A return of 60's Anti-Americanism and Hippies?

It is now almost exactly five months since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the question I want to explore tonight is whether 9/11 hurled us into a new era of American history.

Certainly, this is how it seemed. The most obvious symptom was that once again we were saluting our now ubiquitously displayed flag. This was the very flag that, not so long ago, leftist radicals had thought fit only for burning. Yet now, even on the old flag-burning Left, a few prominent personalities were painfully wrenching their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute.

Contemplating these people, I was reminded of the response to the suppression by the new Soviet regime of the sailors’ revolt that erupted in Kronstadt in the early 1920’s. Far more murderous horrors would pour out of the malignantly tenebrous recesses of Stalinist rule, but as the first in that long series of atrocities leading to disillusionment with the Soviet Union, Kronstadt became the portent of them all.

Well, 9/11 served as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical Leftists of today. What it did was raise questions about what one of them called their inveterately “negative faith in America the ugly.”

September 11 reminded me, too, of a poem by W. H. Auden, transplanted from London to New York in a trade of poets (they got T. S. Eliot and we got Auden plus a few future draft choices). Auden’s poem, written upon the outbreak of World War Two, was entitled “September 1, 1939.” It contained hostile sentiments about America left over from Auden’s Communist period, but the opening lines are so evocative of September 11, 2001 that it is no wonder they were quoted so often in the early days of this new war:

Auden’s low dishonest decade, of course, was the 1930’s, and its clever hopes centered on the construction of a workers’ paradise in the Soviet Union. Our counterpart was the 1960’s, and its less clever hopes centered not on construction, however illusory, but on destruction—the destruction of the institutions that made up the American way of life. For America was conceived as the great obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the wretched of the earth, not least those within its own borders.

Now, I recognize that, as James Q. Wilson has recently reminded us, the Sixties are not an all-purpose explanation of everything that has gone wrong with this country since then. And where the hostility of American intellectuals toward America is concerned, I myself have traced it back to the period following the Civil War. Nevertheless, I am far from alone in my conviction that the radical movement of the Sixties was the proximate source of the “negative faith in America the ugly” to which so many were converted both during and after that period.

Because to me, the new patriotic mood represented a return to greater sanity and health, I fervently hoped that it would last. But I want to tell a story that will explain why I could not fully share the heady confidence of some of my political friends that this was a permanent and not an ephemeral change.

One day in the year 1960, I was invited to address a meeting of left-wing radicals. For my sins—sins of which I have been repenting for more than three decades by now—I was a leading member of this then tiny movement. The main issue around which it had first begun to coalesce was nuclear disarmament. But the subject on which I had been asked to speak was a new one that had barely begun to show the whites of its eyes. It was the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place of which we knew little—a place called Vietnam.

Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary magazine, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the fifty or so people in the audience, and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

Marion Magid’s quip brings back to life some sense of how unpromising a future there promised to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that the these young people, and the generation about to descend politically and culturally from them, would within the blink of a historical eye be hailed as “the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known.” These words, incredibly, would emanate from what the new movement regarded as the very belly of the beast: from, to be specific, the mouth of Archibald Cox, a professor at the Harvard Law School and later Solicitor General of the United States. Similar encomia would also ooze unctuously out of parents, teachers, clergymen, artists, and journalists.

More incredible yet, the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would within a mere ten years turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that we would “pay any price, bear any burden,” and so on, “to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” By 1972, George McGovern, nominated for President by Kennedy’s own party, was campaigning on the slogan, “Come Home, America.” It was a slogan that almost perfectly reflected the ethos of the embryonic movement that I had addressed in Union Square only about a decade before.

But the pathetic impression my audience made on Marion Magid does not begin to explain why such a development would have struck anyone present that night as so unlikely.

For the new movement was bucking a national consensus that came close to being universal. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman, recognizing a threat from Soviet expansionism, had embraced the policy of containment to deal with it. A year later, running for reelection, Truman had fended off challenges both from his Right, which regarded containment as—in Richard Nixon’s term—“cowardly,” and from his Left, to which the same strategy amounted to warmongering.

