Yes, Virginia, there is a "decent left"

And Dissent's Michael Walzer is one of its few members. But his "second thoughts" about al-Qaida and the war don't go quite far enough.

By David Horowitz

Mar 27, 2002 | Fifteen years ago, Peter Collier and I assembled a group of disillusioned New Leftists for a conference in Washington we called "Second Thoughts." These second thoughts had been provoked by many things, but most relevant was the wholesale slaughter of innocents in "liberated" Cambodia and Vietnam by political forces that had been supported by the left. It was not the first sprouting of such radical second thoughts. Generations of leftists before us had been repelled by the similar crimes of Stalin and Mao and Castro, and had shed their progressive worldviews for a sadder, wiser and often more conservative philosophy. Indeed, Irving Kristol, who was on the panel of "elders" we invited to our conference, observed that second thoughts had begun with the creation of the modern left during the French Revolution and had been repeated many times since. Our second thoughts, he said somewhat sardonically, were in fact a Yogi Berra moment of "dij` vu all over again."

And now it is dij` vu once more. The events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath have induced second thoughts in a whole new generation of leftists who are in various stages of reassessment. These include such luminaries as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, who this fall joined with their opponents on the right to defend America against a radical Islamic enemy, one that they previously might have regarded as the historical agent of the Third World oppressed. Now the editor of Dissent, Michael Walzer, has come forward to articulately and provocatively pose this generation of second thoughts, and ask how far to push them. A philosopher, social critic and lifelong Democratic socialist, Walzer has pointedly titled his article "Can There Be a Decent Left?"

In so far as there is a "decent left," which I've been known to question, Michael Walzer has exemplified it throughout his political career. I crossed political swords with Walzer nearly 40 years ago, when I was a young and combative Marxist in England. I do not remember the substance of our disagreements, and I no longer have copies of Views, the obscure left-wing magazine that printed them. But I am certain that he was the more civil of the two of us, and that he, then being to my right, was also more right on the issues.

I would also say that the faction of the left that Dissent represents is itself the decent faction of the left. During the '60s, Dissent's founder Irving Howe symbolized resistance within the left to the totalitarian elements who came to dominate it during that sad decade. Although in the 1980s its editors were seduced into a "critical" defense of the Nicaraguan regime, they have an otherwise honorable record of having opposed communism throughout the Cold War, even if they only grudgingly supported or, worse, were often excessively critical of America's crucial efforts to contain the communist threat.

Not all Dissent writers share Walzer's personal decency. One obvious manifestation of decency is to respect those you disagree with if they deserve it. Dissent editor Paul Berman once described me as a "demented lunatic" -- as though only the redundancy would do justice to a political enemy no matter how ludicrous the overkill. Dissent's other leading philosophical figure, Richard Rorty, has defined his left as a movement "against cruelty." But his own writings have not been without crude demonizations and peremptory dismissals of his neo-conservative opponents (not to mention Republicans generally) as dolts and fascists, whose ideas a civilized progressive is obliged to dismiss. He has even celebrated the left's political domination of the universities, something he well knows is the result of an ideological cleansing of conservatives that he would certainly deplore if the roles were reversed.

Still, Dissent has played an important role in trying to discourage the left from romanticizing America's enemies, and Walzer's fine piece continues that tradition. But where in the past, Dissent as well as "second thoughts" leftists tended to lament the left's active support for brutal regimes, nightmarish states that it mistakenly took to be earthly utopias, Walzer's doubts originate in his problems with the left's passivity about defending America against nightmare threats against it. This is not wholly different from the past, but it is different enough to warrant our attention.

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriot feeling as politically incorrect," Walzer writes. "That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of Sept. 11 or joining in the expression of solidarity that followed." In their first responses, he notes, leftists failed "to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused." Instead, they felt "schadenfreude," that German word meaning joy at another's sorrows, a "barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved."

Even though some of these leftists regained their "moral balance" after the attacks (for many it was more likely a sense of political self-preservation), they still exhibited a myopic attitude when addressing the problem of what should be done. Their sense of being internal exiles in America was again at the root of the problem: "That's why their participation in the policy debate after the attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to the U.N., collect evidence against bin Laden, and so on) seem to have been developed with no concern for effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow-citizens. That was someone else's business; the business of the left was ... what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they did." Hence the left put its energies into defending the civil liberties of suspected terrorists.

Walzer is himself still unwilling to put it this bluntly, of course. This would mean finally stepping away from the left, which he is unready to do. So he applauds the exaggerated concern of the left for, say, the prisoners of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling it "a spirited defense of civil liberties" and a "good result." But this is a minor qualification in the face of the large and pressing question he has raised, about the way the left sees and feels itself to be an alien force in its own country. In fact, Walzer is having a classic set of second thoughts.

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