In conversation with a progressive friend of mine the other day, I had occasion to hear a valid criticism of my writing: why, he asked me, do you limit yourself to attacking the left on the war question, why not praise them when they’re doing something right? This is a paraphrase, and not a word for word quotation, but you get the idea: an entirely negative critique, given the left’s storied history of anti-interventionism, is not entirely fair.
However, it is precisely because of the long, heroic tradition of left-wing anti-imperialism that I tend to get a bit bitchy when it comes to the contemporary record, which hardly measures up. When I hear that United For Peace and Justice, the major antiwar coalition controlled by Communist party types, has basically dissolved itself – at a time when the US is fighting two and a half wars, with a third in the making – I tend to suspect they’re just not that into it, as the saying goes. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that their hero, President Obama, is the one fighting the wars now, and without George W. Bush to demonize anymore, the fight has gone out of them.
The internationalist impulse embedded in Marxist and most Western leftist ideologies makes their followers peculiarly vulnerable to the snares and delusions of interventionism – the idea of conducting a vast social engineering project halfway across the globe appeals to the modern “progressive” imagination, much as they find appealing the same sort of project conducted on the home front. A “war on poverty,” a “war on homelessness,” a “war on illiteracy,” or cancer, or whatever – why not a “war on terrorism,” after all?
Only when the left succeeds in forging – or rediscovering – a distinctively American radicalism will it prove immune to the War Party’s wiles. That’s a long term project, but in the meantime, can we all just get along for the sake of a good cause?
