Another Leftbehind

That is, one who left behind a cozy socio-political mansion on the left to wander in the post-9/11 wilderness. The common factor in so many of them is this "hinge":

9/11, Anthony confesses, was a hinge-moment in his political trajectory. What it did was to force him to reflect on the importance and fragility of the western liberal democratic polity, and gave him a stinging awareness of the existence, and terrifying murderous ferocity, of those who want to destroy it, and to usher in a system of governance infinitely worse. In particular, it alerted him to a profound lacuna within the world-view of the liberal-left: an inability to imagine, or to properly come to terms with, the existence of evil or horrific violence unrelated to the dynamics of global capitalism. For Anthony, 9/11 marked the beginning of a period of systematic political self-reassessment. ‘In a sense’, he says, ‘11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see’ ....

From a review of Andrew Anthony's "The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence" by Simon Cottee.

Rushdie's People

Maybe that's who we are, as people of essentially liberal inclination but continuously steered away from that herd by awareness of its blind spots and reality's stones and thorns. Most jarringly by 9/11 but not in any sense exclusively on that day.

Having graduated from Cambridge in 1968, his politics were not untypical of his generation and class. There was an implied, and often explicit, criticism of western hegemony in his work. In The Satanic Verses, he writes of 'the Coca-Colonization of the planet' and refers to New York as the 'transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms'.

Rushdie still has his criticisms of America, where he lives for much of the time in the architectural gigantism of New York, but they are now moderated by a keener appreciation of the freedoms and advantages of western democracy. He remains a committed multiculturalist. 'I couldn't exist were it not for that transcultural movement. So obviously I'm biased. I do think, still think, there's a lot to celebrate about this mixture. If you live in a city like this or New York it's not possible to imagine it as monocultural. So in a sense it's clearly an enriching aspect of our daily lives.'

But he now has reservations about the direction that cultural diversity has taken. 'What I worry about and don't like,' he says, 'is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody ... that's stupid.'

Rushdie would argue, with some justification, that he was never a proponent of cultural relativism. Nevertheless the event that made him an outspoken opponent was the fatwa on his life issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine's Day in 1989. It was a defining moment in the cultural wars that have grown dramatically more political in recent years. Two hundred years after the Enlightenment, an author was under sentence of death for writing fiction. Suddenly all those beliefs, such as freedom of expression, that seemed so basic to literary and liberal life that no one bothered mentioning them were put to the ultimate life-and-death test.

And a number of writers, among them Germaine Greer, John Berger and John Le Carré, came down on the cultural relativist side of the argument. Their feeling was that, in not showing sufficient cultural sensitivity, Rushdie was the author of his troubles. Meanwhile Rushdie found himself in the strange position of having to rely on the support of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and agencies of the establishment - Special Branch and the intelligence services - of which he had been stern critic. Did this affect his feelings towards the establishment?

'Yes,' he says, 'sort of. I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.'

He developed not just an admiration, but a fondness for many people he came to know within the security and intelligence services. 'I've met a lot of Special Branch officers both at the everyday and higher levels and, with one or two exceptions, I liked all of them. I still have, improbably, quite a lot of friends in the British Special Branch.'

The only unkind words he has are reserved for the Foreign Office, which he found untrustworthy. 'I've always been able to handle anything as long as people are straight with you,' he says. 'Deviousness I can't deal with. That's not to my taste.'

...

There was a brief reprise last year when Rushdie was awarded a knighthood. A few opportunists in Pakistan, and clowns like Lord Ahmed over here, tried to generate a firestorm of protest, but it came to nothing.

Though it did produce one golden vignette on Question Time, when Shirley Williams argued that the knighthood was 'not very clever' because Rushdie had 'deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way', and he had 'been protected by the British police for many years at great expense to the taxpayer'. The Liberal Democrat Baroness was then taken apart by Rushdie's friend, Christopher Hitchens.

...

Since 2001, he's been joined in the political arena by a number of fellow authors, some of whom have taken up a more prominent, and sometimes more controversial, position than Rushdie.

'I think, fair enough,' says Rushdie. 'It's a big subject that everybody's thinking about. I don't agree with all Christopher Hitchens's views but that doesn't stop him being my friend. And I don't agree with everything Martin [Amis] said, but he's entirely entitled to say it without being abused in the way that he was.'

...

The point for Rushdie, however, is that he and his friends remain on the progressive side of the argument. 'My instincts are completely liberal, but I do think we live in a very weird world and we do need to realise that the world has changed. And when Martin, Ian [McEwan] and I say that we get called conservative. But,' he emphatically adds, 'we're not conservative.'

Another 'Left Behind'

This one is kind of a surprise to me: David Mamet. Though the rest of the left's drift away from Israel, and towards its would-be killers, seems to loom large, logically.

A Good Start

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

Sarah Baxter, who goes on with:

It is no longer possible to tell at a glance which side people are on. My husband, a photographer, has long hair and wears T-shirts and cargo pants. We live in stuffy Washington, where almost everybody wears a suit and tie but secretly longs to be artistic and hip. On the school run, nice lawyers confide to him that they hate George Bush, despise the Iraq war and are not as reactionary as they look. They are completely thrown if he tells them he dislikes Islamo-fascism more than Bush, is glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein, supports Nato against the Taliban and thinks the Iranian mullahs should never be trusted with a nuclear bomb. He considers himself an antifascist who believes in the secular values of the Enlightenment and human rights. There is nothing radical about being tolerant of the intolerant, he says.

While you're at it, check out Emily Hill on Martin Amis, who features in Baxter's piece. Hill would pass Baxter's test for a genuine liberal, I suspect. She has her blind spots: Islamic zealots were "nurtured" by the West "as a counterweight to genuinely secular and anti-imperialist mass movements" -- genuinely run by the Soviet Union. Often writers from her perspective find it convenient to forget there ever was a Cold War. The U.S. made its bad choices during that war, but they were not unforced errors.

