The Left At War

by tristero

Michael Berube was in town and stopped by Casa Tristero for an Indian dinner* with Madame T, our mobile DNA continuator unit, a friend from Germany, and yours truly. A genial, kind, and intelligent man – who’s been certified by no less an authority than David Horowitz to be one of the most dangerous academics in America – Michael came heavily armed… not with guns, you literalists! but carrying both an excellent bottle of wine and a copy of his hot-off-the-presses latest, The Left at War.** I started it right after he left for the wilds of New Haven, and it’s terrific.

Below is the official description of the book, but I thought I’d say a few words from first impressions. The book’s introduction and first chapter reminded me of some forgotten reasons for why I started blogging, back in early ’03. True, the prime reason I began was because of the atrociously criminal behavior of the Bush administration coupled with the failure of anyone in the mainstream media, Krugman a notable exception, to tell the truth about them. But there was another big problem which I felt needed addressing.

Back in ’02, the major groups visibly opposed to Bush’s proposed invasion of Afghanistan often had pretty lame politics which often struck me as thoroughly incoherent. Incredibly, opposition to Bushism was often paired with support for Saddam, as if they both weren’t morally reprehensible creeps who should never have had the chance to wreak havoc on the world. But there was little choice back then. You either held your nose and signed petititions you didn’t entirely agree with and attended marches sponsored by groups whose politics often made you uneasy, or you spent your time screaming in frustration at your TV set. (Or you did what I did: all of the above.)

There had to be an alternative, but it meant opposing not only the mad obsession to go to war that had taken over most of the US, but also working out a new rhetoric with more sensible politics than those I encountered. It had to be a politics which gave Bush and Cheney no quarter without in any way providing the slightest moral or political concession to tyrants, whether they supported or opposed US policies and goals. I felt I had something to contribute to this new rhetoric, and, as small as I knew my contribution would be, I felt then – and still feel – that I simply had to speak up.

From what I can tell so far, The Left at War is a formal critique, from the perspective of cultural studies, of the kind of leftism that prizes its marginal status in mainstream political discourse above genuinely effective engagement. Berube strongly disagrees with those, for example, who respond to an indefensible Israeli aggression by declaring, “We are all Hezbollah now”. Berube’s disagreement seems, like mine, not only rhetorical (what a stupid way to phrase your absolutely correct opposition to Israel’s bombing campaign) but political (it’s wrong-headed and naive to the point of being cuckoo to think Hezbollah is some kind of paragon of moral behavior). But make no mistake: no one on the right will be able to take any comfort in the political positions Berube proposes.

In short, what Michael seems to be up to is a rigorous advocacy of what I informally call “liberalism.” Whatever you call it, this position seeks, as I see it, not a “middle way” between left and right but rather a popular, effective, politics based on a sympathetic – and critical, when necessary – examination of the kinds of moral values that have pre-occupied so many great Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment writers.***

That is exactly the kind of discussion we need to have right now, now that we have, on some basic level, a sane administration and a conservative movement that, temporarily, has no remotely electable presidential candidates. The stakes are very high. We need to grapple with the complex politics of the Obama administration and the complex social changes and social upheavals his election caused. If we are to be effective, we need positions far more relevant and supple than those provided by what Berube calls the Manichean Left. And those of us, like myself, who have been trying to imagine a new political position need all the help we can get clarifying the intellectual issues in play. There hasn’t been much done so far that’s been all that interesting and useful. If the beginning is any indication, Michael’s book seems like it will be.

I”ll have a complete review when I’ve read the whole thing, perhaps next week, because this week I”m busy preparing – and happily so – a lecture on music and science for next Friday at the Kahn Institute at Smith College. Meanwhile, here’s the publisher’s info for The Left at War. I hope you will buy the book, not because Berube’s a friend of Hullabaloo’s, but because it looks like a damn good and provocative read:

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s belligerent response fractured the American left–partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures that had appeared a decade earlier.
In a masterful survey of the post-9/11 landscape, renowned scholar Michael Berube revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to 9/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of the 1990s to the question of what (if anything) is the matter with Kansas.

The Left at War brings the history of cultural studies to bear on the present crisis–a history now trivialized to the point at which few left intellectuals have any sense that merely cultural studies could have something substantial to offer to the world of international relations, debates over sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, matters of war and peace. The surprising results of Berube’s arguments reveal an American left that is overly fond of a form of countercultural politics in which popular success is understood as a sign of political failure and political marginality is understood as a sign of moral virtue. The Left at War insists that, in contrast to American countercultural traditions, the geopolitical history of cultural studies has much to teach us about internationalism–for in order to think globally, we need to think culturally, and in order to understand cultural conflict, we need to think globally. At a time when America finds itself at a critical crossroads, The Left at War is an indispensable guide to the divisions that have created a left at war with itself.

*Recipes courtesy Raghavan Iyer’s masterpiece, 660 Curries.

**It’s helpful for new books if they get a high ranking from Amazon. Of course, it’s better if Hugo Chavez comps the president of the United States with your latest opus, but still… If you prefer, you can also get Michael’s book here.

***Cue the inevitable riposte that there was plenty wrong with the Enlightenment. No kidding. Obviously, I’m talking about a cultural/political/moral system that builds upon what these people got right, and they got a lot right.