Can There Be a Decent Left that SHUTS UP for Minute, Ever?
One of the least appealing things about the self-consciously “Decent Left” is its narcissism. You get the feeling that the emphasis is less, “What’s the decent thing?” than “How shall we demonstrate our decency?” It’s self-conscious and gestural and obsessed with striking the right profile. Ironically, this mirrors the standard conservative complaint about leftism generally. You don’t have to read many issues of the New Criterion or Commentary to find complaints that leftists are more concerned with being seen to be capital-G Good than with the practical work of building a decent society.
The tic survives even in a lot of the late and partial recantations by decent-lefters who have decided, after all, that the Iraq thing wasn’t such a good idea: they spend inordinate time making sure we know how sincere they were at the time, as if their personal sincerity were what mattered. There’s something disgusting about the ur-”confession” that, I cared ever so deeply, but OTHER PEOPLE (the Bush Administration) failed my noble sentiments. They’re like Gregers in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck; in the face of tragedy their chief concern and regret is their own stance in relation to it.
Gregers. If you are right and I am wrong, then life is not worth living.
Relling. Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal.
Gregers[ (looking straight before him).] In that case, I am glad that my destiny is what is.
Relling. May I inquire, — what is your destiny?
Gregers[ (going).] To be the thirteenth at table.
Relling. The devil it is. THE END
Comment by Gary Farber —
April 29, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
”The tic survives even in a lot of the late and partial recantations by decent-lefters who have decided, after all, that the Iraq thing wasn’t such a good idea: they spend inordinate time making sure we know how sincere they were at the time….”
I’d find it helpful if you’d name who you’re referring to, because I can’t help but feel sorta in that category, and I’d like to know if I am or am not. If so, so, but if not, not. Clarity, though, would be good.
Comment by Barry —
April 29, 2006 @ 3:48 pm
As I said earlier, ’contrarianism’.
Comment by Nell —
April 29, 2006 @ 4:45 pm
Gary, Jim will give his own answer, but the shoe fits Norman Geras and George Packer, among others. Geras actually uses the term ’decent left’.
I don’t think you, or lots of other people who supported the invasion to some extent before it happened, are in that category — because you don’t hector or condescend to people who were opposed.
Comment by Andrew Olmsted —
April 29, 2006 @ 5:15 pm
Granting that I’ve hardly made a comprehensive survey of the blogosphere, but this hardly seems restricted to the left. Isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s new shtick that he was wrong about Iraq not because he was wrong, but because the evil Bushies blew it?
Comment by Davebo —
April 29, 2006 @ 9:14 pm
Jim Henley linked by Atrios. What’s next?
Jeff Goldstein enlisting or Hugh Hewitt nominated as a new Supreme Court justice?
Comment by intercourse the penguin —
April 29, 2006 @ 9:14 pm
Jesus H. Christ, could you at least use a decent lube when you’re wanking - the constant squeaking is really annoying.
Comment by dj moonbat —
April 29, 2006 @ 9:18 pm
We’ve forgiven completely those who, like Belle and Matt Y, just said, ”Whoa! I sure got that one wrong! Sorry, y’all!”
There is an intermediate step, epitomized by Josh Marshall: I got it wrong, because I should have known that getting it right didn’t matter to BushCo, so I should’ve opposed this particular war under these particular circumstances.
Then there’s the Beinart wing: I still have it right, but BushCo fucked it up for me.
Comment by Monkeyfister —
April 29, 2006 @ 9:46 pm
Yeah.
Fuck that decency shit. We’ve been speaking the TRUTH and REALITY since LONG before the Iraq War even began. These foolish bastards (on the nominal Left) who are just waking up to the fact that they made a mistake? I welcome their return to reality, but, JEEBUS… Why’d it take so long, you fools?!!!?
Yeah, I (and the rest of us who’ve been here in reality), have been at it SOOOOO long, that we’ve taken to talking like Sailors… Hell, I AM a Sailor (disabled and retired), and damnit, we’ve earned our anger, and our language quirks.
Folks can clutch their pearls and swoon with the vapors all they want– screw them… We’ve been trying to keep folks seeing the forest for the Bushes for waaaay too long to suddenly start playing nice. Fuck that. These Bush Bastards have GOT to go, NOW… by any means.
Welcome aboard, folks. How’s the reality you helped create look now?
Thanks, BTW. I hope that you will start writing assholes like Joe Klein –Immediately. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated.
It’s time to take back the House of Representatives, now…. We certainly HOPE that you can support NON-DLC candidates, so that we can get this Country back where it belongs.
