The Enemy At Home (36 page)

To many conservatives, the level of trust the left places in the United Nations seems ridiculously naïve. How can the U.N., which does not command an effective fighting force, resolve conflicts that may require the use of force? What good is the U.N. in stopping rogue states from acquiring dangerous weapons? Is it credible to expect this international agency, half of whose member countries are governed by dictators, to be an effective instrument for the promotion of democratic values? This criticism of the left is itself naïve. It presumes that leftists expect the U.N. to do these things. In reality, the left has entirely different goals for the United Nations. From this point of view, the U.N. and its various agencies function well as an international leftist legislature, proclaiming ever-new “rights” and then enforcing them in countries that would never themselves consider passing such laws.

We have seen how this process works. The left relies on multilateral treaties and international conferences to adopt leftist priorities and declare them universal rights. Then human rights groups like Amnesty International and other leftist NGOs use leverage against liberal tyrants to force them to comply with the left’s agenda or be found in violation of international law. Recently, the left won a big victory in Morocco when, after a decade of pressure from international NGOs, King Mohammed VI agreed to replace the country’s Islamic family law with a Western-style code. In one sweep, Morocco abolished polygamy and established something close to no-fault divorce. The left was jubilant: here was an obliging tyrant taking his orders not from the Moroccan people but from Human Rights Watch. Now Regan Ralph, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says the “true test” for the king is to abolish the country’s personal status code, which stipulates that the husband is the head of the family.
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In a similar vein, the European Union is pressuring Turkey to liberalize its divorce laws and adopt a nondiscrimination provision on homosexuality as a condition for being admitted into the European Union. The EU demonstrates how political and financial leverage can be used to armtwist Muslims into setting aside their religion as the basis of law and adopting secular and liberal laws instead.

The left has a second major problem with democracy in the Muslim world. If democracy succeeds there, the result is a big win for George Bush and his conservative allies. Recall the left’s seething hatred for Bush, a man whom Sean Wilentz terms “the very worst president in all of American history.” Let us also remember that the left is still reeling from its loss in the Cold War. Despite the rhetorical bravado with which liberals continue to say, “We won the cold war,” the left knows very well that it lost the Cold War. It’s easy to forget now that for at least two decades leftists commonly used the term “cold warrior” as an epithet. Some continue to mourn the collapse of the Soviet empire. “To this day,” historian Eric Hobsbawm recently admitted, “I notice myself treating the memory of the Soviet Union with indulgence and tenderness.” A leading critic of the Iraq war, the British leftist George Galloway, says, “Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.”
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The outcome of the Cold War helped to consolidate the image of the Republican Party as the party that could be trusted with national security. The left recognizes that if Bush’s policies succeed in the Middle East, this result would solidify patriotic sentiments and may even boost traditional values generally. The left recognizes the military is a conservative institution with a large number of Southerners and evangelical Christians. Military values are right-wing values. The left despises these values, but it cannot openly attack the military for fear of being called unpatriotic. Learning from its past mistakes, the left has adopted a wily new strategy: it now seeks defeat for America on behalf of the American military. Even though military personnel strongly support Bush’s mission in Iraq, the left solicitously urges: “Let’s bring our troops home.” “Let’s keep them out of harm’s way.” “Iraq is not worth the life of one more American soldier.”

The left is fighting a high-stakes battle in which its identity as a viable political movement is at stake. As Paul Starr admits, “Liberalism is at greater risk now than at any time in recent American history. The risk is of political marginality, even irrelevance.”
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His remarks can be understood in this way: America has a one-party system of government. This means that one party tends to dominate American politics in a given era. The major party sets the agenda, and the other party has the choice of reactively opposing its ideas or of sounding a feeble cry of “me too.” During the Andrew Jackson era, the Democrats were the majority party. This dominance lasted half a century, until the Civil War. After the war, the Republicans became the majority, a position they held until the Great Depression. Since 1932, the Democrats assumed the majority position, which continued through the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.

Since 1980, the Republican Party has been in the ascendancy. First there was Reagan, then the GOP sweep of Congress in 1994, and then George W. Bush’s election and reelection. Despite short-term reversals, the broader pattern is one of Republican success. And now the party of conservatism is looking to solidify its hold on American politics for the next several decades—a nightmarish prospect for liberal Democrats. In addition, the Supreme Court seems ready to tip decisively to the right. If this happens, it would endanger the left’s entire social agenda. As long as the left dominated the courts, it retained the power to achieve its most important objectives, in many cases by invalidating laws passed by representative bodies. A conservative court would deprive cultural liberalism of its most valuable political institution. No wonder the left is desperate to reverse the conservative tide.

Even so, it may seem paradoxical for the party of autonomy and secularism to risk an important country like Iraq falling into the clutches of Islamic radicals who would execute homosexuals and impose strict forms of sharia. It appears even more incredible that the left would consider allying with groups that proclaim themselves the sworn enemies of America. The mystery disappears, however, when we realize that the left is simply applying the doctrine of the lesser evil. From its point of view, the left is allying with the bad guys in order to defeat the worse guys. Obviously leftists do not wish to live in the kind of society that bin Laden seeks to establish. But the left also knows that bin Laden wants to establish sharia in Baghdad, not Boston. The left is willing to risk an Islamic fundamentalist state in Iraq in order to improve its prospects of defeating conservative government here in America.

