A European Leftist's Critique

Over at Arts and Letters Daily is a bemusing article by Bernard-Henri Lévy titled, "A Letter to the American Left". It starts out promising-sounding enough, but it fails resoundingly to hit its mark, which seems to be a sort of rallying of the troops on the American left. Why?

Indeed, one thinks of another famous Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, at least at first, with Lévy's observations.

And the fact is that nothing remotely like [the right] has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. [bold added]

Nothing there ideologically. Check.

The 60-year-old "young" Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the "enemy," staring in disbelief when I say I've spent quite some time exploring them.... [bold added]

The liberal cocoon. Check.

[E]x-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: "If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know"....

In denial, still, of a long line of electoral defeats. Check.

[T]he supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: "to raise more money"....

Money-grubbing to obtain power to grub more money to.... In perpetuity. Check.

[A]nd then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals--I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called "American Empire" (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).

Doctrinnaire "intellectuals" with nothing to say. Check. Again.

And these intellectuals should have plenty to be on the warpath about. Ooh! This is going to be good! Well, here goes:

For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance, that a number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to wait for Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or even learned about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American cities.

Poverty? We could look at this in two ways. Does Lévy mean the "poverty" that is causing the Food Research and Action Center, a left-wing activist group that claims to be "working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger and undernutrition in the United States" to be contorting itself into pretzels to explain the current obesity epidemic among our nation's poor? Or does Lévy mean the intellectual and moral poverty of the government-subsidized underclass, who in some cases have generations-old traditions of not working for a living? The one kind exists despite our welfare state and the other because of it!

The word "poverty" thus begins the standard leftist laundry list and is the pinprick that bursts the bubble of hope that perhaps a leftist is about to have an original thought -- but not before Lévy teases us.

For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas, it is simply incomprehensible that more voices weren't raised long ago, in the name of no less than the force of "the Enlightenment," to denounce the ridiculous fraud of the anti-Darwinian supporters of "intelligent design."

Yes. That is incomprehensible. The left has been essentially AWOL on the issue of "intelligent design". But will this European "used to the battlefield of ideas" show the way for his intended audience, the American left, to support science against the theorcrats? Or to support anything? Let's read on and see.

First, the warmup:

And what about the death penalty? How can it be that there isn't yet, within the political parties, especially the Democratic Party--which everyone knows will never budge on the question without decisive internal pressure--a trend of opinion calling for the abolition of this civilized barbarity?

Abolish the death penalty? On what basis? At least say something about the impossibility of restoring life to the wrongly convicted as a start.... That is, after all, a very serious matter.

But he doesn't. And then comes the standard leftist pitch, the one we've been hearing ever since the United States contemplated doing anything else about terrorism beyond simply toppling the Taliban.

And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in Central Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer applies? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I know you have journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished what our French press still hasn't finished forty years after our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens from their political duties? Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag--or even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other grounds) on this vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of that handful of individuals who, after September 11, launched the debate about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be justified?

Guantánamo. Abu Ghraib. Central Europe. Yawn. These are all incontestable atrocities to Lévy, who fails to teach his audience, lacking in intellectual vigor as they are, why "desecrating" a Koran and playing loud music somehow make Guantanamo into a "Gulag". Or why he and his leftist compatriots, though perfectly willing to catalogue what went on at Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein choose to gripe loudest about American frat-boy stunts. Or why real torture, if we are even using it at all in Central Europe, really is bad under every circumstance.

Mr. Lévy, your compatriots on the left need help: This issue was debated entirely within the American right. It's one thing to mindlessly oppose or support something. It's quite another to marshal arguments in support of that position to win minds.

And then, more of the same.

And I'm not even talking about Bush. I won't even mention Bush's gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except for the sake of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of course, that you denounce him--but mechanically, I am almost tempted to say ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies and lied. They impeached Clinton for a venial lie about inappropriate conduct. How is it, then, that it took so long to draw a parallel between those lies and a lie about which the least you can say is that its consequences were anything but venial? How is it that so few "public intellectuals" have been found, within the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy, who can bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?