Most sincerely,
Monkeyfister
Comment by el loco —
April 29, 2006 @ 9:47 pm
Fucking queers. Some shit that annoys the hell out of me are these ”pussies” making statements. I never ever advocated for the Iraq war, I did advocate for the Afghan invasion. It’s more, I put my actions where I put spouted my words. As a civilian, I spent 7 months working in a hostile environment in Jalalabad. I go ballistic when I read about these chicken-pussies excusing themselves for not serving cause they got terminal ill wifes, anal emotions, etc. Tell you what culeros, yeah I’m a Latino and proud of it, I’ve gone through hell and back for doing what I did. Did I ever whine? No, I mean no bitches. Grow up or shut up culeros.
Comment by Leonard —
April 29, 2006 @ 10:39 pm
Jim, I’d like you to say more on this topic.
Seems to me, the left’s ideology has been taken over by an intentionalist stance where how much you care is believed to translate trivalially into effective policy; thus more important than whether what you advocate will work. (Actually what I just wrote is a sort of category error; the left seems to believe that intention is what works, not the policy based on intention per se, because if you really care you’ll correct any mistakes, reform, etc as needed.) Since many objectively stupid policies are intuitively appealing, at least if you don’t particularly know much about economics, human nature, etc., the left’s platforms are rotten with socialist nostrums, feel-good meaningless gesturism, and flat-out statements of good intent divorced from any policy at all.
Thus, for example, support for political correctness, rent control, minimum wages, socialist schools, the drug war, and democratizing the world. Only one of these is the particular error of the ”decent left”.
But I’d be curious to hear your specific criticisms of the left’s will to good intentions, and its fallout into our world.
Comment by della Rovere —
April 29, 2006 @ 11:21 pm
And the Democratic Party following the deep wisdom of these morally superior turdballs, wonders why it has trouble winning elections.
Comment by Gary Farber —
April 30, 2006 @ 12:29 am
”Fucking queers. Some shit that annoys the hell out of me are these ”pussies” making statements.”
Indeed, we want to have no part of ”queers” and ”pussies.”
Well done. Admirable. Persuasive.
Comment by Repack Rider —
April 30, 2006 @ 12:33 am
AS much as I appreciate born-again realists Like Josh and Matthew, and as much as I appreciate Josh Marshall’s penance…uh, great recent work, I still do not understand how anyone rationalized the ”down is the new up” bogus argumest that led us into Iraq.
Josh, Matt, WHY DIDN’T IT MATTER TO YOU THAT THEY WERE LYING, SINCE THE LIES WERE AS TRANSPARENT AS A NIKON LENS? IT’S NOT EXACTLY LIKE NO ONE KNEW THEY WERE LYING.
I’m sorry. Was I ranting?
Comment by owlbear1 —
April 30, 2006 @ 1:39 am
Rendon:
”We lost control of the context,” Rendon warned. ”That has to be fixed for the next war.”
Comment by Gary Farber —
April 30, 2006 @ 1:52 am
”Can There Be a Decent Left that SHUTS UP for Minute, Ever?”
And, you know, I’m thinking about posting about the folks who won’t SHUT UP for a minute in demanding apologies about being pro war. As it turns out, I wasn’t, quite, myself. But the self-righteousness of those who were opposed isn’t always admirable. It’s possibly not an entirely an ”appealing thing,” any more than most such self-righteouesness is, and given the moral vulnerability of such effing righteousness.
Some of them, as we know, are outright semifascists, after all, such as that loveable bunch at antiwar.com. And so on.
Comment by Mithras —
April 30, 2006 @ 3:36 am
”But the self-righteousness of those who were opposed isn’t always admirable.”
Yes, it’s almost as bad as advocating a invasion that costs untold thousands of people their lives.
Comment by neo lenin —
April 30, 2006 @ 6:02 am
Leonard is an idiot. A very ”useful idiot”.
Comment by Nell —
April 30, 2006 @ 8:33 am
Gary, I’m not a big fan of self-righteousness myself. And, rather than apologies, what I and I think many other against-the-war-before-the-war people want, is for those who got it wrong then not to be given the benefit of the doubt when arguing policy towards Iran.
We’re not starting from zero, here; the slate is not magically wiped clean for each new policy struggle. On the anniversary of the invasion this past March, I did not see one op-ed by or interview feature of a prewar opponent of the war. Pundits who were completely off-base are given far more space and time to opine about future policy towards Iran and Iraq than those who predicted the consequences.
