Leaving the Left Behind

How does one go about leaving the left? Is there a formal defrocking process? Are you officially drummed out of a camp somewhere in Berkeley? Do you have to turn in your gun and badge, affirm your belief in Mumia's guilt? Can you rip off your Che Guevara button (given yesterday's underwhelming anniversary of the good doctor's death, would anybody notice?), and throw it down in disgust, Dirty Harry-style?

Following Ron Rosenbaum's impassioned, non serviam to his former fellow travelers, these are no longer academic questions. "Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth," the New York Observer columnist writes, concluding his relationship with a left he blames for consciously downplaying the crimes of Stalin, Castro, and now Osama bin Laden.

Rosenbaum's conversion follows that of Christopher Hitchens, who grandly eighty-sixed his column in The Nation a few weeks back, scolding his co-workers "who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." And Hitchens in turn had recently been attacked by Martin Amis, who grouped his long-time friend in with leftists (including, at one time, Amis' renowned father Kingsley), who stubbornly laughed off the Uncle Joe's atrocities.

It's not clear where these and other refugees from the left will be able to go. Rosenbaum strongly implies that he is not growing the rock-ribs of a true conservative. As for Hitchens, his anti-Clinton barbs would gain him some new friends, but how long will anybody on the right tolerate his residual sympathy for the Palestinians? In any event, all people of good will, particularly readers of a magazine unsympathetic to both the left and the right, should be thankful that so many former leftists are throwing off their mental chains.

But is it too churlish to point out that they're making this gesture at the precise point in history when it is most meaningless? Radical Islam and Marxism/Leninism may share some intriguing tactical habits but there's very little in the Cold War playbook that points the way in the war on terrorism (which, when it ends, will almost certainly be called, and thought of, something other than the "war on terrorism"). It's hard to see how either the left or the right has gone very far in helping us comprehend this brand-new-but-also-ancient enemy. If anything, both leftists and rightists are remarkably similar in their insistence that we're facing a threat that is mainly materialist.

In both cases, this constitutes wishful thinking. For the left, eliminating the root causes of poverty and American imperialism will remove the motivations for terrorism. For the right, the hand of the market will eventually do, well, pretty much the same thing. (This is the view of the free-market right, at any right. The religious right at least recognizes the reality of a faith-based ideology; and Andrew Sullivan, in a famous think piece for the New York Times Magazine, came closest to providing the context for a religious/secular Cold War). That radical Islam is a remarkably compelling notion precisely because it obviates the material concerns that were at the heart of communism, that in addition to being (as Rosenbaum rightly notes) the oppressors of worldwide Muslims, bin Laden and company may be in a perverse way their fullest expression, is bad news that neither liberals nor conservatives seem to have digested fully. More than a year into our new war, nobody is quite sure what we're up against.

Perhaps the really valuable explicator here will turn out to be John Walker Lindh, a gift horse we have entirely failed to appreciate—young, disaffected, in league with the enemy, but willing to talk, as intriguing as Lee Harvey Oswald minus Jack Ruby. I'd trust Lindh's explanation of radical Islam's attractions before I'd listen to any of the blowhards of the left or the right—erstwhile, and perhaps future, enemies united now in their determination to fight the previous war.