The Fear of the Liberals (Page 4)

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 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 Gellhorn 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.

But the real reason Berman's analogy does not hold up is that where yesterday's progressive insisted that the struggle for freedom and equality was a two-front war--"if freedom and equality are not vouchsafed" for "the peoples of color" at home, A. Philip Randolph wrote in 1942, "the war for democracy will not be won" abroad--Berman and his allies hope to find in Iraq precisely what they cannot find in the United States. Trotskyists of defeat, they export revolution not in order to save it but in order to evade it.

Liberals and leftists panning for political gold in the wreckage of downtown Baghdad--or New York--is not a pretty sight, which has led some critics to chalk up these scenes to illicit motives. But the infatuation with political fear and imperial deliverance from evil cannot be explained away as mere opportunism. It has a long history in modern politics, arising whenever reform comes up against reaction, whenever movements for progress lose their bearings and buoyancy. At such moments of doubt, nothing can seem as real as fear itself, nothing more tempting than to make evil--and the fear it arouses--the basis of all politics.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, I think, who first noticed this tendency. In one of his lesser-known writings on the French Revolution, Tocqueville noted the inevitable deceleration and disillusionment that consume failed movements of reform. After every great defeat comes a great despair. Comrade accuses comrade of treachery or cowardice, soldiers denounce generals for marching them toward folly and everyone is soon seized by what Tocqueville described as the "contempt" that broken revolutionaries "acquire for the very convictions and passions" that moved them in the first place. Forced to abandon the cause for which they gave up so much, failed rebels "turn against themselves and consider their hopes as having been childish--their enthusiasm and, above all, their devotion absurd."

Since the 1960s, liberals and leftists have been beaten at the polls and routed in the streets. Equality no longer propels political argument, and freedom--that other sometime watchword of the left--is today the private property of the right. Unable to reconcile themselves to their loss, liberals and leftists are now seized by the contempt and embarrassment Tocqueville described. Berman cringes over the "androidal" complexion of sixties sectarians, with their "short haircuts" and "flabby muscles," their "flat tones" of Marxism so "oddly remote from American English." Others wince at the left's lack of patriotic fervor and national identification, its hostility to all things American.

Lacking confidence in the traditional truths of God and king and the revolutionary truths of reason and rights, Tocqueville hoped that his contemporaries might find succor in the idea of fear, which could activate and ground a commitment to liberal ideals. "Fear," he wrote, "must be put to work on behalf of liberty." And so he dedicated himself to a career of liberal pursuits whose only success would be a scheme of mild improvement in Algeria--and leadership of the counterrevolution in 1848.

So has it been with today's liberals: However much they may argue for domestic reform, it is liberalism's conquering thrusts abroad--and assaults on the left at home--that earn their warmest applause. Again, other factors explain this turn to empire and fear, including the appalling violations of human rights throughout the world and the left's failure to respond adequately to those violations. But given this vision's periodic appearance at moments like ours--one could also cite the case of cold war intellectuals offering their own politics of fear after the setbacks of the late 1940s--it would seem that the appeal of fear has as much to do with defeat and disillusionment as it does with the stated concerns of its advocates.

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