Yet she can see something:

Put your hands up, said Amis, if you think you are morally superior to the Taliban. When a minority of the audience did so, Amis muttered: ‘About 30 per cent…’ His implication is that, in our current relativistic climate, it is taboo to assert your superiority to anything – even the Taliban. Anyone who values freedom, Amis says, should have a problem with Islamism. He graphically went through some of the feudal punishments that the Taliban metes out to women who step out of line. ‘We’re in a pious paralysis when we can’t say we’re morally superior to the Taliban’, he said. His attack on cultural relativism is welcome, and it certainly exposed moral sheepishness amongst the assembled at the ICA. But I couldn’t help thinking: is that it? Is that what it means to be ‘Enlightened’ and principled today – to be Not-The-Taliban?

There's enough shared reality in that that I can talk to that person and be confident we're using the same words to mean the same things, mostly.

Failure to Communicate

[posted by Callimachus]

I should just stop reading Memeorandum. It does me no good and makes me mean-mad like Tom Joad.

I see a link to this opinion piece which seems to me to raise an essential question -- the one I've been grappling with all through this war/occupation: This ought to have been the "liberals' war." It promised the projection of American might in the interest, partially if not largely, of a humanitarian cause. It came at a moment when national interest dovetailed with a bid to make a suffering swath of the world a better place. Nation-building was a liberal cause. Cleansing the world of our bad bargains from the Cold War was a liberal cause.

I understand people who saw that and were tempted by it but backed off out of suspicious of Bush and company and their former unwillingness to do any of that, of Rumsfeld's known contempt for nation-building, and of the evidently muddled motivations. All us old Cold War liberals who weren't outright pacifists had to pause and ponder and cross that bridge, or not.

But so many seemed never to acknowledge the humanitarian justification, or that such a thing even could exist. So many seemed to focus so entirely on Bush and his administration that they never bothered to address the thing in the context of what a liberal foreign policy and military policy ought to look like. Or whether such a thing would be worth doing with an administration they trusted.

It baffled me, because some of our heroes among the eloquent champions of liberalism around the world were persuaded -- tempted, if you must -- by the humanitarian justification for the war. If not America, who will do it? If not now, when it nearly converged with her national interest, when? It seemed to me that many self-identifying liberals at that watershed moment revealed themselves as more America-hostile than essentially liberal. It was where I and others finally parted ways with many former political bedfellows.

It didn't turn out anything like I had hoped. Those who acknowledged the humanitarian justification but were overruled by their suspicion of the administration's motives or competence have the right to say they were both liberal and astute. More so than I was. Those who merely trashed the whole thing as blood-for-oil and naked Israel-inspired imperialism, and who write as though the alternative to overthrowing Saddam was to live forever in February 2003, can't claim that. But they are the ones who most loudly do.

Anyway, the above column was written by one Jonah Goldberg, whose name I see kicked (literally) around the Web a lot. He seems to be a neo-con legacy of some sort. But his argument was essentially the same one used by José Ramos Horta and Václav Havel and André Glucksmann, updated with some quotes from current Democratic candidates. As with John Kerry in 2004, none of them has answered the dilemma to my satisfaction; none seems to have tried. If I could ask it, I might frame it like this: With reference to both military and diplomatic themes, and in light of Oil-for-Food revelations and the blackmailability of our old allies in Europe (cf. the recent deal with Libya over the doctors), what is a post-Cold War liberal American policy for dealing with rogue nations, former U.S. allies who also happen to be genocidal maniacs, and dangerous regional tyrants? Does our commitment to freedom and liberties and the rights of man die at the borders? What should be the role and weight of human rights and the better angels of human nature in guiding our decisions about national interest?

So I see via Memeorandum one of the progressive (for want of a better word) bloggers has weighed in on this column. And it is one who is often mentioned with respect by many of the un-progressive (for want of ...) people I read and respect. So I follow the link to find an answer. But I don't find one. The question never gets consideration. The whole post is an extended, foul-mouthed ad hominem rant, with an impenetrable title and nothing to even explain the depth of the fury. It amounts to "How dare he ask that?"

It's hardly even ad hominem because the homo in question never appears. The piece just assumes we know the name and know exactly why it's impossible for him to ask that question. Perhaps in the echo chamber, that is true. If the problem is Goldberg, she never explains that. If the argument is simply rubbish and the facts are simply wrong, as claimed, she never shows you how. The blogger can't be bothered. And frankly, after venting about it thus, neither can I.

Stuck in Westphalia

[posted by Callimachus]

As America does its slow dance of defeat in Iraq, we should attend to the lives of the people we have sent over there to do a job we bailed out on before they finished. We should attend to those who have come home already with wounds and crippling conditions, and to the survivors of the slain. We should attend to the Iraqi people who stood by us and cast their lot with the vision we dangled before them, then yanked away, of a free, strong, prosperous place to live.

I'm trying to do my part for all that. But, over my shoulder, I can't help but note some people who don't seem to care much about doing any of that are busying themselves writing history in advance: The anti-war people, who have the luxury of not really doing or saying anything positive while they toast retreat and wait for the big change in January 2009. Currently they're sorting out whether to write the story so that the entire adventure was a fool's errand, doomed from the start, or whether it was doomed by specific post-invasion decisions or indecisions by the criminal Bu$h gang.

Shrubbie & Co. are the cartoon villains of the piece. But when the official victors' history is written, I predict plenty of bile will be hosed at the turncoat liberals, the humanitarian and conscientious people who normally never would have found themselves taking the same side as a George W. Bush in anything so drastic as this.

Already it begins. Here, Scott Lemieux sneers at "one of the more bizarre manifestations of pro-Bush's-war liberalism, Paul Berman's attempt to fit Islamic terrorism seamlessly into the WWII and/or Cold War models of conflict, as a fight waged against totalitarianism."

Well, is it or isn't it totalitarianism? It seems that's something that can be persuasively argued down, and not merely dismissed with an ad hominem. Lemieux cites this 2005 "Nation" column by Stephen Holmes which attempts to bitch-slap Berman and his ilk.

His analogies, first of all, are tendentious to an extreme. Islamist murderousness resembles Bolshevik and Nazi murderousness. The planetary battle against terrorism (World War IV) resembles the planetary battle against communism. Baath dictatorship resembles Islamic militancy. The problem with such comparisons is not only that they are strained. They are also transparently calculated to serve a partisan political program.

