The resilience of the adversary culture

Paul Hollander

THE TERRORIST attacks of September 11, whatever else they mean and have wrought, provide a new vantage point for examining the recent evolution and current condition of the American adversary culture. This term, coined by Lionel Trilling in his 1965 book Beyond Culture, refers to a discernible and durable reservoir of discontent, to a disposition on the part of those Americans who habitually find the United States--or at least its government--at fault in virtually every conflict in which it is engaged. It is a culture whose boundaries, both demographic and intellectual, defy precise definition, but the concept has nonetheless been indispensable for identifying a chronic domestic estrangement and the specific beliefs associated with it.

As to the demographical boundary, most of those within the adversary culture may be loosely described as intellectuals, or quasi-intellectuals, and their followers; they are found in the greatest concentrations on major college campuses and nearby communities. Living near a campus generally inclines one to overestimate the adversary culture's importance and influence, whereas distance from such a setting tempts one to write it off as inconsequential. A visit to a campus by someone not inured to its atmosphere can illustrate the psychic distance between the two. About five years ago, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked former President George H.W. Bush what he had learned at a Hofstra University conference about his presidency; Bush answered: "I learned that there are some real wacko professors scattered out around the country." (1)

As to the adversary culture's intellectual boundaries, it is generically far Left, its central animating views being unswervingly anti-capitalist. For most of its 20th-century existence, these views coincided with formal Marxist and less well-defined Marxoid perspectives. But radical pacifists and anarchists were counted among that culture, and with the collapse of Soviet communism and the accompanying nadir of socialism, the mix of attitudes within the adversary culture has changed and grown. Environmental, anti-globalization and "multicultural" forms of radicalism have been moving into spaces formerly occupied by conventional left-wing parties and movements. Environmentalism fits the adversary culture well, as we will see, because of its essentially anti-modernist bias. Anti-globalization combines environmentalism and anti-corporatism on a global scale to replace what used to be discrete anti-capitalism on national scales. Multiculturalism fills the need to bind together the several constituencies of the a dversary culture, for no longer is that culture dominated by white Protestants and Jews as it had been before the first half of the 20th century.

So, too, has the adversary culture adopted post-modernism and deconstructionism as the intellectual anchors for its politics. These radically relativistic affections have been combined, curiously enough, with denunciations of American society and Western culture just as heart-felt as those of simpler days gone by. As before, these condemnations rest on the non-relativistic assumption that there are absolute standards available with which to condemn that society and culture.

Adherents of the adversary culture can be found in a wide variety of settings, organizations and interest groups. They include postmoderist academics, radical feminists, Afrocentrist blacks, radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, pacifists, Maoists, Trotskyites, critical legal theorists and others. They often have different political agendas but share certain core convictions and key assumptons: all are reflexively and intensely hostile critics of the United States or American society and, increasingly, of all Western cultural traditions and values as well. The most important among their beliefs is that American society is deeply flawed and uniquely repellent--unjust, corrupt, destructive, soulless, inhumane, inauthentic and incapable of satisfying basic, self-evident human needs. The American social system has failed to live up to its original historical promise and, they insist, is inherently and ineradicably sexist, racist and imperialist.

It should also be noted that, for the most part, the adversary culture took little notice of the collapse of Soviet communism, the end of the Cold War and the retreat of state-socialist systems around the world. Its increasing preoccupation with matters domestic reflects the dearth of foreign alternatives to the alleged evils of American society and capitalism. Of late, therefore, as suggested above, critiques of globalization on the basis of its domestic environmental and economic effects have become a substitute for more explicit attacks on capitalism.

