What's Left?
Between Michaels Walzer and Moore, not much
The need to rebel is something most of us have felt at one or more points in our life. There are, indeed, moments when a country orsociety become so oppressively of one mind that a feisty individualist feels hard put not to start screaming in the streets. An honorable mention in this department must go to Christopher Hitchens, who in one blessed period, when both Mother Teresa and Princess Diana were being buried and deified, managed to splutter outraged contempt for both. So you have to feel at least a little sympathy for the members of the American left in the wake of September 11. This has been a very, very hard period, and the strains are beginning to show.
Sure, thousands of people were killed - but the tragedy didn't stop there. After all, the loathed president Bush performed quite well in the aftermath, won a war and saw his ratings jump. Patriotism - the display of which nauseates large parts of the left-wing intelligentsia - proliferated from suburb to inner city. Military budgets went up - and presidential speeches became rallying cries again. And all this happened just when the left was licking its chops at the prospect of eviscerating a man they regarded as an illegitimate, unelected, moronic puppet of evil corporate interests.
Some left-wingers went under-cover; others blurted out what they truly felt - that America deserved to get bloodied - only to find public derision and dismay so intense they retreated to their bunkers. (Yes, Ms. Sontag, that includes you.) And then a happy few decided - what the hell? - that with little to lose, they might as well go even further in their opposition and not only call Bush illegitimate, but the entire war on terror a convenient excuse to ratchet up defense spending, rape the environment, and give Donald Rumsfeld the political version of a Viagra.
Exhibit A in the latter category is one Michael Moore. His new book, "Stupid White Men," has soared to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, just when most liberals had conceded that the American book market now belongs to the right. Moore became best known as the director of a documentary about corporate downsizing in Flint, Michigan, called "Roger And Me." The film mocked both corporate leaders, and just as viciously the ordinary Americans naive enough to believe that hard work might bring them financial rewards and a leg up the social hierarchy. This general belief in the inherent and unreformable iniquity of American capitalism, the evil of all corporations, and the elite conspiracies to defraud and defund ordinary Americans are all classic tropes of the paranoid American left - and Moore endorses every single one of them. In fact, there's almost a beauty in the way in which he backs up every single left-wing prejudice - from hatred of successful white people to hostility to car-owners, from the ability to drop Sweden into every argument about the welfare state to the notion that capitalism is always a zero-sum game in which every gain for the rich is always and everywhere a loss for the poor. Alongside this theological zeal goes a general belief in the idiocy and indolence of most Americans, and the stupidity and malevolence of their leaders. If you're a Guardian reader - this book's for you!
There's no point in seeking a coherent thread through Moore's book - it's a rant, a series of rhetorical explosions, fantasies and occasional facts that build upon each other through repetition rather than logic. The notions that evil corporations, for example, actually employ and help people, or that shares in them enrich others, are nowhere entertained. It is also a given in Moore's universe that, despite exhaustive media recounts that have found no such thing, George W. Bush lost the election and his "presidency" (always in quotation marks) is illegitimate. "Can I say this any louder?" Moore screeches at one point, "Bush didn't win! Gore did." But Moore is equally furious at the Democrats. He describes Bill Clinton as one of the most successful Republican presidents in recent years, and supported Ralph Nader in 2000. His contempt for Al Gore, despite believing in his election victory, is arguably more intense than his antipathy to Bush. "Friends," he belabors, "when are we going to stop kidding ourselves? Clinton, and most other contemporary Democrats, did not and will not do what is best for us or the world we live in. We don't pay their bill - the top 10 percent do, and it is their will that will always be done. I know you already know this; it's just hard to say it because the alternative looks so much like ... Dick Cheney."
Moore's argument, like that of most purist class-war leftists, is therefore oddly disempowering. He's always calling for some sort of mass revolution, but there is no institution capable of delivering it which isn't already corrupted by Moore's exacting standards. He supported a purist left-wing candidate in 2000, Ralph Nader, who took enough votes from Al Gore to hand George Bush the Oval Office. His desire to turn the United States into the Netherlands overnight makes his politics more than a little quixotic. So his politics become a little like the politics of the far right under Bill Clinton - an endless tirade designed to appeal solely to those who already agree, a kind of aesthetic politics more attuned to the correct left-liberal life-style and outlook than any tangible alternative to the current system. Moore's politics are, in the words of Philip Roth, "the combination of embitterment and not thinking."
There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of a viciously oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny? But how at the same time could they support a war conducted by a president inimical to their beliefs and interests? On the opposite side of the spectrum between reason and unreason, the eminent liberal political theorist Michael Walzer just wrote an essay in Dissent worrying about exactly this kind of leftist surrealism.
Unlike Moore, Walzer's less concerned with a form of purist performance art than how the left can actually change America, if it hates her so. "The truth is," Walzer writes: "Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved." This anti-American nihilism is exactly what some parts of the left sought refuge in as terrorists killed thousands of their fellow-citizens. In one gesture, such leftists both showed how far gone they were and also how unhinged from most Americans they had become.
Walzer sees the deeper problem as an inheritance from the New Left of the 1960s, a left that still cannot see religious motives for terror, for example, preferring to view Islamofascism with some kind of Marxist subtext - to the point of misreading the nature of the terrorist threat altogether. And he sees the endless legacy of defeat for the American left as a debilitatingly alienating experience: "Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. ThatÕs why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed." Along with this radical alienation, there is also sheer pathology. Hence, in Walzer's words, "the favorite posture of many American leftists: standing as a righteous minority, brave and determined, among the timid, the corrupt, and the wicked. A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure."
Walzer is surely right. If the Congressional Democrats are offering now mere anodyne and mealy-mouthed opportunism, then the intellectual left has failed to come up with anything more persuasive or apposite. So the market is left to bitterness-mongers like Michael Moore, men of the left for whom cynicism, rather than decency, is instinctual. The sad realty for their ideological comrades is that while cynicism may make for best-selling books with racist titles, like "Stupid White Men," it does not make for a coherent liberal critique of the current administration or the current war. American democracy - and the world - is poorer for lack of that debate.
March 31, 2002, The Sunday Times of London
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