Norman Podhoretz: Six years after 9/11 it's notable how little the politics of the left have changed
[Mr. Podhoretz is editor at large of Commentary. This essay is adapted from his new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," out today from Doubleday.]
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....
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....
Read entire article at WSJ
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....
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....