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November 2001 -- A commentary from the Navigator Special: The Assault on Civilization.
The events of September 11 have changed the political landscape in America. Traditional political groups—progressive, liberal, conservative, and libertarian—have found themselves deeply split over the terrorist attacks and the war.
Consider, first, the division that emerged in the far-Left magazine The Nation, where longtime columnist Christopher Hitchens engaged longtime America-critic Noam Chomsky.
Said Hitchens:
I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the [Noam] Chomsky-[Howard] Zinn-[Norman] Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. . . . But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally (The Nation, October 8, 2001).
Chomsky replied:
Consider Hitchens's fury over the 'masochistic e-mail...circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter,' who joined such radical rags as the Wall Street Journal in what he calls 'rationalizing' terror—that is, considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region, rich to poor, secular to Islamist, the course that would be followed by anyone who hopes to reduce the likelihood of further atrocities rather than simply to escalate the cycle of violence, in the familiar dynamics, leading to even greater catastrophes here and elsewhere. This is an outrage, Hitchens explains, because 'I know already' about these concerns—a comment that makes sense on precisely one assumption: that the communications were addressed solely to Hitchens. Without further comment, we can disregard his fulminations on these topics ("Reply to Hitchens," The Nation, October 1, 2001, Web only).
The situation among liberals (as opposed to progressives) was well put by Michael Kelly, editor of The Atlantic Monthly:
The leftward wing of politics . . . includes [on the one hand] liberals who work in politics and [on the other] academic and literary leftists who stand — in a pose that apes moral superiority but is really a species of aesthetic snobbery — apart from (and, they fancy, above) politics. . . . Sept. 11 cleaved the left smack on the line between these two primary constituencies. Liberals and leftists who work in politics or who are serious about politics [he mentions the political philosopher Michael Walzer] have pretty much lined up on the side of the government and the public, which is the side of giving war a chance" ("The Left's Great Divide," The Washington Post, November 7, 2001).
Writing in the Weekly Standard (November 5, 2001), David Brooks observed:
The splits on the right have been quieter, but no less important. Anti-establishmentarianism on the right comes in libertarian and populist forms. Its adherents have noticed that during wartime, the power of the state tends to expand. . . . This skepticism applies not only to any new social programs that might emerge in this centralizing moment, but to proposals to strengthen the forces of law and order." (David Brooks, "The Age of Conflict").
Brooks himself cites libertarians to illustrate this split (overlooking the splits among libertarian. See below.) But he might equally well have cited paleo-conservatives. Thus, Samuel Francis recently wrote:
If Americans have learned nothing else from the Sept. 11 attacks, they should at least have learned what the priorities of the dominant political classes are. Ever since the attack, the spokesmen for that class have exploited it to push for immense increases in the size and scope of federal power and the federal government—to the gain of the class that manages and directs the vast labyrinth of the federal leviathan.
As readers of Navigator surely know, the split Brooks sees between national-security conservatism and economic conservatism can also be found within libertarianism. No one familiar with the history of libertarian foreign policy could have expected otherwise. For example, Murray Rothbard found the 1975 victory of North Vietnam to be "inspiring." Ayn Rand, though she wanted America to withdraw from Vietnam, said it had to be done in conjunction with a new, far more aggressive policy of isolating the Soviet Union diplomatically and economically. Moreover, Rand held, so long as America had an army in the field, Washington should ban campus anti-Vietnam demonstrations as harmful to our soldiers' morale and therefore tantamount to aiding the enemy. (I will be grateful to everyone who resists the temptation to circulate an e-mail saying that TOC advocates suspending the First Amendment rights of antiwar protesters.)
Given this divided history, it can be no surprise that, last October, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, Jacob G. Hornberger, posted on the FFF Web site an essay entitled "Libertarian Splits in the War on Terrorism." He began by noting that "responses to the September 11 attacks have split the libertarian movement like no other issue I have seen since I discovered libertarianism almost twenty-five years ago." He then summarized, very briefly, the position of pro-war libertarians: "One of the essential functions of government is to protect the nation from invasion or attack. The corollary of that duty is the government's power to wage was against those who invade or attack us." ( More in defense of President Bush's war on terrorism can be found on the Web site of The Objectivist Center .)
But, Hornberger went on:
For decades libertarians have been arguing that the roots of terrorism lie in the U.S. government's interventionist and imperial foreign policy. . . . Therefore, almost all libertarians have argued that in order to end terrorism in the long term, it's necessary to pull the weed out by the root by putting a stop to the U.S. government's interventionist policy. Yet, since September 11 attacks, some libertarians have become totally silent about the relationship between U.S. interventionist foreign policy and terrorism.
