Andrew Sullivan: America's left surrenders itself to the giant sulk

The need to rebel is something most of us have felt at one or more points in our lives. There are, indeed, moments when a country or society become so oppressively of one mind that a feisty individualist feels hard put not to start screaming in the streets. So you have to feel at least a little sympathy for the American left in the wake of September 11. This has been a very, very hard period, and the strains are beginning to show.

Sure, thousands of people were killed, but the tragedy didn’t stop there. After all, the loathed President George W Bush performed quite well in the aftermath, overthrew the Taliban and saw his ratings jump. Patriotism — the display of which nauseates the left-wing intelligentsia — proliferated from suburb to inner city. Military budgets went up and presidential speeches became rallying cries again. And all this happened just when the left was licking its chops at the prospect of eviscerating a man it regarded as an illegitimate, unelected, moronic puppet of evil corporate interests.

Some leftwingers went undercover; others blurted out what they truly felt (that America deserved to get bloodied) only to find public derision so intense they retreated to their bunkers. And then a happy few decided — what the hell? — that with little to lose, they might as well go further and not only call Bush illegitimate, but the war on terror a convenient excuse to ratchet up defence spending, rape the environment and give Donald Rumsfeld the political version of Viagra.

Exhibit A in the latter category is one Michael Moore. His new book, Stupid White Men, has soared to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Moore is best known as the director of a documentary about redundancies, Roger and Me. The film mocked both corporate leaders and the ordinary Americans naive enough to believe that hard work might bring them financial rewards and a leg up the social hierarchy.

This general belief in the inherent iniquity of American capitalism, the evil of all corporations, and the elite conspiracies to defraud ordinary Americans are all classic tropes of the paranoid American left, and Moore endorses every single one of them. There’s almost a beauty in the way he backs up every left-wing prejudice, from hatred of successful white people, to hostility to car owners, the ability to drop Sweden into every argument about the welfare state, and the notion that capitalism is always a zero-sum game in which every gain for the rich is always a loss for the poor.

Alongside this theological zeal goes a general belief in the idiocy and indolence of most Americans, and the stupidity and malevolence of their leaders. If you’re a Guardian reader, this book’s for you.

There’s no point in seeking a coherent thread through Moore’s book — it’s a rant, a series of rhetorical explosions, fantasies and occasional facts that build upon each other through repetition rather than logic. The notions that evil corporations, for example, actually employ and help people, or that shares in them enrich others, are nowhere entertained. It is also a given in Moore’s universe that, despite exhaustive media recounts that have found no such thing, Bush lost the election and his presidency is illegitimate.

But Moore is equally furious at the Democrats. He describes Bill Clinton as one of the most successful Republican presidents in recent years. His contempt for Al Gore, despite believing in his election victory, is arguably more intense than his antipathy to Bush.

“Friends,” he belabours, “when are we going to stop kidding ourselves? Clinton, and most other contemporary Democrats, did not and will not do what is best for us or the world we live in. We don’t pay their bill — the top 10% do, and it is their will that will always be done. I know you already know this; it’s just hard to say it because the alternative looks so much like . . . Dick Cheney.”

Moore’s argument, like that of most purist class-war leftists, is therefore oddly disempowering. He’s always calling for some sort of mass revolution, but there is no institution capable of delivering it that isn’t already corrupted by Moore’s exacting standards.

He supported a purist left-wing candidate in 2000, Ralph Nader, who took enough votes from Al Gore to hand George Bush the Oval Office. His desire to turn the United States into the Netherlands overnight makes his politics more than a little quixotic. So his politics become a little like the politics of the far right under Bill Clinton — an endless tirade designed to appeal solely to those who already agree, offering no tangible alternative to the current system. Moore’s politics are, in the words of Philip Roth, “the combination of embitterment and not thinking”.

There is also barely a mention in Moore’s book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn’t want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of an oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny? But how at the same time could they support a war conducted by a president inimical to their beliefs and interests? On the opposite side of the spectrum between reason and unreason, the eminent liberal political theorist Michael Walzer has just written an essay worrying about exactly this kind of leftist surrealism. Unlike Moore, he’s less concerned with a form of purist performance art than how the left can actually change America, if it hates her so.

“The truth is,” Walzer writes, “the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally got what it deserved.”

This anti-American nihilism is exactly what some parts of the left sought refuge in as terrorists killed thousands of their fellow citizens. In one gesture, such leftists both showed how far gone they were and also how unhinged from most Americans they had become.

Walzer sees the deeper problem as an inheritance from the new left of the 1960s, a left that still cannot see religious motives for terror, for example, preferring to view Islamofascism with some kind of Marxist subtext, to the point of misreading the nature of the terrorist threat altogether. And he sees the endless legacy of defeat for the American left as a debilitatingly alienating experience: “Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That’s why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed.”

