Hitchens, skilled polemicist that he is, finds it more effective to lump together and dismiss all anti-war protesters as soft on fascism, fairness and subtlety be damned. Unfortunately, by letting the WWP organize most of the anti-war rallies and inviting people like Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky (people who reflexively oppose ANY U.S. intervention anywhere) as their speakers, the anti-war movement has effectively shot itself in the foot. It may be too late now, but perhaps the honorable anti-war people (Danner, Corn, Gitlin, et al.) ought to try to organize their own rallies and exclude the Chomsky-Clark fringe.

It's Pollitt's privilege to dismiss Hitchens out of hand, but so what? The moral failures of the Left that Hitchens has pointed out remain, and they're huge.

Is there any congruence whatsoever between what Pollitt wants politically, and that subset of what George Bush wants that is in fact morally defensible? Or is she so high on self-righteousness that she'll side to defend Hussein against Bush because she's more morally outraged by Bush's unilateralism than Hussein's regime of fascistic torture -- and the Europeans' aged-in-the-keg cynical acquiescence in it?

If the "anti-war" movement can't, ever, on any grounds, concede that Bush might be right about anything, then they had damn well better hope that by some miracle Bush never *is* right about anything. That'd save them the horrible experience of FALLIBILITY -- which we all know can never at all happen to the Left, only to the Right.

Nonsense like this made me leave Catholicism. Now I see it propounded by atheistic Leftists, and I'm reminded of James Joyce: "I said that I had lost the faith ... but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"

"Is there any congruence whatsoever between what Pollitt wants politically, and that subset of what George Bush wants that is in fact morally defensible? Or is she so high on self-righteousness that she'll side to defend Hussein against Bush because she's more morally outraged by Bush's unilateralism than Hussein's regime of fascistic torture -- and the Europeans' aged-in-the-keg cynical acquiescence in it?"

I don't know. But, say. Have you stopped beating your wife?

"If the "anti-war" movement can't, ever, on any grounds, concede that Bush might be right about anything[...]"

If I had a peg leg and a parrot, I'd be...Wait. Don't tell me.

Incidentally, I don't recall ever having inquired into Katha Pollitt's religious views, so perhaps you know something I don't. But this weblog, at any rate, is not written by an "atheistic Leftist."

You certainly do jump to conclusions a lot. Do you find it makes your life better? Does it impress your friends?

Regarding the organizers of the anti-war rallies:

I'd hoped that since McCarthy's era, we'd gotten past the assumption that associating with Communists made one unfit for human company. The key to the rallies is pretty simple. Hundreds of thousands of people are protesting this war. The politics of the organizers are irrelevant to that fact.

Well, I have attended two anti-war rallies and seen two more on C-SPAN, and I have to say I was repelled by most of the speakers. I am not interested in "overthrowing the capitalist regime" in "fascist America." Nor I suspect are most other Americans. I do not care to have my cause linked to the aims of Hamas and Hezbollah. Nor I suspect do most other Americans. I do not subscribe to 9/11 conspiracy theories involving Mossad and the CIA. Nor I suspect do most Americans. I do not wish "Death to Israel." Nor I suspect do most Americans. I do not care to have Ramsey Clark represent my position...

The point being, I hope it is clear by now, that all that kind of stuff is guaranteed to repel most Americans and doom the anti-war movement to failure. I would have thought this would be obvious to anybody.

Pollitt was fairly vehemently against the Afghanistan war ("Put out no flags", 9/20/02), so it's more than a little disingenuous of her to use those who didn't as a shield to get after Hitchens, who was right on the money on that issue. Hitchens may be a bore, but I think he got Pollitt right, at least as far her foreign policy views.

Let me see if I have this straight. First, Pollitt was against the invasion of Afghanistan (which I noted at the time, and disagreed with). Therefore, it's somehow extra-bad for her to now point out that Hitchens is exaggerating when he imputes that all the opponents of war on Iraq were against the Afghan war as well.

Hm. No, I don't think I agree with this proposed rule of political discusssion.

I'm also not sure what it means to use something "as a shield to get after" someone, but it does suggest a certain convoluted quality of thinking.

Personally, I often find that although I disagree with somebody about something (let's say, Pollitt's "Put Out No Flags" essay), I may find them later saying something with which I agree. By and large, I try not to react to these shocks by saying "You aren't entitled to say that, because you were once wrong about something!" Perhaps your experience is different.

Dinosaurs are extinct. The sun rises in the east. Christopher Hitchens makes a lot of unjustifiable generalizations about the "left". I find these statements to be reasonable, documentable, and true, whether they're being made by Katha Pollitt, John Derbyshire, Stone Cold Steve Austin, or Norman Vincent Peale. Your mileage may vary.

What I meant was, I felt like she was writing like she was for Afghanistan when in fact she wasn't. Convoluted writing -- and maybe reading and thinking -- on my part.

