, for “not being a real union.” Another mention is in his infamous Boston Globe piece where he calls out liberal gays for being “intolerant” when they won’t date him for being a conservative. He lists a litany of left wing causes that he doesn’t like, with teachers unions coming in on the list:

But there’s nothing about my homosexuality that dictates a belief about raising the minimum wage, withdrawing immediately from Iraq, and backing teachers’ unions: all liberal causes that I strongly oppose [emphasis added - mz]

We’ve established that Kirchick’s advocacy on behalf of labor unions in Iraq and just in Iraq is dishonest, but besides that, does it make any sense? Maybe in a world where the only metric by which we judge whether a policy is a good idea is in so much where labor unions can be publicly recognized, it would be worth staying in Iraq. The reason I and many others want to leave Iraq is because our presence isn’t doing anything to make Iraq a politically reconciled, unified, secure state. Instead, we’re arming Sunni militia to take on Al Qaida — even when they’ll inevitably use those guns on the Shia dominated Iraqi government and Shia militia. The various factions in the Iraqi government still don’t trust each other and the military and police are largely stocked with militiamen without loyalty to the Iraqi state. If our occupation isn’t working and won’t ever work, then what is the point of staying? That there will be a “genocide” in Iraq isn’t a given, and the fact that there exists labor unions in Iraq shouldn’t mean that we should station 160,000 soldiers in Iraq to fight a hopeless counter insurgency. So maybe if these mythical liberals in Iraq were benefiting from US troops being in Iraq and there was a realistic hope that we could improve conditions on the ground in a permanent, structural manner, we could stay on their behalf. Somehow who’s either hostile or indifferent towards organized labor in general should be able to see the merit of this argument, but no intellectual dishonesty is too much if it means trying to shame liberals for being right about Iraq.

Whither the Pro Anti-Totalitarian Left Right?

In a debate that’s sure to get old, Jamie Kirchick has fired off another screed, so common these days, bemoaning the fall of the “anti totalitarian left.”

Anti-totalitarianism was once an animating feature of the Democratic Party, and the American left in general. It was FDR who led the United States against Fascism, Harry Truman who aided anti-communists fighting in Turkey and Greece and John F. Kennedy who stated that the United States “would pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom abroad. The American labor movement played a crucial role in fighting communism (both domestically and internationally), with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland, the “Champion of American Labor,” at the helm…With the impending realist takeover of the Democratic Party, anti-totalitarianism will recede, and this is unfortunate. Whereas once the AFL-CIO had a large and effective international office, you’d be hard-pressed to hear, for instance, what they’re doing for Iraqi trade-unionists. But the intellectual failings of the American left cannot compare with the infighting of the British left. A fascinating feud has erupted over the past few weeks amongst several left-wing British writers over the future of the European left. It begins with Nick Cohen, a co-writer of the much-heralded Euston Manifesto, whose book, “What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way” presents an historical examination of “the willingness of people on the liberal-left to support or, more often, excuse or explain away totalitarian movements of the ultra right.” Johann Hari, a columnist for the Independent and an erstwhile supporter of the Iraq War himself, trashed the book in Dissent and renounced Euston for being explicitly pro-war (Cohen responds here). Yet one of the signers of Euston was Michael Walzer, himself opposed to the Iraq War.

Besides the fact that the AFL-CIO is actually working and advocating on behalf of labor unions in Iraq, since when did Jamie Kirchick give a rats ass about labor unions, or for that matter, any cause that can traditionally be associated with the left? This is a man who worked at has written for* the Weekly Standard and Commentary, two right wing mouthpieces, self identifies as a conservative and is “strongly opposed” to a whole gamut of left wing causes, even unions. So why then is Jamie wrapping himself in the flag of Bayard Rustin, and presenting himself as a man genuinely concerned with the left?

This type of dishonest appropriation of left wing causes, especially ones relating to labor unions, is a common neocon trope — Michael Ledeen also complained that American labor unions weren’t doing enough to support their fellow workers in Iran. Never mind that Ledeen and Kirchick never write about any other labor issues — labor is just another way of trying to shame the left into supporting their dangerous, failed ideology.

Jamie is just a symbol for how confused the current “anti-totalitarian left” is. The entire idea of an international left, while Jamie would say it coalesced around 50s opposition to the Soviet Union, is in fact a relic from the Internationalist labor and communist movements from the first part of the 20th century. Since the cold war and the era of truly global ideological struggle is over, those who would want to engage in such a conflict are left grasping for straws. So, in an effort to revitalize their fighting spirit, they have latched on to one of the most unlikely champions of any international leftist movements - George Bush. When Michael Weiss, Jamie Kirchick, Nick Cohen and other champions of the anti totalitarian left wonder why other self acclaimed leftists aren’t on their side, it’s because they decided to attach their anti totalitarianism to the most reckless and authoritarian president in our nation’s history. And since we are American (notice how the Euston Manifesto was signed in Britain), we have to actually live with Bush. And since Guantanamo, warantless wiretapping, legalized torture and secret prisons are all directly related to the “struggle” that this soi disant left has signed on for, we have no hope but to oppose these “leftists” in their current guise.

