I was eighteen years old and just starting my second year of college on September 11, 2001. After the initial shock of the terrorist attacks passed, a horrifying realization set in: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — the worst possible people in the worst possible situation — were at the helm of the American military machine. The attendant sense of powerlessness was at times overwhelming. It was compounded by the fact that, despite our best efforts, a worldwide movement against war in Iraq was not enough to prevent it.
The years after 2003 were the most disorienting and demoralizing time in my political life, and the war’s twentieth anniversary brought up a welter of emotions for me: anger at its perpetrators, fondness for my old friends with whom I protested, and a profound sense of gratitude at the progress the US left has made since that dark time.
There is one big area, however, where socialists seem stuck in a state of arrested development: our sense of what we would do with American power in the world if we found ourselves in possession of it. We were so far from power for so long that it seemed pointless to give much thought to it. Discussions of international affairs only seemed to invite the most divisive quarrels, precisely because it was the thing we could do the least about. The recent growth of the Left — namely, the fact that a democratic socialist ran two realistic campaigns for president — means that this isn’t a parlor game anymore. Yet we lack a coherent internationalist vision fit for our times and are still trapped within the terms of old debates. This was very clear to me while revisiting the post-9/11 arguments of two prominent voices from that time: Noam Chomsky and Michael Walzer.
At ninety-four, Chomsky is still a prominent voice in public discourse (he’s featured elsewhere in this very Jacobin issue). Walzer was the coeditor of Dissent for many years and, at eighty-eight, continues to be involved with the journal. After 9/11, they epitomized the divergence among left intellectuals on what the country’s response to the attacks should be. Chomsky forcefully argued against any kind of military response. Walzer defended military action against the Taliban and advocated increasing coercive measures against Saddam Hussein’s government, though not a full-scale invasion. Behind these positions lay different conceptions of America’s role in the world. For Chomsky, the United States is a “leading terrorist state,” responsible for unleashing violent chaos around the globe. For Walzer, the United States sometimes acts justly, sometimes unjustly, but is preferable to the alternatives as the world’s leading power.
Chomsky did a seemingly endless stream of interviews in the weeks after the attacks, some of which were collected into a short book called 9-11. In one of his many interviews with David Barsamian, Chomsky makes an assertion that could serve as an epigraph for his entire career as a critic: “If we are even pretending to be serious, we apply the same standards to ourselves, always.”
Chomsky’s criticism of US foreign policy often hits the mark. Thanks in part to him, generations of leftists will never again take anything our government says about its role in the world at face value. Yet Chomsky sometimes bends the stick against official discourse so far that he engages in special pleading of his own. He is quite right that Americans have a particular responsibility for the actions of our own government. But in making that point, he can sometimes create the impression of indifference to the crimes of other governments, particularly those that Washington has deemed enemies. The relentless exposure and critique of double standards in American conduct is valuable, but it is not necessarily a useful guide to practical action. We need an international agenda that goes beyond ruthless criticism of US power to a positive conception of what we might do with it instead.
Chomsky isn’t mentioned by name in Walzer’s 2002 Dissent essay “Can There Be a Decent Left?” But it’s probably safe to assume he had Chomsky in mind when he wrote it. Here Walzer takes umbrage at what he saw as the Left’s bankrupt response to 9/11. The reasons for this, in Walzer’s view, could be found in our fundamental alienation from the country we live in, the “festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate” born of “long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power.” The ensuing guilt from living in the world’s only superpower therefore makes it difficult for the Left to be “decent” — which, in Walzer’s definition, means “intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced” — in its politics.
Parts of Walzer’s observation rang true. During the post–Cold War years, when the Left was at its lowest point and all forms of socialism seemed discredited by the Soviet Union’s collapse, the “movement,” such as it was, attracted only a handful, most of us on the fringes of society. Like many of us, I found my way to the Left through punk-rock subcultures, where the whole point is being as ostentatiously alienated as possible. Our opposition to American power was sometimes bound up with distaste for the people around us who seemed to enjoy the fruits of life in the imperial core without a pang of guilt. Those feelings also found expression in a ready credulity toward nearly any critic of US power, and in a displaced patriotism for whatever one’s favorite foreign government or resistance movement happened to be.
Walzer was right that the Left should act as if it won’t always be powerless, and that many of our worst ideological reflexes were a symptom of political defeat. This stance does not necessarily entail support, however critical, for indefinite American primacy in world affairs. But that is, unfortunately, where Walzer ends up. One line in particular struck me upon revisiting his essay: “Faced with states like, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I don’t think we have to support a global redistribution of political power.” Replace “Saddam Hussein’s Iraq” with “Xi Jinping’s China” and you’ll see just how dangerous and unrealistic this formulation is. Iraq was never a contender for world power. Whatever we think of China’s authoritarian nationalism, trying to prevent it from exercising a meaningful share of world power risks a terribly destructive conflict.
Such an assessment seems to meet Walzer’s definition of political decency — intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced — but I’m not sure he would agree. US leftists absolutely must avoid the mistake of siding with America’s rivals in a new cold war. This would throw away all the progress we’ve made and set us on a path back to the political wilderness. But we can’t take our “own” side for the sake of protecting our “decency” either. We need a project that seeks to overcome the logic of poles, blocs, and camps in the name of a popular and practical cross-border solidarity.
Chomsky and Walzer each got one big thing right in the wake of 9/11. For Chomsky, it’s that Americans have a particular responsibility for the actions of their own government, which, contrary to its self-image, is a major purveyor of violence and chaos. For Walzer, it’s that the Left needs to act like it’s part of the national community and feel some sense of responsibility for its fate.
Neither of these perspectives is sufficient on its own, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. But twenty years later, socialists still seem trapped within this fruitless dichotomy. We do not suffer from a lack of vision when it comes to domestic policy, but we are still fumbling for a similar confidence in world affairs. Considering the rising danger of global conflict, we need to remedy this weakness sooner rather than later.
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