I agree with the rest of what you say. Pollitt can be wrong one time, right the next. I felt like she was saying she's been right all along.

Also, I said I thought Hitchens got _Pollitt_ right, not the entire anti-war left. But maybe that wasn't worth saying.

Patrick: it's not "jumping to conclusions", it's impatience arising from about 20 years of watching this sort of ideological row, starting at Harvard College in the early 1980s.

The Left's pretty scathing about what it considers the religiosity of the Right. Fair enough, if that comes from some sense of actual rationality and fallibility. But the price of conceding fallibility is that you have to be willing to say, when it's necessary, "X was right on that issue, and I was wrong." That's the hardest thing in the world for us ego-besotted human beings to say. Scientists aren't more virtuous than other people, but Nature has this wonderful way of kicking us in the pants when we get our ideas wrong, so we have at least some degree of humility beaten into us. The empirical feedback for bad thinking in politics or economics isn't nearly as clear as it is in an controlled laboratory experiment, so it's easier for politically concerned people to lapse into what amounts to religious thinking.

And boy, do they ever. The sound of somebody connected to reality is somebody honestly facing uncomfortable facts. Orwell did that; Hitchens tries to do that; but the left, in America, is mostly *not* doing that. Which is why it reminds me of an erzatz version of Catholicism. Catholic authorities are infallible, too.

In real sciences like biology, the price you pay for actually being in some sort of dim contact with reality is that you end up having your ideas about that reality proven wrong a lot. That is the hardest part of science -- not the math, not the long hours, not the (relatively) low pay by comparison with other trades that have equally stiff entrance requirements, but just having to tear down your own ideas every few years. But the price you pay for not being willing to do that is that you become divorced from any kind of external reality that might continue to renew your understanding. The price of "infallibility" is that you get more and more wrong over time, but become less and less conscious of it. That's *the* defect of any faith-based religion.

Most 'enlightened' folk I know are happy to concede that point about an actual religion, but they then turn around and adopt what amounts to a secular religion -- some political ideology or another, that fills the empty "God slot" in their hearts and minds. That's (perhaps) harmless most of the time, but when the issue is literally "what do we need to do to make sure there's some chance we won't get hit with biowarfare or an atom bomb in one of our cities," it becomes a lot more important to not adhere to some faux-religion in which War Is Never Right.

Looking at the left, in its unthinking "dissent" from Bush that does nothing to advance human freedom or the legitimate defense of America, I don't see much room for empirical flexibility. And Hitchens, however self-impressed he may well be, seems to be saying the sorts of empirically inconvenient things that the Left won't let itself hear any more.

Pollitt will never admit that Bush was right about anything -- anything at all. If I'm wrong, I'd be delighted if you can find any instance whatsoever in her writing where she says, for instance, "I was publically opposed to fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the consequences seem to have been much better than I thought they'd be." Please excuse me for not holding my breath though, because I don't think you can find that quote because I seriously don't think it exists.

Pollitt's always right, even when she's empirically wrong. So's the anti-war left. That's what reminds me vividly about my former Catholic Church -- it has the same way of avoiding the humiliation of error; it just ignores it.

It's always entertaining to beat on the straw-man Left, the one composed entirely of people who think in slogans like "War Is Never Right."

Of course, as a strategy for engaging with reality, it's about on the order of saying that everyone to the right of Tom Daschle is a Klansman.

I quoted Pollitt on Hitchens because I found it interesting that she seemed to, as I said, land a few blows. (In retrospect, glancing at Matt Welch's blog, I suspect I may have subconsciously purloined the turn of phrase from him, since he linked the the same piece with nearly the same words--before I did.)

Now what I'm seeing in my comment section is a lot of hooting and stomping about how nothing Katha Pollitt says can be any good, because she's ultra-bad in the following ways. Followed by citations of, well, distinctly varying specificity. Since I don't recall claiming that All Leftists Are Geniuses or announcing that Katha Pollitt is my spirit guide, I'm starting to run out of patience with the lectures. I'm all for dialog and argument among people of different political views, but this is starting to feel less like conversation and more like technique.

Patrick:

Is it really all that surprising that people took your link and used it as a jumping-off point to talk about Katha Pollitt instead of the article itself? I mean, yeah, we should consider the content of the message rather than the messenger, but that's not usually the way these kinds of things go. If you'd posted a link to a speech where Bush made a bunch of substantive arguments for why we should attack Iraq, would you be surprised if people started talking about Bush instead of about attacking Iraq?

Erich:
MizD says hi.

Yes, Pollitt may not be the most convincing spokesperson. Yes, Hitchens is blatantly unfair in lumping all anti-war activists under one banner. But the serious problem remains: keeping the radical extremists from dominating the debate. Most of what the public hears from the anti-war movement comes from reports and broadcasts of these rallies--which, as far as I'm concerned, are positively horrifying in the message they convey. Stalinoid rabble-rousers and hot-headed Hezbollah boosters will turn away Americans faster that a flood of raw sewage. David Corn, Todd Gitlin, and others are right about that, but nobody wants to listen to them.

