I've read some good critiques of "the Left" in my day. This is not one of them. Let me count the ways ...
1) He's beating up a straw leftist. This is very common. He presents some caricatured attitudes which he insists are held by all sorts of "people at dinner parties", and props them up with a few very selective quotes, in some cases (as with Sontag) so selective and misleading as to amount to slander. I don't know anyone who slots into his caricature, myself. Maybe he does. I don't think they're exactly filling the world.
2) A kind of refinement on (1) -- there is no such thing as "the Left" in the monolithic sense he seems to believe. There are pacifists and anarchists and Quakers and liberation theologians; there are hardline Communists, there are many types of socialists, there are social democrats; there are people who have no special political attachments but are to a greater or lesser extent dismayed by events in Iraq, which are by the way going quite a bit more badly than he seems to think, and I don't say this because I want it to be true -- a functioning Iraqi democracy would be a fine thing. There are people who believe the US is doing the right thing in Iraq but who are very upset about sexual harrassment on the job. You just can't lump all these people into one category and call them all simpering leftists.
3) And by the way, the repeated use of the word "simpering" does not suggest that the author is actually making a difficult but considered decision to leave behind a once-prized political allegiance. Nor does his account of his past history, such as it is, sound like that. It sounds like he's always enjoyed finding "leftists" that he disagreed with and then pretending that he's a lone voice crying in the wilderness against them.
4) There are jerks everywhere in the world. Of course you can go out and find people on the left who just hold obviously silly opinions, or who do seem to be taking delight in every casualty in Iraq. You can find people everywhere on the political spectrum who hold silly opinions and indulge in inappropriate schadenfreude. The fact that this writer appears to me to be a jerk does not invalidate all criticism of "the Left" any more than the existence of some leftist jerks invalidates all progressive thinking.
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Date: 2005-05-26 06:11 pm (UTC)1) He's beating up a straw leftist. This is very common. He presents some caricatured attitudes which he insists are held by all sorts of "people at dinner parties", and props them up with a few very selective quotes, in some cases (as with Sontag) so selective and misleading as to amount to slander. I don't know anyone who slots into his caricature, myself. Maybe he does. I don't think they're exactly filling the world.
2) A kind of refinement on (1) -- there is no such thing as "the Left" in the monolithic sense he seems to believe. There are pacifists and anarchists and Quakers and liberation theologians; there are hardline Communists, there are many types of socialists, there are social democrats; there are people who have no special political attachments but are to a greater or lesser extent dismayed by events in Iraq, which are by the way going quite a bit more badly than he seems to think, and I don't say this because I want it to be true -- a functioning Iraqi democracy would be a fine thing. There are people who believe the US is doing the right thing in Iraq but who are very upset about sexual harrassment on the job. You just can't lump all these people into one category and call them all simpering leftists.
3) And by the way, the repeated use of the word "simpering" does not suggest that the author is actually making a difficult but considered decision to leave behind a once-prized political allegiance. Nor does his account of his past history, such as it is, sound like that. It sounds like he's always enjoyed finding "leftists" that he disagreed with and then pretending that he's a lone voice crying in the wilderness against them.
4) There are jerks everywhere in the world. Of course you can go out and find people on the left who just hold obviously silly opinions, or who do seem to be taking delight in every casualty in Iraq. You can find people everywhere on the political spectrum who hold silly opinions and indulge in inappropriate schadenfreude. The fact that this writer appears to me to be a jerk does not invalidate all criticism of "the Left" any more than the existence of some leftist jerks invalidates all progressive thinking.
Okay. Rant done.