There’s a new liberal spin out there. The left has always been in favor of the war. My friend Jake Weisberg makes the point in Slate: “Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers. Of course those opposed to the United States defending itself against terrorism are wrong. They also happen to be totally irrelevant.” My friend, the always charming Rick Hertzberg, did the same pirouette in the New Yorker last week: “[T]here is no anti-war movement to speak of… Apart from traditional pacifists, and a tiny handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles, almost no-one objects, in broad outline, to the aims and methods of the anti-terrorism campaign.” This week Hertzberg blithely goes on to object to virtually every domestic security measure the administration has pursued and calls for Attorney General Ashcroft to resign. Never mind.
SOME CONTEXT: What neither Rick nor Jake points out is context. Neither can deny that a battery of left-wing intellectuals – from the Nation to the New Yorker to Slate – had immediate knee-jerk anti-American responses to September 11. They did. Some of us documented it. Neither Rick nor Jake can deny that 5 percent of the country still opposes the war. Neither can deny that much of the left-wing professoriate blamed America first – again, it is documented, thanks in part to invidious “debate-policers” like me. (And by the way, I started the Sontag Awards. The Weekly Standard ripped the idea off.) Nor can they deny that anti-war protestors organized, rallied and mobilized in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Did Rick or Jake go to Union Square or see the anti-war protestors in Washington calling George W. Bush the “real terrorist”? Now it’s also true that these people are a tiny fringe. They exist in “enclaves.” But it’s equally true that the main reason for their current retreat is not because they didn’t exist in the first place – but because even in their reality-free minds, the sheer success of the war completely pulled the rug from beneath them. After all, it’s hard to rally against a war when it seems on the verge of being won. Do Hertzberg and Weisberg doubt for a minute that if the Taliban were still in power and if the Northern Alliance and U.S. troops were still bottled up in Northern Afghanistan that the airwaves wouldn’t be crammed with naysayers and anti-war protestors? Do they listen to NPR’s incessant anti-war commentary? Another reason, methinks, why the Nation, Sontag, et al have changed their tune somewhat is precisely because some of us refused to give them a pass. I think many leftists were shocked by the vehemence of the reaction to their nihilism and stupidity. Our intellectual daisy-cutters, like the real thing, had an effect. Most of these intellectuals are slaves to public opinion and they tacked to the prevailing winds at the first opportunity. But they haven’t disappeared. At every step of the way, they have tried to undermine the war effort. They have done what they can to slant the media; they have opposed much of the domestic anti-terrorism effort; people like Barbara Kingsolver still subject us to glib sermons about American cultural inferiority. I can see why moderate lefties might want to retroactively cover up the knee-jerk attitudes of their more extreme allies in the wake of a mass-murder of American civilians. But some of us noticed at the time. And some of us won’t forget.
The Dish 