Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 28

How Liberals and Democrats Are Spinning a Possible Romney Victory, Before the Election!

As it becomes clear that Mitt Romney might actually win the election, desperate Democrats are beginning to develop a new spin about why Obama might lose. That they are doing this two weeks before the election gives us a glimpse of just how scared they are. 

First, the New York Times’ top political reporter, Matt Bai, suggests that if Obama loses, blame could be put on none other than his most important campaign asset, Bill Clinton. Bai writes:

But there is one crucial way in which the 42nd president may not have served the 44th quite as well. In these final weeks before the election, Mr. Clinton’s expert advice about how to beat Mitt Romney is starting to look suspect.

At first, Bai says, the Obama campaign tried to depict Romney as “inauthentic and inconstant, a soulless climber who would say anything to get the job.” But after the public got to see what Romney was really like in the debates, that effort ground to a halt.  Instead, Clinton argued they had to portray Romney as an extremist conservative. That, after all, is what Clinton did when he ran, portraying himself as a centrist in between far left elements in his own party and right-wing Republicans opposed to him. 

Barack Obama, of course, is no Bill Clinton, and yet the campaign adopted Clinton’s advice, working hard to paint Romney as Bush-Cheney redux. Clinton, as Bai writes, was a “centrist deal maker,” while Obama is correctly not seen in this light by the American public. Bai adds that since the debates, Romney “has made a brazen and frantic dash to the center, and Mr. Obama has often seemed off-balance, as if stunned that Mr. Romney thinks he can get away with such an obvious change of course so late in the race. Which, apparently, he can.”

Romney thus cannot be painted as “a far-right ideologue,” no matter how many times Obama ads try to do just that. To put it bluntly, the tactic is not working, as the increasing numbers shifting to Romney in the polls continue to prove. Obama and his team will continue to make efforts to try to convince swing voters and independents of just that, and so far, it isn’t working.

So, Bai says, if Romney wins, Democrats will put the blame on Bill Clinton for having the campaign change its tactics as Clinton told them to do. Obama, he concludes, “now has only a couple weeks to convince a lot of independents in states like Ohio and Virginia that Mr. Romney really is some raging conservative, rather than the more malleable, somewhat awkward fellow he is impersonating on TV.”

What is significant is that Bai is writing this now — rather than after the election. When can you remember a pro-Democratic analyst writing an explanation for what they fear is a Romney victory when the campaign is still going on?

George McGovern: R.I.P.

Look no further for what was wrong with the late George McGovern’s politics than this tribute to him by the liberal columnist Eleanor Clift.  Clift concludes her tribute this way: 

Much of what McGovern stands for is summed up in the slogan of his ’72 campaign, “Come Home America.” Ridiculed by critics at the time, it enjoys renewed resonance today in a country weary of wars that in McGovern’s view are “just as silly as the war in Vietnam. We shouldn’t be in countries we don’t know anything about.”

In fact, the slogan posited a return to the old isolationism shared by both the Old and New Left and the Old Right and their present day paleoconservative activists. Rather than have resonance today, a move towards Right or Left-wing isolationism would all but guarantee a retreat on our nation’s part that would assure the eventual dominance of the West’s major enemies—whether it was the Soviet Union in the recent past or the  Mullahs of Iran and the Islamists today.

In The New York Times, the late David Rosenbaum’s obituary, prepared for the paper before its author himself passed away, made this point:

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought. Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

McGovern may not have been the candidate of “abortion, amnesty and acid,” as Nixon proclaimed he was in the election that led to the Senator’s devastating defeat, but in fact, McGovern was not simply the Western prairie liberal described by Rosenbaum and other obituary writers. In fact, he was a left-wing labor historian with a Ph.D. about The Great Coalfield War , the story of the same Ludlow Massacre of 1913 which Woody Guthrie put to music.

He also was a war hero and patriot, who flew scores of major bombing raids over Italy, Austria and  Germany during World War II, for which he received a Distinguished Flying Cross. McGovern often said he would fly over Auschwitz, and was horrified that he and his comrades never received an order to bomb the railroad tracks used to transport Jews being brought to the gas chambers. Later, McGovern would say his own experience of reigning death and destruction on civilians hit by the bombs he dropped turned him into a fierce opponent of all military action.