Walzer is surely right. If the congressional Democrats are offering now mere opportunism, then the intellectual left has failed to come up with anything more persuasive. So the market is left to the subliterate bitter-mongers such as Moore, men of the left for whom cynicism, rather than decency, is almost instinctual. But cynicism and alienation do not make for a coherent liberal critique of the current administration or the war. And American democracy — and the world — is poorer for lack of that debate.

There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of an oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny? But how at the same time could they support a war conducted by a president inimical to their beliefs and interests? On the opposite side of the spectrum between reason and unreason, the eminent liberal political theorist Michael Walzer has just written an essay worrying about exactly this kind of leftist surrealism. Unlike Moore, he's less concerned with a form of purist performance art than how the left can actually change America, if it hates her so.

"The truth is," Walzer writes, "the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally got what it deserved."

Walzer sees the deeper problem as an inheritance from the new left of the 1960s, a left that still cannot see religious motives for terror, for example, preferring to view Islamofascism with some kind of Marxist subtext, to the point of misreading the nature of the terrorist threat altogether. And he sees the endless legacy of defeat for the American left as a debilitatingly alienating experience: "Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

Andrew Sullivan: America's left surrenders itself to the giant sulk
The Sunday Times (U.K.)

Why was the World Trade Center destroyed by kamikaze-style Islamic terrorist airline hijackers?

Why did 5,000 American perish Sept. 11?

Why was the Pentagon attacked?

To hear former President Bill Clinton explain it, the United States of America is "paying a price today" for its past sins of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

That's what he told 1,000 students at Georgetown University Wednesday evening, according to news reports.

"This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human," Clinton said. "And we're still paying the price today."

Clinton blames America

IT IS OBVIOUS

By Mia T, 3-3-02

It is obvious to anyone who bothers to remove his political blinders. It is so patently obvious that even those whose political blinders are a permanently fixed fashion statement -- that is to say, even Hollywood -- can see it. (Just ask Whoopie Goldberg...) Bush's poll numbers are a reflection of this self-evident truth.

What is manifestly obvious and confirmed on a daily basis is the plain fact that Democrats are, by definition, constitutionally unfit to navigate the ship of state through these troubled, terrorist waters. Democrats were unfit pre-9/11, but few could see it then. It was 9/11 and its aftermath that made this truth crystal clear even to the most simpleminded among us.

The unwashed masses, the uninformed, the disinformed can see it now. All America can see it now. Self-preservation is kicking in, trumping petty politics at every turn.

And this is why Democrat demagoguery and stupidity and sedition are achieving new lows...

We are witnessing the last gasp of a political relic. The Democrat party is not merely obsolete. As 9/11 and clinton-clinton-Daschle action and inaction have demonstrated, the Democrat party is very dangerous.

We must now make sure that this fact, too, is obvious to all...

That Joe Klein still thinks he can, post-9/11, credibly argue that clinton ran "a serious, disciplined, responsible presidency" is testament to leftist self-delusion, indeed, to the left's utter unfitness to govern.

JOE KLEIN STRIKES OUT. . . AGAIN

JOE KLEIN UNDERMINES OWN THESIS

Admits to Hannity: "clinton was weak on terrorism"





by Mia T, Mar. 14, 2002





n Hannity & Colmes last night, Joe Klein undermined the central thesis of his most recent clinton hagiography, "The Natural," that clinton ran "a serious, disciplined, responsible presidency."

Klein exposed the absurdity of his own reasoning by admitting that "clinton was weak on terrorism," (a position, BTW, that is not inconsistent with the more enlightened current leftist dogma).

But only in a deluded liberal's mind could such an utter failure as a president be considered a successful president...

The clintons' failure to confront terrorism -- the clintons' failure even to recognize the critical need to confront terrorism -- indeed, the clintons' aiding and abetting of the terrorists -- must necessarily be the defining moment of the clintons' --uh -- presidency, trumping even the systematic deconstructing of our society as a democracy by clinton corruption. . .

And all of this, BTW, ultimately renders "sleaze, the sequel" unelectable, clinton "infrastructure" notwithstanding.

They ARE space aliens

reckless rodham-clinton-gore reinvention-of-government schemata

KNOWNOTHING VICTIMS RODHAM/CLINTON REVISITED

^{Q ERTY2} "There isn't a shred of evidence."