Yet that assistance to other agendas need not be collusion and doesn't ipso facto make them false. Neither Lemieux nor Holmes seems interested in looking at this, however, only in dismissing it as idiocy.

If you read Qutb or Bin Laden, clearly their world-view is totalitarian. It happens to be rooted in religion, not in the essentially secular (but subversively spiritual) systems of communism and fascism -- Holmes notices this much. Yet it is just as totalitarian as they are. That the Islamist political worldview is hostile to atheist Soviet communism doesn't change their fundamental similarity as totalitarianisms. The individual is subsumed into the proposed system in a complete and total way in both.

It is totalitarian; I defy anyone to prove otherwise. And like the other great totalitarianisms of the 20th century, it insists it is the true and ultimate freedom of mankind. It sets itself in firm opposition to Western capitalism and decadent liberal democracy -- as did Hitler and Stalin.

You need not say, as some do, that the Islamists borrowed these grand, awful ideas from the West. They found them independently. Just as modern anti-globalists criticize the capitalist corporations in the same frame and terms (but with less rhetorical skill) that the Southern slaveholders of the 1850s used against the Yankee industrialists, without having any essential identity with them.

Islamism finds common cause with communism and fascism in having a common enemy -- us. Like fascism, it is full of yearning for a mythical past golden age, it despises and fears Jews as the authors of conspiracies. Like Soviet communism, it is deeply (if often hypocritically) collectivist, socialist. Both of those come from Islam itself. You need not posit a Western source, though the convergence does, perhaps, help explain the perverse fondness of certain fringes in our society for certain fringes in theirs.

What you're left with in considering the totalitarianism question -- and what some have said, though not Lemieux and Holmes, as far as I read them -- is that the difference is, both fascism and communism had control of powerful nation-states, while Islamists do not. Yet.

[Shortly after 9/11 the satirical newspaper site "The Onion" ran a story to the effect of George W. Bush offering to buy Osama a country and build him a capital -- so we could bomb it to the stone age.]

I suppose the reason Berman's critics don't go there is that it re-elevates Islamism to the level of the great 20th century mass killing ideologies -- where Berman has placed it. For there was a time when they, too, were not yet empowered.

Which is an interesting parallel path to consider. If you were the leader of America in the 1920s, and you foresaw the rise of Hitler and his party, how would you have stopped him? Invade Germany? Or do something to reverse the economic despair and political impotence felt by the German people? Or both? Could it have worked? Or do you have to wait for the dictator to complete his rise to power and reveal himself?

America and other powers did try to halt the rise of Soviet communism through military intervention. But, like Iraq today, the American people soon lost track of the point of what seemed an endless mission to nowhere, and they complained to Congress and Army morale suffered, and we gave it up.

The difference, of course, was that Iraq in 2003 was not at imminent threat of becoming the next Islamist nation. Saudi Arabia or Pakistan would have been high on that list. But Iraq seemed to be, as I've said, not a bad place to begin to do something to reverse the economic despair and political impotence felt by the Arab Muslim people. To this day, I have no idea exactly why George W. Bush went to war. But that was my reason -- that and the lesson that you have to clean up the messes you leave behind after wars (as we didn't do in the Civil War and World War I and the Cold War, and we paid and continue to pay the price).

One of the principal criticism leveled at Berman is that he insists on some sort of Saddam-9/11 connection. This is one of the most frustrating topics for me. Of course there was a connection. But it's nothing like people imagine, whether they insist on it or they mock the very idea of it. It was a clear, explicit connection, stated plainly time and time again by Bin Laden himself, both before and after the attack.

Here, for instance, in the interview he gave to Al-Jazeera correspondent Tayseer Alouni in October 2001:

When we kill their innocents, the entire world from east to west screams at us, and America rallies its allies, agents, and the sons of its agents. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is? Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in our countries for decades? More than 1 million children, more than 1 million children died in Iraq and others are still dying. Why do we not hear someone screaming or condemning, or even someone's words of consolation or condolence?

The sufferings of the Iraqi people -- under the U.N. sanctions regime as a result of the Gulf War -- always figured high on his short list of specific grievances against the West. Whether he felt that sincerely or not, I can't say. But the suffering was real, Saddam's continuance in power was the cause of it, and the U.N. sanctions only hurt the innocent while the guilty prospered by bribing their way through them. Saddam most of all.

Somehow I suspect that won't make it into the histories, as written by the victors.

At Home

[posted by Callimachus]

"I don't believe in what people call 'realpolitik', which rejects values and still doesn't win any deals. I don't accept what's going on in Chechnya, since 250,000 dead or persecuted Chechens are more than a detail of world history. Because General de Gaulle wanted freedom for everyone, the right to liberty is theirs, too. To be silent is to be an accomplice, and I don't want to be any dictator's accomplice."

Nicolas Sarkozy, Jan. 14, 2007, as quoted by André Glucksmann, here. Glucksmann I discovered late, on the eve of the Iraq war, as one of the brave stand of liberal European voices (the intellectual "300"?) who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein on the grounds of humanitarian justification. They were closer to my position on that matter than most Americans I listened to about it.

In this article, Glucksmann takes the unusual (for him) step of backing a candidate to lead France. In this case, Sarkozy (against Ségolène Royal).

I'm a Francophile -- and yes, I've been there, and yes, they were rude to me, too. I think the reason America and France dislike each other so much is that they are so much alike, and deep down they know it. It's like they're trying to occupy the same moral high ground in the world, and there's not room for both.

Listen to Glucksmann plead for the "large-hearted France" that he feels is eclipsed by realpolitik and other fetishes, and see if it doesn't resonate with your sense of American ideals (if you have such a sense):

But a large-hearted France has never forgotten the oppressed. Vietnamese boatpeople fleeing communism, the embattled Trade Unionists of Solidarity, those who suffered under Argentinean fascism, Algerians confronted by terrorism, victims of torture in Chile, Russian dissidents, Bosnians, Kosovans, Chechens… In no other country were these barbarities and the resistance to them discussed so much. Our ability to open our hearts to our brothers worldwide is etched into our cultural heritage – witness Montaigne, Victor Hugo, the 'French doctors' and those who would emulate them.

