Walzer s Razor: Is a reasonable, responsible Left possible?

National Review Online ^ | March 22, 2002 | Steven Hayward

[xsysmgr]

By March 22, 2002

ifty years ago a few of the leading intellectuals on the left, such as Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, began to perceive growing weaknesses in the dominant liberal ideology of the time, and began to look hopefully for the emergence of a reasonable, responsible conservatism. Today, the shoe is on the other foot, as conservatives wonder whether a reasonable, responsible Left is possible. As David Brooks has pointed out, being on the left in recent years has meant being for freeing Mumia and cheering infantile leftists when they throw bricks through windows to protest globalization.

September 11 made the position of the radical Left even more acute, and brought out the worst instincts in many Leftists. It has also provided a clear dividing line between two kinds of Leftists: those who genuinely love America but who are confused, and those who resolutely hate America; between those who now fly the flag (some for the first time in their lives), and those who still want only to burn it. A number of prominent Leftists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, have responded splendidly and correctly in the aftermath of September 11, while many of the usual suspects — Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, etc. — have reacted according to script.

Which brings us to Michael Walzer's immensely important article in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, entitled "Can There Be a Decent Left?" It might well be thought of as "Walzer's Razor," providing a cutting divide between the serious pro-American Left from the frivolous anti-American Left. (The article appears here.[Posted on FR here.]) Walzer, a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, is the author of numerous books, including Just and Unjust Wars and Spheres of Justice, and thus is a serious man of the Left. His chief complaint about his fellow Leftists is that they are not serious. The Leftist critique of American power, Walzer says, "has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate." Walzer suggests that his fellow Leftists begin to acknowledge that not all uses of American power are evil. The Left conducts itself on this point with "willful irresponsibility" that Walzer thinks is "pathological." David Horowitz would be hard pressed to exceed this critical vocabulary.

"The radical failure of the left's response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question," Walzer writes; "Can there be a decent left in a superpower?" Walzer thinks there can, but only if the Left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances and emotional extravagances. Patriotism is not politically incorrect, as an earlier generation of Leftists (George Orwell and Mary McCarthy, for example) understood. The Leftists of earlier generations understood that it was possible to lend Western democracies their "critical support." Mary McCarthy famously remarked that she began to set aside her contempt for "bourgeois society" during World War II when she realized that she cared about the outcome of the war, and hoped the Allies would win. Too many of today's Leftists are embarrassed by, if not opposed to, America's success to date in Afghanistan.

More fundamentally, Walzer calls on the Left to find "something better than the rag-tag Marxism with which some much of the left operates today — whose chief effect is to turn world politics into a cheap melodrama." Egalitarianism — the cornerstone of Leftist social thought — is one thing; in recent decades the Left has been overtaken with elaborate theories of imperialism that give off an air of paranoia worthy of the black helicopter crowd. Walzer notes that many leftists revel in their self-marginalization and irrelevance. Walzer calls for the Left, in essence, to grow up, and "begin again."

This may turn out to be the most difficult step for the Left. Consider that the hottest book on the left today is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, which argues, among other risible ideas, that terrorism is merely "a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality." (Worse: Hardt and Negri write that the Soviet Union was "a society criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom.") Empire has been selling out at bookstores and is being translated into 10 languages. It has received the blessing of the New York Times, which commented on the "buzz" surrounding the book (thereby adding to the buzz). So long as Empire is a guiding light for the intellectual Left, Walzer's noble project has little chance of success.

Walzer is not an isolated voice on the left, however. The left-leaning sociologist Alan Wolfe took square aim at Empire in The New Republic just three weeks after the World Trade Center attack (it appeared in the October 1, 2001 issue of TNR), which means that his review did not receive the attention it deserved. Calling the book "shabby" and "a lazy person's guide to revolution," Wolfe writes that "Empire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to literature. . . Empire is a thoroughly non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously irresponsible tour through questions of power and violence."

So Walzer has one ally, at least. Responses to Walzer's article will be posted on Dissent's website as they arrive. Their tone and substance will reveal whether the Left is participating in the post-September 11 sobriety that has swept much of the rest of the country.

Steven Hayward [is the] author of The Age of Reagan & is an adjunct fellow of the Ashbrook Center.

[justshutupandtakeit]

The answer is "NO" and read Horowitz to find out why. If you don't already know.

[Noumenon]

...conservatives wonder whether a reasonable, responsible Left is possible.

By definition, no. The root premise of the Left is that your life doesn't belong to you. People are property - 'human assets' - to be managed by the State. We all know where that leads.

[Noumenon]

Walzer writes; "Can there be a decent left in a superpower?" Walzer thinks there can, but only if the Left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances and emotional extravagances.

Then it will collapse into a pile of dust, because there is nothing else holding it up.

[Shermy]

True, and it's all about an oppositional identity. For them, the people of the USA failed to adulate their pose of higher moral superiority. So they turned to the third world, borrowing the old and parternalistic noble savage paradigm. Third world suffering, at least as so far it could somehow be fitted to have been "caused" by America, was the new guilt object for the left, their understanding of these sufferers waived at us like they've found God. Essentially, a narcissism masked in charity.

Now they are confronted with Osama, rich terrorists, and thrid world people who hate their values more than they hate those of western conservatives. The left is in a funk because they cannot define the Islamist crisis into a rational anti-American construct, and then proclaim their special understanding of it. They tried, some early gasps being the September/October "root causes" arguments, meaning what they would hope the root causes would be. Osama's later videos stumped them.

Simply, they have nothing worthwhile to say, and since they cannot claim a special knowledge of foreign affairs anymore since the same are widely discussed now among all elements of the public. Additionally, they have nothing to say about religion, which makes them unable to address religion as a cause of political and military crises. Finally, since many lived in the New York kill zone target of the terrorists, they've shut up or changed their tune, or at least opened their minds.