As the Cold War developed, McGovern became a typical anti-war fellow traveler of the American Communists. Left out of most of the obituaries is the fact that McGovern was a delegate to the Henry A. Wallace Progressive Party convention in 1948, that nominated Wallace for a presidential run in a party created and dominated by the American Communist Party. A small faction of delegates from Vermont sought to pass a resolution calling for the party to have an independent foreign policy. The Communists took that as an effort of some members to not support the Soviet Union. The resolution was defeated, as delegates including McGovern voted to reject it.

Later, he would take positions akin to those Wallace took in 1948, arguing that the Cold War was waging because the United States refused to accommodate serious Soviet concerns for their own security. In one sense, his own massive defeat in 1972- losing the electoral college vote in every state except Massachusetts- including his own South Dakota- showed that McGovern proved as unpopular to the American people as Wallace was in 1948.

With the McGovern rules created by a commission he chaired, the Democratic Party was transformed into an institution beholden to special interest groups of the Left, that easily used those rules to pick McGovern himself as their candidate. His effort began the slow takeover of the once mainstream party by forces of the far Left.

McGovern himself never had a real chance. I recall watching him on the main convention night, postponing his acceptance speech until 1 am- way after most viewers were asleep- to meet outside the convention with left-wing protesters from the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. Any major party candidate who would do such a thing was clearly more than out of touch with the reality of American politics.

Years later, I heard McGovern at the PEN International Writer’s Conference in New York City, where he spoke on a panel with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bruno Kreisky, the former Chancellor of Austria who was virulently anti-Israel.  At that meeting, McGovern said that had he been elected President, the first thing he would have done to deal with the Middle East would have been to go to ask Kreisky for advice. Kreisky, with McGovern’s support at the panel, also called for recognition by the West of Communist East Germany, and rejected  any policy that would have sought to isolate the regime. It was clear then, listening to McGovern at that event, what a disaster he would have been for his country had he been elected.

McGovern, it is true, opposed the War in Vietnam before it was popular to do so, and showed rare political courage, taking a position he thought was right although it could not help his political career. He was a straight-shooter, honest, and principled, and one could reject his policies and still respect him as a person of honor who thought what he fought for was in the nation’s best interest. A war hero, he did not ever mention his war record to try and show that he had fought valiantly for America, even though Nixon was condemning him for weakness and for having no concern for America’s position in the world. He simply did not feel to raise his own war record was the right thing to do, especially since he had become anti-war.

His defeat revealed to most people that standing for national office on a platform of extreme leftism, if openly proclaimed, could lead only to political destruction. Future leftist candidates learned from the outcome in 1972 that a more stealth approach to a move to the left was the way to operate if one wanted to achieve, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States based on redistribution of wealth and attainment of a social-democratic model for a future America.

A good and decent man who advocated policies that were both dangerous and wrong, passed away living into his 90th year. R.I.P.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Woody Guthrie Tribute Concert at the Kennedy Center: Some Good Music, and some Dreadful Politics

How sad that on the night of the final event of the year-long celebration of Woody Guthrie’s life and music, his son Arlo’s wife passed away two days after their 45th wedding anniversary, and the morning after the concert Arlo wrote the following about her passing:

The sun rose on my world this morning. Jackie stayed with us throughout the night, lingering in our hearts just out of sight but clearly present. She woke me before sunrise in a dream saying that the hour had come when she would need to leave us and be gone before the sun arose. As her words awakened me I walked outside and stood looking over the river talking with her in the predawn twilight we both loved so much. It was our time and for years she brought me coffee as I took photographs of morning on the river.

There are loves, and there are LOVES. Ours was and will continue to be what it has always been – A very great love. We didn’t always like each other. From time to time there were moments when we’d have our bags packed by the door. But, there was this great love that we shared from the moment we met – a recognition – It’s YOU! And we would always return to it year after year, decade after decade and I believe life after lifetime.

The audience at the concert- held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., all wondered about Arlo’s absence, since he was in the program. One artist said “we’re all singing Woody’s songs for Jackie today,” but she didn’t elaborate. Arlo writes that we all live for the moment we are in, and hence “we have no thought of past or future.” He will continue to tour and make up the gigs he missed. That is what he does, communicating through art and song, like his father and many of his own children.