Sarkozy, of course, is the politician vilified on the French left as an "American neoconservative with a French passport." A worse insult hardly can be imagined (but where are the cries of dismay from those who counter-snarked against the "John Kerry looks French" smear?). And, yes, it goes back long before the invasion of Iraq. As in all such cases, the slur reveals only the poverty of ideas of those who repeat it.

Exiling people, and stigmatising them as anti-French, was for a long time the prerogative of a right which could come up with few answers to the successes of Léon Blum or Roger Salengro. The left deserves better that that.

The tale is familiar on many levels, and the one that resonates for me is the notion of old, sound liberal ideas edged out of their ancestral political homes, finding a refuge in a revitalized, center-right. Just as the rootless and dissident of all lands have found homes over the decades in Manhattan or the Left Bank:

Wallowing in its narcissism, the left found itself badly wanting when Nicolas Sarkozy broke with every tradition of the right and claimed to stand for the rebels and the oppressed, as well as the young communist agitator Guy Môquet, martyred Muslim women, Simone Veil (who eradicated the suffering caused by clandestine abortions), Brother Christian à Tibhirine, and the Spanish Republicans. Instead of bemoaning the way he has appropriated the socialist legacy, allow me to rejoice. When I recognise Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès, Georges Mandel, Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Albert Camus in this candidate's speeches, I feel somewhat at home.

Arrested Development

Maybe this explains some people; maybe it doesn't explain anything.

Like Neo-Neocon and others who came from the same background as a lot of the modern Western fringe left, and who once thought we were among them, I feel an occasional mission to try to understand how they got to where they are now and I didn't. It can become a kind of obsession, like some people used to be obsessed with the Lindbergh baby or Nixon.

Like a lot of people, I'm puzzled by the fact that the fierce heat of the anti-war, anti-Bush protesters -- who could turn out hundreds of thousands at one point -- hasn't come close to producing a political movement. Howard Dean tried to tap into it, but that fizzled out.

The excuse I often hear is that the people who control the media never gave them the chance. That doesn't fly. When in history did a "movement" begin with the media on its side? In fact, operating inside that media, I can tell you the gatekeepers were more than willing to rally to the anti movement, if it had just shown any sign of legs. But if there's one quality that defines the media more than "liberal," it's "cynical."

Instead, I look out and I see people who don't know how to, or don't want to, achieve positions of power and authority. They kick the door open, and then they stand there, blinking like animals, forgetting what to do once they get inside, or even how to get inside.

I've been surrounded by these cynical, lifelong dissenters for years. They all are of one generation; older than me, younger than my parents. Now I'm watching them head down to their graves as permanent outsiders in the land of their birth. They don't seem nearly as sad about this as I am; they seem to like it.

I can stack up their statements and speeches, but when I do the words never seem to build into anything. Their positions and ideologies of this year contradict their positions and ideologies of last year. It doesn't matter to them. These folks have a glib, snide, articulate put-down for everything they dislike. They defend nothing, they advocate nothing but glib, snide, articulate put-downs. Their current hero is that Jon Stewart guy who was on the Oscars. Last year it was Michael Moore.

They are fatalists, but not passive. They protest; they raise hell; they march with glib signs and big-headed puppets to shame the infamy. They offer no viable alternatives. They never stood up for Democrats when they were in power, though they would make glib, snide, articulate put-downs against Republicans who attacked those Democrats.

Here's what might have happened. There comes a point in a young intellectual's life when he discovers hypocrisy and stupidity and venality in his culture -- about the same time he notices the same in his parents. He or she reacts strongly against that.

During the 20th century, from say 1920 to 1990, young intellectuals in the West, and especially America, could flee, figuratively, from selfish America and posture in alien and enemy collectivist political cultures.

Communism was the most enduring of these, first in the Soviet model, then in the Third World version. In the 1920s and early '30s Italian fascism also had its allure, and many of Ezra Pound's generation succumbed to it. These alternatives seemed to be the future. They seemed idealistic. The realities were distant and reported in America in garbled form, if at all.

And after a time the wise and sane among the young intellectuals eventually arrived at historian Theodore Draper's conclusion. He wrote, "each generation had to discover for itself in its own way that, even at the price of virtually committing political suicide, American Communism would continue above all to serve the interests of Soviet Russia."

Draper himself made that journey. The moment of discovery, though perhaps I imagine this, tended to come about the same time the young intellectual found himself confronted with the personal realities and ugly choices that made him understand his own parents' compromises.

It was almost a rite of passage, for a young intellectual. But then the place for posturing collapsed. And those who were in full rebellion against the West in 1980 were robbed of the final step, the back-down at the time and place of their own choosing, the ability to escape with dignity intact and return to the fold. They were never allowed to make their own way back, and they refuse to come back on any other terms.

Maybe this explains some people; maybe it doesn't explain anything.

Left Behind in Britain

Sasha Abramsky, whose writings appear in Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation, is among the lifelong "leftwing" activists who have a feet-on-the-ground approach to the current struggle with Islamists. He recently wrote a thoughtful meditation on that situation in The Progressive, and an abridged version of the article is online at Open Democracy.

I think the British wing of the "Left Behind" faction -- lifelong liberals who were mugged by reality on 9/11, to borrow Neo-Neocon's phrase, had a confirmation experience in the wake of the July 7 bombings in London.

As summer 2005 began, I flew to London to stay with my parents. A few days after I arrived, four bombs blew up tube trains and a bus in central London on 7 July. It was the second time I had been in a city that was under attack by terrorists. Four years ago, I was living in Brooklyn when al-Qaida slammed passenger jets into the World Trade Center.

Over these four years, I have spent more time than is entirely healthy obsessing over the new realities. Some of my friends and relatives tell me I’ve changed – that my politics aren’t as “leftwing” as they used to be during the anti-nuclear movement in Britain back in the 1980s. In a way, they are right. My core politics haven’t changed, but it seems to me that the world has changed so dramatically – traditional alliances and reference points have become unreliable, the ground rules of the power game have so shifted – I’d be a fool not to incorporate these changes into my analytical framework.

