Yadda Yadda Yadda
(This is another long post that is not funny. Sorry.)
Atrios I think takes Comrade Max the wrong way. Atrios takes Max personally. I was tempted to as well but then had second thoughts. Atrios asks exactly “which Internets [Max was] reading?” That’s easy: the non-Dirty Fucking Hippie “Leftwing” Internets; the “Left” that was stridently partisan but morally and ideologically tepid and mealy-mouthed; that was either equivocal on Iraq during the run-up to the war and the early days of its prosecution, or was mildy against it but insisted that its reasoning was the only acceptable sort and therefore was just as or more likely to attack parts of the anti-war Left which didn’t conform to said model as it was likely to attack the actual looters and war criminals who engineered the whole operation. Think of Jonathan Chait, one of the most egregious Democrats in punditry, who “hates George Bush” but loves or loved the Iraq War.
If I’m right about Max’s point, it’s an especially nice touch that he got his criticisms published where he did, TPM, which is, or was, a nexus of such thought. I don’t remember if Josh Marshall was for the war before he was against it, but I know that by his own admission he isn’t much of a Leftist. Yglesias, longtime TPM contributor, was for the war before he was against it, and is also not much of a Leftist.
Still, Max isn’t being quite fair:
* The netroots have no political economy, except to join the blather about the unbalanced budget and the national debt. It did a fine job opposing Bush’s Social Security privatization, but will it support Democratic efforts to fix a program that is not broke? By contrast, the direct action forces have been mobilizing against the emergent neo-liberal/free trade economic dogma for a decade.
* The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Harrington, Saul Alinsky. What does the netroots read? Don’t Think of an Elephant?
Some of us in the netroots have railed against the neo-liberal fucktards for years now and with the new Congress made of Shulers and Webbs there is hope that Democrats are closer to forcing the neo-liberals into abandoning their stupidity and choose between a mild form of economic populism that actually gives a shit about the working class and wingnuttery. I have no doubt that some will choose wingnuttery, but most won’t.
And as far as reading Marx goes, come on. Max knows that socialist-studies has been for generations Talmudic — you didn’t read the primary texts so much as you read the secondary material, some of which Max lists. I readily admit that most of my understanding of Marxism is not even that good; it comes not from reading bits and pieces of Marx but from blowing through Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station in a few winter days many years ago. Yes, I know that isn’t enough, but I’m trying. Anyway, among Max’s list of radicals is one name that is very familiar to the netroots, someone who is read a lot, who is still very popular; and the attitude about whose writings and politics neatly and not coincidentally illustrates the divide between those who thought about the Iraq War in terms like ‘yes’, or ‘yes if’, or ‘I’m agnostic’ and those who thought of it in terms best summarized thus: ‘fuck no’.
The name is Chomsky; Chomsky’s politics are so scary to the tepid “Left” that it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that they will endorse anything’s he’s against and will deplore anything he’s for.
I don’t wanna argue about if Chomsky was right or not on Kosovo. I don’t know if he was and for purposes of this post, I don’t care. If he was, he’s batting 1.000 on the subject of US interventionism/imperialism; if he wasn’t, then it’s his only out, which makes for a better average than the former Ford Administration hacks and sundry war criminals whom the supposedly Leftwing war-supporters or war-agnostics chose to bet on or equivocate about instead.
But first things first. The tepid Leftist is the sort that accepts polemic from the Right — he wants to engage it, which sadly means in practice that more often than not he wants to compromise with it. Because he thinks of himself as occupying a position as far Left as one may decently be, however, he doesn’t want to engage true Leftist polemic, which is ‘too far’ or in the ‘dustbin of history’ or something. In public discourse, this dynamic means that the goalposts are moved Rightward, to the delight of the Right which seizes such opportunities to re-define its ‘acceptable opposite’. Thus Chomsky is labeled:
an intellectual totalitarian. What I object to is that Chomsky tears up all the trail markers that might lead to conclusions different from his, and makes it next to impossible for people unversed in the issues to even understand what the live and much-debated points of contention are.