Notice how I say current guise — Jamie Kirchick, since he really isn’t a man of the left, is all too happy to be pessimistic about any hope for the Democrats to be like Bayard Rustin and get back a little of their internationalist flavor. He ominously warns about Democrats turning inwards into a “feral crouch,” almost gleeful in having another 4-8 years to slam the party of the American Left for not living up to his ideals:

Beyond the particularities of specific military interventions, what is most worrying is that the left has become so embittered by the response to 9/11 that it has withdrawn into a feral crouch from which it is more suspicious of what the Western democracies do to protect themselves than it is with the plight of oppressed people abroad…Indeed, Tony Blair is gone and his evil puppeteer George W. Bush will soon be out as well. We may very well have a Democratic president. But what will inform their foreign policy values now that the Democratic Party is not animated by the anti-totalitarianism of old, but rather a mere hatred for the president and a serious lack of faith in even the potential role America can play in the world?

Is he serious? Does he think that Hillary Clinton, one of the main drivers in the Clinton White House for intervention in Kosovo, will be some sort of anti-American isolationist. Does he think the same things about Barack Obama or John Edwards, whose foreign policy manifesto is deeply infused with internationalism? Barack is all about hope and optimism, hardly the kind of person who doesn’t believe in America’s potential power for good. So while some of the netroots and international ANSWER might be wary of the orientation of these potential president’s foreign policy, Democrats and the American left will support them. If Kirchick were serious about supporting an Anti Totalitarian Left, he would recognize that those who support the policies of our would be authoritarian war monger President have been more damaging to America’s ability to promote freedom and push back against totalitarianism than those who have prudently opposed those policies of overreach, recklessness and aggression.

* James Kirkchik emailed me with this correction.  His “contentions” (Commentary’s blog) bio, dated August 16 described him as “…a frequent contributor…to the Weekly Standard.”  His current contentions bio describes him as only “on the editorial staff of The New Republic and is a columnist for the Washington Blade.” I apologize for the error.

Did John Rawls Lose the Election?

Like Ezra and (older, more famous) Matt, it’s worth pointing out that Linda Hirshman’s claim that John Rawls 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice is responsible for the subsequent Democratic presidential doldrums is just so breathtakingly wrong, hell, it’s such a vacuous claim that it’s not even wrong. Linda Hirshman is smart, she knows that Carter didn’t lose in 1980 because he proposed that we all evaluate the presidents from behind a veil of ignorance, or that Reagen’s economic policies violated the difference principle. Surely liberal egalitarianism wasn’t exactly a hot commodity in the 70s and 80s, but liberal egalitarianism existed before ToJ. More importantly, Hirshman’s critique largely harps on irrelevant points and offers a weak alternative to Rawlsian egalitarianism.

Hirshman first issue is that she seems to be confusing political philosophy, especially contractian philosophy, with a Rorty like commitment to everyday politics (he even wrote up a platform for the American left) and assuming they should be judged in the same way.  A political philosophy has its own standards - rigor, refutation of common objections, having point A be logically derived from point B and so on, while a platform or set of principles has different standards - feasibility, popularity etc.  Surely there’s some overlap, but to confuse one with the other basically guarantees a conceptually confused crticism

Rawls’ project, besides bringing back normative political philosophy as a discipline, was thinking of how we could establish just institutions. Thus, he formulated his principles of justice - 1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others and 2) Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that a) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity b) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). So, sure, these principles may not provide a guide to winning elections, but they help us realize whether our institutional arrangements in America are just, and how we should change or reform them to make them more in line with the principles of justice. If you’re going to have first principles for American liberals, Rawls’ aren’t half bad.

Hirshman also echoes the most common critique of Rawls from the left, that his actors in the veil of ignorance are disembodied, unencumbered “like brains in vats–theoretical beings completely disconnected from real-world politics.” While she may be hinting towards Michael Sandel’s famous critique, she instead offers some lame criticism. She surely misses the point of the Rawlisan exercise, that liberal egalitarianism would be the product of the deliberation of people from behind the “veil of ignorance” and thus that it really was the right form of government and the correct way to set up institutions. In so much as debates over philosophical first principles are important, what Rawls did in ToJ simply can’t be wished away because his explanatory device was too clever.

Additionally, on a more simple level, the veil of ignorance provides a great intuitive way to look at institutions. As Glen Loury pointed out in his piece on our prison policy, imagine you were behind the veil of ignorance, or more trenchantly, imagine you were a young black man living up in pathologized, urban poverty - would you accept our overly punitive crime policy? Rawls’ device, while seemingly too abstract to be practically useful, is one of the most effective ways to make intuitive judgments, from a liberal perspective, on the justice of any institutional arrangement or even individual policy.