Unlike my compatriot Christopher Hitchens, however, whose break with erstwhile comrades on the left over foreign policy has resulted in a wholesale swing rightward, I still hope that my rethinking of some foreign policy questions can be incorporated into a vibrant progressive movement. Indeed, I’d argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today’s world.

Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed “left” in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that “twilight conflict.” While on the one hand I agreed with their well-reasoned arguments pointing to a certain degree of western culpability for spawning groups like al-Qaida, on the other hand I was saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time.

Read the whole thing!

Chapter One

Here's another "Left Behind" story to add to the list. This one may be the earliest in the modern pack -- it's that ol' debbil AL CAPP! Chronicled in this article on "right-wing" comics.

Then you had Al Capp of Li’l Abner fame, a former liberal so distressed by the excesses of the sixties that he took time off from chronicling Dogpatch’s amiable swindling and social climbing to lampoon “Joanie Phoanie,” a Joan Baez look-alike in bare feet and love beads, with flies constantly circling her head. Capp also came up with Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (SWINE). In one representative entry, SWINE, having determined that America should be returned to its rightful Native American owners, induces wimpy Harvard administrators to hand over the university to the only Indian they can find—a shady character named Lonesome Polecat.

Even Lonesome Polecat—who soon trades the school to mobsters—can hardly believe the administrators’ lack of spine. Coming upon a bunch of students hitting a dean over the head with protest signs, he demands, “Why enemy no fight back?” “Because we’re students!” replies one of the kids. “If we commit assault, arson, and vandalism . . . ”

“... they’re not crimes ...” chimes in another.

“... they’re simply proofs of our idealism!” adds a third.

In explaining his political shift, Capp described an ideological journey that countless other liberals would make in the decades to follow. “What began to bother me, privately, was that, as things grew better, the empire of the needy seemed to grow larger. Somehow they became entitled to government gifts other people couldn’t get, such as people who worked,” Capp explained. “Yet I remained a loyal liberal,” he continued. “I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of liberalism. I spoke at liberal banquets in New York, Los Angeles, Washington. One day a lady photographer came to my studio and showed me a collection of Boston photographs. A publisher would publish them if only I would rattle off the captions. ... Well, one doesn’t turn down a lady liberal. ... This one, she said, will break your heart. She showed me a picture of a city street. It was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining. Garbage cans were tipped on the sidewalk. Bottles lined the gutters. On a porch sprawled a half dozen teenagers, drinking and smoking. The caption, I said, should be, ‘Get up off your asses and clean the street!’ The lady stormed out. I guess that was when I began leaving what liberalism had become.”

I still remember that series in "Li'l Abner," which still ran in the Philly Inquirer when I was a kid.

Yoostabees

I surfed some of the nastier anti-Bush/anti-War/anti-whatever blogs and saw a lot of derogatory commentary about people like me, who switched our self-identification from Democrat/liberal to ... something else after 9/11. I call us the "Left Behinds" (yes, totally aware of the pun and fond of it; we're also "South Park Republicans," after all). Over where I was, they call us "yoostabees," as in "used to be a Democrat." They mock and scorn and wonder what it was about 9/11 that made us realize, all of a sudden, that one party was slightly more "liberal" than the other.

They can see only partisan dichotomies. Most of the "Left Behinds" I know, while they may have been diligent voters, were not terribly activist in the political party sense. Michael J. Totten, whom I count as one of us, remains a Democrat. A number of others I know have crossed from Democratic registration to Republican, but others have gone "independent" and now find a home in no party.

Me, I was a Republican even before 9/11, but that's a twisted story; I've lived the last 20 years in places so utterly "red" as to count as the last one-party states on Earth, since the fall of Enver Hoxa's communist Albania. Even if space aliens kidnapped two out of three Republican voters on the eve of the election, the Republican candidates still would win.

The real elections were the primaries, and the real battles between progressives and conservatives took place in May. So I joined the GOP, because that was the place to make a real stand against the people I considered most dangerous. "I joined the Republican Party because everyone I hate is in there, and this way I get to vote against them twice a year," I'd tell people. But I usually crossed party lines in national elections. I voted for Clinton in '92 and Dole in '96 (I knew he'd lose, but I wanted to show some respect for him).

I think many of the "Left Behinds" were mostly in the process of a slow maturing out of their eariler hardened notions, and 9/11 telescoped a decade of gradual change into about a week.

But still, there was something about that day, and people's reactions to it, that threw a stark light on the landscape. Those of us in or near the center saw the world we thought we knew come down. Stunned, groping for a new construction to fit the new world we found ourselves in, we found little to say except anguish and sorrow, anger and rage.

But off on the fringes, right and left, the voices of the people who never lose their certainty still rang out. The fringe shouted into the void, and commentators usually dismissed as loopy were the only ones talking in clear sentences.

On the right, there was Ann Coulter:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

In other words, treat them exactly as they were treating us. Do to them exactly as they promised to do to us. I could feel, viscerally, the same way in those hours. I wouldn't have written that; something in me -- decency or pride in being better than our enemy -- would have got between my brain and my pen. But I could feel that. It was, to me, a natural human reaction: both to think that, then to think better of it.

And what of the Ann Coulters of the left? Well, take your pick among them. There was Michael Moore:

"If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes' destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

Or the San Francisco city supervisor who said this at the municipal memorial service a few days after the attacks:

"America, what did you do, in Africa, where bombs are still blasting? America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up?"

Or my '60s survivor anti-war protester co-worker:

Don't you think we're over-reacting to this whole thing?

Wow. I confess, I didn't recognize those reactions at all. They corresponded to nothing inside me. But it wasn't just me. My peers, like my liberal co-workers, felt a recognition, too -- for the Moores and the San Francisco officials. In their case, it confirmed their identity. In my case, it revolutionized it.

The Public Interest

Irving Kristol re-tells his own "Left Behind" story in the final issue of his magazine, The Public Interest. As for a lot of lesser lights, pulling one lever, and not another, in a voting booth in a presidential election marked the moment of emancipation.