Reams and reams of Great Screaming Wingnut Journalism affirming the American Empire, Molly Bloom-like, ‘yes yes yes!!!’. You’d think that people not of the Reichwing persuasion would welcome its opposite in the form of Chomsky’s ‘no no no!!’. But — umm, no. They don’t. As in so many other things, they want a ‘Third Way’, a synthesis, but in categorically disregarding the Chomskyite, Dirty Fucking Hippie position, their synthesis is inevitably skewed Rightward.
My point in all of this blathering is that Max is right ..about certain people. Because of the obviously gigantic fuck-up that is Iraq, some people are now sounding, in their disgust with Wingnuts, like the Dirty Fucking Hippies who are seriously Leftwing in their ideology, who were right from the get-go on Iraq, whose politics are the legitimate antithesis of Wingnuttery. But they aren’t Dirty Fucking Hippies, and one needs to keep an eye on them when the next crisis comes, when the Next Wingnut Crusade foments, when they will again be tempted to be for something (or agnostic about it, or only against it out of partisanship) before they are against it ideologically.
[Note: I pick on Brad DeLong a lot in this post. I don’t mean it personally. Also, it must be said that there’s an important irony in my using him so often as an example: He was against the Iraq War all along. Still, it’s his political temprament that is shared by so many supposed “Leftists” which made them such wingnut-enabling fools. DeLong was right; DeLongism is spectacularly wrong.]
The left is the left, of course, of course,
And no one can speak for the left of course
That is, of course, unless the choice is the famous neo-lib.
Go right to the source and ask the lib
He’ll give you the answer that’s centrally glib.
He’s always steer the compromised course.
Talk to a neo-lib.
People yakkity yak a streak and waste your time of day
But neo-lib will only speak to trade his strengths away.
The left is the left, of course, of course,
And a neo-lib talks ’til his voice is hoarse.
You never heard of a stalking horse?
Well listen to this. I am Mister Left.
Norbiz is gonna get medieval on your ass, Bubba.
Norbiz is gonna get medieval on your ass, Bubba.
Fuck, man, I’m small potatoes if all I’ve got is re-worked re-run bits.
I don’t know how many times I have been dismissed as “unserious” because I brought up a point by Chomsky, or Herman, or Roy, or Zinn. Yet those folks accuracy and predictive power is uncanny compared to the likes of most of the big “lefty” bloggers.
Except Billmon.
or Digby
Yes, crack a serious book, unless it’s New Deal Thought or — heaven forfend! — a screechy screed by Bella Abzug.
The more the libs run from the left, the stronger the hold of the Christian Right on the Republican party will become.
Be nice to see that trend start to reverse itself.
I’m not much of a Leftist myself by Retardo’s standards* – in fact Retardo will probably line me up against a wall and shoot me after the Revolution – but I’ve ALWAYS thought the Iraq war was just a god-awful idea. Bad for us and bad for them.
That’s why I started reading dfh’s like Atrios in the first place, because at the time the dfh’s were the only people I could find who weren’t waving pompoms for the invasion. So more power to the dfh’s.
*I’m a total pinko by South Carolina standards, though
I wouldn’t be so defensive, Retardo… Max’s piece is pretty great overall, and he’s taking on the right people. I think he makes one key point:
“The netroots criticized the Iraqi effort a) for not gaining the support of the U.N.; b) for not armoring the troops sufficiently; c) for not proving the existence of WMDs; d) for not proving connections to Al Queda; e) for not using enough troops.”
Yes, they accepted all the assumptions behind the U.S. intervention; in fact, their “anti-war” arguments reinforced those assumptions, for example by encouraging the U.S. to be tougher on Afghanistan. Case in point: when the U.S. bombed a bunch of civilians in Somalia the other day (including a 4-year-old), a writer at this very blog described it as “good news” — because the U.S. military *claimed* they were aiming at Al-Qaeda.
