The
American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never
attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes
a way to realize the promise of America. As for the American Communist
Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s
to be pro-American, and its chairman, Earl Browder, coined the slogan
“Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This pretense came to an end
during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of
its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming a
nascent fascist state.
The remnants of the ’60s New Left identified with America’s new
enemies, especially North Vietnam, Communist Cuba, the PLO, and, in the
’80s, Sandinista Nicaragua. After 9/11, many of its adherents took the
position that the United States had the terror attack coming to it,
since the perpetrators had taken 3000 lives in protest against
America’s imperial ambitions and control.
The
left-wing of the Democratic Party is not happy. Baker interviewed
Phyllis Bennis, who works at the far-left Institute for Policy Studies
(not, as Baker describes it,“a research organization for peace
activists”). The NYT does not let its readers know that Bennis herself
is a person who believes that Israel’s very creation was illegitimate,
and who supports “the right of return” and has previously criticized
moves taken by Israel against Hamas. As for the IPS, as one can find at
Discover the Networks, during the Cold War it was a major group
disseminating Soviet disinformation and working to push the United
States to the far left.
This led Michael Walzer, the social-democratic intellectual, to pen an
article called “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Walzer courageously took
on many of those on his side of the spectrum, hitting them for
accepting the “blame America first” doctrine to explain foreign policy
defeats; for not criticizing any peoples or nations in the Third World;
for believing in what he called “rag-tag Marxism”; for failing to
oppose dangerous jihadists and Islamist states; and for refusing to
blame anyone else for the world’s wrong except the United States.
I wonder what Walzer would write today if he examined his article anew.
If one looks around at the Left’s response to Hamas’ actions in Gaza
and its attacks on Israel, and its view of Islamist fascism in
countries like Iran, Syria and among the ISIS forces seeking to take
over Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the Left has one function — to
support the enemies of democracy. Operating in the United States,
Britain and France, the Western Left takes the opportunity to speak
freely in the democracies in which they live, to openly support and
express their solidarity with democracy’s most fervent enemies.
Some would question why this Left, perhaps numerically small in terms
of the entire population of the Western nations, is so important.
Aren’t they really marginal? The answer is that in the United States,
as well as in Great Britain, the positions of the far left have now
become mainstream, and influence those in political power. So it is
with the Democratic Party.
On these questions, the answer of the left-liberal wing of the
Democratic Party, and the even further far left-wing base, makes the
Democrats as an entire group unable to take any steps that endanger
their electoral chances, unless the party’s leaders continually kowtow
to the leftist base. They fear that if they took tough interventionist
positions that would offend them, it might lead the Left to opt out of
voting in the coming November elections, as well as not rallying behind
whomever the Democrats pick as their candidate for the 2016
presidential race. There are, of course, some exceptions. Senator Bob
Menendez of New Jersey is one Democrat who has continually called for
tough measures against Iran, much to the consternation of others in his
own party.
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PJ
MEDIA CONT]
