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THE FEAR OF THE LIBERALS
BY COREY ROBIN
It is the fourth anniversary of September 11, and
Americans are getting restless about the war in Iraq. Repub
licans are challenging the President, activists and bloggers are
pressing the Democrats and liberal hawks are reconsidering their
support for the war Everyone, it seems, is asking questions.
Two questions, however, have not been asked, perhaps
because they might actually help us move beyond where we are
and where we've been. First, how is it that few liberals and no
leftists in 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the most
progressive President in American history, would or could airlift
democracy to Vietnam, while many liberals and not a few leftists
in 2003 believed the most reactionary President since William
McKinley could and would export democracy to Iraq?
Second, why did certain liberals who opposed the war in
Iraq refuse to march against it? The reason they gave was that
left-wing groups like ANSWER, which helped organize the anti
war rallies, failed to denounce Saddam's regime. Yet many of
those who could not abide an alliance with ANSWER endorsed
the war in Afghanistan — even though it was waged by a govern
ment that recently invaded three Caribbean countries, funded
dirty wars in Latin America and backed the government of
Guatemala, the only regime in the Western Hemisphere
condemned by a UN-sponsored truth commission for commit
ting acts of genocide Politics, of course, often entails an
unhappy choice of associations. But if the deeds of the U S.
government need not stop liberals from supporting the war
in Afghanistan, why should the words — words, mind you,
not deeds — of leftists deprive the antiwar movement of
these very same liberals’ support
Both questions register a fundamental shift among
liberals, and on the left, since the 1960s: from skepticism of
to faith in U S. power, and from faith in to skepticism of popular
movements. During the Vietnam era, liberals and leftists believed
not only in social justice but also in mass protest Whether the
cause was democracy at home or liberation abroad, men and
women afflicted by oppression had to organize themselves for
freedom. Yes, some of yesterday’s activists were blind to
coercion within these movements, and others joined elite cadres
bombing their way to liberation. Still, the animating faith of the
1960s was in the democratic capacities of ordinary men and
women, making it difficult for liberals and leftists to believe in
conquering armies from abroad or shock troops from on high.
Many liberals, and some leftists, no longer hold these
views. Their faith is guided not by the light of justice but by the
darkness of evil: by the tyranny of dictators, the genocide of
ethnic cleansers and the terrorism of Islamist radicals. Despite
their differences — some of these liberals and leftists support
the war in Iraq, others do not; some are partial to popular move
ments, particularly those opposing anti-American governments,
while others favor constitutional regimes, particularly those
supporting the United States — theirs is a liberalism, as the
late Harvard scholar Judith Shklar put it in a pioneering essay
in 1989, that seeks to ward off the "summum malum" (worst evil)
rather than install a "summum bonum" (highest good). Reversing
Augustine’s dictum that there is no such things as evil — evil
being only the absence of good — today’s liberal believes there
is only evil and progress is measured by the distance we put
between ourselves and that evil.
Hostility to popular protest and indulgence of American
power follow naturally from this position Mass movements,
liberals claim, are blind to evil or apologize for it. Sometimes they
actively court it. In their reckless pursuit of utopia, they march
men and women to the gulag or into shooting galleries of terror
ism and civil war. Only a politics of restraint can shield us from
the temptations of violence.While such a philosophy would seem
to militate against George W. Bush’s empire, many liberals have
concluded that evil in the world is so titanic that only U S. power
can deliver us from it.
Straddling minimalism at home and maximalism abroad,
many of today’s liberals are inspired by fear. This “liberalism of
fear,” as Shklar called it, is not to be confused with the terror
Americans felt after 9/11 or with Democratic timidity in the face
of Republican success No, today’s liberal believes in fear as an
idea — that it inflicts such suffering on men and women that we
can assess governments by the degree to which they minimize
it. Fear is the gold standard, the universal measure, of liberal
morality: Whatever rouses fear is bad, whatever diminishes it
is less bad. In the words of Michael Ignatieff, liberalism “rests
less on hope than on fear, less on optimism about the human
capacity for good than on dread of the human capacity for evil,
less on a vision of man as maker of his history than of man the
wolf toward his own kind."
Though leftists in the 1960s certainly spoke of fear, they
viewed it not as a foundation but as an obstacle, a hindrance in
the struggle for freedom and equality Whites resisted civil rights,
James Baldwin observed, because they were possessed by a
“sleeping terror” of ceding status and privilege to blacks. Blacks,
in turn, were like “the Jews in Egypt, who really wished to get to
the Promised Land but were afraid of the rigors of the journey."
The goal was to eliminate or overcome fear, to take one step
closer to the Promised Land This required not only courage
but also an ideologically grounded hope for progress Without
an answering vision of social justice, no one would make the
journey.