Their are still some bleats. My favorite one is the repetitive "I'm being censored" when they mean "I'm being criticized." They haven't felt what they have been practicing against others - it's dumbfounding to them.

[Yardstick]

*bump*

[Noumenon]

In a very real sense and by definition, liberalism/leftism is a cult. Requires the same slavish devotion to cult figures and a total disregard for reason, facts and rationality. Most of all, it requires the propensity for spiral-eyed hatred of anyone who dares disagree with them.

[Yardstick]

I like the way you put that.

*re-bump*

[wretchard]

You are correct in cataloguing the Left's defects. It doesn't follow that they will dissolve into impotence or even see the error of their ways. History is full of examples of the bad guys winning. Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis, Stalin and Mao were not nice people.

Of course, in the long run, dysfunctional and amoral political movements consume themselves, but not before they have heaped a pile of skulls at the city gates.

It is necessary for men of goodwill not only to retain their sanity (i.e. reject the psychosis of the Left), but also to learn the arts of intellectual and physical conflict. The Left, for all its defects, is a formidable projector of ideas. Conservatives must either become better at this type of fighting than the Left, or go down in defeat. It isn't enough to be righteous to win.

[NorCoGOP]

only if the Left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances and emotional extravagances.

By sheer simple definitions, this is not possible for the liberals - they have to "feel" a moral superiority over all those not agreeing with their viewpoints, and two, liberals are only known for doing things that "feel good" - not looking at the facts....it's simply not possible....it's too much of a paradigm/worldview shift to go from Qualitative to Quantitative interpretations.....

[ZeitgeistSurfer]

Can there be philosemitic Arabs and Nazis?

[rdww]

Good points. It pays to reread the essays of George Orwell, who was a definite liberal, even socialist, yet, thoughtful and more than willing to strike out wisely to his left.

[Richard Kimball]

Is a reasonable, responsible Left possible?

No. Socialism is coercive by definition. It can only be enforced at the point of a gun. You cannot have a choice between a free market and communist socialism. Quick example: I'm teaching a class, and I tell the students, "Grading in the class will be on one of two models. You can choose either one, and may change at any time during the school year. The first model is the socialist model. All the grades will go into a pool, and each student will receive the average of the rest of the pool. The other is the merit system, where each student will receive the grades they have written on their tests." All of the A students will opt to work on their own merit. All of the lazy or F students will opt to take the class average. When the B and C students see themselves being pulled down to D's because of the lazy students, they will opt out. Eventually, the "pool" will only be made up of the lazy and incompetent. If I want to have anyone but total losers in my socialist society, I must make sure that the high performers have no other option. That's where we got the Berlin Wall, and many other trappings of Communism. The Left in the US just wants to make sure there's nowhere else in the world to run to.

[Southack]

Is a reasonable, responsible Left possible?

No.

The overall goal of the Left is to "equalize" society. To that end Liberals want to transfer money, resources, and privileges from you (i.e. the wealthy, productive, efficient, educated, rational population) over to them (i.e. the poor, downtrodden, uneducated, inefficient, and unproductive population).

The Left uses several tools toward this end.

1. The press. What the media reports and what gets high praise (re: entertainment) tends to either support the overall goal directly or at least undermine a facet of an opposing ideology.
2. Government. The Left proposes the same solution to every problem, no matter the cause or effect: government. Are people unemployed, then the government needs to provide unemployment benefits or make work via social spending. Are people discriminated againt, then the government needs to insert itself into every case and force people to no longer discriminate. Name a problem and the Left has a government solution for it.
3. Education. The tenure system has long been co-opted by the radical Left. Our children will be inundated by liberal mush long after Left-wing ideologies fade from fashion simply because we can't fire all of the pedarasts for keeping their catamites locked in their ivory towers.
4. Dependency. Many people are compelled to vote with their pocketbook. The Left has long taken advantage of that fact and used their positions of power to create generations of people who are entirely dependent upon them.

So why can't the Left be reasonable or responsible?

Because it isn't reasonable to take from one productive group to give to an unproductive group (save for a few worst case, safety-net exceptions). Nor is it responsible to create generation after generation of dependents. 40 years and three generations after Jim Crowe laws have been repealed, why are Affirmative Action programs still needed to ensure that some groups find jobs and college admissions? The only answer is that earlier Affirmative Action programs created more dependency, not less.

Furthermore, the Left will adopt any position that fosters its agenda, even if said position conflicts with existing positions. To wit: labor unions versus environmentalists. Unions want jobs (ala drilling in ANWR). On the other hand, environmentalists want an end to development (which they refer to as exploitation of Mother Earth). The enviro-nazis also find themselves in conflict with urban Lefties. Urban Lefties want cheaper housing, but enviro-lefties fight "urban sprawl" tooth and nail. Without new housing, however, the Supply versus Demand crashes the financial hopes of many urban Lefties. There just aren't enough homes in most urban areas.

Moreover, Lefties can't be reasonable or responsible because they are Machiavellan. By that, I mean that Lefties will say any lie and engage in any subterfuge to promote their cause. To them, the Ends justify the Means.

So they tell us that abortions are rare. They tell us that guns cause crime and suicides. They tell us that it's a good idea to pack the poor into subsidized housing. They claim that it makes sense to release criminals from prison early (10 year sentences often mean 10 months now). Drugs are good, they say, but smoking is bad, et al. Rent controls will keep housing costs low, they claim. Regulation will keep electricity costs down, they say.

Can the Left ever be reasonable or responsible?

No.

The Left is our enemy.