This can be summed up as follows: "Bush lied, people died. Impeach the bastard." His complaint about so few intellectuals calling for Bush's impeachment is silly. Just try googling "impeach Bush" and see what you get. Either quite a few intellectuals are out there bringing the subject up, or something else Lévy claims isn't going on -- a "resounding mobilization of civil society" is going on here.

The rest of the essay is Lévy's way of rallying the troops (after first shaming them), partly by recalling the glory days of the left, when it was intellectually respectable and did fight for worthwhile causes, like racial equality. But one passage in particular is on point far more than its author intended.

Some will retort that the "public intellectual" is a European specialty, that we shouldn't blame Americans for their infidelity to a tradition that is not their own. What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible? Or of that golden age of civil rights awareness, when great writers enunciated what was right and good and true? [bold added]

You first, Mr. Lévy.

Is it right that Americans get criticized for "mishandling" Korans, but that Moslems get what amounts to a free pass for daily committing crimes and making threats over imagined slights of which they are themselves guilty? Is it good to simply allow Iran to enrich all the uranium it wants, as a European leftist thinks? And is it true that torture is absolutely wrong under every circumstance? Lévy just wrote all these things, and without backing up a single one of his contentions.

Lévy is correct to notice that there is an intellectual vacuum on the left, but it cannot be filled by taking every leftist bromide for granted and whipping up a "resounding mobilization of civil society". Lévy thus personifies the very problem he tries to point out by ignoring its root: A massive failure on the left to consider whether their positions make any sense against the facts of reality.

To wit: Lévy makes a big deal out of visiting megachurches, but he goes in with his mind already made up that they are "Machiavellian" "laboratories". He is merely doing reconnoissance, and not engaging in a Tocquevillian intellectual exploration. His American counterparts at least conserve their energy in reaching the same conclusions. And conversely, while the complaints of Moslem prisoners are taken at face value, absolutely no consideration is given to why Americans might torture prisoners vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein, or by what degree. And what of the laundry list against Bush? Is there no need to persuade the right that it is wrong about Bush? Or is he afraid that the facts will not back him up?

Or do facts just not matter to Lévy? I think this is the problem, and it is reflected in Lévy's style of argumentation. If the American government really were brutally and unjustly torturing people in Guantanamo, Lévy (and other leftist intellectuals) would have a whole armada of facts at his disposal to cause the blood of ordinary citizens to boil. But he doesn't. Ditto for Abu Ghraib. The American public saw what evidence there was for "torture" in each case and remained unmoved. More damning, the left (i.e., Amnesty International) compiled a huge list of atrocities committed by the Bathists and uttered not a peep before the invasion. But then, this would have buttressed the cause for invading Iraq, which apparently is something to be avoided at all costs -- like stopping Iran from getting the bomb.

While one might counter that Lévy was preaching to the choir and so needed not defend any of his positions, rhetorical necessity dictates that he would still need facts in support of his arguments in order to sound convincing. Levy's initial shaming of the troops works because the charges are true. The left is out of ideas. It can't face up to its electoral impotence. It exists in an intellectual cocoon. It just wants money and power. (Tellingly, three of these charges obviously involve some cutoff from reality.) Lévy has reality on his side there.

But Levy's attempt to rally the troops fails because his ideas are have no connection with reality or even to each other, except, that every single position Lévy names is in some way anti-Bush! There is no grand unifying theme to rally behind. There is only hatred of Bush as a surrogate for America. Whatever the merits of any position espoused by Lévy are accidental, it would seem. No evidence robustly supports Lévy's anti-Bush laundry list, and hatred does not provide a conceptual framework with which to marshal evidence in support of a genuinely good cause.

It would appear from this critique, which does little more than conduct a post-mortem of the American left and faintly recall its better days, that the left is dead on both sides of the Atlantic.

-- CAV