Truman’s victory, then, signified the coming together of the nation behind his foreign policy. But there was also a wider dimension to this emergent political consensus, and it was beautifully captured in a historic essay of 1947 by George F. Kennan. Much later Kennan would deny that he had said what he said in that essay, what everyone at the time thought he had said, and what rereading the essay clearly demonstrates that he had in fact said. To wit:

The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

In “pulling themselves together” precisely for these reasons and in precisely this way, the American people were rewarded with a surge of self-confident energy. But the effect on the country’s intellectuals was even more extraordinary. Many of them had only recently gloried in their “alienation” from American society. Now they too joined, often to their own astonishment, in what the few remaining socialists among them petulantly derided as the “American celebration.”

Yet this did not result in the loss of creative power smugly predicted by these dissenters. On the contrary: the rediscovery by the formerly alienated of what Mary McCarthy, one of their brightest young stars, did not shrink from calling “America the Beautiful,” gave rise to a richer high culture than the Thirties before it or the Sixties that followed. I am thinking of the emergence in the Fifties of a host of figures who shared in the newly positive attitude toward American society: novelists like Saul Bellow; poets like Robert Lowell; critics like Lionel Trilling; philosophers like Hannah Arendt; theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr; political analysts like George Kennan himself.

In going over this familiar ground, I am trying to make two points. One is that the nascent radical movement of the late Fifties and early Sixties was up against an adversary that looked unassailable. Even so—and here is my second point—to the bewilderment of almost everyone, not least the radicals themselves, they blew and they blew and they blew the house down. And even some of the rediscoverers of “America the Beautiful,” including Mary McCarthy, did another 180-degree pirouette and contributed a bit of emphysemic blowing themselves.

Here we had a major turning point that slipped in under the radar of virtually all the pundits and the trend-spotters. How well I remember the late John Roche, a political scientist then working in the Johnson White House, being quoted by Jimmy Breslin as having dismissed the radicals as a bunch of “upper West Side jackal bins.” Jackal bins? What were jackal bins? As further investigation disclosed, Roche had said “Jacobins,” a word evidently so unfamiliar to his interviewer that “jackal bins” was the best he could do with it in transcribing his notes.

Much ink has been spilled, a few gallons of it by me, in the struggle to explain how and why a great “Establishment” representing so wide a national consensus could have been toppled so easily and so quickly by so small and marginal a group as these “jackal bins.” In the domain of foreign affairs, the usual answer is the subject of my talk that night in Union Square: Vietnam. In this view, it was by deciding to fight an unpopular war that the Establishment rendered itself vulnerable.

But the problem is that Vietnam was a popular war. At the beginning, all the major media—from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from Time to Newsweek, from CBS to ABC—supported our intervention. So did most of the professoriate. And so did the public. No matter. Even when all but one or two of the people who had either directly led us into Vietnam, or applauded our intervention, commenced falling all over themselves as they scampered to the head of the antiwar parade, public opinion continued supporting the war. But public opinion had ceased to count. Indeed, even reality itself had ceased to count. Consider the Tet offensive of 1968. It was, as all now agree and some vainly struggled to insist then, a crushing defeat for the Communists. But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a defeat for us on the CBS Evening News, and a defeat it became.

Admittedly, in electoral politics, where numbers are decisive, public opinion remained potent. None of the doves contending for the presidency in 1968 or 1972 could beat Richard Nixon. But even Nixon felt it necessary to claim that he had a plan for getting us out of Vietnam.

In other words, on Vietnam, elite opinion trumped popular opinion. But its effects were not restricted to foreign policy. They extended into a newly antagonistic attitude toward America that ranged from skepticism about our character and intentions to outright hatred of everything we were and represented.

It hardly needs stressing that this attitude found a home in—to round up the usual suspects—the world of the arts, the universities, and the major media of news and entertainment, where intellectuals shaped by the Sixties, and their acolytes in the publishing houses of New York and in the studios of Hollywood, held sway.

But it would be a serious mistake to suppose that the trickle-down effect of the professoriate’s attitude was confined to literature, journalism, and show business. John Maynard Keynes once said that “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But practical functionaries like bureaucrats and administrators were subject to the same rule, though they tended to be the slaves not of economists but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who were very much alive even when their ideas had, or should have, become defunct.

It was by no means necessary for the practical men to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of the authors of those works. All they had to do was read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies—and drip by insidious drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material would be absorbed into their heads and their nervous systems.

