The attempt to resurrect a popular front of the left is threatened, however, by internal factors, specifically the emergence of what Rorty calls the "cultural left." Its commissars, as Harold Bloom and others note, have disquietingly reproduced the political modalities of 1930s fascism and Stalinism on American campuses. It is a left that Rorty describes as "spectatorial, disgusted, mocking," and politically correct. His chief complaint about the cultural left is not that it has purged conservative viewpoints from the academy using methods that even McCarthy did not, but that its nihilism is so total that it has no practical political agenda to offer. After reading works by prominent tenured radicals like Frederic Jameson, comments Rorty, "you have views on practically everything except what needs to be done."
There are overlaps between these "postmodernists" and the Old Left. Rorty himself notes that Jameson, an armchair Maoist, thinks that "anti-communists are scum." To Rorty, this is an amusing quirk rather than a nasty political orientation. Indeed, elsewhere, Rorty himself has referred to anti-communist politicians like Ronald Reagan, in almost identical terms.
In distinguishing between the two incarnations of the left, Rorty characterizes the older economic vanguard as intending to purge society of "selfishness." The new "cultural left," in his view, aims rather to purge America of "sadism." As Rorty tells it, this agenda has been marked by "extraordinary success." According to Rorty, the speech code and sensitivity enforcers of the academic left "have decreased the amount of sadism in our society. Especially among college graduates, the casual infliction of humiliation is much less socially acceptable than it was during the first two-thirds of the century. The tone in which educated men talk about women and educated whites about blacks is very different from what it was before the Sixties. . . . The adoption of attitudes, which the Right sneers at as 'politically correct,' has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago."
In such statements, the intellectual bubble inside which leftists like Rorty conduct their ruminations is revealed in all its parochial glory. Perhaps it is true that the tone in which "educated" men talk to women, and whites to blacks, has improved under pressures from the left. But what about the tone in which women talk to men and blacks talk to whites, and in which both talk to males who are also white? What about the ritual punishments meted out daily in these havens of cultural sensitivity and concern to those who deviate from the leftist party line?* To those who are the subject of political grading and hiring, or who suffer general ostracism and reflexive hatred as a result of their unpalatable politics, race, gender, or religious orientation?
The poisons of atavistic prejudice have simply been redirected by the left, although a case could easily be made that they have also been intensified (since prior to the advent of the cultural left the liberal academy was not at all the scene of such sadism). Now faculty and student bigotry is aimed at religious Christians-and at Jews, who have been the subject of more virulent forms of anti-Semitic assault by black supremacists and Arab fundamentalists, egged on by progressives, than at any time since the liberation of Auschwitz.
How is one to account for these lacunae in the perceptions of so intelligent a man as Richard Rorty? Would it be so far-fetched to suppose that Rorty has become the intellectual prisoner of his own commitment to a movement whose younger generations he is loathe to alienate?
While writing mash notes to the politically correct, Rorty shrewdly punctures their revolutionary illusions: "The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy."
A conservative could not have said it better. Yet Rorty keeps returning in his text to the idea that a way can be found to achieve the socialist fantasy despite what he knows. This acceptance of conservative truths while avoiding conservative conclusions marks the intellectual cul de sac in which the left finds itself in the post-communist era. In order to preserve his radical faith, Rorty constantly finds it necessary to demonize the conservative right, and to do so in a manner as ham-fisted as his cultural comrades' demonization of white males and America itself. Here is how Rorty characterizes conservatives who are his intellectual peers:
It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called "conservative intellectuals" deserve this description. For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice. But even the most learned and thoughtful of current conservatives ridicule those who raise such issues. They themselves have nothing to say about whether children in the ghettos can be saved without raising suburbanites' taxes or about how people who earn the minimum wage can pay for adequate housing. They seem to regard discussion of such topics as in poor taste.
Can it be that Rorty is ignorant of the work of James Q Wilson, Marvin Olasky, Peter Mead, Glenn Loury, John DiIulio, Robert Woodson, or any of scores of other conservative intellectuals who have thought long and hard about the problems of poverty, and have done so from a perspective of concern? One might suppose that this caricature of conservatives as mean-spirited and lacking in basic human instincts is so extreme as to be self-discrediting. On the other hand, the purge of academic conservatives by Rorty's political allies has been so thorough, that in making such indefensible statements he need hardly worry about being held to account.
