Tony Judt in the London Review of Books excoriates American liberals for acquiescing in Bush’s foreign policy.

Some of it will be familiar to Americans. And he ignores liberals who have been against the Iraq war from the beginning, focusing on traditional liberals who supported it. Plus, the article suffers (imo) from the predictable, one-sided criticism of Israel and a lack of any suggestion of what contemporary liberalism consists of beyond fighting Bushism. Nevertheless, there’s lots in it that I found illuminating, including:

…the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

And I think Judt is right in his fundamental observation that we don’t have the set of outspoken, respected, liberal thinkers and politicians that we had during the Vietnam war or during the cold-hearted Reagan years. To a large degree, I think this is because we haven’t gotten past the anger stage of grieving for the death of our childhood on 9/11. We’re still not willing to hear that terrorism is not an enemy that can be defeated (because it’s a tactic), that we are never going to be as safe as we once imagined ourselves to be, that the world shrugs off simple answers, that working to connect the world will make us safer than our power can (they brought down the World Trade Center with boxcutters, after all), that the best way to foil terrorists is to shut up about what you’re doing, that crime is a more apt metaphor than war for the struggle we’re in, that peace makes us safer than war and peace requires connection and fairness. If these are things that cannot be heard, then the speakers—and there are plenty of them around—have to be marginalized for psychological if not political reasons. [Tags: liberalism tony_judt politics terrorism]

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