These, in sum, are some of the factors that make me wonder whether September 11, 2001 will have turned out to mark a genuine turning point comparable to December 7, 1941. I was not quite twelve years old when President Roosevelt declared war right after Pearl Harbor, but I remember the period well, and I cannot recall so much as a peep of protest out of the isolationists who had previously opposed our entry into that great conflict. And it was in order to learn better how to defeat the enemy, not to love or justify him, that the Germans and the Japanese now became more intensive subjects of study.

Now here we are in the early days of another war that may well be supported by an even larger percentage of the public than Vietnam was at the beginning. Today, however, the numerically insignificant opposition is stronger than it was in the early days of Vietnam. The reason is that it now maintains a tight grip over the institutions that had been surrendered to the anti-American Left by the end of the 60’s.

Take, for a start, the literary community, which can stand in for the world of the arts in general. No sooner had the Twin Towers been toppled and the Pentagon smashed than a fierce competition began for the gold in the anti-American Olympics. Or perhaps the race was with Osama bin Laden for the Nobel Peace Prize. (After all, if that prize could be given to the contemporary godfather of terrorism, Yasser Arafat, why not to Bin Laden?)

One of my old ex-friends, Susan Sontag, seized an early lead in this contest with a piece in The New Yorker, in which she asserted that 9/11 was an attack “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” Not content with that, she went on to compare the congressional expressions of support for what she characterized as our “robotic President” to “the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.”

But another of my old ex-friends, Norman Mailer, who had been uncharacteristically slow out of the starting gate, soon came up strong on the inside by comparing the Twin Towers to “two huge buck teeth,” and pronouncing the ruins at Ground Zero “more beautiful than the buildings were.” Still playing the enfant terrible even as he was closing in on his eightieth year to heaven, Mailer gathered steam in denouncing us as “cultural oppressors and aesthetic oppressors” of the Third World. And in what did this oppression consist? It consisted, he expatiated, in our establishing “enclaves of our food out there, like McDonald’s” and in putting “our high-rise buildings” in around the airports of even “the meanest, scummiest, capital[s] in the world.”

So much for the literary community. Then there was the campus, to which I am tempted to apply Hamlet’s words: “Fie on it! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,/ That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.” A report issued shortly after 9/11 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA—whose founding chairman was Lynne V. Cheney—cited about a hundred malodorous statements wafting out of campuses all over the country that resembled Sontag and Mailer in blaming the attacks not on the terrorists but on America.

I realize that the stench emitted from the groves of academe has long since penetrated into all our nostrils. But I think another whiff would sharpen our sense of the noxious weeds still flourishing there that could, under the right circumstances, grow to a truly monstrous size. Here, then, are three typical samples:

From a professor at the University of New Mexico: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.”

From a professor at Rutgers: “[We] should be aware that the ultimate cause [of 9/11] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.”

And from a professor at the University of Massachusetts: “[The American flag] is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.”

When the ACTA report was issued, cries of “McCarthyism”—that first refuge of a left-wing scoundrel—were heard throughout the land. A New York Times editorial later chimed in with the epithet “repugnant.” Yet what repelled the Times about the report was not statements like the ones I have just cited. It was that ACTA, had “attacked dozens of professors for having reacted to the terrorist attacks in ways its authors considered inappropriate.”

Inappropriate! One could scarcely find a better current illustration of what George Orwell meant when he wrote in 1946 that “In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” And I cannot resist revisiting Orwell’s much-circulated crack about a comparably demented piece of anti-American vitriol that a leftist British intellectual spewed out during World War Two: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” said Orwell; “no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But much as I revere Orwell, I prefer a homelier version of the same crack, whose author was the aunt of Saul Bellow. After overhearing a passionate ideological dispute around her own kitchen table between the future Nobel laureate for literature and his radical friends from the University of Chicago, she remarked: “Smart, smart, smart…stupid.”

Like the professors in the ACTA report, Susan Sontag, too, claimed that her freedom of speech was being placed in jeopardy. In this peculiar reading of the First Amendment, she is free to say anything she likes, but the right to free speech ends where criticism of what she has said begins.

Actually, with rare exceptions, the only attempts to stifle dissent on the campus were directed at the many students and the few faculty members who supported the 9/11 war. All these attempts could be encapsulated into a single phenomenon: on a number of campuses, students or professors who displayed American flags or patriotic posters were forced to take them down.