Rorty's myopia (if that is all it is) extends to his characterization of the left, which he calls the "party of hope," while dismissing conservatives as defenders of the status quo: "The Right . . . fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful — the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change." This is simplistic nonsense worthy of the 1930s Stalinists who attacked Rorty's father, and as far removed from the reality it seeks to describe. It is not even worth pausing to ask why the interests of a Bill Gates or a Marc Andreessen, or a Larry Ellison or their community of su- per-rich Silicon revolutionaries, or the 70 percent of American millionaires who are self-made, would be interested in "forestalling" economic and political change.
The other half of Rorty's marxist formula — that political conservatives are defenders of the status quo — is equally vacuous. Consider what the political right has accomplished of late: It has exploded the socialist empire, liberating its inhabitants and inaugurating the political and technological future across the globe. In America, it has stemmed the flow of government red ink that promised to drown future generations in an ocean of debt, and it has begun the long unraveling of the welfare bureaucracy that for a quarter of a century has stifled personal and economic growth in the inner city. In Washington, the Republican right is, in fact, the party of reform, just as surely as the Democratic left, hopelessly addicted to its socialist nostalgias, has become a camp of reactionaries, clinging to the bankrupt past of welfare entitlements and government handouts.
When all is said and done, the true source of the left's negativism is its guilty recognition that the future it promoted for two hundred years killed tens of millions and impoverished billions and, in the end, did not work. Achieving Our Country is a disappointing book about the left by a man who should know better, but like so many other pundits of today's radical academy, is not acquainted enough with his intellectual opponents to argue with them efFectively and does not have the intellectual grit to admit that he was wrong.
* * *
*See Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty On America's Campuses (NewYork: Free Press 199
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Defending Christopher
I SHOULD BEGIN by acknowledging the obvious: I am the last person an ideological leftist like Christopher Hitchens might wish to see defending him in his imbroglio with White House henchman and ex-friend, Sidney Blumenthal. This affair was triggered when Hitchens signed an affidavit providing evidence to House investigators that Blumenthal had lied to the federal grand jury in the Lewinsky scandal. Like Sidney and Christopher, the two of us were also once political comrades, though we were never quite proximate enough to become friends. But for nearly two decades we have been squaring off on opposite sides of the political barricades. I was aware that Christopher's detractors would inevitably use my support of him to confirm that he had lost his political bearings and betrayed them. But Christopher has not had second thoughts about the left, nor is he ever likely to join Peter Collier and me as critics of the movement to which he has dedicated his life. On the contrary, as everything Christopher has put on the public record attests, his contempt for Clinton and his decision to expose Clinton's servant as a liar and knave spring from his deep passion for the left and the values it claims to hold dear.
In two mordant and incisive articles in Vanity Fair before the Blumenthal episode, Hitchens demonstrated that the nation's commander-in-chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest superpower on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose (as Hitchens put it): to "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."
Hitchens's claim that Clinton's military actions were criminal and impeachable are surely correct. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to show how this mattered to policy issues the public cared deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and constitutional impeachment bars and lost the electorate along the way. In making his own strong case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power — the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Lewinsky subtext — while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the office of commander-in-chief, damaging the nation's security, and killing innocents abroad.
Reading Hitchens's riveting indictment stirred unexpected feelings of nostalgia in me for the left I had once been part of. Not the actual left that I came to know and reject, but the left of my youthful idealism, when I thought our mission was to be the nation's "conscience," to speak truth to power in the name of what was just. This, as is perfectly evident from the book he has written, was Hitchens's own mission in exposing Blumenthal as the willing agent of a corrupt regime and its reckless commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, in carrying out this mission, Hitchens was forced to trip over the Lewinsky matter, specifically Blumenthal's effort to smear the credibility of the key witness to the president's bad faith. But that is because it was through Lewinsky that the Starr investigators had set up the character issue in the first place.