My wife and I went to the concert last night, along with some friends. It was an all star cast, and there were many memorable moments. The young folks who make up the popular Old Crow Medicine Show brought vigor and a rousing old timey feeling to some of Woody’s best songs. Rosanne Cash and her husband and guitar accompanist John Leventhal sang beautifully. Jimmy LaFave, who sounds like a younger Bob Dylan, was superb, and the bluegrass group featuring Del McCoury and his family, playing with banjo master Tony Trischka, did “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” bluegrass style, and Trischka and the band scored with a banjo rendition of “Woody’s Rag,” the only instrumental composition Guthrie ever wrote.

The Case of Eric Hobsbawm: Can a Stalinist Be a Good Historian?

At first glance, the question of whether a self-proclaimed Marxist historian, a member in good standing of the Communist Party, can be a good historian seems self-evident. After all, anyone who in this day and age still defends the Marxist-Leninist project and the reign of Lenin and Stalin in the the 20th century must be somewhat self-deluded.

The late Eric Hobsbawm, who died two weeks ago, was such a historian. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to the end and a founding member of the Communist Party Historians Group (and an editor of its journal Past and Present), Hobsbawm was heralded in obituaries and memorial statements as one of the best historians writing in our own time.

The mainstream media went out of its way to sing Hobsbawm’s praises. Last week’s Time, for example, ran a short piece by Ishaan Tharoor, who wrote that “though the Cambridge-educated Briton was an unrepentant Communist who refused to quit the party even after the horrors of Stalin became clear, his work showed little trace of dogma. As a historian, he was interested less in the actions of great men than in the lives of ordinary people.” Or, to put it in clearer terms, Tharoor is saying that Hobsbawm may have supported totalitarianism and the regime of the Gulag, but he cared about the real people and their “struggles.” And, moreover, his “taut, lucid prose” was written in “Marxism’s most ideal form: cosmopolitan, humanist and rooted in the study of societies from the bottom up.”

I bet you weren’t aware that to Time, Marxism was cosmopolitan and humanist. PJM’s own Roger Kimball sees Hobsbawm a bit more accurately. Roger said it best in these words:

Hobsbawm was adulated by an academic establishment inured to celebrating partisans of totalitarian regimes so long as they are identifiably left-wing totalitarian regimes. Although he claimed to have been victim of a “weaker McCarthyism” that retard advancement of leftists in the UK, Hobsbawm enjoyed a stellar career replete with official honors, preferments, and perquisites. He was showered with honors and academic appointments at home and abroad. His books won all manner of awards. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honor. But the central fact about Hobsbawm, as about so many doctrinaire leftists, was his willingness to barter real people for imaginary social progress. If he “abandoned, nay rejected” the “dream” of the October Revolution, he never abandoned its animating core: an almost reflexive willingness to sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a spurious ideal.

Hobsbawm himself made this quite clear in a now famous and much quoted interview with Michael Ignatieff that conducted in 1994. What you are saying, Ignatieff asked, is “that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm immediately gave a one-word answer that says it all: “Yes.” No wonder Roger Kimball refers to him as a “repellent figure.”

Naturally, writing in The Nation, the left-wing’s most prominent historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner lauded Hobsbawm in very different terms. Playing the old Popular Front game, Foner ignored Hobsbawm’s defense of the old Soviet Union and of Stalin’s terror. Foner simply called him a “life-long advocate of social justice.” Obviously, in Foner’s eyes, anyone supporting Stalin and the old Soviet cause was simply revealing his concern for the peoples of the world and their persistent struggles for equality. Hobsbawm never gave up his beliefs, Foner writes. Of course, Foner never tells readers what these were, saying only that Hobsbawm stayed firm “out of respect for the memory of comrades who had suffered persecution or death for their political beliefs.”

Eugene D. Genovese: 1930-2012. Rest in Peace

One of America’s best historians, Eugene D. Genovese, passed away two days ago. He was one of my long-time friends. I knew him when both he and I considered ourselves  Marxists, and his scholarship, integrity, forthrightness and outspoken and principled positions made him a figure that everyone had to contend with. Anyone who was lucky enough to have known Gene, even when at times they found themselves on opposite sides from him in a political battle, knows how much they learned from him, and how lucky they were to have had the chance to engage with him.

I will be writing a tribute to him for The Weekly Standard that appears one week from now. But those who want to know about his work and his passion for the truth, should consult the following sites for the first tributes. His family provided an obituary, which outlines the unique nature of his contributions to both scholarship and politics.