As for Susan Sontag’s freedom of speech, I have in my possession a file several inches thick containing transcripts of fawning interviews with her in periodicals and on television programs after her New Yorker piece appeared.

And speaking of television, it was soon inundated with material presenting Islam in the most glowing terms. Mainly, these programs took their cue from the President and other political leaders. Out of the best of motives, and for prudential reasons as well, elected officials were striving mightily to deny that the war against terrorism was a war against Islam. They therefore never ceased heaping praises on the beauties of that religion, about which few of them knew anything.

But it was from the universities, not from the politicians, that the substantive content of the broadcasts derived, in interviews with Muslim academics whose accounts of Islam were—how shall I put it?—selectively roseate. Sometimes they were even downright untruthful, especially in sanitizing the doctrine of jihad or holy war, or in misrepresenting the extent to which leading Muslim clerics all over the world had been celebrating suicide bombers as heroes and martyrs.

I do not bring this up in order to enter into a theological dispute. My purpose, rather, is to offer another case study in the continued workings of the trickle-down effect I have already described. Thus, almost within hours after 9/11, the universities began adding innumerable courses on Islam to their curricula. On the campus, understanding Islam inevitably translated into apologetics for it, and most of the media dutifully followed suit. The media also adopted the stance of neutrality between the terrorists and ourselves that prevailed among the relatively moderate professoriate, as when the major television networks ordered their anchors to avoid exhibiting partisanship.

Here the great exception was the Fox News Channel. The New York Times ran an article deploring the fact that Fox was covering the war from—O the horror! The horror!—a frankly pro-American perspective. But the Times was relieved that no other network had so cavalierly discarded the sacred conventions dictating that journalists, in the words of the president of ABC News, must “maintain their neutrality in times of war.”

It is important to note that a few voices on the Right also blamed America for having been attacked. Speaking on Pat Robertson’s TV program, the Reverend Jerry Falwell delivered himself of the view that God was punishing the United States for the moral decay exemplified by a variety of liberal groups among us. Both later apologized for singling out these groups, but each continued to insist that God was withdrawing His protection from America because all of us had become such great sinners.

On the secular Right, we had the columnist Robert Novak, along with that born-again Coughlinite Pat Buchanan. In the opinion of these two, and others of like mind, it was not our disobedience to divine law but our friendliness toward Israel that had brought this attack upon us. That bin Laden had never been much concerned with the Palestinians made no difference to Buchanan and Novak: they knew better.

For the moment, though, the major fount of the oppositional action remained on the Left, and it was mainly holed up in the universities. There, Eric Foner, a professor of history at my own alma mater, Columbia, was perhaps the most prominent among those who tried to turn the tables on ACTA by risibly condemning it for trying “to enforce a particular party line on American colleges and universities.” Foner also condemned the report as misleading, since the polls proved that there was “firm support” for the war among college students. “If our aim is to indoctrinate students with unpatriotic beliefs,” Foner smirked, “we’re obviously doing a very poor job of it.” Well, we know that parents who shell out $35,000 a year to universities like Columbia are not getting their money’s worth, but in this one perverse respect, at least, we and they can be grateful for it.

Yet even at the height of the radical fevers on the campus in the Sixties, only a minority of students sided with the antiwar radicals. But though they were in the majority, the non-radical students were unable to make themselves heard above the antiwar din, and whenever they tried, they were shouted down. So it was on the campus after 9/11. There were, here and there, brave defiers of the academic orthodoxies. But mostly, the silent majority remained, well, silent, for fear of incurring the disapproval of their teachers, or even punished for such crimes as “insensitivity.”

The confidence in America, and American virtue, that became nearly universal during the Second World War had enough momentum to carry us into the very different war that we waged against Soviet totalitarianism. And it was strong enough to create the consensus I described a while back. But it was not strong enough to withstand the assault upon it I also sketched out some moments ago.

Will the consensus that spontaneously materialized on 9/11 succeed in resisting the similar assault that began being mounted against it within hours by the guerrillas-with-tenure in the universities, along with their spiritual and political disciples scattered throughout other quarters of our culture? Can this “tiny handful of ageing Rip van Winkles,” as they were breezily brushed off by one commentator, grow into a force as powerful as the “jackal bins” of yesteryear?

