By contrast, when there is bad news for American foreign policy, leftists in the media become visibly excited and cannot stop talking about it. Years after Abu Ghraib, the New York Times continues to report on it, and liberal outlets like salon.com titillate their viewers with “new photographs” aimed at further humiliating the U.S. government. Similarly leftists reacted with undisguised glee to civil strife in Iraq following the destruction of the Shia mosque in Samarra. At the first sign that marines may have killed some two dozen Iraqi civilians in Haditha, the liberal press began daily front-page coverage of the allegations, and John Murtha and his leftist admirers quickly proclaimed the scandal “worse than Abu Ghraib.”3 There is a pattern here: the left reacts to events as if America were the enemy and toward the Islamic radicals and insurgents as if they were the good guys. This is the most troubling consequence of a divided America: one side now cheers for the enemy and labors for its success. With the help of the left, Al Qaeda’s “media strategy” appears to be working.
But why would the left take the side of America’s sworn enemies, while treating the American government as the adversary? The issue of the left’s motives is the great unanswered question among conservatives. So far, there are several theories to explain the left’s behavior. Perhaps the most common theory is that the left is weak and does not understand the threat. The right-wing pundit Mark Steyn has made valiant attempts to show the left that Islamic fundamentalists are really illiberal and don’t care for people like Barney Frank and Maureen Dowd. Since leftists refuse to become exercised over the threat posed by “crazy mullahs,” Steyn concludes that they are “unserious” about foreign policy. Another conservative theory is that the left hates America. As Jeane Kirkpatrick once put it, the left always blames America first. David Horowitz and others insist that this is because the left is made up of “neo-Communists” in a new garb.4 Radio host Michael Savage has a different theory, conveyed by the title of his recent book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.
In reality, the left understands the threat of Islamic fundamentalism very well. Contrary to Mark Steyn, it is very serious about foreign policy. Nor is the left weak in promoting the values it believes in. As we have seen, the left has an aggressive global campaign to undermine patriarchy and traditional religion, and to promote secularism, feminism, and the corruptions of American popular culture. This campaign is far more comprehensive than anything contemplated on the right. Its centerpiece is a battle against traditional Islamic morality, which is viewed by the left as the greatest barrier to achieving the triumph of liberal morality worldwide. So the Muslims who say America is “against Islam” are partly right. Of course, it is not America that is against Islam, it is the cultural left. The left does not want to acknowledge its hostility to Islam, so it accuses the right of fighting a religious war. The left charges the Bush administration with political imperialism to distract attention from its own campaign of cultural imperialism.
Yet, oddly enough, the left does not want this campaign of social transformation to be extended to the war on terror, even though military conquest would be an obvious way to transform illiberal societies like Afghanistan and Iraq into more liberal ones. The left’s reluctance is not due to weakness but due to calculation. Instead of fighting a war, the left seeks a kind of global law enforcement campaign against bin Laden and “the guys who did 9/11.” The left would prefer the narrowest possible fight against the most illiberal forces in the world. Again, the critical question is why.
One reason is that Bush is fighting Islamic radicalism with democracy. The left frequently poses as the champion of democracy. It has to, because liberals are generally committed to the democratic idea, and the left relies on liberal support to secure mainstream legitimacy for its agenda. Recall, however, that the left has won virtually all of its victories in America not through the democratic process but by going around it. How did abortion become legal? How did the left get its radical doctrine of secularism adopted? How has the left managed to overturn virtually all laws against pornography? How is gay marriage being pushed today? In every case, the left has relied on the courts to declare a “right” and then enforce that right against the will of the American people and their elected representatives. In this sense, the biggest victories of the cultural left in the past few decades have all been achieved undemocratically.
The left knows it is imperative to circumvent democracy in the Muslim world. Notice how the left never calls for democratization in Syria or Iran. The left may fault America for being “hypocritical” in supporting Pakistan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, but it rarely presses for democratization in those countries either. In the 1980s the left constantly pressured the United States to compel its allies, like Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, and the Afrikaner government in South Africa, to democratize. So why has the left lost its appetite for democracy in the Middle East? The reason is that leftists have figured out that in that region the tyrants are relatively liberal, and the Muslim people are socially and religiously conservative. The Gulf kingdoms are the most liberal regimes in the Middle East today—there is a parliament and a relatively free press, and women enjoy a wide array of liberties—but all of them are ruled by kings and oligarchs. When Kuwait recently gave women the vote, it was the hereditary ruler, the emir, who had to pressure the elected parliament to adopt the measure. The most liberal regime in the Middle East in the past half century was Iran under the shah. As long as you didn’t protest against the government, you could dress as you liked, believe as you liked, and live as you liked. Eventually the shah was overthrown, not so much because he was a tyrant as because he was a liberal!