Nevertheless, the supporters of the adversary culture still tend to sympathize with virtually every political force that opposes the United States. These include the former Soviet Union, China under Mao, Castro's Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, supporters of the uprising in Chiapas, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia under Milosevic, the PLO and various other anti-Israeli Arab groups, and, most recently, even the Taliban. There have been occasional disagreements among these critics regarding U.S. policy toward particular adversaries: a few of them supported the Gulf War and more of them the intervention in Kosovo. Most recently, some recognized that the Taliban's hatred of the United States and all it stands for does not necessarily make it an admirable ally or friend. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, was seriously disheartened that authentic enemies of the United States were less than enlightened as regards the rights of women: "What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist is that the strongest response to c orporate globalization and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology." (2)

BUT DOES any of this still matter? Many observers claimed in the weeks after September 11 that the most remarkable thing about the contemporary adversary culture is its silence. Hendrik Hertzberg, for example, found that only "traditional pacifists . . and a tiny handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles" object "to the aims and methods of the antiterrorism campaign. . . .Conservative commentators have had a frustrating time of it rounding up the usual blame-America-first suspects, because so few of those suspects are out there blaming America first." (3) Michael Kelly proclaimed "the renaissance of liberalism" and argued that "what had been since the late 1960s the dominant voice of left-liberal politics" has become "marginalized" post-September 11. (4) Even more pointedly, George Packer argued in the New York Times Magazine:

September 11 made it safe for liberals to be patriots. Among the things destroyed with the twin towers was the notion held by certain Americans, ever since Vietnam, that to be stirred by national identity, carry a flag and feel grateful toward someone in uniform ought to be a source of embarrassment. (5)

Loud dissent and telegenic demonstrations against the beginning of U.S. military action in Afghanistan on October 7 were noticeably muted, it is true--more so even than the modest protest accompanying the Gulf War in 1991. But the adversary culture had not disappeared, and as America's conduct of the war on terrorism gradually replaced the images of the September 11 attacks themselves, it made a quick comeback. The influence of the adversary culture has been most obvious on the campuses, where anti-U.S. sentiments and statements are conventional wisdom, and least apparent in towns and suburbs, where its presence is all but absent. Generally speaking, the adversary culture, entrenched in its academic strongholds and other cultural institutions, still wields considerable influence even as it has become increasingly isolated and weakened by recent defections. In addition to the appeal of some of its messages of the moment, some of the adversary culture's worldview has been absorbed over time into what we casual ly call the mainstream through the media and, in a different way, through the American commercial culture. (6) (It is, for example, commonplace for observers outside the adversary culture to refer to the American international vocation as "imperial." (7)) That is why some observers had trouble locating the adversary culture after September 11; they were looking in the wrong places.

They were looking, in particular, at the overtly political. While the adversary culture still overlaps with the Left (old, new, and left-over), a purely political definition does not do it justice. Rather, the attitudes and beliefs in question also involve what is peripheral to the political: a sense of identity, cultural norms, matters of taste. Russell Jacoby's comment about alienation captures what is distinctive about the adversarial disposition: "Alienation once referred to social relations and labor, signifying an objective condition. Later it turned into an irritation or annoyance. 'I am alienated' someone will announce, meaning, 'I am unhappy or uncomfortable.'" (8)

Some Americans, it seems, have always been alienated; we should not lose sight of the fact that many of the earliest American forebears came here from the Old World precisely because they were alienated there. A keen receptivity to the real or perceived injustices of American society thus has a long tradition; high expectations and the value placed on nonconformity have deep roots in American social and cultural history. Strong beliefs in the perfectibility of human beings and institutions have for centuries been an essential attribute of the American view of the world, as has an indefatigable optimism regarding the solubility of all social, political and personal problems. The social critical temper of the adversary culture has always fed on the high expectations that American social and historical conditions have generated and nurtured, and such expectations remain in place today.

The current adversary culture bears the imprint of the last high watermark of American social discontent: the "Sixties." More than a result of the Vietnam War, however, as is usually assumed, the contemporary phase of the adversary culture owes its strength to a period of great changes after World War II. In this most modern of all societies, the pains and problems of modernity--especially its corrosive effect on sense of purpose, community and identity--are inseparable from the discontents that the adversary culture embodies and projects. Since we may be sure that the next half century will bear as much disconcerting change as the last half, it is a good bet that, for better or for worse, the American adversary culture will persist and thrive. Surely, the actions of a few dozen terrorists are not enough to stymie it.

