September 16, 2006
Tony Judt's Liberal-Bashing Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST A friend today steered me to a piece by Tony Judt in the new London Review of Books revealingly titled “Bush’s Useful Idiots.” Judt is a professor of history at New York University and is also director of NYU’s Erich Maria Remarque Institute. A man with a distinguished and interesting career, originally a historian of the twentieth-century French left, he published some attacks on the French Communist party’s influence on French intellectuals. One of these books was published in 1994, which may strike some readers as a tad late in the day for an attack on the French Communist party, but even as late as 1994 that attack earned Judt some snide comments within the academy, where anti-Communism is not a particularly strong passion. More recently he has become a sharp critic of Israel, and of the war in Iraq. Neither of these positions is particularly freakish in the American university system. What is striking about Judt’s newest piece is his venomous attack on . . . American liberals. The people he attacks—people associated with The New Republic, Dissent, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The New York Times—he generally attacks with savagery; when not savage, his tone is contemptuous (the liberals he dislikes are variously described as portentous, shameless, “useful idiots,” etc.). Their sin is to be insufficiently hostile to the war in Iraq, or to Israel. Judt sees liberals who fail to meet his purity tests as fellow travelers of the most detested members of the right: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.” I don’t think that any of my co-bloggers will be persuaded that there is now no difference between American liberals and American neoconservatives, but this sort of “thinking” does ring a bell. More on that below, but first, some other notes on Judt-ism. Judt is scornful of Paul Berman and Peter Beinart, both of whom have recently written extensively on foreign policy in an age of Islamist terror, for opining on their new subject when “neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East.” Such modesty has not much inhibited Professor Judt, when opining on the same subject, but be that as it may. What is more remarkable is the brisk condescension he displays to some of the liberal anti-Communists he once admired: the Pole Adam Michnik and the Czech Václav Havel, men who opposed Communist tyranny from exposed positions within those tyrannies themselves, rather than from the trenches of the faculty dining room in the dangerous days of, say, 1994. In their persistent and excessive enthusiasm for liberal society and rights, Michnik and Havel, along with French figures like André Glucksmann, have now, apparently, committed a grave error, and at its worst, this error can even lead to initial support for the overthrow of genocidal tyrannies like Saddam’s regime. It turns out that “this trend is an unfortunate byproduct of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. . . . A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’—and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name—can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms.” Binary moral and political choices, alas, sometimes exist—but again, be that as it may. What is interesting about Judt’s sneering, jeering, and liberal-baiting is the memory it evokes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. Then, too, it became the fashion to demonize liberals from the left, and for some elements on the left to take only the sketchiest interest in national security, and avoid commitments to any “abstract universalism of rights” when surveying foreign regimes. This is not generally thought to have worked out too well for the left. The Republicans won seven out of the next ten presidential elections, and the three Democratic victories were won by Democrats who were not at the time seen as particularly liberal. That history may not be much of a worry for Tony Judt, an Englishmen writing in a British journal. It should worry Americans, if they are liberals, or anywhere else on the left.
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