What’s New after September 11?
Dick Howard*
The left must move beyond a discourse that stresses
economic "root causes" of global wrongs. It must focus
on democracy, defending it against fundamentalist,
neo-totalitarian currents. This implies countering
society's tendency to substitute false certainties
and supposedly non-negotiable "fundamentals" for genuine
political deliberation.
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Introduction
Must the intellectual, or the leftist—who need not be identical—always
adopt a critical position, declaring that the glass is half-empty?
Must the intellectual, or the leftist, always oppose
the government, or the imperial hegemon?Must the intellectual,
or the leftist, always take the side of the minority, the
underdog, the victim—and in so doing, ignore any responsibility
that might fall to that minority, underdog or victim?
Is the intellectual, or the leftist, faced with choices
that are morally clear-cut to the point that political choice
and personal responsibility are superfluous? Must the intellectual, or the leftist, always
have a good conscience and opt always if not for the side
of the angels at least for that of Historical Progress?
This series of (rhetorical) questions
comes to mind in the face of the new
political landscape left by the terrorist attacks of September
11th. But they are in fact old (and not just rhetorical)
questions, that go back to the origins of left-wing political
movements—recall, for example, the polemics between Marx
and Weitling, Marx and Proudhon, or Marx and Bakunin; think
of the debates between reformists, revisionists and orthodox
Marxists; remember the sad end of the promising “new left”
that shook the political culture of the established order
in the first, then the second and into the third worlds.
But those old debates took place in a landscape defined
by the dominance of the capitalist economy, and the need
to overcome the exploitation and alienation that it reproduced.
As I have suggested elsewhere, it is misleading to
make political choices dependent on such economic conditions
(whose existence, and impact cannot be denied); it is more
useful to recognize that modern politics has to take into
account the emergence of democratic
social relations that represent a challenge to all
forms of social domination—as long as those democratic conditions
are maintained. If this is the case, then perhaps the intellectual,
and the leftist, should be arguing that the glass is half-full—and
then show how one can fill it still further.
One further introductory remark leads me back to September 11th. The critic, Harold Rosenberg, once spoke of
the engaged political militant as “an intellectual who doesn’t
think.” He meant that the militant uses his mind, so to
speak, only to try to adjust his vision of the factual world
in order to fit it into the already existing “line” of the
party. Such a militant
is incapable of facing up to the new—indeed,
he is comfortable with the old, whose repetition is like
a nursery rhyme rocking to sleep the good conscience of
the innocent who need never grow up. The terror of September 11th was
a wake-up call, for the intellectual and for the left. The first step in facing up to the challenge
is to look back at some of the old
arguments that have again been recycled in order, then,
to see what new issues have emerged.
Against this background, the immediate political
question facing the left is whether we will confront something
like a new Cold War that freezes the possibility of political
innovation, or whether the realization that the free market
cannot prevent acts of terror will lead to a renewed Social
Democratic politics. But that politics cannot simply react to social
needs as did the old welfare state; it must recognize that
what the terrorists attacked was democracy,
and that democracy
must not only defend itself but must also take the offensive.
1. Old Arguments
The old arguments are not false; the problem is that they
can be used to criticize any action (or inaction) by the U.S. Moreover, they don’t consider arguments that might be made for the choice of a given action. As a result, they are weak because one-sided,
based on an either/or, forgetting that politics is based
on judgements made in situations that are not defined by
rational choice or zero-sum games.
The centrality of judgement in politics does not,
however, mean that politics takes place in a landscape governed
by moral relativism. There
clearly are values and moral standards. That is why, for example, members of the Frankfurt School remained
anti-capitalist even while they worked for the OSS, forerunner
of the CIA: Nazism
represented a greater evil and presented an immediate challenge.
More generally, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily
my friend, as one could have learned already before that
War, when progressive intellectuals were told not to criticize
the Moscow Trials because America still lynches Negroes!
This old argument remains valid still today.
A. The most general of the old arguments is the “root causes” approach.
It says that yes, terror is bad, but we have to understand
that it is a reaction to something even more serious, deeper,
and crying out for attention.
Terror must be the expression of that something deeper;
it is the root cause. Such
a root cause does not excuse the terror, but it makes it
comprehensible; and the left and its politics are justified
by their ability to pierce beneath the surface to uncover
these hidden roots of evil, which must then be uprooted
for the good to triumph.
This argument can formulated generally, and then
translated into the particular language of international
and domestic politics—each level points toward the others,
promising a key to understanding world history.
The most basic form of the root cause
argument serves to justify an anti-capitalist politics.
Capitalist exploitation is destructive of both traditional
life-forms and the physical environment. In its advanced form, capitalism leads to freer
trade, which has the effect of increasing the gap between
rich and poor while what passes for capitalist culture destroys
indigenous cultures. This, and more, is all true; but it is not
clear how such a universal claim explains this
particular terrorist response.