It was therefore inevitable that early proclamations of the decline of the adversary culture would prove short-lived. Rather than undergoing major change, the left-liberal side of the American political community underwent a split after September 11. The stalwarts of the adversary culture--Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal and others--blamed the United States for the attack against it, and some even cheered it. All their familiar ideas were on display, as well: Vietnam War metaphors, therapeutic analyses designed to turn murderers into victims overwhelmed by the "root causes" of their deeds, appeals to oppose America's inherent racism and militarism, and whatever other pet obsessions happened to be at hand. But there were also new and important voices dissenting from the conventional adversarial wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz put it: "September 11 served as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical leftists of today. What it did was raise questions about what one of them called the inveterately 'negativ e faith in America the ugly.'" (9)

Dissidents from the adversarial predisposition have included Michael Waizer who, for example, emphatically rejects the idea that poverty and inequality explain terrorism. He favors a "cultural-religious-political explanation" that emphasizes the obsession with an Enemy embraced by people who are "ideologically or theologically degraded." (10) He has even signed up, conditionally, for a military campaign against Iraq. Christopher Hitchens has criticized those on the Left who were reluctant to acknowledge that "the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face." He reminds fellow leftists that what Islamic militants "abominate about 'the West' is not what Western liberals don't like." (11) Ellen Willis, a columnist for the Village Voice and a journalism professor at NYU, has argued that "the lessons of Vietnam" do not apply to Afghanistan, and favored committing ground troops in the war. (12) Richard Falk has argued that a U.S. military response to 9/11 could be justified and himself sought to pr ovide a legal-moral framework for "a just response"--although he did feel compelled to observe that "a frenzy in the aftermath of the attacks [is] giving us reason to fear the response almost as much as the initial, traumatizing provocation." (13)

As a result of all this, Michael Kazin has predicted the disappearance of the prospect for a "unified left." (14) Echoing Hertzberg, Kelly and Packer, Andrew Sullivan reached the logical but surprising conclusion that the Right was also split by September 11:

...perhaps the biggest conservative victim of the war has been cultural pessimism. Not long ago leading paleoconservatives were denouncing America as a country . . . 'slouching toward Gomorrah.' Moral decline was almost irreparable; civil responsibility was a distant memory ... the evils of feminism, homosexuality and Hollywood were corroding the country's ability to believe in itself and defend its shores.... The response of the American people to the events of September 11 surely disproved these scolds... . Surely what post-9/11 America has shown is that those who viewed this country as socially decadent, morally confused, culturally bankrupt, and in need of drastic spiritual revival were baldly, incontrovertibly wrong. (15)

Some conservatives, it seems, are not persuaded by Sullivan's argument. The split on the Right persists--between those who justify America's response to terror based on national interest, and those who do so on the basis of a metaphysics of American exceptionalism. Those of the latter persuasion have retained their cultural pessimism, and still see the left-liberal establishment as a potent negative element in American social life.

It is hard to know what proportion of left-liberals have allowed newfound patriotic impulses to overcome their adversarial outlook in the aftermath of the September attacks. More pertinent, perhaps, it is hard to say how long the restraint of the dissenters will last. In any event, most responses to September 11 from the adversarial Left suggest the persistence of sentiments and attitudes traceable to the late 1960s.

Of Course They Hate Us

TWO MAJOR, closely linked arguments have been pursued among those on the adversarial Left that converge in assigning ultimate responsibility to the United States for the attacks. The first proposition is that if Arab terrorists harbored profound hatred for this country, this hatred had to be well founded; in other words, the United States must be hateful if it is hated. This proposition has provided a welcome opportunity to enumerate America's historic misdeeds, which is what members of the adversary culture seem most to enjoy. Many of those who maintain this position nonetheless believe that not all hatreds are justified. They firmly believe in the reality of irrational hate crimes committed against their favorite victim groups. They apportion guilt and advocate severe punishment for such wrongdoers.