The notion of “liberal tyranny” is surprising because Americans are accustomed to thinking of “liberal democracy.” We often use the terms “liberal” and “democratic” synonymously, presuming that liberalism leads to democracy and that democracy is an expression of liberalism. In reality, liberalism and democracy are quite different. Liberalism means individual rights. Democracy means majority rule. Liberalism refers to the right of individuals to shape their lives. Democracy refers to the right of a people to collective self-determination. One may say that, in America, we have exercised our democratic choice for a liberal society. We have chosen liberalism from within democracy. But this is not an inevitable choice. Other societies can vote differently. In Algeria during the early 1990s, the Islamic Salvation Front campaigned on a platform of ending women’s employment, enforcing the veil, and making sex outside of marriage punishable by death. The party won resounding victories at the polls. The electoral success of Hamas in the Palestinian territories and of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt confirms the pattern of Muslims voting for illiberal outcomes.
For the left, Iraq is a frightening example of what happens when a tyrant like Saddam Hussein is replaced by an elected government. Repressive though he was, Saddam Hussein was also something of an egalitarian. He treated men and women with brutality, but (from the left’s point of view) at least he treated them with equal brutality. Although rights didn’t count for much under Hussein, men and women had the same rights in court. Conceding that Iraq was “no feminist paradise” under Hussein, the New York Times praised him for granting women “access to educational, professional and personal opportunities.” Moreover, Hussein was a secular ruler who kept the mullahs under strict control. By contrast, Iraq’s democratic constitution declares Islam the official state religion, makes Islam a valid source of law, and permits no law that contravenes the clear teachings of Islam. Iraqi elected officials seek to implement some form of sharia, at least in domestic or family law. What makes these rules even more appalling from the left’s perspective is that they have been enacted through popular consent. It is the Iraqi people who have rejected feminism and secularism. Women can vote in Iraq and they too supported the regime that is in power. Having seen what Muslims do when they get democracy, the American left seems to have secretly given up hope for democracy in the Middle East. As a consequence
of Iraqi democracy, the Times warns, “the future of women’s freedom is in serious question.” The new leaders “could be consigning Iraqi women to a life of subjugation” and secular Iraqis to “a bleak, Iran-like future.” In the same vein, columnist Maureen Dowd fretted that “the Iraqi election may actually be making things worse” because it “is going to expand the control of the Shia theocrats.”5 This, by the way, is the same Maureen Dowd who earlier complained that the United States would never let the Iraqis choose their own leaders and rule their own society.
Author Sam Harris draws the logical conclusion: America should not encourage democracy in the Muslim world. “It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century.” Harris’s candor is exceptional. Most people on the left won’t admit that they consider Muslims too backward and fanatical to entrust them with the ballot. So leftists subject democracy in the Muslim world to impossible standards. Here is a classic statement from the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun: “There can be no democracy in Iraq without a fundamental redistribution of legal, economic, political and social power toward women and their equal representation throughout the region’s economies and governments.”6 By this measure democracy is impossible in the world today, since nowhere do women have equal representation in economic and political life. A kind of utopianism, in this way, is deployed as a weapon against progress.
THE LEFT WOULD rather use the United Nations and other international groups that it dominates to promote its agenda. Liberal enthusiasm for the U.N. seems rooted in a belief in ethical universalism. “The emphasis on patriotic pride is morally dangerous,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes. “We should give our first allegiance to…the moral community made up of all human beings.” Another prominent thinker, Richard Rorty, pines for what he terms “the parliament of man, the federation of the world.”7 But do not for a moment think that Nussbaum, Rorty, or anyone on the left would trust the world community with genuine legislative power. The main problem with “world government” is that it would place a chastity belt on the left’s social agenda. By Western standards, most people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are very conservative. On issues like feminism and homosexuality, they are to the right of Pat Robertson! They are likely to impose far more restrictions than now exist in the West on birth control, divorce, homosexuality, and abortion. I doubt Nussbaum and Rorty would want to live under the moral rules enacted by a truly representative world government. For these reasons the left should be very relieved to be spared world government and to have the United Nations instead. As a self-styled surrogate for the global community, the U.N. enables the left to espouse the ideal of world government without having to actually live by that ideal.
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.8 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.”9
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.”10 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.”11 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.
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