For the first seven years of its existence, The Public Interest was generally regarded (and regarded itself) as a moderately liberal journal. The editors and most of the contributors, after all, were registered Democrats. Pat Moynihan was in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and in 1968, I was on a Hubert Humphrey campaign task force. It was the election of 1972 that precipitated the first political divisions in our community. Daniel Bell could not bring himself to vote Republican and unenthusiastically endorsed George McGovern. ... I, on the other hand, repelled by McGovern's views on foreign policy, unenthusiastically endorsed Nixon's reelection. My Republican vote produced little shock waves in the New York intellectual community. It didn't take long-a year or two-for the socialist writer Michael Harrington to come up with the term "neoconservative" to describe a renegade liberal like myself. To the chagrin of some of my friends, I decided to accept that term; there was no point calling myself a liberal when no one else did. And I had to face the fact that voting for Richard Nixon was, in the university world and in the intellectual world generally, the equivalent of a Jew ostentatiously eating pork on Yom Kippur. It was an act of self-excommunication. In fact, some of my critics regarded it as especially heinous for a Jew to abandon the creed of liberalism. For them, neoconservatism was seen as a religious as well as a political heresy.

I also find much to agree with in his view of religion in America. He's secual, but appreciative.

The culture wars introduced yet another dimension in the neoconservative spectrum. In The Public Interest, those wars were fought mainly in the book review section. Here the journal found allies among liberals, in academia particularly, who were offended by the extravagances of the counter-cultural Left. The counter-culture, for its part, moved steadily toward an aggressive secularism and an animus against religion, foreshadowing an ominous tension between the secular and the religious in American politics. Here, too, The Public Interest found itself on firm ground. It had always had a benign interest in religion-a secular interest in religion, one might say, deriving from traditional political and moral philosophy, which has been appreciative of religion as a social as well as a spiritual force.

De Tocqueville, as usual, said it right: "At the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything."

Who You Calling Conservative?

Bush has been slipping in the polls. And Glenn thinks he knows why:

The Democrats' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jane Fonda. They tried -- but failed miserably -- to convince people otherwise in the last election.

The Republicans' weakness is that people worry that they're the party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They tried, successfully, to convince people otherwise in the last election, but they're now acting in ways that are giving those fears new life. Add to this the fact that the war is going well, weakening the national security glue that holds Bush's coalition together, and a drop is natural: People who reluctantly backed Bush because Kerry was just unacceptable on national security are now seeing their worries about domestic issues as more credible.

Jeff Jarvis refined that thought:

I think it's more than that religion is a distraction from the nation's business. I think Americans get scared when they confront people who are too religious -- especially when they do that on the other side of the church/state wall. This doesn't mean the Democrats should be godless; they should just be religously moderate (read: sane). ... [I]n the general election, a religious mainstreamer can win over a fringer.

He advises Bush to "Concentrate on energy and health care." He advises Democrats to "Concentrate on energy and health care." And, I would add, Iraq, Afghanistan, and terror. Leave religion in the pulpits, and in the homes, where it belongs.

So I'm finding much of what comes from the GOP administration distasteful these days. Am I sorry I voted for it? Not a bit. I knew what it was; I waited for the other side to offer me a better choice; it never did.

Ever since I wrote my brief story about leaving the comfortable coccoon of "liberal" certainties, and put it online here, I've gotten occasional e-mail rants from present-day progressives demanding that I justify every "conservative" perfidy and hypocrisy that crosses their minds.

My favorites are the ones from old veterans of the '60s "movement" that castigate me for my relative youth. Like this one:

I'm 69. That you are young is merely an observation. Whether one lives through an era directly or knows it only by reputation makes a difference.

Many things might be observed. A writer choses to observe some and not others. Presumably, there is a method and a purpose to that. Perhaps, then, this writer remembered the reactions of the "elders" who were alive in 1967, and their constant reminders to the impetuous youth of that day about the wisdom and perspective that only a long experience in life can bring.

I tell them that being "no longer a liberal (as self-described liberals define it)" is not at all the same thing as "being a conservative (as self-described liberals define it)."

As I said right at the top of my piece, I don't know what sort of political animal I am, in the modern American zoo. But that book only has four pages: each side's view of itself and its caricature of the other. I think a lot of people don't connect with that.

I don't know what a real conservative is any more than I know what a real liberal is. I think I can cobble together a very good "conservative" argument for legal abortion and state permission of homosexual marriage. But those positions are ones no one seems to associate with "conservatism." At the same time I think I can make a real liberal argument for protection of the unborn and for the right to bear arms. But, ditto.

These labels lack meaning anymore, either historically or etymologically. Sans meaning, it's impossible to separate "real" anything from "fake" anything.

It's likely that someday soon I'll find myself voting for candidates touted by the "liberals" who snipe at me now. I'm not side-oriented. I'm voting for who convinces me. But you've got to convince me. And I'll tell you the things I care about. They're all over these pages. Then you try to win the vote. You don't get it just for "not being the other guy."

Left Behind

Most of my adult life I've been on what is called, in our degraded political language, "the left." Now, I don't know what I am.

I believe in protecting the environment from rapacious exploitation, and I believe in an economy that encourages people who work hard and play fair, but with safety nets and protection for the little guys against the unscrupulous corporate predators among the honest business people.

I own a home in an urban neighborhood of mixed ethnicity. Every time I see another farm or wooded copse chewed up for a housing development, I grit my teeth. I led editorial battles to save farmland and woods from suburban sprawl. A $50 million bond issue to save open space in one county passed, probably, in part, because of editorials I wrote about it.

I've spent hours and dollars working to keep religious fundamentalists from taking over local school boards (a much more important job than simply bashing on Jerry Falwell). I've advocated for minorities and sick Vietnam veterans. I sought to vote for statesmen who would offer a generous foreign policy that shared America's good fortune with the world. I was in favor of Enlightenment virtues and freedoms in opposition to fundamentalist strictures and darkness, peaceful solutions over violent ones.

A "liberal" is someone who believes that change can be good, especially when it is guided by a spirit of free inquiry and a firm sense of what is right and it aims to increase human freedom and give people more opportunities to guide their own lives. A liberal believes people are basically good, and they can, and want to, make their lives better. It's a faith enshrined in Bobby Kennedy's quote (nicked from G.B. Shaw) about "seeing things that never were" and saying, "why not?"

