The subject at hand, the anti-interventionist trend in American politics, is of more than academic interest. As I speak, American troops are engaged in two wars, and Washington is threatening a third. On the left, the prostration of the former antiwar movement is near total: the speed and abjectness of the capitulation before the cult of Obama has been astonishing. Never has a movement evaporated so quickly, and with such alacrity, the long tradition of left-wing anti-interventionism betrayed and forgotten. Eugene Victor Debs is spinning in his grave.
On the right, the exact opposite is occurring: conservatives are rediscovering an anti-imperialist tradition that has long been reviled by the former leftists who now “police” their movement. Once forgotten, the slogan of “America First” has been making a comeback in recent years, ever since Patrick J. Buchanan revived it back in the early 1990s, making it the leitmotif of his presidential campaigns. Indeed, it was Buchanan who, in response to the first Gulf war, raised the banner of a movement that had the courage to ask: “Why should a single American die for the Emir of Kuwait?” A decade later, when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq, he was not alone among conservatives in predicting disaster.
Now, in response to President Obama’s escalation of our endless “war on terrorism,” many conservatives are moving into opposition. Cynics may say that this is due entirely to political opportunism, but may I remind you that opportunism in the cause of peace is no vice – and if, in search of a rationale for this turnabout, conservatives care to reclaim their historical legacy, it is there for the taking.
Yet it is on the left that the anti-imperialist tradition is so deeply imprinted that there’s less chance of forgetting it, and no excuse for betraying it. A left shorn of its opposition to America’s wars of aggression is no longer the left in any recognizable sense of the term: and yet that is what seems to have happened to the so-called progressive movement in America, which has been largely subsumed by the Obama cult. As a liberal Democratic President wages two wars and threatens a third – Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – the great historical traditions of the left-wing movement in America are being trod underfoot.