The answer no doubt depends primarily both on whether—God forbid—we are hit again by terrorists, and on how well the military side of the war will go. Thus, antiwar activity on some campuses was dampened by our mind-boggling success in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the mopping-up operation there created an opportunity for more subtle forms of opposition to gain traction. Complaints began being raised about alleged tramplings of civil liberties here at home, and then about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo.

Though soon shown to be almost entirely baseless and even preposterous, I suppose some people raised these concerns in good faith. But it is also true that such issues could and did serve as a respectable cover for opposition to further military action. This is how it worked during Vietnam, when demonstrably false accusations of war crimes were lodged against certain lawful American military tactics, were uncritically accepted as proved, and were then used as a potent weapon by the antiwar movement.

Be that as it may, of one thing we can be sure: as the war widens, opposition will widen along with it. We could already see this happening after President Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech two weeks ago. In this single image the President brilliantly defined our present enemies as a fusion of those we fought in World War Two with the evil empire we battled in World War Three, which is the name Eliot A. Cohen has rightly suggested we give to the cold war. The President now promised an expansion of the war to regimes that may or may not have been directly involved in 9/11 but whose leaders were preparing to threaten us with weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, he declared that he would if necessary attack them preemptively. And he reiterated that we would prefer to fight with allies, but that if we had to, we would go it alone.

As well we might have to do, given the anger and contempt this wonderfully bold declaration aroused throughout the world. Even the Europeans, after offering us their condolences over 9/11, could scarcely let a decent interval pass before going back into the ancient family business of trying to prove how vastly superior in wisdom and finesse they were to us. Now they mocked the President as “simplistic,” while urging that our military operations end with Afghanistan, and that we leave the rest to diplomacy in deferential consultation with the great masters of that recondite art in Paris and Brussels.

At home, much the same position was expressed by the New York Times and other publications ranging from the Center to the hard Left. In these precincts the President was hit for recklessness and overreaching, while terms redolent of Vietnam like “slippery slope” and “quagmire” were resurrected. Yet unlike the antiwar movement during Vietnam, which was almost completely made up of leftists and liberals, today’s developing opposition resembles the one we had during the run-up to the Gulf War. That is, it is forging a coalition of the hard Left, elements of the soft Left, and sectors of the American Right.

In a pungent foretaste of this bizarre ideological cocktail, Michael Kinsley on the soft Left allied himself with Pat Buchanan on the hard Right in indicting the President for evading the Constitution by proposing to fight undeclared wars. Meanwhile, the same charge was moving into the political mainstream through Democratic Senators like Byrd, along with complaints from Tom Daschle about the concept of an “axis of evil,” from which his advisers only last night persuaded him to retreat somewhat. Only last night, too, Al Gore endorsed the concept, but—like some Republican Senators earlier—he simultaneously endorsed the whining over American “unilateralism” in the chancelleries and chattering classes of Europe. There, it seems, they agree that an axis of evil does actually exist, but it is made up not of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice. Anyhow, all the toing-and-froing by the politicians was accompanied by a thousand reasons as to why the Bush Doctrine in its present form was the wrong way to go.

As this kind of thing metastasizes, a great responsibility will fall upon those of us who stand in awe of the moral courage and the strategic clarity President Bush has increasingly drawn out of his heart and soul and mind and guts since 9/11. We will need to mobilize all our intellectual firepower to fight off the arguments against the Bush Doctrine, and to expose them for what they really are: appeasement and defeatism traveling under other names.

Here an analogy with World War Three may be illuminating. I believe that Ronald Reagan led us into victory in that war by reversing the post-Vietnam decline of American military might and resuming a vigorous ideological struggle against the “evil empire.” For this he too, like President Bush today, was ridiculed as a simpleton and a “cowboy.” Which is why I also believe that no one campaigning on such promises could have been elected in 1979, and then could have prevailed in office over his political foes, if the ground had not been prepared by the neoconservative intellectuals who had for more than ten years been waging a fierce war of ideas against their former colleagues on the Left.

To be sure, the neoconservative contingent was preceded by conservatives to the manner born—and all honor to them. But the neoconservatives constituted a fresh wave of reinforcements. And because they possessed a more intimate fix on the positions of their old political allies, they were able to mount a newly aggressive offensive against the defamation of America by the Left, while effectively revivifying the case for regarding the Soviet Union as, yes, an evil empire.