A "liberal" is someone who believes the Enlightenment values enshrined in the constitutions of the Western democracies are true human values, not merely cultural artifacts. The West has no gift from god, and our citizens are not better than those of other lands, but I love my country because it has set up these principles as our collective guide and have committed ourselves to live by them, when right, and be corrected by them, when wrong.

I grew up thinking that, and I identified myself as a liberal.

What I saw as the opposition was ... well, everything opposite to this. It was many things: Hidebound religious orthodoxy, knee-jerk refusal to think and apply one's mind to political and social problems, insistence that any change only would make things worse. These attitudes often huddled under the label "conservative."

Like a lot of people raised in my generation, I was mistrustful of U.S. military power, and selfish nationalism. Like a lot of people, I recited the litany of "stupid American" stories and jokes. In those days, I regarded America as almost God-like in its invulnerability. Thus I naturally had a root-for-the-underdog identification with any people or group I felt as a victim of U.S. power. Like you'd slap a bad kid for kicking a dog. The slap won't hurt the child, but the kick could kill the dog.

Then I saw the reeking ruins in New York city. 3,000 dead -- people just like me, who probably told the same jokes and held the same views. Why dead? Because they were Americans. The edifice of the country shook, and it made me realize, this place is mortal, like any nation. Like the moment you realize that, someday, your parents are going to die, it changes you.

When I look at America, for all its flaws, against its enemies, and all their purposes, I know which I prefer, which side I give my whole support. And when I look at the way the rest of the world reacted to us -- telling us we deserved it, still more frightened of us than of anything else, a world where a hot-selling book in France right now is called "50 Good Reasons to Hate Americans" -- I saw the fruits of unrestrained America-bashing as clearly as I saw them in the ruins in New York when my son and I went up there a few weeks after the attacks.

Killing the Americans didn't start on 9/11. It is at least as old as the Palestinian hijacking of the '80s, when the Americans were routinely singled out on international flights and beaten to death. It's a result of resentment of American power, you say? Very well, the Germans in the 1930s started killing the Jews not because they felt the Jews were weak, but because they were terrified of the supposed power the Jews had in the world.

I'm one of those who believes America is at war, and ought to behave like it, since Sept. 11. And after much studying and soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that the world probably, and Iraqis definitely, would be better off if the U.S. used its military might for once to remove a corrupt fascist who had been occasionally useful to us. He was our mess, largely, so it was our job to clean him out.

It strikes me as a decision a principled man could possibly make. But it doesn't strike my liberal friends that way. I understand their vexation, but it seems they can see only venality or psychopathia in people like me. And having once stood on the other side from them, and seen them in that perspective, I can't imagine going back to their camp (not that they are inviting me back).

I spent much of the '80s and '90s in active, public disputation with "the right." When I thought of "them" I pictured zealous, pious, ignorant, self-assured demagogues of crusading ideologies, inflexible mean men clad in expensive suits and cheap ethics.

Yet, as a small-town newspaper editor, the people I dealt with on the "right," with three or four odious exceptions, were fine and decent. The head of the local anti-abortion group was a soft-spoken young widowed mother of two. A school-prayer advocate was a cheerfully avuncular man who always asked about my son and would as gladly sit in my office and chat about the things we agreed on -- such as the genius of George Washington -- as the ones we didn't. The ex-mayor, a hardcore law-and-order cop, used to regale me with stories of law enforcement in the old days. I welcomed visits and phone calls from them.

I still hate SUVs and corporate malfeasance, executives who jilt retirees out of their hard-earned savings and foul the waters. I still think police should be held to a high standard in exchange for the power we grant them. I'm still a friend of freedoms and Enlightenment values, and an ally of whoever embraces them, in whatever place or culture. I reject the notion of school prayer as a panacaea for society's ills. I think abortion is tragic, but a necessary evil. I applaud the idea of gay marriage, and would gladly leave it to the states to decide whether it should be so. I also think states should decide whether marijuana should be leagal to buy, sell, own, and smoke. I think the government has no business censoring what we see on TV or do in our bedrooms.

In other words, I still disagree with my old enemies. But on more and more issues, I've come down on the side opposite my former friends. And I find myself in political opposition to many people and organizations I once supported.

On the whole, my old adversaries never forgot that their opponents were human beings. And thus they never stopped being human themselves. I wish I could say the same of the humanists around me today.

***

Possibly, all this is no deep matter. The evolution of a radical young man to a conservative middle-aged one is among the oldest of stories. Yet I feel neither "conservative" nor evolved. I still believe I'm upholding the values of my liberal youth, albeit in a different form. And like the aftermath of a divorce, I can't help re-examining my history on the left to look for incipient signs of a break-up.

"Gun control" is one such issue. I've never owned or fired a gun. I once held in my hand my great-uncle's .22 revolver from his days as a Pennsylvania Railroad conductor, but I'm not sure that gun would even fire. I've been to a shooting range once, to cover a police contest for a newspaper.

My grandfather on my father's side was an avid hunter, as were other men on that side in the late 1800s. I have photos and illustrations of them with rifles in hand. But that never got passed down to my dad, perhaps because his own father died before he had the chance. Probably it wouldn't have mattered. In our suburban existence, nobody talked about guns. It wasn't a gun culture.

So I came of age associating firearms with Christian enthusiasm, flag-waving patriotism, fondness for the military, and other irrational fixations of the right-wing loonies in this country.

I was of the "why would you need an AK-47 to hunt a deer" school of gun control. But back in the '80s I read the Village Voice, and back there among the naughty personal ads they ran Nat Hentoff's column. I read him regularly. And here was this Jewish intellectual from the city, with no more of gun culture in him than I had, teaching me to think of the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, as a whole.

My commitment to freedom of speech was solid; anything this side of "shouting fire in a crowded theater," I endorsed. So, I set myself the task of devising an argument against the Second Amendment that wouldn't also involve, and constrict, the First.

