The Enemy At Home (2 page)

Even so, it is rare to see the illiberal practices of Muslim cultures aggressively denounced by American or European liberals. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman. But in general liberals seem to condemn illiberal regimes only when they are allied with the United States. Nor do liberals seem eager to support American efforts to overthrow hostile, illiberal regimes. Berman, who supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, counts “maybe fifteen or twenty” liberals who shared his position on this issue.
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If the case of Iraq is any indication, most liberals actively oppose American efforts to use military power to install regimes that are more pro-American and pro-Western and embody a more liberal set of values, such as self-government, minority rights, and religious tolerance. Indeed, the central thrust of the left’s foreign policy is to prevent America from forcibly replacing illiberal regimes with more liberal ones. This is a genuine mystery.

Liberal resistance to American foreign policy cannot be explained as a consequence of pacifism or even a reluctance to use force. With the exception of a few fringe figures, the cultural left is not pacifist. Its elected representatives—the Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer—frequently support the use of American force. For instance, President Clinton ordered systematic bombings in Bosnia and Kosovo during his terms in office. Clinton’s airstrikes were warmly endorsed in speeches by liberal Democrats such as Boxer, Paul Wellstone, David Bonior, and Carl Levin. Cultural liberals routinely call for America to intervene, by force if necessary, in places like Haiti and Rwanda. So liberals are not in principle opposed to regime change or to American intervention.

How, then, can we explain the mystery of liberal opposition to American foreign policy acting to secure liberal principles abroad? Superficially, the left’s position can be explained by its attachment to multiculturalism. In other words, liberal antagonism toward the beliefs and mores of traditional cultures is moderated by its conviction “Who are we to judge these cultures?” This concept of withholding judgment is a product of multiculturalism and cultural relativism, both of which are based on the theory that there are no universal standards to judge other cultures. Our standards apply only to us.

But again, this multicultural rhetoric is a smokescreen. Liberal activists mercilessly condemn other regimes and cultures when they are friendly toward the United States. In the past liberals showed no hesitation to condemn the Philippines under Marcos, Nicaragua under Somoza, and even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (as long as America was allied with Hussein during the 1980s). Today liberal congressmen and talk show hosts are quick to deride pro-American despots like Egypt’s Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. As a practical matter, liberal multiculturalism inhibits liberal condemnation and liberal judgment only when the regime in question is a sworn enemy of the United States. The suspicion of treason, although distasteful, is inevitable. What else could account for this bizarre double standard? Why would so many liberals oppose American foreign policy actions even when they would advance liberal principles abroad?

Treason is not the problem. To see what is, let us consider two revealing exhibits. The first is a short article by a left-leaning writer, Kristine Holmgren, that appeared shortly after 9/11. Holmgren wrote, “Even in my waking hours, I am afraid.” Was she afraid of a second 9/11-style attack? Not at all. “Nor am I afraid of planes striking my home or my children dying in their beds.” What, then, was the source of Holmgren’s trepidation? “My fears are more practical,” she explained. Here in America, Holmgren wrote, the forces of Christian fundamentalism are gaining strength. They are threatening abortion rights and civil liberties. “My local school district is so afraid of adolescent sexuality, drug use and music videos that they are willing to suspend civil rights to proselytize for Jesus Christ.” Holmgren concludes on a grim note: “Fascism crept up on post–World War I Europe with the same soft, calm footsteps it is using these days in the United States.”
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Here in clear view is the cultural left’s mind-set. Just two months after 9/11, with its memory still fresh in the national consciousness, Holmgren candidly confesses that she is less scared of bin Laden than she is of Christian activists on her school board. In her view, bin Laden might do episodic damage, but the Christians are on their way to establishing a fascist theocracy in America!

For my second exhibit I offer excerpts from Senator Robert Byrd’s recent book
Losing America
. In an early chapter, Byrd faults President Bush for his repeated references to the Islamic radicals as evil. “Presidents must measure their words and look past such raw simplicities,” Byrd opined. “The notion of ‘evil’ and ‘evildoers’ tends to set one faith against another and could be seen as a slur on the Islamic faith. Bush’s draconian ‘them’ versus ‘us,’ ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ serves little purpose other than to divide and inflame.”
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On the face of it, this passage seems to suggest Byrd’s high-minded objection to using crude terms like “good” and “evil” to describe the world we live in. Byrd’s point is that even if those labels are superficially descriptive, we should avoid them because they create unnecessary hostility and division.

A little later on in Byrd’s book, however, we find Byrd comparing President Bush to Hermann Goering and the Nazis. Byrd accuses Bush of “capitalizing on the war for political purposes—using the war as a tool to win elections,” which is “an affront to the men and women we are sending to fight and die in a foreign land and without good reason.” Moreover, Byrd charges Bush with “a political gambit to keep the American people fearful” through a strategy of “silencing opposition” and diverting people’s attention toward the war on terror and away from “the country’s festering problems.”
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Now, if these charges are true—if Bush has concocted an unnecessary war that causes the deaths of American citizens for no reason other than to benefit himself politically—then he deserves impeachment and everlasting disgrace. Indeed, in some ways Bush would be worse than Goering because at least Goering believed in a cause larger than himself.

By these accusations, Byrd forces us to revise our interpretation of his earlier words. He shows, by implication rather than outright suggestion, that he
agrees
with Bush that some people are fundamentally evil and they deserve to be treated as such. Only, in Byrd’s analysis it is the Bush administration and its allies, rather than the Islamic radicals, who are the genuinely evil force in the world. Thus dividing and inflaming, which Byrd thinks a harsh and self-defeating strategy in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, is precisely Byrd’s strategy in dealing with the Bush administration.

