Making Things Right

It was on my list of “things to link” yesterday, but for a number of reasons (chief of which was the kabuki play I was caught up in) I didn’t. So, just to make things right (if only for myself), here’s one of the better editorials I’ve read lately: 'America the Ugly,' (subtitled) “Six years after 9/11, it's notable how little the politics of the left have changed.” Excerpts:

As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

In this connection, I was haunted by one memory in particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?"

The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very "Establishment" they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) "the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known."

[…]

John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

[…]

Today, like the McGovernites with respect to Vietnam in 1972, the overwhelming majority of the Democrats in Congress, and all the Democrats hoping to become their party's candidate for president, want America out of Iraq, and the sooner and the more completely the better. And like Nixon in 1972, many Republican members of Congress, along with a few of the Republicans running in the presidential primaries, also want out, but with our honor intact.

I run the risk of quoting too much here, when what I really want you to do is go read the whole thing. There aren’t many (if any) parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, but Mr. Podhoretz has put his finger on perhaps the one and only thing that hasn’t changed between then and now: the short-sightedness and utter vapidity of the American Left. Or, plus ça change…

Resist!