Perhaps the most moving tribute to his greatness is provided by Robert P. George, the Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence and Politics and Director of the James Madison Center. Dr. George speaks eloquently and beautifully about Gene’s vision and his life, and what in particular he delivered to our knowledge about the nature of the slave South in our country’s past, as well as his fierce dedication to the truth that allowed him to break with the Left which for many years provided the framework for his life.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, his friend and colleague, Mark Bauerlein, sums up Gene’s contribution this way:

Genovese will be remembered for two things that don’t often coexist in figures in our time. First, he was a scrupulous, diligent, and discerning scholar; his work on the antebellum South will stand as a monumental corpus for years to come. Second, outside the classroom and the archive, he was a vigorous partisan, sometimes confrontational, identifying political adversaries and hurling broadsides with Homeric force.

And in the libertarian magazine Reason, Jesse Walker writes that Gene was a “cultural conservative, a sympathetic interpreter of southern traditionalists, and a fierce critic of the academic left. By the P.C. wars of the early ’90s, he was routinely categorized as a man of the right, even though he still considered himself a socialist; by the end of his life, he had contributed to National Review and spoken at the American Enterprise Institute.” Walker is correct to note that at whatever stage Gene was in his political life, he always thought for himself, and never adhered to any party line.

There will be many more tributes as the news gets out of his passing. Gene Genovese was a major figure in American intellectual life, and a warm and decent human being. All of us who knew him will miss him dearly, and those who knew of him only from his writings, also understand what a great loss his passing is to the world of learning. He was, as Robert P. George so aptly says in the conclusion to his speech, a “truth-teller.”

An Excellent Republican Candidate You May Not Know: Dan Bongino

A few weeks ago, I moved from West Virginia back to Montgomery County in Maryland, where I had previously lived from 1992 through 2006. Maryland is a solid Democratic state, and therefore Republicans have written it off and the president has no need to campaign in it. So what conservative would even bother to run for Senate in such a liberal state, one in which Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor in the state, lost to current Senator Ben Cardin by 54 percent to 44 percent?

The answer is Dan Bongino, whom I was privileged to hear speak before a packed meeting today in Silver Spring, Maryland. I predict Bongino will be another one of those rising stars in the Republican Party, a man who is able to produce in an audience the kind of passion and enthusiasm that we have seen for stars like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Like both of these men, Bongino has the knack for explaining and defending conservative policies and programs in a way that people can understand without demonizing his opponents — he makes clear it is their policies, not them, whom he opposes.

Go to his website and watch the video of him in action, and you’ll catch a glimpse of how he talks to people. In his speech today, Bongino stressed how different this election is than previous ones. He mentioned that while he voted for Bob Dole, he did not think it was a catastrophe that Bill Clinton won a second term. After all, he said, Clinton did some good things with Republican support, and some things he opposed. But the Republic lasted, and the country continued to thrive. This election, he said, was something different: the choice is between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, who he posited is an “ideologue” who sees things differently than most people.

A former Secret Service officer in the elite Presidential Protection Division during both the administration of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Bongino said he would have given his life for Obama if need be, and that he considers himself a decent person and a good family man. But he said he entered the race for one reason alone: he believes the policies of the Obama administration are wrong for the country he loves, and he felt compelled to not leave it to others to put America back on the right course. So this former Secret Service officer, who was the lead agent coordinating Obama’s trips to Prague, Jakarta, and the war zone in Afghanistan, has decided to enter the race against the president he served with distinction.

A Republican Candidate You May Not have Heard of, and who Deserves to Win. His name is Dan Bongino

A few weeks ago, I moved from West Virginia back to Montgomery County in Maryland, where I had previously lived from 1992 through 2006. Maryland is a solid Democratic state, and therefore, Republicans have written it off, and the President has no need to campaign in it. So who would even bother to try and run for the Senate in such a liberal state, one in which Michael Steele, a former Lieutenant-Governor in the state, lost to now Senator Ben Cardin by 54 to 44 per cent?