My contention is that 9/11 will have given rise to a genuine transformation only if, once again, the military forces we deploy are undergirded by an equally formidable intellectual campaign. Maybe the 9/11 Kronstadters will eventually take on this job. So far, however, they seem to be stopping short of a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the assumptions behind their old faith in America the ugly.

Hence, for the time being, if—in a phrase I am borrowing from Matthew Arnold who borrowed it from the Gospel of Luke—“the one thing needful” is to be done, we old soldiers and our younger colleagues will have to do it pretty much on our own. But here is a hot news flash: forty-eight scholars, some of them fellow old soldiers who are with us tonight, have only just issued an open letter supporting the war. Their statement is a very welcome counter to the dogmas on the campus. But it is, I fear, a little too defensive to satisfy the full demands of “the one thing needful.”

What are those demands? To describe them in language I have frequently used before, but that cannot be repeated too often, they are, first, to remind ourselves, and then to teach our woefully miseducated children, that this country enjoys more freedom and more prosperity more widely shared than any nation in the history of the world. It has thereby earned a place for itself among the greatest of all human civilizations.

We need, after dwelling for so long on what may be wrong with us, to remember, and to celebrate, how much more is right and good and noble. We need to realize that the answer to the plaintively asked question “Why do they hate us?” is not for whatever crimes we may have committed, but for our accomplishments and our virtues.

Correlatively, we need to understand more clearly that these accomplishments and virtues have their source in the institutions designed by our Founding Fathers—institutions that have, just as they hoped, conduced to “the preservation of the blessings of liberty” for their posterity. Which is to say, us.

I for one pray that our victory in this war—World War Four—will result in the creation of conditions under which the same blessings can be heaped upon as many countries as possible. And I pray that it will set Islam onto a path of reformation from within. Both Judaism and Christianity began undergoing such a process centuries ago. Why should Islam alone remain forever exempt?

“America! America!”—sang Katharine Lee Bates in 1893—“God shed his grace on thee.” Appealing to God to shed the same grace on the rest of the world can no doubt be taken as a call for American imperialism. I confess that the word imperialism does not frighten me, but since a term like “leadership” would be less incendiary, I will resort to it.

In advocating such leadership by America, I do not make light of the widespread doubts that this country, by its very nature, is endowed either with the will or the skill to play even a benevolently imperial role in the world. But then the cadences of George F. Kennan in 1947 spring reassuringly back into my ears. To my delight, I heard echoes of his words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech, both in how it began and in how it concluded. But Kennan’s more eloquent formulation remains the locus classicus here, and so I want to conclude by quoting it once more, in an updated form as applicable to World War IV as the original was to World War III:

The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

To which, surely, the only fitting response is a very loud and a very resonant Amen.

The ultimate nightmare of the art crowd and the self-proclaimed intelligentsia and the self-regarding academia is simply this: to know that they have become irrelevant. Hatred they feed on ("looks like we touched a nerve") but disdain gets inside their shield, and worst of all, laughter. The bleating we're hearing now has degenerated from "power to the people" to "look at me, ma," the ultimate cry of the petty, self-centered child who never grew up. That cry devolves into screaming - and it won't be long.

Great article. I copied, sent it to my friends at the UC Davis College Republican party.

Don't count us all out- I've gotten used to getting into the faces of the "free-Palestine" camel-jockeys, and anti-war shitheads, and telling whose cow eats the grass...

Some 7' tall, geeky looking jerk was trying to tell me he was for California "going back to its' original owners," and that he doesn't support America." I told him "fine!", dug out my Visa and threw it on the table. Told him to pick a country, 'cause I'm buying him a one-way ticket to any country he wanted to go to (we were ~75 ft from the on-campus travel office). He asked what I meant, and I told him I'd buy him a ticket to any country he wanted, as long as he promised never to bring his sorry ass back here, ever again... When he said he's "from here" I said "then shut the hell UP!" He stumbled away, after displaying a look of utter confusion...

Poor jerk. Didn't know what to say to someone who has the balls and the means to actually give him his wish...

FReegards,

I remember my Mom and Dad having an argument during the Vietnam War, that if I (a female) were a boy, would they send me to Canada to escape the draft. My Mom vowed she'd send me to Canada, but my Dad insisted, "No kid of mine is going to Canada." (I can hear him shouting that even now!) Of course it was a moot point, since their child was a girl, but my parents actually stopped speaking for a couple hours over this. Shows how hot tempers were back in that era.