At what level of philosophy shall these splits be explained? David Brooks borrows a metaphor from Machiavelli to describe the two sides as lions and foxes: "Lions," he writes, "believe in the aggressive use of power. For them the main danger is appeasement. They worry that we will be half-hearted and never really tackle our problems. Foxes, by contrast, believe you have to move cleverly and subtly."
Personally, I suspect the source of these divisions goes deeper than politics. And I find it instructive that the magazine Touchstone, which calls itself "A Journal of Mere Christianity," ran two articles in its November 2001 issues that took very different views of the terrorist attack. Most instructive was the fact that the two authors did not seem to differ politically, as a pacificist Christian and "realist" Christian, say. Rather, they framed their differences religiously, which is to say, metaphysically.
Louis R. Taristano, an associate editor of the magazine and an Anglican priest in Georgia, wrote an article called "The War We Must Win." Its second paragraph sets forth his view plainly: "Those who have waged war against us must be eliminated. Their safe havens and hiding places must be removed from this earth. Their allies must be compelled to give them up, or they must be required to share their fate. Nothing but victory will suffice, because nothing but victory can be a just or moral purpose when the blood of so many of our fellow citizens, of our neighbors, has been shed in such a cruel and vicious way."
Still more telling is Taristano's fifth paragraph, where he adverts to the split in Christian ranks: "A small group of especially careless Christians has reverted to a form of ancient heresy called Gnosticism—a counterfeit sort of 'spiritual knowledge' that . . . at the worst hands the physical world over to the devil, to do with as he pleases, because only 'spiritual' things truly matter."
Touchstone's very next article is by Frederica Mathewes-Green, who is a columnist for Beliefnet.com, a Web site open to all faiths. This author's article gets its content chiefly from a Romanian priest, Father George Calciu, who explains the terrorist attack thus: "'It was the punishment of God.'" Fr. George then quotes from the book of Daniel: "He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity." The author concludes: "This gave me a lot to think about. For years, I've been thinking that the main thing America needs to do is be humble and repent. Here comes a blow that looks a lot like things God has done in the past to kindle that kind of response. . . . But no one, including Christians, is likely to draw such conclusions. Instead, we'll focus on how much we have been wronged, and smite our adversaries by our own considerable earthly power, and feel satisfied at videotape of young Arab men frying to death in Jeeps."
I put forward as a suggestion—it is nothing more—that the common source of these splits can be traced to people's belief (or non-belief) in man's ability to use coercion rationally, even in the realms of security and justice. Progressive opponents of the war seem to be most plentiful among those who are suspicious of educated elites and who would prefer to see power wielded by the democratic mass. Among liberals, the largest number of opponents seems to be found in the academy, where the anti-rationality of postmodernism shapes the culture most fully, leading our modern intelligentsia to assert that ideas are mere camouflage for motives of power. Among conservatives, the most full-bodied opponents are found among the paleo-conservatives, who place their reliance chiefly on faith and tradition and who dislike the rationality of modernity and the market. Among libertarians, opponents apparently come from those who do not trust the government to act rationally, perhaps because they subscribe to Friedrich von Hayek's theories concerning man's "fatal conceit," perhaps because they subscribe to James Buchanan's Public Choice theory regarding the behavior of government officials, Lastly, among Christians, opponents seem to come from those who feel we must bow to God's will and the workings of Providence rather than employing human determination and efficacy.
If this analysis has merit, then the events of September 11 may offer us an opportunity to bring about the most significant cultural realignment since the late Enlightenment, when men's belief in the efficacy of reason was shaken by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. In the realignment that followed, politics were so far set aside that a man who staunchly supported British and American liberties, Edmund Burke, could be seen as an ally of a man who worshipped the state, G.W.F. Hegel, because both opposed the Enlightenment epistemology of individualist empiricism.
If our own time follows a similar course, then we may be on the verge of rediscovering the wisdom Ayn Rand expressed when she protested that she was not primarily an advocate of capitalism, nor even of egoism, but of reason. And we may find ourselves in new alliances, where politics are considered minor differences that may be overlooked for more fundamental similarities based on tenets about the metaphysical nature of man and reality.
This article was originally published in the November 2001 issue of Navigator magazine, The Atlas Society precursor to The New Individualist.
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