The answer is that candidate is Dan Bongino, whom I was privileged to hear speak before a packed meeting today in Silver Spring, Maryland. Bongino, I predict, will be another one of those rising stars in the Republican Party, a man who is able to produce in an audience the kind of passion and enthusiasm that we have seen for stars like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Like both of these men, Bongino has the knack of explaining and defending conservative policies and programs in a way that people can understand, without demonizing his opponents as bad people and making clear it is their policies, not them as individuals, whom he opposes.

Go to his website and watch the video of him in action, and you’ll catch a glimpse of how he talks to people. In his speech today, Bongino stressed how different this election is than previous ones. He mentioned that while he voted for Bob Dole, he did not think it was a catastrophe that Bill Clinton won a second term. After all, he said, Clinton did some good things with Republican support, and some things he opposed. But the Republic lasted, and the country continued to thrive. This election, he said, was something different: the choice is between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, who he posited, is an “ideologue,” who sees things differently than most people.

A former Secret Service officer in the elite Presidential Protection Division during both the administration of George W. Bush and Barack Obama,  Bongino said he would have given his life for Obama if need be, and that he considers himself a decent person and a good family man. But he said he entered the race for one reason alone: that he believes the policies of the Obama administration are wrong for the country he loves, and he felt compelled to not leave it to others to join the fight to put America back on the right course. So this former Secret Service officer, who was the lead agent coordinating Obama’s trip to Prague, his visit to Jarkarta and to the war zone in Afghanistan, has decided to enter the race against the President he served with distinction.

Bongino, however, has a background not just in active police and security work, but has a B.A. and Master’s Degree in Psychology, with a concentrate on Neuro-Psychology and Behavioral Learning, and a second Master’s in Business Administration. He describes himself, as he did today, as a man who is not rich, but a member of the middle class—the very group that polls show is gaining Mitt Romney the most votes. With his wife, he started three small businesses, and left his work with her for this campaign.

Bongino is particularly interested in what he calls the main civil rights issue today- that of education for minorities and the poor in central cities. He spoke about his own work on that behalf in those sections of Maryland where poor and minority residents are forced to attend bad schools and have no choice for anything else.  As he learned from personal experience, as a young boy growing up in Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, only a scholarship from a Catholic school in his borough allowed him to gain the advantage of a solid education denied those of his other friends who attended poor public schools in his own community.

Listening to Bongino speak, it occurred to me that it is possible he will receive more votes on the Republican line in Maryland than Mitt Romney, and that there is even a real chance that he could win against his opponent, the current Democratic Senator who seat is he challenging, Ben Cardin. Like the presidential candidates, Cardin and Bongino have two or three debates coming up, one of which will be broadcast on one of the three major networks, and another on the local Maryland PBS station. I have not heard Cardin speak, but Bongino is up on both domestic and foreign policy, and can handle anything thrown at him. Like Paul Ryan, he has studied economics and he regularly cites works that have influenced him, like the writings of Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman and others.

At today’s talk, many of the seniors present were concerned about what might their fate might be should Obama Care not be defeated. Explaining the stakes, Bongino answered that the  IPAB boards set up to judge what Medicare will or will not cover would result eventually in a two-tier health system: good medical care for the wealthy who can afford concierge service and pay their own way, and poor and diminished medical care for everyone else forced to go into the government run program without the ability to make a choice of what they want.

So, even if Mitt Romney does not win- and at this point he can pull it out and become our next President-there are local races where good candidates have emerged, and where they can have the ability to reach people, change their way of thinking, and possibly even win. Dan Bongino is one of these candidates, and I hope that this column has served to introduce him to those who until now have not heard about him. And if you live in Maryland like I do, don’t despair. Get out there and do your part.

 

 

Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left: An Answer to Richard Landes

Last week, I wrote a column challenging Professor Richard Landes of Boston University to respond to the critique I wrote of his own arguments against Judith Butler. In that article, I argued that well-meaning men of the Left like Prof. Landes should give up trying to tell people like Butler that the reasons for their hostility to Israel contradict the humanist values of the Left. I argued that it is a fool’s errand trying to save the Left from itself; that in today’s world, what defines being on the Left are precisely the kind of positions Landes and others disdain.

Writing a day after my column appeared — ironically on the anniversary of 9/11, on which most of the Western Left took the position that “the chickens had come home to roost” and that the attack on the United States by al-Qaeda was nothing but payback for American imperialism — Landes countered that I was only talking about “the revolutionary Left,” whereas when he talks about the Left he is referring to what he terms a “demotic” Left. Its principles, he wrote, are really basic “liberal” principles — those of “free people, entering with personal dignity into uncoerced relations with others,” including “the dignity of manual labor … equality before the law,” and “the value of human life (rather than the sacrifice of the well-being of the many for the pleasure of the few.)”