It's absolutely outrageous that Norman Podhoretz would draw a moral equivalency between 9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin. This is the premise of his argument. That both wars have the same moral foundation and therefore risk the same moral reaction from the American people. There simply is no equivalency between murdering thousands of citizens in a terrorist attack and a gunboat firing a torpedo at a destroyer. Shame on Mr. Podhoretz.

The threat the North Vietnamese posed to America was minimal. The threat Islamic terrorism poses is maximal. It is even greater than that posed by the Japanese in their attack on Pearl Harbor. The American people understand the scope of this threat, the liberals, and apparently Mr. Podhoretz, don't.

Being a so-called "conservative" Norman Podhoretz must be even denser than Tom Daschle. But of course he's not is he? So what's the purpose of his article?

Excellent post. Very insightful analysis. Increasingly, I'm coming to believe that there are significant numbers of Americans who don't even realize the degree to which their attitudes have been affected by patterns of thought and speech that are consistent with an absolute hatred of America and all she stands for. Susan Sontag and those influenced by her, feel in their very souls, a thrill at the thought of the United States someday being at the mercy of nuclear bomb wielding terrorists. When that day comes - and it will if America's actions are influenced by them - they will cluck and observe how regrettable the situation is, but they will note that, under the circumstances, it is simply irresponsible - inconceivable even - to consider doing anything other than what the terrorists demand. They will caution against any "over-reaction" by the "extreme right wing", and secretly they will thrill to America's humiliation and defeat. That is exactly what they - not just Susan Sontag, but even Tom Daschle, whether he admits it to himself or not - have in mind today.

"If I learned anything from the 60's ...."

What I learned from the 60's was never concede any argument, anytime, any place. Not in the streets, not on campus, not in the classrooms, not in the news media. No compromise, no conciliation with evil.

If they take to the streets, *we* must take to the streets, and in greater numbers and more militant attitudes. If they try to use our schools as propaganda outlets, we must stand up in class and object, stand up at the alumni meetings, at the school board meetings and in the legislative chambers and object. If they write columns in the newspapers, we write letters to the editor, or even found our own newspapers.

Above all we must get involved in the politcal process: vote, work for candidates of our persuasions, run for office ourselves, if need be. The last Presidential race was decided by a razor's edge thin margin, but there were more than enough people who didn't bother to vote to have turned it into a landslide for either side, for the candidate who could have mobilized them, motivated them just enough to get out and go down to the polling places. Local races are often decided by a plurality of the minority of voters who bother to turn out.

It is up to us.

The threat the North Vietnamese posed to America was minimal.

First, the threat posed to America by international communism was immense. Second, Podhoretz is simply making the point that the Vietnamese War was a popular intervention which was nonetheless undone by a tiny but determined and critically situated minority. He is simply warning us that if it happened then it could happen again. Indeed as he points out, there are already signs that the anti-America crowd aren't even waiting for a decent interval to begin their effort to undermine our resolve.

Many already seem more concerned about offending Muslims than defending ourselves notwithstanding that this attack occurred in America. His analogies are on target.

The Draft created the hippies and it might bring them back.

I was drafted. I became a soldier, not a hippie.

I submit that a prolonged, illprosecuted war, too costly of lives, for no gains, caused American people to become skeptical. I did and my mother did.

The public will support this war, so long as the leaders are honest, the prosecution is effective, the loss of life is relatively small, and the "gain" is significant.

Good for you. However when a nation institutes conscription, it opens itself up to revolutionary dangers. That is why the monarchs of the 18th Century eschewed conscription. When the French called out the levee en masse in 1793, it brought about both victories and profound social changes. Millions of armed citizen soldiers can be turned against the governments that conscripted them as the Tsar in 1917 and the Kaiser in 1918 found out. Just pointing out that conscription and social changes seem to be inextricably connected.

The times they are a-changed! This time around we've been attacked, not just threatened from afar. No one from the anti-American left will be able to withstand the righteous accusations of disloyalty and ignore the cries of "traitor" coming from an angry citizenry. The claims of "an un-just war' will fall on deaf ears. Bush = Roosevelt, not Johnson or Nixon. It will be the leftists who will have the credibility gap to jump in this war.

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