Don’t get me wrong — I like Sadly, No! a lot. I discovered you guys a few weeks ago and I keep reading you because you’re, well, really fucking funny. But it’s hard to swallow the casual, unchallenged chauvinism that infects most of the liberals in this country, who defend the right of their government to slam bombs into whole towns just because there’s a suspected terrorist nearby. And frankly, even the best liberal blogs I’ve read don’t do anything to challenge this; instead they follow the wingnuts down the rabbit-hole of minutiae (Jamil Hussein, etc.) which keeps the debate within the boundaries of conventional wisdom.
For what it’s worth, I think the most comprehensive and intelligent demolition of the “pro-war left” is done in this recent article:
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=275&issue=113
It’s from a British point of view. The “non-Dirty Fucking Hippie” left in the UK, including some of the country’s most prominent liberal columnists, got together in a pub and produced the Euston Manifesto, summing up their pro-intervention, anti-Muslim worldview. Richard Seymour dismantles their politics from top to bottom.
Incidentally, Seymour also maintains the blog Lenin’s Tomb — http://leninology.blogspot.com. It’s unabashedly far left, for those who are put off by that sort of thing, but it takes on a staggering range of topics and I consider it essential reading.
Sorry, that’s http://leninology.blogspot.com/ — the period screws up its clickability
I’m not much of a Leftist myself by Retardo’s standards*
What are those anyway? What is the Retardtopia Montalbania?
Anyone who bought the pre-“war” bullshit is just a fool who is easily led. There were even a few righties who didn’t buy it.
Regarding Chomsky: What the fuck is wrong with people whose knees break their noses at the mention of his name? (a la Sully)
I think there’s something to be said for finding common ground with people who aren’t necessarily “leftists” for political purposes, as well as keeping principals clear.
Good example: When Lou Dobbs started speaking out against overseas outsourcing of companies, his _goals_ were similar to those of progressives fighting neo-liberal trade policies. However, his underlying principals were nativist, as opposed to class-based; Americans first, rather than labour first. The clue-by-four didn’t happen until the Immigration debate, culminating in the use of maps of “Azetlan” provided by the CCC, white-collar cousins to the KKK.
To change the status quo, we need majority opinion on our side. It requires a firm grip on principals to ensure that the change is to something better.
R. Bubba–
Ex-cellent. This, in my day (68, etc.), was the indictment of the lib: that he stood for “everyone gets to have their opinion” as opposed to the relative goodness or badness of those opinions.
Por-gee..Tire-biter (he’s a student like you)–
Agree.
Retardo–
God help me, I actually read vols. 1 and 2 of Capital. It’s more satisfying than you may think, and Karl M. has a decent sense of humor. FYI.
Unfortunately, reality hasa well-known Chomskyan bias.
I think anyone with any regard for social democracy, social justice, goodness, truth, beauty, a stable currency, and/or a well-balanced and nuttritious diet, should give thanks to Gaia and Her Astral Consort for making George W. Bush, against all odds, President of these United States. The unpredictable human element often confounds the most serious dialectical analysis, and the fact that this shitforbrains sub-simian fratboy was raised by his handlers to supreme executive authority over the most powerfuls economic and military machine in the history of this arm of the Galactic Spiral has done more to reveal to John Q. Internetaddict that you really, really can’t trust the mother raping bunch of clumsy crooks , wimpy schoolboys, and psychotic jesus freaks which corporate capitalism in its most decadent form is forced by the Unseen Hand to select for public leadership.
When they are not crazy they are stupid. When they are not mediocre and bland they are sociopathically vicious. When they are not self-congratulatory and exuding the cheapest, fakest, most smarmy version of half-witted bible-thumping psychotic fundamentalism, they have their hand either in you pocket or down your pants.
Of course, we’ll be lucky to survive to see another Martin Luther King Day, but Gaia helps those as helps themselves, and we should be happy that as the stunned and drugged audience to this freak show slowly shakes off its stupor, it has found any kind of voice at all.
Regarding Chomsky: What the fuck is wrong with people whose knees break their noses at the mention of his name?