The second proposition focuses on the alleged "root causes" of this hatred. The root causes of terrorism and the hatred of the United States (which shade into one another), adversary culture members believe, should be understood rather than condemned. Emphasis on root causes leads to a deterministic, therapeutic view of the terrorists who are seen as "products spawned" by compelling social-political and economic conditions beyond their control or full comprehension. They and their beliefs are held to be products of authentic grievances: poverty, inequality, backwardness and social injustice. (It is not easy to explain how bin Laden, his associates, and well-educated middle class suicide pilots fit into this argument, but never mind. (16) The "root cause" approach also proposes that hostility toward the United States is inspired by American support for corrupt and repressive political systems such as those in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia--as if Islamic terrorists opposed to these governments were anxious to replace them with political democracies, or as if these regimes would not be more or less as they are without U.S. support.

Responses of the adversary culture to September 11 illuminate well the persistence of the convictions of its best-known figures. Their moral indignation and anger focused almost entirely on the actions and policies of the United States, and was largely devoid of corresponding sentiments regarding its avowed and murderous enemies. Gore Vidal thus observed that "the USA is the most corrupt political system on earth"; bin Laden was merely "responding to U.S. foreign policy." (17) Elsewhere Vidal suggested that "You [the United States] keep attacking people for such a long time, one of them is going to get you back." (18) A particularly curious form of this argument was proposed by a speaker at a Green Party conference: "The World Trade Center Disaster is a globalized version of the Columbine High School Disaster. V/hen you bully people long enough they are going to strike back." (19) According to Professor Thomas Laqueur of Berkeley, California, "on the scale of evil the New York bombings are sadly not so extraordinary and our government has been responsible for many that are probably worse." Frederic Jameson argued that "the Americans created bin Laden.... This is therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal." (20) Susan Sontag was far more enraged by the White House, our "robotic President" and public figures who stood united behind him, than she was by the terrorists:

... this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.... The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems ... unworthy of a mature democracy. (21)

Norman Mailer, always ready to outdo his peers, told a Dutch audience:

The WTC was not just an architectural monstrosity but also dreadful for people who didn't work there, for it said to all those people: 'If you can't work up here, boy, you're out of it....' Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. (22)

There was an unmistakable discrepancy between the volume of compassion extended to the wholly unintended victims of U.S. air strikes against the Taliban and the terrorists and the expressions of compassion for the wholly intended victims of the suicide pilots. American militarism thus managed, once again, to become a major theme of the adversary culture. To the very end of the bombing campaign there was an adamant refusal to accept the possibility that the U.S. military could accomplish its purpose without wreaking counterproductive bloodshed; rather, it was viewed as another display of mindless and malicious destructiveness. Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most durable and representative figure of the adversary culture, proposed that the attacks of September 11 were eclipsed by the American bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and numerous other American atrocities. (23) He asserted that "the United States had killed thousands of innocent civilians in Somalia, Sudan and Nicaragua--actions far more ' devastating' than the September 11 attacks--and was now trying to 'destroy the hunger-stricken country' of Afghanistan." (24) Edward Said, similarly prominent, made clear (in the Egyptian daily Al-Abram), that he sees the United States as a genocidal power with a "history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust." (25) Michael Mandel, a law professor in Toronto, believes that, "The bombing of Afghanistan is the legal and moral equivalent of what was done to the Americans on September 11." (26) Eric Foner of Columbia University could not decide "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." (27) Michael Mare, a professor of "peace studies and world security studies" at Hampshire College (Amherst, MA) became "despondent" because "the United States was ratcheting up a strong military response to September 11." He professed to be consumed by fear "that U.S. military reprisal s would set off a renewed cycle of terrorist attacks and violence." (28)