These principles, Landes argues, were “hijacked by revolutionaries on the Left in the 2oth Century,” from Hitler to George Bernard Shaw, Heidegger and Jung, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom, he writes, defend “revolutionary state terrorists.” Landes praises the work of Bruce Bawer on the threat of Islamism in the West, and he accuses scholars like Judith Butler of adapting “aspects of the authoritarian personality” and of identifying with aggressors against the humanist values he supports.

Landes’ flawed argument falls apart when he writes — after showing how stupid people like Butler are when they argue that terrorist groups like Hamas are part of a “progressive social movement” — that “every decent person is on the demotic Left.” What he has done, literally, is to argue that all those who oppose evil are on the Left. Really? Is he now going to therefore continue to argue that Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and other conservative opponents of Hamas, who unlike so many of the Left, fully realize the evil of that movement, are all on the Left? I agree, as I said last week, with Landes’ own attacks on Butler. But I am a conservative. According to Landes, however, I too am a leftist. Or, are the Republicans I named and myself as well all leftists?

Why There Cannot be a Decent Left: An Answer to Richard Landes

Last week, I wrote a column challenging Professor Richard Landes of Boston University to respond to the critique I wrote of his own arguments against Judith Butler. In that article, I argued that well-meaning men of the left like Prof. Landes should give up trying to tell people like Butler that the reasons for their hostility to Israel contradict the humanist values of the left. I argued that it is a fool’s errand trying to save the left from itself; that in today’s world, what defines being on the left are precisely the kind of positions Landes and others disdain.

Writing a day after my column appeared- ironically on the anniversary of 9/11, on which most of the Western left took the position that “the chickens had come home to roost,” and that the attack on the United States by Al Qaeda was nothing but payback for American imperialism- Landes countered that I was only talking about “the revolutionary left,” whereas when he talks about the left, he is referring to what he terms a “demotic” left. Its principles, he wrote, are really basic “liberal” principles- those of “free people, entering with personal dignity into uncoerced relations with others,” including “the dignity of manual labor…equality before the law” and “the value of human life (rather than the sacrifice of the well-being of the many for the pleasure of the few.)”

These principles, Landes argues, were “hijacked by revolutionaries on the left in the 20th century,” from Hitler to George Bernard Shaw, Heidigger and Jung, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom he writes defend “revolutionary state terrorists.” Landes praises the work of Bruce Bawer on the threat of Islamism in the West, and he accuses scholars like Judith Butler of adapting “aspects of the authoritarian personality” and of identifying with aggressors against the humanist values he supports.

Landes’ flawed argument falls apart when he writes, after showing how stupid people like Butler are when they argue that terrorist groups like Hamas are part of a “progressive social movement,” that “every decent person is on the demotic left.” What he has done, literally, is to argue that all those who oppose evil are on the left. Really? Is he now going to therefore continue to argue that Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and other conservative opponents of Hamas, who unlike so many of the left, fully realize the evil of that movement, are all on the left? I agree, as I said last week, with Landes’ own attacks on Butler. But I am a conservative. According to Landes, however, I too am a leftist. Or, are the Republicans I named and myself as well all leftists?

Landes argues that the left stands for “fairness,” and that the left Butler represents is a “deviation” from the real left. He calls their left “the self-destructivist left,” while the one he identifies with is not one that favors appeasement of evil, while their left supports “suicidal versions” of leftist “folly” that marches in the streets in support of a movement that would make all non-Muslims dhimmi. They have lost their “moral compass,” while the members of the left he supports does not support the Islamic radicals, out of fear that to not show solidarity with them would make them “right-wingers.”