Among other things, he challenges people’s nationalism and illusions, and is unafraid to call a villain a villain, even when that villain is us/US. It’s not a great way to become popular with several types of people, especially anyone who buys into the myth of American exceptionalism.
Is reality’s well known Chomsky bias any stronger than her well known Dwight Eisenhower bias?
think anyone with any regard for social democracy, social justice, goodness, truth, beauty, a stable currency, and/or a well-balanced and nuttritious diet, should give thanks to Gaia and Her Astral Consort for making George W. Bush, against all odds, President of these United States. […] the fact that this shitforbrains sub-simian fratboy was raised […] to supreme executive authority over the most powerfuls economic and military machine […] has done more to reveal to John Q. Internetaddict that you really, really can’t trust the mother raping bunch of clumsy crooks , wimpy schoolboys, and psychotic jesus freaks which corporate capitalism in its most decadent form is forced by the Unseen Hand to select for public leadership.
Holy wishful thinking, Batman!
Holy wishful, poorly stated, self-congratulatory thinking with a side of obfuscatory doublespeak!
It’s been a week or so since I totally derailed a thread, so I’ll give it a go for Chomsky’s batting average.
A foreign-relations professor of mine worked in NATO during the Kosovo operations. One class he stated point-blank that the purpose of the operation was to give NATO something to do, lest it be disbanded and the U.S. military forced to leave “Old Europe” after a 50 year tennancy. I’ll take that account—from the mouth of the guy that fed the horse, at least—over some principle’s speeches or onanistic NYT op-ed anyday.
I will lead the struggle against DeLongism! Please send me to the reeducation camp!
Whoa, what internets were you and Max surfing in ’02-03? Because nobody I was reading was “accepting the assumptions” behind the invasion. We were attacking with every means at our disposal, which meant the invasion itself and the way they went about it.
This jumped out at me as well:
If this isn’t elitism I don’t know what is. Maybe I don’t. But since when do you have to read a bunch of specialist literature to be a progressive? Some of us have lives. Personally I feel life is to short to waste puzzling over fucking Marx, and Chomsky’s language hurts to listen to. My study time is occupied by people like Elvin Jones and Thelonious Monk. Fuck this guy if it’s not good enough for him.
Before I knew about blogs, I relied on listservs like Henwood’s lbo-talk (I wasn’t anyone notable). The right edge of discussion there was pretty much … DeLong and Max. So proporama to Max for honoring the left that was. Such as it was. At the other end Louis Proyect and Yoshie Furuhashi are still out there blogging I believe. I just swim with the tide as I get older and I have to say I’m more impressed with the blogs’ record of angering the powers that be more than anything since Seattle (here in the US hellmouth that is). I tend to think that the policy impetus is all at the left edge. So there are some empty-headed neoliberals blogging, but they don’t tend to get the policy podium. I don’t think.
I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t know much about Chomsky’s politics, but I am familiar with his linguistics. Chomsky is a brilliant man. I’ve met him and heard him talk, and I have tremendous respect for him. However, I’m led to believe by people who are familiar with both aspects of his life that this is a valid observation:
If Chomsky is attacking conventional wisdom or well-established theory, he is almost always right. If Chomsky is defending his own theories, he is almost always wrong. (But in a subtle and convincing way.)
Funny story: I have a wingnut nephew from Missourah. I was taking him to visit my wife in her lab at MIT, and we were standing in the elevator. An older gentleman got in, nodded pleasantly, and said, “Good morning.” He then hummed a jaunty little tune until he got off a few floors up.
When I told my nephew that he’d just met Noam Chomsky, he just about shit himself.
dylan, I’ve got no idea what you were reading online. Offline, however, the discussion in magazines like The Nation included voices decidedly against the planned invasion of Afghanistan. This was posted at their web site on 20 September 2001, just over a week after 9/11, by columnist Katha Pollitt:
There are plenty of other such examples. Fahrenheit 9/11, for instance, which claimed that an Afghanistan invasion — as opposed to an attempt to kill or capture Osama bin Laden — was motivated by an interest in oil. I hear a lot of people thought that movie was pretty good. Of course, “sensible” liberals have to distance themselves from the “Michael Moore”s of the world. He’s fat!