Anti-militarism has long been an attitude that adversary culture Marxists and religious pacifists could share. So it remains today. Thus the General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee said: "[O]ur history teaches us that bloodshed leads only to more bloodshed. . . . We call upon our president and Congress to stop the bombing.... Our grief is not a cry for retaliation. Terrorism must be stopped at its root cause." (29) This too was the considered judgment of Vivian Gornick (author of The Romance of American Communism): "Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not retribution." (30) If force is not the answer, what is? Love and joy, apparently. Alice Walker "firmly believe[d] that the only punishment that works is love." (31) Richard Gere, the actor, similarly advised: "If you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick ... the medicine is love and compassion." (32) Oliver Stone, however, detected no illness; he called the September 11 attacks "a revolt." He equated the Palestinians dancing on the streets at the news of the attacks with those who publicly rejoiced at the news of the French and Russian Revolutions. (33)

Another oft-repeated theme of the adversary culture soon reappeared, as well: that of America being untrue to its own best values. Thus Russell Means, the American Indian activist who lead the 1973 uprising at Wounded Knee, said:

It's what I used to see when I was behind the so-called Iron Curtain touring Eastern Europe. It's what I used to see in Nicaragua and Colombia . . . [namely] the ongoing deprivation of individual liberties and violations of the U.S. Constitution by the Federal Government... the government lost all constitutional responsibility and has become an outlaw. (34)

Terry Eagleton was equally convinced that "They [the Bush Administration] will use the crisis as an excuse to trample on our civil liberties", (35) and the cover of Gore Vidal's new book, The End of Liberty--Towards a New Totalitarianism, shows the Statue of Liberty gagged with a U.S. flag.

Alexander Cockburn averred, yet again, as though the Cold War had never ended, that the war was "about the defense of the American Empire." (36) Two feminists found no difference between the practices of a religious police state and the influence of fashions on portions of the population:

Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm.... During the 20th century, American culture has dictated [sic] a nearly complete uncovering of the female form.... The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness of the ways in which women's bodies are controlled by a repressive regime in a far away land, but what about the constraints on women's bodies here at home... ? The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political spectrum. (37)

Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was led to conclude that "there is an escalation of the corporate takeover of the United States. The ground and soil are ripe for a revolt by the American people." (38)

The best example of an almost purely visceral response, in this case to the flag and what it stands for, came from Katha Pollit of The Nation, who, for one, did not join the newly unembarrassed patriotic liberals. She revealed that "my daughter who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." (39) A physics professor at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) shared these sentiments: "To many ordinary people...around the globe the U.S. has done terrible things....If I think about the flag, I have to think about it from the point of view of those people." (40) At Amherst College war protesters (allegedly students from nearby Hampshire College) burned the flag while chanting "this flag doesn't represent me." (41)

It was not only the celebrities of the adversary culture who found the events of September 11 an appropriate occasion for reaffirming their animosity toward American society. One would not know it from the early writings of Washington-based pundits, but there were demonstrations on nearly 200 campuses and in several major cities as a "nationwide network of more than 150 student antiwar groups...[emerged] holding campus vigils, protests, and teach-ins." (42) The correspondence columns of local newspapers in and around college campuses were flooded with letters expressing sentiments similar to those of the better known critics of the United States quoted above. These critics have a following.

Thus, a professor of journalism at Amherst regarded the attacks as the "predictable result of American policies ... [which] ignored the suffering of Palestinians.... How can we fail to see that our policy has created zealots and suicide bombers." (43) He, too, was convinced that the adversaries of the United States are helpless pawns of social and historical forces; only the United States and its amoral leaders have alternatives to choose from and can therefore be held morally culpable. (44) A professor in the sociology department at the same university proposed that we must "find a way to reduce those alienating actions whereby we create our own enemies." (45) At a Haverford College meeting on September 14, an emeritus professor suggested that "the United States was the most violent nation on earth and ended by saying, 'We are complicit."' At a teach-in at the University of North Carolina, "one lecturer told the students that if he were President he would first apologize to the widows and orphans, the tortur ed and impoverished and all the other millions of other victims of American imperialism." University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen told his students and peers that the attack "was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government had committed during my lifetime." (46) Barbara Foley, professor of English at Rutgers University, warned her students: "Be aware that whatever its proximate cause, the ultimate cause [of the attacks] is the fascism of u.s. [sic] foreign policy over the past many decades." (47)

