'America the Ugly'

Six years after 9/11, it's notable how little the politics of the left have changed.

By Norman Podhoretz
Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:01 a.m.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on us that took place on this very day six years ago, several younger commentators proclaimed the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941, had done to the old isolationism, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001, had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural fallout of that war--all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960s and '70s--would now follow it into the grave.

I could easily understand why they thought so. After all, never in their lives had they witnessed so powerful an explosion of patriotic sentiment--and not only in the expected precincts of the right. In fact, on the left, where not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning, the sight of it--and it was now on display everywhere--had been driving a few prominent personalities to wrench their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute. One of these personalities, Todd Gitlin, a leading figure in the New Left of the '60s and now a professor at Columbia, even went so far as to question the inveterately "negative faith in America the ugly" that he and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more.

Having broken ranks with the left in the late '60s precisely because I was repelled by the "negative faith in America the ugly" that had come to pervade it, I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. It seemed to me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.

But I could not fully share the heady confidence of my younger political friends that the change was permanent, and that nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same again. As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

In this connection, I was haunted by one memory in particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?"

The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very "Establishment" they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) "the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known."

More incredible yet, in a mere decade the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. By 1972, only 11 years after President John F. Kennedy had promised that we would "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty," George McGovern, nominated for president by Kennedy's own party, was campaigning on the antiwar slogan, "Come home, America." It was a slogan that to an uncanny degree reflected the ethos of the embryonic movement I had addressed in Union Square only about a decade before.


In sharp contrast to my younger friends, I could not help fearing that something like this might happen again. On the one hand, those who thought that we had brought 9/11 down on ourselves and had it coming were in a very tiny minority--even tinier than the antiwar movement of the early '60s. On the other hand, they were much stronger at a comparably early stage of the game than their counterparts of the '60s (who in some cases were their own younger selves). The reason was that, as the Vietnam War ground inconclusively on, the institutions that shape our culture were one by one and bit by bit converting to the "faith in America the ugly." By now, indeed, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of these sectors of the culture was limited to their inhabitants. John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

The few people I knew who shared my apprehensions believed that if things went well on the military front of what we were calling World War IV (the Cold War having in our scheme of things been World War III), all would be well on the home front too. And that was how it appeared from the effect wrought by the Afghanistan campaign, the first front to be opened in World War IV. For a short spell, the spectacular success of that campaign dampened the nascent antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses. But I felt certain that, as other fronts were opened--with Iraq most likely being the next--opposition not only would grow but would become more and more extreme.

I turned out to be right about this, and yet even I never imagined that the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach. Nor did I anticipate how closely the antiwar playbook of that era would be followed and how successfully it would be applied to Iraq, even though the two wars had nothing whatever in common.

To be sure, this time, mainly because there was no draft, there would be no student protesters and no massive street demonstrations. Instead, virtual demonstrations would be mounted in cyberspace by the so-called netroots and these, more suited to the nature of the new technological age, would prove an all-too-effective substitute. And so on the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the main issues agitating this country are how quickly we can extricate ourselves from Iraq and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline for abandoning the field.

Here too the antiwar playbook of the Vietnam era is being very closely followed. In 1972, Richard Nixon was elected by landslide to a second term as president, but in campaigning against George McGovern's call for us to withdraw from Vietnam, Nixon did not sound an opposing call to fight on to victory. On the contrary: He too promised to get us out of Vietnam. The difference was that he also promised to accomplish this with our honor intact.

Today, like the McGovernites with respect to Vietnam in 1972, the overwhelming majority of the Democrats in Congress, and all the Democrats hoping to become their party's candidate for president, want America out of Iraq, and the sooner and the more completely the better. And like Nixon in 1972, many Republican members of Congress, along with a few of the Republicans running in the presidential primaries, also want out, but with our honor intact.


Well, Nixon did get us out of Vietnam. By 1975, when the North Vietnamese communists conquered the South, not a single American soldier was left in the country. But never in American history had our honor been so besmirched as it was by the manner of our withdrawal. Having left with the promise that we would continue to help save the South Vietnamese from communism by supplying them with arms, Congress nevertheless refused to send them so much as a bullet when the communists of the North were already storming the gates. As President Bush recently reminded us, to the sputtering rage of those who did not wish to be reminded, the price "was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.' "

It is impossible at this point to predict how and when the battle of Iraq will end. But from the vitriolic debates it has unleashed we can already say for certain that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way. But is it strong enough in its present incarnation to do what it did to the honor of this country in 1975? Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.