Hirshman’s critique would be weightier if she could offer up an alternative to Rawls near-airtight, rigorous and influential defense of liberal egalitarianism, instead she just says we should embrace “classical political virtues of courage, philanthropy, and temperance”  As I’ve written before, her alternative to Rawlsian egalitarianism is mushy, vague and opens room for conservative co-option of those very values.  Plenty of conservatives have shown courage, been philanthropic and displayed temperance.  This doesn’t change that their political project is based on defending and exasperating injustice.  Again, liberals don’t necessarily need a debate over first principles, mushy Rortyean ideals or Tomasky’s “common good” will probably serve us fine electorally.  But if we are going to have one, Hirshman’s lame defense of classical virtues can’t hold a candle to Rawls.  

Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right - Comparitive Historiography Edition

Robert Kagan, along with his seemingly hydra headed family, is one of the biggest cheerleaders for war, any war, that America can possibly enter. The Kagan-Kristol branch of the Neocons are “anti-pacifists,” They seemingle support any war, at any time, for any reason. Kagan is the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics embodied in one pundit.

Kagan’s book, based on this and other reviews, argues that America, from its founding, was an expansionist power, intent on meddling in other countries’ business and spreading their conception of freedom. I’m not judging the merits of any particular foreign policy here, we can save that for later. I want to point out, however, an odd convergence in the general historical view of the US from the leftist anti imperialist view and Kagan’s. The striking thing is how much they agree. Talk to the Zinns and Vidals of the world and you’ll see that they essentially agree with Kagan. They bag on Lincoln and Monroe as being imperialists, and shed many tears for Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, the South and many other spots for pre or early 20^th century US asskicking. Kagan, in his course to justify that interventionism is as American as apple pie and poorly made cars, largely agrees with this interpretation. From AmSpec‘s review of Dangerous Nation via Sullivan:

Kagan’s America was a place of “ugliness” that provided “fortunes for a few and misery for many…[and] treated men as things” until “laws and institutions modeled after England’s” made it livable.

Kagan deconstructs American history’s protagonists as representatives of impersonal forces and presents them without regard for their own understanding of what they were doing.

He argues that the Founders understood it to mean that they had the right and duty to deprive other peoples of their independence and liberty as they might understand it.

Robert Kagan writes that “despite four hundred years of steady expansion and ever deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite numerous wars, interventions, and prolonged occupations of foreign lands… Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity.”

Take out the obvious normative differences (Zinn: Intervention all over the place is bad, Kagan: No, you knave, it is good!) and you basically have the same story. This of course, is an insight into why Zinn and Kagan are both wrong. While it may be fun to look at US history as just capital vs labor or wanting to kick ass vs. wanting to kick more ass, there are individuals involved, and major, consequential policy decisions that could or could not have been made. It is no surprise why this simplistic view of history produces what, in my view, is bad foreign policy. Either, “the US is an imperialist beast and always has been and that’s evil ergo I oppose US imperialism” or “The US is an imperialist beast and always has been, but interventionism is sweet, ergo I support all US interventions.”

Remember, just because Zinn and his lot were right about Iraq, that doesn’t mean they have a sound approach to foreign policy. All it means is that the neocons are clearly out of their minds, when they make Zinn’s or Cockburn’s ill-advised, reflexive foreign policy look good.

Of course, there is a similar, and related, historical convergence on the Civil War, with Marxist Perry Anderson and most paleocons on one side vs Henry Jaffa types. It goes basically like this. “Lincoln was an imperialist, authoritarian, war monger” Anderson and the paleocons think this is awful, Jaffa likes it. Birds of a feather… (ed - maybe now is not the time to belittle paleocons by comparing them to Marxists)

UPDATE: Blogfather Larison chimes in, and contra Sullivan, informs us that:

Angelo Codevilla is wildly, intensely hawkish and hegemonist; he is one of those people who will bear the label imperialist as a badge of honour. No one who has any sense of the various factions and arguments on the American right would ever confuse a Codevilla piece with anything related to paleos.

Of course, I’ll trust that Larison knows more than me (ed - you’re damn right you will) on who is and isn’t paleo. I think most of my analysis holds up (ed - with all the standard caveats: you have no qualifications, you don’t really know what you’re talking about etc) Which is odd, of course, because your standard Struassian loves to gloat about how only he knows the true, esoteric nature of America and, if you’re at Claremont, how Abraham Lincoln was totally sweet and truly American is his habeas stripping, pseudo authoritarian ass kicking of the South; (I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but the Civil War is for another day) basically, I’d expect them to agree with Kagan’s analysis, but then again, I’m capable of being suprised. Of course, you have famed Straussian Harvey Mansfield revealing to us that Machiaveli is really the hidden founding father equal to Jefferson or Hamilton and how an executive above the law is the sweetest thing ever. So you can never really be sure what these Struassian neocons are up to.