It is difficult to believe that a sociopathic personality like Clinton's could be compartmentalized to stop at the water's edge of sex, or that he is innocent of other serious accusations against him that Starr and the Republicans have been unable to prove. In fact, the same signature behavior is apparent throughout his administration (an idea aptly captured in the title of Hitchens's book about the president — No One Left To Lie To). The presidential pathology is evident not only in his reckless private dalliances (the betrayal of family and office), but also in his strategy of political "triangulation" (the betrayal of allies and friends), and in his fire sale of the Lincoln bedroom and advanced military technology to adversarial powers (the betrayal of country). Hitchens is quite right (if imprudent) to strike at the agent of the King, when the King is ultimately to blame.
Given the transparent morality of Hitchens's anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more remarkable, and interesting, that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, chose instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they were by a man whom only yesterday they still called "friend" and whom they no longer wish to know.
Leading this pack was Hitchens's longtime Nation colleague Alexander Cockburn who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation colleague, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong. . . . Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a thirty-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison" in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.
Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William. F. Buckley, proclaiming an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-Contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservative figures) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?
The curses rained on Hitchens's head were part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated (and consigned to various Siberias) for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon typical of religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had evidently violated a fundamental principle of its faith. But what was it?
In fact, there seem to be at least two charges attached to Hitchens's transgression. On the one hand, he was accused of "snitching" on a political ally; on the other, he was said to have betrayed a friend. These are not identical. Nor is it obvious that the left as a matter of principle is generally outraged about either. Daniel Ellsberg, to cite one example, is a radical snitch who betrayed not only his political allies but his own government. Yet, Ellsberg is a hero to the left. David Brock, who also kissed and told, is not exactly persona non grata among leftists either. The left's standards for snitching on itself are entirely different from its standards for those who snitch on its enemies.
Hitchens's Nation editor, Victor Navasky, has written a whole volume about the McCarthy era called Naming Names on the premise that the act of snitching is worse than the crimes it reveals because it involves personal betrayal. On the other hand, the bond of comradeship, of loyalty, of belonging, is exactly the bond that every organized crime syndicate exploits to establish and maintain its rule.
There is an immediate reminder of these connections in the Paul Robeson centennial that progressives were observing at the time Hitchens and Blumenthal ceased to be friends. In a variety of cultural and political events held across the nation, the left was celebrating the life and achievement of one of its great heroes on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Robeson, however, is a man who also betrayed his friend, in his case the Yiddish poet Itzhak Pfeffer, not to mention thousands of other Soviet Jews, who were under a death sentence imposed by Robesods own hero, Stalin. In refusing to help them, despite Pfeffer's personal plea to him to do so, Robeson was acting under a code of silence that prevented communists like him from "snitching" on the crimes their comrades committed. They justified their silence in the name of the progressive cause, allowing the murderers among them to destroy not only millions of innocent lives, but their socialist dream as well.
In that same spring, the Motion Picture Academy honored Elia Kazan, a theater legend w
ho had been blacklisted for nearly half a century by the Hollywood left. He, too, was called a "Judas" by leftist members of the Academy protesting his award. Kazads sin was to testify before a congressional committee about fellow communists who were also loyal supporters of Stalids monstrous regime, and who conducted their own blacklist of anti-Stalinists in the entertainment community. Kazads most celebrated film, On the Waterfront, scripted by another disillusioned communist, Budd Schulberg, depicts a longshoreman who "snitches" to a congressional committee that is investigating organized crime, specifically a mob that controls his own union and exploits its membership. It is a thinly veiled commentary on Kazads and Schulberg's experiences in the left.
"Snitching" is how the progressive mob regards the act of speaking truth to power, when the power is its own. The mafia calls its code of silence omerta, because the penalty for speaking against the mob is death. The left's penalty for defection (in those countries where it does not exercise state power) is excommunication from its community of saints. This is a kind of death, too.
Cognizant of these realities, I avoided informing on friends or even "outing" them, during my own journey out of the left many years ago. In fact, my first political statements opposing the left were made a decade after I had ceased to be an active participant in its cause and when the battles I had participated in were over. This did not make an iota of difference, however, when it came to my former comrades denouncing me as a "renegade," as though I in fact had become an informer. I was subjected to the same kind of personal betrayal Hitchens is experiencing now. With only a handful of exceptions, all the friends I had made in the first forty years of my life turned their backs on me, refusing to know me, when my politics changed.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 23
