Recently (April 17th) the editors of The Wall Street Journal sought to explain the tendency of Americans on the left to expect the worst when the United States military is deployed. They find this pessimism to be rooted in political partisanship and the legacy of Vietnam.
It is fertilized by the tendency of a “self-insulated elite convinced of its own virtue” to “operate in an echo chamber.” Inside this echo chamber, one finds what Jeane Kirkpatrick once called the “blame America first” mentality.
What is this pessimism the WSJ is referring to? It is the way the media and academic elites predicted, says the WSJ, “a long war with horrific casualties and global damage” when the United States struck against Saddam Hussein this spring: a Vietnam-like “quagmire.” “Then at the sight of Iraqis cheering U.S. troops in Baghdad, they quickly moved on to fret about ‘looting’ and ‘anarchy.’ Now that those are subsiding, our pessimists have rushed to worry that Iraqi democracy and reconstruction will be all but impossible.”
We are all troubled by the drip-drip-drip of American casualties in recent weeks. But, as bad as it is, it is nothing like the scenario that was predicted by the liberal gurus, says the WSJ: “a nationalist uprising against U.S. troops, a la Vietnam; the ‘Arab street’ enraged against us; tens of thousands of civilian casualties…Iraq’s oil fields aflame, lifting oil prices and sending the economy into recession; North Korea…using the war as an excuse to attack; the Turks intervening in northern Iraq and at war with the Kurds; and all of course leading to world-wide mayhem.” Actually, this pessimism is nothing new. The left has been calling the United States “ugly Americans” since the Vietnam days. They fretted over the invasion of Grenada and Panama, our opposition to the Sandiniastas in Nicaragua. They blame us for the ongoing tension between the United States and Fidel Castro.
But here’s the rub. The left is not always pessimistic. With only a few exceptions, the liberals backed the Clinton administration’s military intervention in Haiti, Somalia and the Balkans. They urged Clinton to intervene to stop the bloodshed in Rwanda. In recent weeks, they have taken the lead in calling for a deployment of troops to Liberia and to other hot spots in Africa, even if it requires an in increase in the size of the U.S. military budget to carry it off.
Is this the political partisanship the WSJ has in mind? In part. But only in part. The liberals back the Bush administration’s efforts in Liberia, even though they vehemently oppose what we are doing in Iraq. Why the difference? The WSJ notes that the left is favorably disposed to the application of U.S. power when it is not “tainted by national interest” and when its is applied in concert with the “international community,” specifically under U.N. auspices. “But they simply don’t trust that, left to their own devices, the American government and military will act in a moral way that leaves the world better off.”
Precisely. But more needs to be said on this issue. I would argue that there is a need to explore why the left is not opposed to the use of American military power in “humanitarian” efforts; why they are less troubled by American casualties when they are incurred as part of a U.N. peace-keeping mission than in defense of our national interests. The answer is not that they left is motivated by a concern for the oppressed. The Iraqis were as oppressed by Saddam Hussein as the Liberians by Charles Taylor, yet they oppose our intervention in Iraq. How does the left draw these lines?
I submit that there is a need to consider a notion often criticized as “right-wing paranoia”: the impact of one-world theory on the worldview of our media and academic elites. The left does not want the U.S. to use its power in defense of American national interests. They don’t want us to act “unilaterally.” They don’t want the U.S. to use its status as the world’s “only superpower” to secure an advantage for the American nation-state. Indeed, they want to see an end to the nation-state. United States military actions that help bring about that goal, that are carried out in the interests of the “world community,” are good. But when we act in our self-interest, we become an arrogant superpower, in their eyes.
An overstatement? Check the record. The educational guru John Dewey argued that history “discloses a fairly uninterrupted movement toward widening the area of units of political organization.” He urged his readers to overcome their national loyalties to further the cause: “Those who are devoted to peace must recognize the scope of the issue and be willing to bear the cost, largely moral and intangible, of sacrificing their nationalistic sentiments to broader conceptions of human welfare. The criterion of the greater good of all must be extended beyond the confines of family and clan.”
In case anyone missed his point, Dewey stated flatly that the “State is a myth.” We must not “cast stones at any warring nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are willing . . . to submit affairs which limited imagination and sense have led to consider strictly national to an international legislature.”
These quotations come from Dewey’s Ethics, written in 1908, and his German Philosophy and Politics, written in 1915. In the 1960s, Kennedy advisor Walt Whitman Rostow wrote that it is “an American interest to see an end of nationhood as it has been historically defined,” and that it “is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations – including the United States – the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests.” In The Great Betrayal, Pat Buchanan quotes Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s Deputy Secretary of State: “Within the among next 100 years…nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” Talbott wrote that in 1992 in Time magazine.
Why were liberals eager to send American troops into battle to enforce United Nations’ objectives in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia, when they once took to the streets to protest the American war effort in Vietnam? Why are they calling for intervention all over Africa? Why do liberals favor an immigration policy that will make Americans of European descent a minority in this country by the middle years of the next century? Why do liberal academics seek a “multicultural” curriculum that will lessen the patriotic sentiments of America’s youth by casting aspersions on the heritage of the Christian West?
I think it fair to hold it is because their political loyalties are not to the American nation “as historically defined,” as W.W. Rostow put it, but to a globalist future, one which they are willing to use America’s wealth and power to realize. Put simply, they do not have America’s interests uppermost, except when they coincide with the “world community’s.” They have taken Dewey’s prodding to heart. They are “willing to pursue a greater good than the interests of family and clan.” They are “willing to bear the cost, largely moral and intangible, of sacrificing their nationalistic sentiments to broader conceptions of human welfare.” They are willing to put American troops in harm’s way as part of that effort.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at jkfitz42@aol.com.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