HILLARY, YOU KNOW, ^{KnowNothing Victim} Q ERTY4 ^{double bagel},

W I D E B O D Y. _{low-center-of-gravity} Dim Bulb, _{Congenital Bottom Feeder}

_{Q ERTY3} ^{zipper-hoisted}

clinton zipper vitiated by obvious spilth

_{Humpty Dummies}

Q ERTY6 _{utter failure} ^{4th-Estate Malfeasance} (DEATH BY MISREPORT)

_{rodham-clinton} ^{reality-check}BUMP!

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

Michael Walzer

Why was the World Trade Center destroyed by kamikaze-style Islamic terrorist airline hijackers?

Why did 5,000 American perish Sept. 11?

Why was the Pentagon attacked?

That's what he told 1,000 students at Georgetown University Wednesday evening, according to news reports.

Clinton blames America

The only way they can win is to convince people that we're space aliens.
--bill clinton




June 9, 1999

Peggy Noonan's excellent piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is really the story of the death of democracy. At its core it is the description of the human double helix gone terribly awry, of a denatured protein grotesquely twisted, of two mutant, tangled strands of DNA, the basest imaginable of base pairs linked permanently, as firmly as guanine to cytosine, bill inexorably to hillary and conversely, doing what they do best, and doing it relentlessly.

Killing.
Killing insidiously.
Killing as they pose and pander and feel our pain.

My only complaint is with Peggy Noonan's title.
The Mad Boomer, doesn't begin to capture candidate clinton considered separately or even taken as the self-anointed "twofer," permanently conjoined at that cavity conspicuously empty except for ego, that place where brain and soul and guts and heart normally reside.

This is not to say that she -- that they -- are not both quite mad and of that self-indulgent, arrogantly, ignorantly solipsistic age sandwiched flatly between yesterday's innocence and tomorrow's insouciance. Rather, it is that their madness and their boomerism don't even begin to explain their noxious influence: The cloying, internally inconsistent clinton calculus. The unspoken clinton threats. They permeate the atmosphere like a coiling miasma, choking off all freedom.

Even in New York.
Especially in New York.
When she wrote "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus hardly had in mind this pair of mutant, deadly, twisted aliens.

So forget Arkansas-Illinois carpetbaggery and standard issue muckraking. The clintons are aliens of quite another sort. They are extrinsic, not of this world. They are inhuman. They are dehumanizing.

You may recall that the first act of this story of two degenerates maintained by iterating idiots, farce of farce ad infinitum, was generated quite by accident by iterated AlGoreRhythm, who, it should be noted, is now himself the object of iterated calculation by said degenerates who want iteration 2004 all for themselves.

And thus the odd bit of bloody Gore in Act II: The ugly sight of a corrupt, bottom-heavy hillary self-impaled on the horns of a Treason-Dilemma- masquerading-as-a-Third-Term-Dilemma-masquerading-as-a-Senate-stampede, for example, or bill's recent unsolicited, underwhelming Times interview on the Gore candidacy.

Act I was called "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Ostensibly the tale of the wife of a bloodthirsty crime boss who finds romance with a bland bookseller between courses at her husband's restaurant, it was in fact the Thyestean and moveable -- yet unmoving -- feast of hillary clinton at her husband's sham restitution. (Note the reciprocity. The sham restitution in Act II is all hillary's.)

Food, color coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism were the exotic (if mostly horizontal) fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern memoir which passed as ancient fable about nouveau riche rapacity.
Not for the faint at heart, Purple Hearts or queazy stomachs, this depiction of the gross debasement of America was heavily peppered with irony and dark humor throughout.

Although she baked no cookies, didn't do illicit land or cattle deals and stood by no man, hillary clinton starred in the triple role of the Cook, the Thief and his Wife. Her lover was played at once vaporously and in workmanlike fashion by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, with Janet Reno, between her stints rendering intermittent injustice for the Husband, as the reliable stand-in. Sidney Blumenthal was the stand-in for the Cook and Craig Livingstone the stand-in for the Thief. The last-minute addition of Christopher Hitchens as the snitch was a stroke of absolute genius notwithstanding its cerebral accident, its predictable-if-perfect pitch and its facile alliteration.

Although Act I had no rating, the new clinton soccer-mom directive will require a photo ID for any viewer without independent proof of illegal alien DNC or DNA sequencing.

In Act II, rabid anti-clinton voters, roughly 33% of the U.S. populace according to as-yet-unpodded pollsters, become increasingly aware that they are disappearing in droves and being replaced by alien pod replicas which have their physical attributes but lack all anti-clinton affect.

If Act I was a thinly veiled allegory about naked clintonism, then Act II is a parable about the plan for world domination by the Establishment, aged hippies in pinstripes all, with their infantile, solipsistic world view amazingly untouched by time.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

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