One could react differently to each of these “results”
of capitalism—a capitalism which brings with it also
new social and political possibilities which could, indeed,
result in rising expectations that give new hopes and projects
rather than fuel an anti-political, nihilistic terrorism.
A variant of the anti-capitalist root
cause argument blames capitalism for various forms of imperial
exploitation, in particular the control over natural resources
needed since the demise of colonial domination.
This explains for example U.S. support for corrupt
Arab oil sheiks, toleration of the Putin regime’s terror
in Chechnyia… or the intervention in Afghanistan as ‘really’
motivated by oil and the project of building a pipeline. Not only does capitalist-imperialism seek control
of natural resources; it also monopolizes non-natural ones,
such as the patents permitting it to sell anti-AIDS drugs
at exploitative prices. Again, these general accounts are all true;
but they don’t explain this
particular terrorist reaction to them.
Why not have recourse to the tactics of guerilla
war, or the symbolically powerful sky-jackings, as in days
gone by?
Capitalism can also be denounced for its
imposition of political control that denies democratic self-government
and worker’s rights while supporting corrupt oligarchies. While this criticism is also true, and easy to illustrate in the
mid-East, the fact that September 11 was also the date of
the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile (as well as the defeat of
the Turcs at the gates of Vienna in 1683) suggests the need
to take into account the broader historical context in which
events take place. The
US backed coup against Allende took place in the context
of the Cold War, when the ‘enemy’ was a geo-political actor
which was not simply a passive victim .
In short, the “root cause” argument denounces
an unnatural inequality marked by the growing gap between
rich and poor countries and regions (as well as inequality
within the poorer regions).
Exploitation in international relations joins exploitation
of domestic workers in a diabolical circle in which all
the parts conspire to reproduce on an expanded scale the
inequalities that were present at the (capitalist) outset.
(In an updated version of the argument, proposed
for example by Axel Honneth, this produces an asymmetry
in which one participant denies to the other the “recognition”
that is the natural right of humans and societies; radical
politics [including terrorism?] becomes a struggle for recognition.
This does not, however, explain the origin of capitalism,
the original sin that starts the cycle.)
B.
One difficulty with the “root causes” argument is
that it attributes guilt to huge and seemingly impersonal
forces over which individuals can have little influence.
To remedy this, a modified version suggests: “the
terrorists may be bad but we’re worse.” We’re the original
sinners, first terrorists, who keep thugs in power while
exploiting and humiliating the downtrodden.
Worse, we do so in order to maintain an egoistic,
drug-infested, sexually licentious society that needs to
be made healthy
and whole. The irony, of course, is that this latter is
just what the American religious right claims… and it is
what Bin Laden also believes. What makes this into a leftist argument is the assumption that the real sin is that capitalism
kills more people than died in the WTC and Pentagon—and the assumption that we can, and therefore
should (!), remedy our own wrongs.
Nonetheless, the weaknesses of the “root cause” argument
remain, since it is assumed that once we
heal ourselves, they
will have no more grievances and we’ll all
live happily ever-after in a world that will have no need
for politics and judgement.
(A variant on this argument is the so-called
“blowback” theory often attributed to Chalmers Johnson which
condemns the US for making deals with bad guys (or creating
them, as with bin Laden) who then they turn it when that
suits their nefarious purposes. Thus, the attacks are deserved, the pay-back
for immoral (or amoral) support of such evil-doers who are
now asserting their independence.)
C.
A peculiar inversion of the “root cause” theme points
to a particular policy option that is said to cause general
hatred: unconditioned support supposedly offered to Israel. None of the explanations for this policy seem
convincing: sometimes
domestic lobbies (AIPEC) are blamed, sometimes refusal of
“recognition” to Islam and its civilization are the cause,
at still others, a strategy aiming to divide-and-conquer
Arab nationalism is imagined. None of these explanations is convincing, particularly since the
Bush people (father and son) tend to be pro-Arab (pro-oil),
while their allies on the religious right are pro-Israel,
and the present Bush administration—despite its passivity
(or worse) on the mid-East—has recognized Palestinian rights
to statehood.
D.
This leaves a final set of old arguments that goes
back to the fear by the democratic left that, because of
the unique constitutional status of the President as commander-in-chief,
executive power will grow in times of war; and that this
growth will come at the expense of individual rights.
This is why there was leftist opposition to US entry into
both World Wars. Will the post-September 11 experience be comparable?
This question takes us to the next phase of the argument.
2. New Questions
A.