In particular, Democratic presidential candidates and party leaders, most of whom voted for the war, have their fingers in their ears again about Iran. They’ve decided what the safe line is, and they don’t want to hear any inconvenient facts. Even if it means being played for fools again by Bush and Rove, even if it boxes them in for an attack on Iran after the new Congress is elected.
Comment by Jim Henley —
April 30, 2006 @ 9:32 am
Gary, I wasn’t thinking about you when I wrote this. As to ”semi-fascist” antiwar.com, bvllshit. The site has its problems, but it takes a warped definition of ”fascism” to fit it. Not that there aren’t plenty of warped definitions of fascism out there. But Bill Kauffman has noted that ”It’s always the people who oppose killing foreigners who get called xenophobes,” so I suppose its inevitable that people would start applying the term ”fascist” to people who DON’T want to make war the organizing principle of society.
As to peacenik self-righteousness, what Nell said.
Andrew: Yeah, Sullivan fits all the tropes discussed above, including the sense that it’s all about him.
Leonard: These are the problems I always saw with ”the left” myself. The wakeup call for me over the last four years is discovering that the actual existing American Right, in the form of the Republican Party and its enthusiasts, is prey to them as well. The GWOT as conceived by the Bush Administration is Exhibit A in gestural, emotive politics.
el loco: I’ve had gay friends and colleagues my entire adult life, including some of my favorite people and writers I most admire. So when you start throwing around terms like ”queer,” and not in a fun, ironic way, I take it personal. Please don’t do it again.
Comment by Jim Henley —
April 30, 2006 @ 9:35 am
Should add: I always thought the Republican Party had problems, and I was never a Republican. But I thought its problems were different problems from the Left’s. Instead they mirror it, particularly once its officials enjoy a little power.
Comment by Andrew Olmsted —
April 30, 2006 @ 11:26 am
I’ll wager no small amount that the problems in common are those that are common to all people. Everyone rationalizes their mistakes and clings to bad positions longer than logic can likely justify. And everyone is convinced that they’re right and those on the other side are wrong. And, of course, they’re all generally sure that the other side isn’t just wrong, but are wrong for the worst possible reasons.
Comment by Jim Henley —
April 30, 2006 @ 11:37 am
Andrew, to an extent, yeah. It’s just that the overstory - one that I bought into, btw - was that certain vices were ”left wing” vices and others were characteristic of the Right.
But take ressentiment for example, the habit of so defining yourself in terms of your bete noires that you become almost purely reactive. Nietschze coined the term and defined it as a malady of the Left. Having seen the contemporary Right be taken over with its obsessions with France and Move On and other demons of the day, I finally have to recognize that Nietschze got that one wrong. France, for God’s sake! The pettiness of it boggles the mind.
Comment by radish —
April 30, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
What Andrew said. Everybody is prey. I think if you peruse the history of humanity as it led up to ”western civilization” you see a couple of things that are relevant:
1) that what Leonard calls intentionalism is not only independent of ideology but a natural human tendancy, wired into our brains no less than our tendancy to see faces. it certainly predates anything that we would regard as ”ideology.”
2) that the tension and conflict between intentionalism and consequentialism* is one of the things that the enlightenment supposedly resolved. prior to the enlightenment, intentionalism was taken for granted and the notion of consequentialism was restricted to the trivially physical, and even then it was considered tentative (interventionist deities, witchcraft etc). the whole point of the enlightenment was that it became acceptable to apply consequentialism to non-trivial issues (e.g. politics, engineering, natural history).
That was the transition from the demon-haunted world to the age of progress, folks. When people talk about the GOP trying to roll back the enlightenment they are not kidding, and anybody who thinks that the consequences are going to be any less dire for us than they were for the Soviet Union just because the Soviets were putative lefties and the GOP are putative righties is in for some unpleasant surprises.
* not moral consequentialism but practical consequentialism — the idea that the outcome of an action is independent of the intent with which it was undertaken.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
April 30, 2006 @ 7:20 pm
The stereotypically right-wing invasion would have been brutal, amoral, but above all, profitable and competently managed, I think - at least, if Jim’s internal life of stereotypes is anything like mine. There’d be spreadsheets and projections for tourist revenue in 2010, and they’d come out within 5% of the actual result, no mater what it took to make that happen, and a significant cost reduction in the repaving of major roads in 2003-4 would have been achieved via a new pulverizer that makes better use of dissidents’ homes and belongings. By now the economy would be in the sort of ”boom” that ours is now, with a lot of activity for everyone and a lot of profit for some.
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May 6, 2006 @ 9:03 am
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