The Politics of Churlishness

The Conning Tower ^ | April 10, 2005 | Trentino

[Davis]

Martin Peretz, a principal owner, chairman, and editor in chief of The New Republic (TNR) magazine, that Liberal bastion, is an authentic, even quintessential Liberal himself. For a number of months now, he has been fingering the worn, tattered fringes of his Liberal cloak and discovering what a threadbare garment it is.

In February, Mr. Peretz published in TNR a quite remarkable essay declaring that Liberalism, his only intellectual/political home for all his adult life "... is now bookless and dying. ... Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength."

Bookless! "Without books, there are no ideas," says Peretz. He's right.

The Left's books are out of date, as useless as a treatise on alchemy or a pre-Copernicus model of our solar system.

It does seem passing strange that academe with its battalions of Lefties should have come to a full intellectual stop and be unable to produce anything new, and it seems to cross Mr. Peretz's furrowed brow that maybe the Left has nothing to say. (The subtitle of his February piece is "Not Much Left.") But Peretz is understandably loath to abandon his collectivist refuge and sail out to the wild shore of consent and exchange.

Just a few days ago, Editor Peretz limbered up his verbal artillery and published his own essay extolling the Middle East achievements of Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the Neocons. He lamented the failure of Left/Liberals, his comrades-in-arms for lo, these many years, for not acknowledging error as he himself does—"I was wrong," Peretz says plainly—noting, "They deny and resent and begrudge and snipe. They are trapped in the politics of churlishness."

Churlishness! You heard right. They're churls, peasants, boors, rude louts with a grudge. That's their reason says Peretz, for denying the obvious, the considerable success of the Bush administration in pushing Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Israel-PA in the direction of democracy.

Mr. Peretz scolds his Lefty colleagues, arguing that even if George W. Bush had discovered a cure for cancer they would still not think well of him. But since President Bush has not discovered a cure for cancer, this argument is unavailing, meaningless. It's a debater's stratagem. And it totally misses the point.

Peretz assumes that the goals of his Lefty comrades are his own, and that they, like him, are reasonable, intellectually rigorous searchers for truth. Hence, if they disagree with him, it must be because of some psychological quirk that prevents them from being reasonable. Aha, they must be churls, ill-mannered boors.

But there isn't the slightest proof—indeed, there's no evidence at all to suggest they're being churlish. The deniers aren't denying the facts, the results of the steadfast application of military force by the Bush Administration in the Middle East. They aren't blind. They can see the results perfectly well. And they despise them.

But what they see in the very same facts seen by Peretz and many of us on the right is a victory for Bush's country, for imperialist, capitalist America. Yes, the United (genocidal) States of America, populated by boobs and dominated by the religious right. Those Lefties see and deplore a victory on the world's stage by a bourgeoisie that thumbs its nose at, mocks the absurdity of and rejects the gift of socialism even though socialism's benefits are obvious.

Leftists who despise America, who longed for quagmire and humiliation, whose yearning for Vietnam redux was palpable, who magnified every setback and minimized every victory, who sat in silence at a Columbia University convocation posing as a "teach-in" when a faculty member called for "a million Mogadishus," who pointed knowingly to the example of our betters in effete Eurabia, who demanded we defer to the superior wisdom of weasels and poltroons, who find the very idea of nation-state repulsive and the pre-eminence of this great nation's freedom and prosperity absolutely disgusting, are not engaging in the politics of churlishness. They are hoplites of socialism, "a fighting faith," as TNR's editor, Peter Beinart has dubbed it, marching in lockstep.

[Texas Eagle]

In February, Mr. Peretz published in TNR a quite remarkable essay declaring that Liberalism, his only intellectual/political home for all his adult life "... is now bookless and dying. ...

Somebody ping every spineless Republican in Washington.

[AntiBurr]

"They're churls, peasants, boors, rude louts with a grudge."

I've always rather liked the quote from a quote from Cyrino de Bergerac, "lewd fellows of the baser sort". It really has more flavor than churls et al.

[Dutchgirl]

To sell a book there must be some element of truthfulness...without a shred of truth, there is no "willing suspension of disbelief." In the past, the left has always taken that a reason to "lie harder." Apparently, the market for lies is a little flat right now.

Some pithy reminders from CS Lewis

"[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."

And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."

To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

"Hatred obscures all distinctions."