Members of the Middle East Studies Association, an academic professional group, also reached the conclusion that the United States bore primary responsibility for the terrorist attacks (which, by the way, they refuse to call by that term). (48) At the 2001 annual meeting of the Association one panelist said, "We have not shown that our actions differentiate us from those who attacked us." An elderly professor in the audience declared, "'We ought to be reminded of our responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and understand that we are not so good', he received a round of applause." The moderator fully endorsed his view. (49)

The Attractions of Obscurity

THE MEMBERS of the adversary culture, famous and not so famous, have something else in common, too, for the most part: an irresistible attraction to obscure theorizing and arcane jargon. Two explanations stand forth as to why many social critics prefer esoteric turns of phrase and opaque abstractions to concreteness and specificity. One is the parochial elitism of numerous academic intellectuals who write mainly for one another and whose inaccessible language and terminology "signifies" their vanguard status. The second explanation may be the more important, however.

The discontent that animates many critics of American (and Western) society and that has become a major source of their sense of identity and self-esteem, is murky and shapeless. Its origins may not be clear even to those consumed by it; such diffuse and contradictory grievances, impulses, unfathomable sentiments and personal resentments are inherently difficult to express in precise and accessible language. Form follows function: lack of clarity in style reflects amorphous motives and beliefs; Jacoby calls them "postcoherent thinkers." (50) A statement of the "Transnational Feminist Practices Against War" illustrates what he has in mind:

As feminist theorists of transnational and postmodern cultural formations ... we offer the following response to the events of September 11 and its aftermath: First and foremost, we need to analyze the thoroughly gendered and racialized effects of nationalism and to identify what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are being enacted. ... We see that instead of a necessary historical material and geopolitical analysis of 9-11, the emerging nationalist discourses consist of highly sentimentalized narratives that ... re-inscribe compulsory heterosexuality and the rigidly dichotomized gender roles. ... A number of icons constitute the ideal types in the drama of nationalist domesticity. (51)

It is among the attractions of obscurity that what people cannot fully comprehend is more difficult to criticize and refute. But it is also the case that some people are impressed by what they cannot fully understand, what promises some great, lurking, not fully penetrable revelation. A paragraph from the newly popular volume Empire, co-authored by an American literary scholar and an imprisoned Italian terrorist, provides further illustration:

In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate. The process consists, in fact, of the moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the extreme. In the colonial imagination the colonized is not simply an other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. (52)

Doubtless there are connections and affinities between the attractions of obscurity, profound political misjudgments and commonsense defying beliefs. As Orwell observed, only intellectuals are capable of believing certain kinds of nonsense. Could, for example, anybody without the benefits of higher education and not living in an academic setting believe (with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors of Empire) that the 1992 Los Angeles riots were "the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the 20th century"? (53)

Then and Now

THE ADVERSARIAL generation of the 1960s holds on to a conception of America as malignant and inauthentic, and to a sense of identity as the fearless fighter for truth and social justice. This is the generation that had the opportunity and pleasure to glorify its youth by linking it to the "good causes" of the 1960s. Perhaps therein lies the key to its durability, and in the critical mass of those who came of age together when youthful idealism converged with the rise of idealistic social movements and causes of the time.

But age and mortality are taking their toll on the 1960s adversary culture; William Kunstler passed away a few years ago as did I.F. Stone and Eqbal Abmad. Other influential representatives are well over sixty, often seventy, including the Berrigan brothers, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, William Sloan Coffin, Angela Davis, David Dellinger, E.L. Doctorow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Stanley Fish, Tom Hayden, Frederic Jameson, Jonathan Kozol, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Michael Parenti, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Paul Sweezy and Howard Zinn. Even Bill Ayers, the cheerfully unrepentant Weatherman-bomber, is approaching sixty. The beliefs of this aging subculture, however, are clearly being passed on to segments of the younger generation, no doubt in part because American society since the end of the Cold War has continued to produce high expectations (which cannot be met) and the corresponding disappointments that often turn into social criticism. Some young people are consumed by the same bl end of incoherent discontent and diffuse idealism that characterized the protestors of the 1960s. They, too, seem to be in the grip of the conviction that "something is terribly wrong" with this society--a conviction that precedes the identification of any specific wrongs. When subsequently identified, the specific flaws become proof of the prior, underlying belief in pervasive corruption and thoroughgoing moral decay.