Another way to put it is that the left is more than willing to partner with foreign enemies it doesn’t like in order to vanquish a domestic enemy it rabidly hates and fears. Columnist Ellen Willis warns that “what used to be the right-wing lunatic fringe is now the Republican mainstream…. The radical right feels entitled to dominate not only government but all social institutions.” Bill Moyers charges that Bush and the right are causing nothing less than the “intentional destruction of the United States of America.”
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From the left’s point of view, an Iraq ruled by bin Laden and his successors is troubling, but an America ruled by Bush and the conservatives is intolerable. So the left fears Bush more than bin Laden, and from its perspective, it is right to do so. The entire social agenda of the left, which was advancing without serious opposition, is now existentially jeopardized by Bush and his supporters. It is Bush, not bin Laden, who threatens to marginalize the cultural left and discredit its most cherished values.

Once again—this cannot be emphasized often enough—I am not suggesting that the left hates America. Nor does the left always “blame America first.” The left doesn’t blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing economic sanctions against South Africa. The left doesn’t fault America for its global support of contraception, liberal divorce laws, and the legalization of prostitution. The left is entirely in favor of Hollywood and the music companies spreading decadent cultural values through movies, television, and songs. The left would like to have Mapplethorpe’s photographs and
Brokeback Mountain
seen in every country. In short, the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.

CONTRARY TO DAVID
Horowitz and others, the left in America doesn’t want communism or full-scale socialism but for America to become more like Europe. Whether they mean it or not, Hollywood leftists are always threatening to move to Europe if Republicans are elected one more time. Liberals like Felix Rohatyn routinely call for American courts to adopt European precedents.
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There has been a spate of left-leaning books extolling the old continent. Consciously seeking to contrast Europe with America, these books have titles like
The European Dream, Why Europe Will Run the Twenty First Century,
and
The United States of Europe
. Author Tony Judt terms Europe a “model for universal emulation.”
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Part of the appeal is economic. Europe has a short work week and a generous welfare state. While many Americans take pride in how much the country’s welfare rolls have been reduced, author T. R. Reid reports that “in Norway the government takes pride in showing that the number of recipients has been growing rapidly.” The main appeal of Europe, however, is its cultural politics. “It is in Europe,” Jeremy Rifkin writes, “where the feeling of the sixties generation has given rise to a bold new experiment in living.” If many Muslims criticize America for moral decadence, many Europeans criticize America for not being decadent enough. Unlike America, Europe is completely secular. France is so systematically hostile to all religion that one of its leading politicians, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaks of the nation’s “secular fundamentalism.” Flag waving is not considered respectable in Europe. “The open display of patriotism,” Reid writes, “is widely sneered at in Europe.”
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Europeans also despise traditional America, which is why Bush is the object of pathological derision and why Michael Moore’s books have broken publishing records across the continent. Appealing to a nondiscrimination provision in its charter, the European Union has forced all member nations to admit homosexuals into the military. Many European countries have legalized gay unions. Meanwhile, traditional marriage has declined to the point where it is now a minority lifestyle. Reports of adultery do not harm a European politician’s reputation, and in France they sometimes enhance it. Childlessness has become a common phenomenon in European households, with the result that the population of Western Europe is shrinking. Of the women who do have children, few devote themselves to full-time motherhood. In France, all children between the ages of three and five are placed in full-time, government-funded day care, a system that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically recommends for this country.
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Many Europeans find nothing controversial in assisted suicide or recreational cocaine use. European countries generally permit abortion but are horrified by the idea of capital punishment.

Many Europeans regard cultural depravity as a mark of their sophistication. In many cases the government gives its blessing, as in Amsterdam, where drugs are legal and you can walk into a coffeehouse and order hashish or marijuana with your cappuccino. The Dutch government provides users with free needles and “treatment”—often consisting of more drugs. Prostitution is also legal, and the only government regulation of it is to ensure that the facilities are sanitary, condoms are used, and taxes are collected. The government even conducts tours of the red light district, and official maps helpfully designate the locations of brothels. Best of all, there are no pesky religious conservatives to object to any of this. The “conservative” reaction to Islamic radicalism in Europe is mainly to take a firm stance on behalf of liberal decadence. The general tone of the European right is, “We won’t stand for any fanatical immigrants questioning the secular basis of our society or telling us to pull our pants up.”

Finally, Europe provides an operational demonstration of the alliance between left-wing radicals and Islamic radicals. In several European countries, radical imams celebrated 9/11 and called for the destruction of America while leftist academics and civil rights groups demanded the imams’ “right to be heard” and defended the legitimacy of their “dissent.” In Britain, secular leftists and Muslim fundamentalists jointly formed the Stop the War Coalition and worked together to discredit Tony Blair for supporting America’s Iraq policy. For the American left, Europe is politically far ahead of the United States and provides a blueprint for the direction in which this country should move.

SINCE EUROPEAN DECADENCE
stands at the opposite pole to the traditional values of non-Western cultures, the left is faced with a problem: how to impose the liberal values of Europe on those conservative cultures? Here we see why the left does not want to dismantle American power. The left needs American power to promote its agenda. What the left seeks is a transformation in the use of American power. This explains why many on the left frequently call for the United States to intervene militarily in countries where no American self-interest is involved. The same people who oppose American action in Iraq or Iran insist that America should intervene in Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Kosovo, or Sudan. While Bush is preoccupied with Iraq, George Soros complains that “already the United States has been reluctant to get engaged in Liberia.”
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Columnist Nicholas Kristof has repeatedly urged America to intervene, if necessary with military force, in Darfur. At first glance such rhetoric seems simply bizarre. The reason people such as Soros and Kristof advocate apparently pointless intervention is that, from their perspective, it is not pointless. Indeed, it provides an excellent opportunity to promote the values of contemporary liberalism.