Unfortunately, I don't think he can make the intellectual leaps necessary to realize that the only 'leftist' or liberal politics that make any sense at all would be a return to the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment and the early 19th century before the development of socialism and Marxism (very different in the early stages, before the fomer was infected by the latter). The values embodied in the classical liberal worldview -- liberty, private property, equality of opportunity and under the law, etc.- are under attack today from both those who describe themselves as liberals and many on the right whose authoritarian impulses are strong.
A holy war against infidels is not, even unintentionally, unconsciously, or objectively, a left politics. But how many leftists can even imagine a holy war against infidels?
the favorite posture of many American leftists: standing as a righteous minority, brave and determined, among the timid, the corrupt, and the wicked. A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure.
Blaming America first. Not everything that goes badly in the world goes badly because of us. The United States is not omnipotent, and its leaders should not be taken as co-conspirators in every human disaster.
I am stunned and amazed a leftie would come up with this. While I suspect I would disagree with this guy on many, many things, it's refreshing to see reason and a snese of proportion on the other side.
So too with Marxist historical theory. The U.S. is regarded as imperialist not so much for its activities, (many of which, as the author points out, do not really fit that description), but because according to that historical theory the most powerful country must, ipso facto, be imperialistic by definition and all its political activities dedicated to that bent. Rather than allow the model to be modified (in many ways this is more a religious orthodoxy than a political model) the Marxist simply squints his eyes hard enough so that the appearance of the world fits the model. At some point the eyes close completely and the viewer is in a blind, purely theoretical world with little connection to reality. So too the American left.
There is, in addition, an element of intellectual laziness in the propensity of the left to define, and especially to mischaracterize or caricature its opponents, and leave its own definition to a comfortable and conveniently vague "we're against that." This is how they can define the right as authoritarian and fascist, take the "power to the people" cant as a political stance, and ignore their own authoritarian and fascist means of attempting to effect that stance. That's the other guys, dontcha know, not us.
What we are seeing here is a classic case of severe cognitive dissonance being realized by its victim. This is a healthy thing if the victim does something about it, such as the reexamination of precepts the author is attempting. But the other classic response to cognitive dissonance is much more prevalent in the American left - denial.
Walzer has invited his colleagues to grow up. Very few of them will accept the invitation, since a major facet of the Leftist psychological syndrome is perpetual adolescence, but the article provides some small comfort for conservatives nonetheless, because in it the author concedes the propriety of certain core principles of conservative thought, for example, when he says "a tough materialist analysis would be fine, so long as it is sophisticated enough to acknowledge that material interests don't exhaust the possibilities of human motivation (emphasis mine).
Marx is dead --- caput --- finito.
Walzer, like his late colleague Irving Howe, has a divided conscience. They both came out of an environment very similar to neo-conservatives like Kristol and Podhoretz and with age they can't help but be disappointed by younger leftists repeating the same old mistakes, but their left-wing emotional ties and self-identification overpowered their intellectual qualms about leftism.
The neo-conservative parallel suggests the complexity of the problem: to break with irrational and harmful illusions without simply surrendering to power and the hope of exercising it. From the outside, it looks just like another silly conflict between the loony left and the cynical and opportunistic left, but those inside necessarily take it more seriously.