GA YLE McKENNON (‘GA THERING FOR THE MARCH’)
Many contemporary liberals have given up that hope,
turning what a previous generation saw as an impediment into
a path. Fear is no longer an obstacle but a crutch, a negative
truth from which liberalism derives its confidence and strength.
“What liberalism requires,” according to Shklar, “is the possibility
of making the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its politic
al practices and prescriptions.” Liberal values like the rule of law
and democracy obtain their worth not from reason or rights —
which many liberals no longer believe in as foundational princi
ples — but from the cruelty and fear illiberal states and move
ments routinely inflict upon helpless men and women.
Today’s liberals are attracted to fear for many reasons,
including revulsion at the crimes of the last century and the
miserable state of the post-colonial world. But one of the main
reasons is their belief that fear possesses an easy intelligibility.
Fear requires no deep philosophy, no leap of reason, to establish
its evil: Everyone knows what it is and that it is bad. “Because
the fear of systematic cruelty is so universal,” Shklar wrote,”
moral claims based on its prohibition have an immediate appeal
and can gain recognition without much argument.” Once liberals
realize that they are “more afraid of being cruel” — and of others
being cruel — “than of anything else,” Richard Rorty has argued,
they need not worry about the grounds of their beliefs.
How did a philosophy so averse to utopia and violence
get hitched to the American empire? I don’t just mean here the
war in Iraq, about which liberals disagreed, but the larger project
of using the American military to spread democracy and human
rights. How did liberals, who have spent the better part of three
decades attacking left-wing adventurism, wind up supporting the
greatest adventure of our time?
The answer is that liberals need fear: to justify their
principles, to warn us of what happens when liberalism is
abandoned. And so they are driven abroad to confront the
tyrannies that make life miserable elsewhere in order to derive
confidence in their own, admittedly imperfect but infinitely better
regimes. A souped-up version of Churchill’s adage that demo
cracy is the worst possible government except for all the others,
the liberalism of fear sends writers and fighters to foreign lands
in search of themselves and their beleaguered faith. In the words
of Ignatieff:
“When policy [in the Balkans] was driven by moral
motives, it was often driven by narcissism. We intervened not
only to save others, bu, to save ourselves, or rather an image
of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies. We wanted
to show that West the 'meant' something. This imaginary West,
this narcissistic image of ourselves, we believed was incarnated
in the myth of a multiethnic, multiconfessional Bosnia.”
The moral exhilaration of which Ignatieff speaks is
closely linked to the revival of an activism discredited since
the '60s — an activism, ironically, liberals helped to defeat but
now miss and mourn. The military incursions in Bosnia, Ignatieff
notes,were a “theater of displacement, in which political energies
that might otherwise have been expended at defending multi
ethnic society at home were directed instead at defending mythic
multiculturalism far away. Bosnia became the latest bel espoir of
a generation that had tried ecology, socialism and civil rights only
to watch all these lose their romantic momentum.”
Bosnia was certainly not the first time that liberals looked
to a benighted regime abroad in order to compensate for the
stalled pace of domestic advance. In 1792 France's Girondins
sensed that their revolution was in peril. Beholding long-suffering
peoples to the east, they decided to export progress and
promptly declared war on... Austria. And it was Robespierre, so
often denounced as a utopian scourge, who issued this prescient
warning to his distracted comrades: “No one loves armed
missionaries."
Nor was Bosnia the last time. Since 9/11 liberal hawks
— and their fellow fliers on the left — have turned the rest of
the world into a theater of social experiment and political reform,
endorsing foreign expeditions in the name of an enlightenment
they can no longer pursue at home. They have opted for a
detoured radicalism, which, like all detours, paves a convenient
path to an obstructed destination: yesterday Afghanistan, today
Iraq, tomorrow ourselves. Though the peregrinations of Christo
pher Hitchens are by now familiar, his confession after 9/11
reveals how easily internationalism can slide into narcissism, the
most provincial spirit of all:
On that day I shared the general register of feeling, from
disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not
quite disclose itself. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was
exhilaration... here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation
between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side,
the ethics o f the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the
cosmopolitan.... On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and
vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for
a very long time. I will never become tired o f waging it, because
it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
More recently, Paul Berman has called the war in Iraq
this generation’s Spanish Civil War. Berman’s own biography,
of course, makes mincemeat of the analogy. Spain’s civil war
demanded, in Stephen Spender's words, “a very personal
involvement." But unlike George Orwell, André Malraux, Alvah
Bessie or any of the other writers who fought for the Spanish
Republic, Berman has yet to pick up a gun to defend the Iraqi
government. Martha Gelhorn claimed that Spain’s foreign
fighters “knew why they came, and what they thought about
living and dying, both. But it is nothing you can ask or talk about.”
Yet all Berman can do is talk. . . and talk and talk. Meanwhile, the
only international volunteers who seem to believe that Iraq is
worth fighting and dying for are joining the other side.
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