This smaller generation of "peace activists" today also resembles earlier ones in that they appear to be not so much opposed to all wars but only those waged by the United States. Given their conviction that American society is a profoundly unjust system, any war its government may wage has to be inexcusable. However, should there appear on the horizon some new "national liberation movement" or militant cause that uses a congenial and idealistic rhetoric, this putative devotion to peace would vanish and be replaced by support for the new, liberating and authentic revolutionary violence (Chiapas? Shining Path? Maoists in Nepal?).

A recent sympathetic portrait of such young people in the New York Times Educational Life supplement demonstrates how present attitudes replicate those prevalent in the 1960s. The "typical student activist" of our times portrayed in the article is one of the leaders of "Students for Social Equality." He "is fueled by a nagging anger over the fact that there are haves and have-nots, oppressors and the oppressed." (His father is a general contractor on Long Island, and both parents are Republican.) His favorite words are "love", unity "solidarity" and "justice", along with "beautiful"--as in "unity is beautiful." In his conversation with the reporter "he searches for the roots of his unrest." This activist and others like him, one radicalized by the writings of Howard Zinn, radiate "an ardor not seen for several decades." The main character in the article was smitten by an anti-globalism demonstration: "It was amazing how many people were out acting on their beliefs and coming together. It was beautiful." A pro test at the military training center at Fort Benning, too, "was a really beautiful protest, really spiritual." Union Square in New York city became a "magical place of unity" at an anti-Afghanistan war demonstration. Among the activists, the reporter observes, "there is a lot of raging against the machine." (54)

Many readers, at least of a certain age, will recall that "raging against the machine" was the main theme of Mario Savio's fiery oration during the Free Speech demonstrations at Berkeley in 1964. Then and now "the machine" stood for impersonality, lack of community and feeling, "profits above people" and the fear of being crushed by forces over which one has no control. Then and now, too, for some people the personal ultimately dwarfs and displaces the truly political. American society will continue to generate a mixture of high expectations, unease and discontent that is the hallmark of its nature and its true modernity. These sentiments have found new expression in the adversarial responses to 9/11; they have by no means disappeared.

Notes

(1.) Dowd, "Happy in Free Fall", New York Times, May 7, 1997.

(2.) Ehrenreich, Village Voice, October 9, 2001, P. 54.

(3.) Hertzberg, The New Yorker, November 5, 2001, p. 37.

(4.) Kelly, "A Renaissance of Liberalism", Atlantic Monthly, January 2002, p. 19.

(5.) Packer, "Recapturing the Flag", New York Times Magazine, September 30, 2001, p. 15.

(6.) Roger Kimball has called this the "mainstreaming of radicalism." See his The Long March (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 26. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1999).

(7.) See, for example, James Chace, "Imperial America & the Common Interest", World Policy Journal (Spring 2002).

(8.) Jacoby, The End of Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 121.

(9.) Podhoretz, "Return of the 'Jackal Bins'", Commentary, April 2002, p. 29.

(10.) Walzer, "Five Questions About Terrorism", Dissent (Winter 2002), p. 6.

(11.) Hitchens, "Against Rationalization", The Nation, October 8, 2001, p. 8. See also his "Minority Report", The Nation, October 22, 2001.

(12.) Letter, New York Times, November 1,2001.

(13.) Falk, "A Just Response", The Nation, October 8, 2001, p. 15.

(14.) Kazin, "After the Attacks Which Side Is the Left On?", New York Times (Week in Review), October 7,2001, p.4.