In the immediate aftermath, and still 6 months later,
the issue of individual rights, particularly for people
of Middle-Eastern origin who are held in prison without
formal charges is unresolved. On the other hand, Bush and Ashcroft have had to retreat on the
use of military courts, for which final procedures have
not yet been established. There were excesses, particularly by Attorney
General Ashcroft, whose earlier regular TV appearances have
been sharply curtailed. Such excesses were to be expected
from this administration, whose penchant for secrecy and
mania for control (in domestic as well as foreign policy)
should not be underestimated.
More striking is the fact that the civil-rights activists,
whose protests explain the more cautious approach of the
administration, are on their side becoming more nuanced.
Racial profiling is seen by some as acceptable;
there is discussion of creating national identity documents
as well as permitting tighter coordination of FBI/CIA/Immigration/Local
Police. An important new political debate can be expected–a
political debate,
because the issues have not been posed in terms of the now
worn-out moral-legal contrast between liberalism and communitarianism. It was the domination of that moral-legal paradigm that explained
many of the ills denounced by E.J. Dionne’s Why
Americans Hate Politics.
B.
Are the place and role of dissent unchanged in times
of emergency? There certainly have been grounds for criticism
since September11th. Everyone
will have their own list, ranging for example, from HEW
Secretary Thompson’s evident ignorance with regard to the
anthrax attacks to the many arrests of Middle-Eastern men
in order to give the public confidence that the government
was alert to the anger, and on to unsavory alliances with
Russians, Saudis, Ouzbeks, Pakistanis, as well as the way
India and Israel use the “war on terrorism” for their own
political purposes. Should
these simply be swallowed, like bad tasting medicine needed
to cure the new illness?
Some journalists have admitted to self-censorship;
others criticize government secrecy and attempts to control
the press. The early doubts about the appropriateness
of the US response were eliminated by the measured build-up
that preceded the military engagement (and the well-executed
Speech to Congress on September 24h)—and even
more by the apparently rapid and painless success against
the Taliban that put an end to talk of a Vietnam-like “quagmire.”
On the other hand, the apparently unlimited extension of
engagement to such countries as Yemen, the Philippines,
Georgia—not to speak of the constant refrain calling for
war with Iraq (or Saddam)—could lead to renewed doubts.
It may well be the hubris that comes with high poll-ratings
and military success that calls forth dissent.
An ill-elected President (the “resident of the White
House”) has found a quasi-religious calling.
The “war” on terrorism justifies his every action—and
particularly those favoring his domestic allies, such as
tax cuts, “fast tract” authority to negotiate free trade
agreements, budget deficits, military spending… This will eventually prove too much for even politicians to swallow.
But the Republican “patriots” will attack any critic,
as was clear in a recent New York Times (March 4, 2002) article, “Daschle Wants President to
Tell Congress More About His Plans for War,” which pointed
to criticisms that “any sign that we are losing that unity…will
be used against us overseas.” It is well-known that the
courage of politicians depends on the mood of their constituents.
C.
In this context, the new face of globalization is
no longer as simple as it was in Seattle or Genoa; finance
capital and ecological destruction are joined in a more
complex human tissue. 1)
People are global. The
New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief,” published
daily for three months after the attacks, shows the human
face of globalization as it cuts across classes and nations
in what Eli Zaretsky calls a de-reification or humanization
of broad-brush categories.
2) But terror is global too, and not just in its transnational
reach and composition.
For example, economic globalization means open borders,
just-in-time-delivery and thus easy passage through customs
of potential ABC arms. On the other hand, the openness of democratic
societies and their protection of individual rights provides
a cover for terrorists (who would be more easily repressed
in a dictatorship). In this sense, terrorism is an internal problem
to democratic societies, which are themselves de facto global.
D.
Is war itself now global?
Indeed, what is the new face of war? Can you have
war without an identified, and declared, enemy?
What are the goals of post-September 11th
warfare? The challenge is to give political form to
a terrorism that does not declare goals while hiding the
visage of its agents.
1) A first model is provided
by the experience of de-colonization, in which violent liberation
movements were not declared outside-the-law but attempts
were made to find points where negotiation could occur.
But the al Quaeda group does not have the same kind
of agenda as did, say, the FLN in Algeria, which could eventually
negotiate de-colonization accords with the French at Evian.
2) The lack of an interlocutor points
to the “failed states” argument.
Herfried Munkler
argues that modern warfare has been increasingly privatized.
Privatized war becomes a self-reproducing industry since
the warlords have no interest in stopping it.
Hence, it is necessary to strengthen state in order
to limit this self-reproducing cycle of war. While this may be true in Sierra Leone, Liberia
or Congo, and despite the rapid disappearance of the Taliban
“state,” does the picture fit al Quaeda?
3) Searching
for an adequate level of political exchange, some propose
an international treatment.
Michael Howard cautions against calling the terror
an act of war, proposing instead a police operation by the
UN to confront a crime against the international community. But reducing the attacks to a simple crime
(even if against “humanity”) means one can only react after
the fact—you remain defenseless before-hand.