I discussed Landes’ argument with my friend David Horowitz, and he e-mailed me a thoughtful response with which I mainly concur. Horowitz writes:

The distinction he makes between a demotic left and a revolutionary left is fairy dust. Yes there have been and still are a handful of decent but impotent people on the left whose political weight is non-existent. Whatever happened to the Euston Manifesto!. What are the leftwing publications, organizations, recognized spokesmen who are defending Jews and Christians and even gays and women against the Islamo Nazis? Where the same even calling them Nazis, which is what they are (and yes the Nazis themselves were leftists? There is a fundamental snobbery and arrogance evident in the postures of the so-called demotic mini-left. The leftists actually have a monopoly on all the values that we associate with human decency, equality, liberty etc. But these values were actually instituted made into a global force by conservatives — American conservatives who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and created a political system to make those values real. Judith Butler doesn’t act out of good intentions. She acts out of the same emotion that motivates the left generally which is hate. Henry James described them all in describing the feminist heroine of his novel the Bostonians: “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage, which was natural enough, inasmuch as to her vision almost everything that was usual was iniquitous…. The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some day … be a martyr and die for something.” Or as Marx — who is the inspiration for all leftists — put it: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That is the true voice of leftism. What the demotic mini-left is about is sentimentality.

At the YIVO Conference on Jews and the Left, the keynote address was presented by Michael Walzer, the co-editor of Dissent, and a man who himself wrote a major essay a decade ago titled “Can There Be a Decent Left?” in which he expressed his disappointment with so much of what the current left stands for. In my own comments, I mentioned that Walzer embodied a contradiction- a man of the left who is pro-Israel- but who stood out as one of a few precisely because there are hardly any others of the left who were joining him. As I said, his own position was hardly known in the country at large, while the left of The Nation magazine and its open hostility to Israel exemplifies the actual position of 99 per cent of America’s leftist intellectuals. Therefore, I argued, Walzer was quite irrelevant.

The proof, as David Horowitz writes, is disappearance and disregard of The Euston Manifesto, a statement of some British and European leftists in defense of Israel and Western democracy. When it was published, it got a flurry of press reports on the day it was issued, and then was quickly forgotten about. The American version had a group of prominent signers, but went completely unnoticed. Some of its signers were affiliated with The New Republic, which since the manifesto’s publication, has all but abandoned its once liberal hawkish principles and fired its most prominent defender of Israel,  its former publisher and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz. Now, in its place, one sees regular columns by John Judis such as this most recent one attacking Mitt Romney as a dreaded neocon.

The truth is that the left in the West, including our own left, is largely anti-American, favorable to extremist radical social movements, and sees any one or group who is not on its side as not only incorrect, but morally evil. The answer to Michael Walzer’s own query is still the same: it would be nice if there was a decent left, but its small and ineffectual numbers proves that its creation is something that will never take place.

 

 

 

Maureen Dowd’s Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews: Stop Being “Puppet Masters” of the Republicans

Last week, our colleague Roger Kimball asked whether the New York Times health insurance included psychiatric coverage, because, he quipped, it seemed by her outrageous columns that Maureen Dowd probably needed it. Evidently Ms. Dowd did not take Roger’s suggestion to heart, because yesterday — the eve of Rosh Hashanah — she insulted her Jewish readers by writing a column that depended on one of the oldest of anti-Semitic tropes: that smart Jews manage to bamboozle their Christian friends by pulling the wool over their eyes and getting them to unwittingly do their bidding.

Politico’s Dylan Beers sorts out the reaction to her Sunday opinion piece, writing that her critics charged that it “peddled anti-Semitic imagery.” The column in question was titled “Neocons Slither Back.” In that piece, Dowd outdoes her usual vitriolic and nasty voice with a screed that makes one pause and take a deep breath, wondering how anyone with half an ounce of intelligence could take her seriously.

She began with an attack on Paul Ryan for his daring to argue that the country needs a foreign policy with “moral clarity and firmness of purpose.” Congressmen Ryan’s statement is hardly offensive; indeed, given the utter failure of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, it is understated. Ms. Dowd has the right to disagree and to argue with Ryan’s case. But rather than do that, she wrote the following:

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and to graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

As in the Bush 43 years, Ms. Dowd continues, the neocons have managed to again capture a would-be future Republican president even before he’s elected. “Before he played ventriloquist to Ryan,” Dowd writes, “Senor did the same for Romney, ratcheting up the candidate’s irresponsible bellicosity on the Middle East.” So, she concludes, Romney is already “kowtowing to the right again.” And this, she adds for emphasis, is “shameful.” If Romney were commander-in-chief and agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to set a red line beyond which Iran should not be allowed to cross, the result would be a “global conflagration” that would be a worldwide disaster.