I couldn't do it, of course. They are of a piece. Would you say that the framers of the Bill of Rights never imagined the destructive power of modern weaponry? Then neither did they imagine the reach and scope of the modern media -- visual as well as printed, and all the more powerful for its pretense of unbias. Was their commitment to an armed citizenry based on an antiquated military model of a minuteman national army? Then so was their commitment to a free press based on a political system where newspapers served as the principle organs of party communications, something that hasn't been true in America since 1880 or so.

You don't need an AK-47 to shoot a white-tail deer, but neither do you need to dunk a crucifix in a piss-pot to make art. Guns kill people -- when people use them for that purpose. So do words. Or were we never serious about that bit about the pen being mightier than the sword?

So I gave up, and learned to accept the idea that some people grow up with guns and they're not survivalist freaks and they're no real danger to me. The gun problem in America -- and it is real -- is largely associated with urban crime. But until you can invent one set of rules for the black inner city, and another for the deer-hunting backwoods counties, you'll not solve it. The ever-clever Ed Rendell discovered the difficulty of that as mayor of Philadelphia. No state illustrates the dilemma better than Pennsylvania.

Later I got to know people in the South, who had grown up in Atlanta suburbs that looked much like mine on the Main Line, but they had been taught to use and handle firearms, and they used them for pleasure. And I actually envied them their Sunday afternoons blasting plastic milk bottles in the back yard. It sounded like fun. As for whether it would ever be a useful skill, as opposed to a passtime, that question got answered when my Marietta, Ga., friend ended up working in post-war Iraq.

I've still never owned or fired a gun. Perhaps I never will. By now, for me, it would be an affectation or a dilletante experience. But I've made my peace with that strain of the American right.

***

In my youth, during the Cold War, "left" and "right" generally stood for "communist" and "anti-communist." But this was a false dichotomy and I got an early education in that.

Twice, in the late 1970s, when I was a teen-ager, I lived in West Berlin and spent some time across the wall in East Germany. It was the most "conservative" place I have ever been. Nothing changed. Ever. No one experimented. It lacked color, even on a sunny day; no discos, no pool halls. The neon decadence of the Ku-damm in West Berlin might have been on another planet, not just across the wall. In the company of other students, I took a tour of historic sites in the East -- Potsdam, Frederick the Great's palaces. Our tour guide was an employee of the state. No doubt she was chosen particularly to lead this cluster of young Americans. Perhaps the bureaucrats thought they had picked someone to convince us of the virtues of the People's Republic.

A few of us, including our American teacher guide, spent a lot of time up at the front of the bus between stops, chatting with her. She was a matronly woman, to all appearances good-natured and honest. We probed her about life in the DDR. She said she would never want to live anywhere else. It suited her just fine. In upholding the virtues of her system, she said something I'll always remember: "when my children go out of the house, I don't have to worry about where they are."

At one of the palaces on this tour, we happened to pass a line of Hungarian students of about our own age (guided by their own government-supplied minder). They practically broke through the velvet ropes to get to us and pepper us with questions about life in America. They scrawled down addresses and pressed them on us. By the time our respective guides had herded us all on, we on the U.S. side got a clear impression of their restlessness and their hunger for a way of life we took for granted.

This was odd because, back in the U.S., all the anti-com-ya-nists I knew were grumps and blue-hairs who saw the Beatles and blue jeans as evidences of socialist corruption, and all the self-professed communists were layabout bohemians with "Che" buttons on their ratty army surplus jackets. It was easy to see which of them would have found life better in the Worker's Paradise of East Germany.

I didn't see at the time how much of the "liberal" view was simply an anti-American one. Many of the people advocating it didn't really care about Marxism-Leninism, except insofar as the idea of their advocating it pissed off their parents. Many of them also didn't really care about North Vietnamese or South Africans, except insofar as those people were shaking their fists at the company daddy runs.

Communism never attracted me, I'm glad to say. I skipped Marx and read Rousseau, Kropotkin, Godwin, Paine, Gandhi, Paul Goodman, that sort of thing. I decided I was an anarchist, or at least that description came closest to what I felt. I embraced the romanticism and somehow overlooked the silliness of it. You can do that when you're 18 and there's not a shooting war on.

In Europe, I also met Kurds. I met them in taverns and hostels in Nuremburg, because, for some reason, the small town of Fürth, near there, was a center for black market passports. They were refugees who had escaped ahead of Saddam's death squads after the U.S. had pulled its support from them. This was the moment Iraq shifted from Soviet satellite to U.S. client in containing the Ayatollah. These Kurds weren't bitter against Americans. They understood war and politics and betrayal. They wanted to come to the U.S., too, to bide their time and live the life.

When I read about Kurdistan today, I wonder if any of the young men I met in Nuremburg in 1979 survived and are now among the leaders of that reborn land. I was on their side instinctively in 1979; I'm on their side now. An indigenous non-Christian tribal people, victims of decades of official repression, fascist attempts to eradicate their culture and literally wipe them off the face of the earth. Brutally murdered with the complicity -- at least -- of the U.S. government. This ought to be a no-brainer for a true "liberal."

But instead the liberals I know have no interest at all in the Kurds, because the Kurds made the unforgivable mistake of liberating themselves with the help of American military power. That makes them the bad guys, because the only indigenous people a modern liberal approves are those that burn American flags.

Sunday, Christopher Hitchens (in NYT Book Review) pointed out that the true, best heir of the 1960s youth Revolution is Vaclav Havel. Unlike the Western hippies, his revolution -- wrapped in blue jeans and non-violence and rock music -- really did overthrow a repressive, dour authoritarian state. Yet the heirs of the '60s in the West have little use for him. They cling to Castro.

In bidding farewell to the left, I find myself in interesting company. Among them is author and columnist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote in his farewell letter:

Goodbye to a culture of blindness that tolerates, as part of "peace marches," women wearing suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. (See the accompanying photo of the "peace" march in Madrid. "Peace" somehow doesn’t exclude blowing up Jewish children.)

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth. If they really believe in serving the cause of liberation, why don’t they quit their evil-capitalist-subsidized jobs and go teach literacy in a Third World starved for the insights of Foucault?

Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology.

Goodbye to all those who have evidently adopted as their own, a version of the simpering motto of the movie Love Story. Remember "Love means never having to say you’re sorry"?

Goodbye to all that.