If you want to win an argument explain your ideas in their terms. This absolves you of the hippie baggage.
If you explain that their self interest is harmed by shooting a lot of people indiscriminantly you win, as long as that is your first argument and you don’t trip their (hippie) BS detector by making emotional or ethical pleas first.
Example: Torture.
#1, it doesn’t work. (link data)
#2, it makes our problems worse. (5 cousins swearing vengance for this outrage makes things worse)
#3, you want moral equivalance, how about doing the same things done in the inquisition (note: may not work on catholics), as well as done by the terrists.
After these arguments you can start appealing to their humanity, and/or the absurd argument.
Response to the ticking time bomb: If a terrorist said he would tell you where the bomb was if you raped your own daughter, would you do it?
Then you can get to the kindergarten lesson of: Hurting people is wrong.
let’s personalize this. what were each of you doing in 2001-2002? were you arguing to friends and family that nationalist and imperialist intervention were wrong, even if they were OURS? that shit was hard. not to toot my own horn to hard, but i was doing so, even on my little read blog.
at the same time, i was never willing to accept for a second that we should allow religious fundamentalism a foothold on this earth. and if it meant killing some innocent people to do so, i was always ok with that. divorcing the actual act of destroying fundie govts from an imperialist tendency on the part of the destroyer–well, that’s hard work.
so here you have two countervailing forces–anti imperialism (and a recognition that most bad things in the world have been done by the US over the past 50 years) mitigated by reality (we have the guns, and who else can actually get rid of religious scum like the taliban or the ayatollahs) times history (a tedious list could follow, mossadegh arbenz and so on).
it’s pretty muddled. but there is an analysis here that would result in a better world than the fascist fuck up we’ve allowed to be created in our names, all of them, each of us individually with varying levels of culpability.
Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun?
I was too, Robert, on various message boards.
But as for your second countervailing force, forget it. Religious scum (wingnuts) cannot be trusted to correctly or decently battle religious scum (ayatollah asshollahs). This is the Hitchens fallacy, the assumption that Bush’s war represents and serves the interests of the Enlightenment against religious Dark Ages fanaticism. Actually, we of the Enlightenment are caught in the middle of a civil war amongst World Wingnuttery. To sign up for Bush’s crusade meant to bin Ladenize the United States by strenghtening the forces of wingnuttery within it. No thanks. Bin Laden could never destroy us, nor our institutions. Bush could, and has largely succeeded. I can’t and couldn’t do anything about bin Laden considering the make-up of the American regime. But I can and could, as an American, hopefully obstruct, via protest and dissent, the American Taliban. That was my duty as a citizen and I didn’t really care if it meant I coincidentally agreed with ANSWER or Free Mumia people or Pat Buchanan.
My thoughts on 9/11:
1.Numb/stunned
2.Oh my god, Holy shit those poor people
3. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before, but then again I don’t think it will happen often from now on, either. Somebody fucked-up. Bad. To let this happen.
4. What would a cynical and devious bastard like Richard Nixon do to the country were he President and a grusome opportunity arise like this?
5. What Bush will do will be as bad or worse than that.
I didn’t have a blog then, but everything I feared has pretty much come true. Now I bitch about people — non-wingnuts, who should have known better — who were fools for Bush, not because I have some sort of vanity about being a Nostradomas, but because I’m goddamn sure I wasn’t alone in being right about all this, and I’d like to see a little meritocracy in the punditosphere. I want every non-wingnut cobag who signed up with Bush’s crusade to eat it.
It’s not enough to Never Take Seriously Again idiots like Richard Cohen or Joe Klein or Lieberman who continue to sign up for more Freidman Units. I want above all else for the masses to Never Take Seriously Again *anyone* who signed up for one Friedman Unit.