However satisfying for the intellectual, no statesman
could accept that risk.
4) However difficult for American optimism,
it may well be that the terrorists have to be understood
as sheer evil. This would be the inversion
of the “root causes” argument and it faces similar difficulties:
if true, it doesn’t explain the particular case in question,
or give a way of protecting against future threats.
Its only advantage is its gigantic claim to offer
a total explanation: by the absurd.
5) These difficulties suggest that it
would be useful to return to an old concept that fell out
of favor after it, too, had served as a global explanation
of evil. Totalitarianism is not
identical with the defeated regimes of Communism or Nazism;
it represents a general reaction to the confrontation with
modernity and democracy which did not end with their demise Whether one interprets the Islamic roots of
the terrorists from a secular or
from a religious perspective,
that selfsame clash lies at the roots of their action. That
does not make the “war” with the new totalitarian
threat a new Cold War (as I will argue in a moment), but
it does help explain certain aspects of the behavior of
the new enemy—for example, the need for a leader built up
by myth (and who, for that reason, is both powerful and
brittle); the fact that such a leader needs continued victories,
a sort of permanent revolution against a polymorphous enemy;
and as a result, that his movement will find constantly
new enemies (liberal democracy, human rights, secularism…)—and
will be unable to define goals that could open possibilities
for political negotiation.
3. The Challenge of the New to Political Theory
A.
We can start with the naïve question asked by many
Americans, “why would they do that to us?”
The question has several implications.
1) The first is its sheer naiveté:
Americans don’t realize that they affect the lives
of others in an increasingly interconnected global world.
Loss of innocence can be a good thing—that was why
the itinerant peddlers of the Aufklärung classified pornographic literature as “philosophy”—particularly
since the Cold War “victory” (i.e., the collapse of communism)
has overcome the so-called Vietnam syndrome. September 11th
said (brutally) to America, “welcome to the world”; America
will have to learn to reply with its own:
“welcome to the world.”
2) Second, the naiveté is expressed also in the idea that
they were not attacking us so much as they were attacking
our democratic values. What is naïve here is not the values but the
notion that because they claim to be universal, everyone
could, should and would adopt them.
The lesson to be drawn from the attack is that these
values have to be fought for, defended, and can also be
lost. I will return
to this point in my conclusion.
3) As a nation based on values, America is also
based on the free choice of its citizens to adhere to those
values (hence its relative tolerance of immigrants).
But the implication of this free choice is also that
those who do not accept American values are sinners who
need to be converted, or punished. This of course is reflected in American attitudes
toward foreigners, but it is also applied to dissenters,
particularly on the left, who are labeled as “Un-American.”
A leftist reply to such attacks has to make clear
that its criticism is blaming America for not living up
to its own values. And one of those values,
implied by the very freedom to choose but too often forgotten,
is the principle of tolerance and respect for otherness. B.
This stress on values points to the fact that the
democracy that is challenged is not simply a system of electoral
politics or even the protection of liberal individual rights
—although it is both of these as well. Democracy is a mode of life deprived of pre-existing
certainties and forced constantly to re-affirm the values
that it chooses—and, for just that reason, it can make choices
that others may disapprove of.
That is why it is a pluralistic form of society,
built on tolerance and open to critical debate. Perhaps
most important, that is why it is a dynamic society, one
that is constantly changing—and change means constantly
putting into question, testing, the very values on which
it is based. As
Paul Berman observed in a lucid discussion of “Terror and
Liberalism,"
what Bush called “the first war of the twenty-first century”
resembles in many ways the great wars of the 20th—which
were fought against liberal democracies by militant movements
and states seeking a return of unity, purity and certainty
that are constantly undermined by the dynamism and progress
of democratic societies.
These modern fundamentalisms were so powerful, moreover,
because there were always citizens of the democratic
societies (on the left and
the right) afflicted by doubt in the validity and viability
of the self-critical democratic values who hesitated to
defend that democracy. C. What then is the place of the critical
intellectual within a democratic society. This is the problem of the half-empty glass from which I began this
discussion. The
point can be illustrated by the clash between the American
rhetoric of multilateralism and its unilateralist practice.
A critic could denounce the rhetoric as simply a
ruse seeking to preserve American hegemony (which is not false). Or the critic might argue that this is the
tribute that vice pays to virtue, and has to be seen as
a first step toward strengthening what David Held calls
a global civil society, or, as Robin Blackburn proposes,
taking the first steps not only toward reforming the UN
but also toward dealing with what Jonathan Shell has called
The Unfinished 20th Century—namely the problem of ABC weapons. That these choices are not simply theoretical
is seen when we return, finally, to the concrete political
choices facing a contemporary American left that, for the
moment, has had little to say about (and in) the post-September
11th constellation.
4. The Challenge of the
New to Contemporary Politic