(15.) Sullivan, "Right Turn: What Conservatives Should Learn from 9/11", The New Republic, December 17, 2001, p. 26.

(16.) Daniel Pipes refutes the argument that poverty causes terrorism in "God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?", The National Interest (Winter 2001/02).

(17.) The New Statesman (London), October 15, 2001, pp. 18-9.

(18.) "Author Vidal Blames US for Conflict", Boston Globe, November 24, 2001.

(19.) Progressive Review, October 29, 2001.

(20.) Laqueur and Jameson quoted in Tony Judt, "America and the War", New York Review of Books, November 15, 2001, p.4.

(21.) Susan Sontag, "The Talk of the Town", The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, p. 32.

(22.) Mailer quoted in The New Republic, November 26, 2001, p. 8.

(23.) Quoted in David Horowitz, The Ayatollah of American Hate (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2001), p. 7.

(24.) Quoted in The New Republic, December 10, 2001, p.9.

(25.) Quoted in The Weekly Standard, October 8, 2001, p. 35.

(26.) Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 9, 2001.

(27.) Foner in the London Review of Books, October 4, 2001.

(28.) Klare, Hampshire Life (Northampton, MA), September 28, 2001, pp. 8,10.

(29.) Letter, New York Times, October 9, 2001.

(30.) The New Republic, October 15, 2001, p. 10.

(31.) Walker, Village Voice, October 9, 2001, p. 54.

(32.) Quoted in The New Republic, October 29, 2001, p. 10.

(33.) "Voices of Reason? Not in Hollywood", Boston Globe, October 23, 2001.

(34.) Associated Press Symposium, "How have we been changed?" Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA), October 13-14, 2001.

(35.) Quoted in Judt, "America and the War", p. 4.

(36.) "The Left and the Just Wae", The Nation, November 22, 2001, p. 10.

(37.) Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacquelyn Jackson in The Boston Globe, November 23, 2001.

(38.) Quoted in The New Republic, November 19, 2001, p. 10.

(39.) Pollit, "Put Out No Flags", The Nation, October 8,2001, p. 7.

(40.) Quoted in "How Words Spoken Sept. 10 Came Back to Haunt the Speaker", Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.

(41.) "Pro-America rally upset by flag burners", Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA), October 19, 2001.

(42.) Lisa Featherstone, "A Peaceful Justice?", The Nation, October 22, 2001, p. 18.

(43.) Bill Israel, "A policy of neglect and cowardice", Mass. Daily Collegian (Amherst, MA), September 12, 2001.

(44.) Such selective determinism has been with us for a long time. See Paul Hollander, "Sociology, Selective Determinism and the Rise of Expectations", American Sociologist (November 1973).

(45.) Jay Demerath, September 15, 2001, departmental e-mail.

(46.) Quoted in "The Best and the Brightest", Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2001.

(47.) Foley, New Criterion (October 2001), p. 2.

(48.) The same is true of spokesmen for the major human rights organizations who argue that "terrorism" lacks clear definition. See Commentary, January 2002, p. 28.

(49.) Quoted in The New Republic, December 3, 2001, pp. 15, 17.

(50.) Jacoby, The End of Utopia, p. 141. See also Jay Tolson, "Wittgenstein's Curse", The Wilson Quarterly (Fall 2001).

(51.) E-mail posted by Augustin Lao-Montes of the department of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 29, 2001.

(52.) Quoted in The New Criterion, October 2001, p.20.

(53.) Ibid., p. 20.

(54.) Abby Ellin, "The Making of a Student Activist: How a Long Island boy learned to start worrying and hate the bombs", New York Times (Educational Life supplement), November 11, 2001, pp. 26-8. See also Andrew Hsiao, "Make Noise Not War: A Peace Movement Grows in New York and Beyond", Village Voice, October 9, 2001.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity;
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and
sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth ....

-- Robinson Jeffers, "Shining, Perishing Republic"

Paul Hollander's books include Political Pilgrims, Anti-Americanism and Political Will and Personal Belief. His most recent work is Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist (Transaction, 2002).

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