Sawicky’s point is very, very important. When the future President Clinton or Edwards or Obama wants to kill a bunch of foreigners on shaky premises and against Republican opposition (think December of 1998) I fear that anyone on the left who protests will be labeled “Wanker of the Day” by the “netroots”.
Well blogged, RM! I think this point about 9/11 you made in comments is particularly important:
I remember how quickly in the fall of 2001 it became conventional wisdom that we’d be having 9/11s on a fairly regularly basis (of course the anthrax business didn’t help…thank goodness they caught whoever did that 😉 ). Moreover, a lot of wingnuts I knew seemed positively pleased by this “fact.” It was as if the U.S. had suddenly become an Israeli settlement on the West Bank…and this was a good thing, because, shorn of our pre-9/11 illusions, we could become hardened, righteous crusaders against teh Evil!!1!!
Scary times…
I also agree with Max that the so-called left of the blogosphere’s almost messianic vision of the Democratic Party does not serve it well.
Can you provide a high-profile example of this? Because I don’t see it. I do see a strong desire to get Democrats elected despite a good amount of disgust with them, because the Republicans are you know, Satan incarnate.
Sure tb…
Just look at most of the largest “left” sites: dKos, Firedoglake, MyDD etc.
But don’t take my word for it. Read Chris Bowers’ and Matt Stoller’s 2005 study “The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere,” one of the conclusions of which was “Progressive blogs are far more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers are to identify with the Republican Party.”
Bowers and Stoller, perhaps unsurprisingly, see this as an advantage for progressive blogs. I disagree.
I don’t see the problem and I don’t see how this is ‘messianic’.
[…] Ooo-ooo-ooo My point in all of this blathering is that Max is right ..about certain people. Because of the obviously gigantic fuck-up that is Iraq, some people are now sounding, in their disgust with Wingnuts, like the Dirty Fucking Hippies who are seriously Leftwing in their ideology, who were right from the get-go on Iraq, whose politics are the legitimate antithesis of Wingnuttery. But they aren’t Dirty Fucking Hippies, and one needs to keep an eye on them when the next crisis comes, when the Next Wingnut Crusade foments, when they will again be tempted to be for something (or agnostic about it, or only against it out of partisanship) before they are against it ideologically. […]
I recall Chomsky visiting Wellington, New Zealand. He gave one lecture in the Opera House.
The Opera House was packed. Full. A week before the lecture. They set up a link to the Paramount movie theatre. It was packed. Full. Two days before the lecture. They had loudspeakers outside both the venues relaying his speech. The police complained about the traffic congestion from the crowds.
He may not be honoured in his own country, but to huge numbers of people around the world, Chomsky’s views explain what the US does clearly and transparently. I suspect that far more people see the US as Chomsky describes it than via any other commentator.
I suspect that far more people see the US as Chomsky describes it than via any other commentator.
And we think “The US can’t be completely hopeless; it’s got Chomsky.”
I honestly would say my only major points of disagreement with Chomsky (as to US actions, thus avoiding Cambodia all together) would be Kosovo (and possibly Afghanistan, which regardless of the semi-clusterfuck it has become, was a justifiable, and ultimately just action, though we may have installed a government that is at best on slightly better than the Taliban, the removal of the Taliban, due to its symbiotic relationship with AQ is undeniably a justiifable response to the attack on 9/11).
Oh God, Chomsky the defender of the fascist murderer Milosevic. Chomsky’s rule of decision is simple- the US is the root of all evil. Not just that anything the US does is evil- anything that anyone else does is either good, or is done at the behest of the US. There are many people around the world who find it flattering to be told how good they are, hence the packed opera houses. Chomsky is a man who puts his considerable intelligence at the service of an idiotic ideology.
who’s the root of all evil:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2502945257750566379&q=demolition+7
[…] and wingnuts alike, the former for allegedly ‘hating America’ and engaging in ‘intellectual totalitarianism‘, the latter (especially by ex-Trotskyist types like C. Hitchens, M. Decter, and N. […]