These examples show the wrongheadedness of the insinuation of liberal treachery. Holmgren and Byrd don’t hate America. What they hate is
conservative America
. The two are fiercely loyal to the American values that they cherish, and it is in the name of those values that they are ready to take on the Bush administration. The lesson of these examples is that the cultural left is unwilling to fight a serious and sustained battle against Islamic radicalism and fundamentalism because it is fighting a more threatening political battle against American conservatism and American fundamentalism. The left cannot support Bush’s efforts to promote liberal democracy abroad because it is more important for the left to reverse the nation’s conservative tide by defeating Bush and his socially conservatives allies at home. In other words, the left’s war is not against bearded Muslims who wear long robes and carry rifles; it is against pudgy white men who wear suits and carry Bibles. While the left is certainly not comfortable with Islamic mullahs, it is vastly more terrified of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia, James Dobson, and Rush Limbaugh.

Why? From the vantage point of many liberals,
our
fundamentalists are as dangerous as
their
fundamentalists, and President Bush is no less a threat than bin Laden. Author Salman Rushdie, who should know something about this topic, asserts that “the religious fundamentalism of the United States is as alarming as anything in the much-feared world of Islam.” Columnist Maureen Dowd accused the Bush administration of following the lead of Islamic fundamentalists in “replacing science with religion, and facts with faith,” and creating in the process “jihad in America…a scary, paranoid, regressive reality.” Author and illustrator Art Spiegelman asserts, “We’re equally threatened by Al Qaeda and our own government.” Pursuing the analogy between Islamic fundamentalists and the Bush administration, columnist Wendy Kaminer described 9/11 as a “faith-based initiative.”
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But if the left sees Christian fundamentalism in the same way as Islamic fundamentalism, why doesn’t it fight the two with equal resolution? If Bush is as bad as bin Laden, why not expend equal effort to get rid of both? In reality, the cultural left is more indignant over Bush’s Christian fundamentalism than over bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalism. Activist Cindy Sheehan makes this clear when she alleges that “the biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.” Other leading figures on the left endorse the view that Bush and his supporters, not bin Laden and Al Qaeda, are the real problem. Social critic Edward Said, who spent most of his career warning of the dangers of overestimating the threat of Islamic extremism, warned in a recent book that “the vast number of Christian fanatics in the United States,” who form “the core of George Bush’s support,” now represent “a menace to the world.” Jonathan Raban writes, “The greatest military power in history has shackled its deadly hardware to the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity.” Writer Jane Smiley finds the people who voted for Bush to be “predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant…. They are full of original sin and have a taste for violence.” Eric Alterman fumes in
The Nation
, “Extremist right-wingers enjoy a stranglehold on our political system.” Author Jonathan Schell insists that “Bush’s abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history.” Author Garry Wills alleges that the Bush administration “weaves together a chain of extremisms encircling the polity…forming a necklace to choke the large body of citizens.” There is no indication that these liberal authorities regard Islamic fundamentalism with anything approaching this degree of alarm.
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The rhetoric of left-wing political leaders is equally revealing. In examining speeches by Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Edward Markey, I am struck by what may be called “the indignation gap”—the vastly different level of emotion that the speakers employ in treating bin Laden and his allies as opposed to Bush and his allies. At first the speaker will offer a ritual condemnation of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda: “I am no fan of Osama Bin Laden.” “We can agree that Bin Laden is not a very nice guy.” Having gotten those qualifications out of the way, the left-wing politician will spend the rest of the speech lambasting the Bush conservatives with uncontrolled belligerence and ferocity. In recent addresses Senator Kennedy denounced “the rabid reactionary religious right” and maintained that “no president in America’s history has done more damage to our country than George W. Bush.” Senator Hillary Clinton accuses the Bush White House and the Republican Congress of “systematically weakening the democratic traditions and institutions on which this country was built. They are turning back the clock on the twentieth-century. There has never been an administration…more intent upon consolidating and abusing power. It’s very hard to stop people who have no shame…who have never been acquainted with the truth.” Congressman Edward Markey darkly warned, “They wish to wipe us out.”
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The “us” that Markey is concerned about here is not Americans in general but specifically liberals and leftists. Here, then, is a revealing clue to the motives of the left. Many in this camp are more exercised by Bush than they are about bin Laden because, as they see it, Islamic fundamentalism threatens to impose illiberal values abroad while American fundamentalism of the Bush type threatens to impose illiberal values at home. As leading figures on the left see it, the Islamic extremists pose a danger to the freedom and lifestyle of
others,
while their American equivalents pose a danger to
us
. Thus, for the left, the enemy at home is far more consequential and frightening than the enemy abroad.

I WANT TO
say more about these liberal fears, but first I want to say a word about the conservative, or right-wing, understanding of 9/11. It is a common belief on the right that many Muslims—perhaps most Muslims—hate America because of a deep religious and cultural divide between our civilization and theirs. In this view, popularized by scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, Western civilization stands for modern values such as prosperity, freedom, and democracy, which the Muslim world rejects. In this conservative view, Islamic radicals lash out at us because they blame us for problems of poverty and tyranny that are actually the fault of Muslims themselves. One variant of this position holds that the radical Muslims are simply envious of American wealth and power.

How, then, do conservatives think America should respond to Muslim antagonism? Some on the right, like Pat Buchanan, as well as some libertarians, argue that the best way for America to protect itself from Muslim rage is to withdraw from the Middle East—to retreat behind our own borders. But the majority on the right, led by the Bush administration, insists that America has no choice but to fight the Islamic radicals, because if we don’t defeat them over there, they will bring the battle to us here. Most conservatives seem to agree with Bush that war is the best and only option. The general view on the right is that bin Laden and the Islamic radicals don’t despise us for what we do, they despise us for who we are. As President Bush has said, on various occasions, “They hate us because of our freedom.”