"Nobody wants to listen to them"? Jeez, it seems to be Topic A in a lot of the places I frequent. I personally have linked approvingly to Left-critical pieces by Gitlin, Walzer, etc., so frequently that I know people who think I've become some kind of attack conservative.

The left: full of self-criticism. In, of course, a massive departure from the usual state of affairs. Next up: Israeli politics highly factionalized! And, get this, water is wet.

I certainly have little patience for the RCP and similar gargoyles, but as Max Sawicky has ably argued, sometimes it's not the most important issue. No, you won't find me listening respectfully to any speakers praising Hizbollah, but if somebody organizes a big, broad-based anti-Iraq-war march in NYC and I go, I'm not going to squeal "eek, cooties" because somebody is wearing a button I disagree with.

I'm old enough, and I was a precocious current-events buff young enough, that I remember the Vietnam iteration of all this stuff. Mainstream America was never going to support the anti-war movement as long as it was run by weirdos who nominated Pigasus for President. Except within just a year or two, lots of mainstream Americans had changed their minds. I agree that it's important not to let out-there sectarians hijack broad-based issues, but it's also important not to waste too much energy on heresy-hunting. To reverse the polarity, I'm not opposed to school vouchers on the grounds that school vouchers are supported by armed neo-Nazi lunatics in Idaho; I'm opposed to school vouchers based on the case made for them by their more reasonable supporters. And if I decide those supporters have convinced me to change my view, I'm not going to be dissuaded from changing my view by the continued existence of voucher-supporting blood-and-volk sociopaths in Cour d'Alene. 95% of the time, fringe nuts are a cause's problem, but not the problem.

Josh: good point.

I didn't mean you, Patrick. I'll amend my post to: "too few are willing to listen". But I still maintain that leaving the organizing and the speakers' platform to the likes of the WWP and Ramsey Clark and the "Death to Israel" types really does hurt the cause. I've marched in two of these rallies and was quite creeped out by much of the rhetoric. When I turned on C-SPAN, I saw more of the same. Common sense ought to tell anyone that most fence-sitters are going to be turned off by that. I'm amazed that more people in the anti-war movement can't or won't see that.

"It's always entertaining to beat on the straw-man Left, the one composed entirely of people who think in slogans like 'War Is Never Right.'"

I wish it were a straw-man. But consider Pollitt's arguments against war in Iraq:

"They're afraid of big casualties, American and Iraqi; they fear it will turn the whole region into a bloodbath; they fear Saddam Hussein will attack Israel, and Israel will strike back; they believe it will mean long-term occupation of Iraq, with terrible consequences for our own society; they fear it will backfire, increasing terrorism against the United States and fueling Islamic fundamentalism. They think it's a substitute for, and diversion from, the more difficult task of going after Al Qaeda."

What are these, if not the arguments against war in Afghanistan, recycled? We'll produce a huge backlash from the Moslem world. We'll bog down in a quagmire. We'll create a huge bloodbath. It's a macho diversion from the *real* problem -- which a year ago was "dealing with the root causes", and now, I guess, has migrated to "the more difficult task of going after Al Qaeda".

What are these, if taken seriously, but arguments against any war in real life at all? There is no instance I know of in the history of the United States where success in a major war was certain, where there was no argument to be made for our enemies, or where there was no opportunism and corruption on our side -- not in "the last good war", World War II, or in "the war to free the slaves", also called "the war of Northern aggression". If we wait for the sort of certainty that Pollitt wants, we will be ipso facto pacifists, and (in Orwell's stinging formulation) objectively pro-fascist. Pollitt's publishing this stuff in _The Nation_; no doubt she thinks it will find an audience that agrees with her. What audience is she writing for, if not the left? What is this, if not constitutive pacifism?

Nowhere is it admitted that we might actually have a right to *act* to defend ourselves from future threats. Nowhere is it considered that several of the risks she cites could remain intact or potentially grow worse if we leave Hussein in power. Nowhere does she face the possibility that a war with Hussein may be practically inevitable, and that our real choice might only be between fighting one now and fighting it later under worse conditions. Nowhere does she consider just how bad her own policies could be if *they* go wrong.

She manages to score off Hitchens himself. That's not hard to do, given his famously undisciplined and inflammatory rhetoric. But I still don't trust her moral or political judgement further than I can throw her. And, while I'll take your word that she's not typical of the Left, the fact that she's probably going to get applauded for writing this in the _Nation_ makes me wonder just what she *is* supposed to be typical of.

I'd rather side with an intemperate, imprecise lout -- or be one -- but nevertheless make a moral stand against the suicide of the West, than be on Pollitt's side, and stand for handing the world to armed tyranny by default.

P.S.: Hi Josh! Please say hi to MizD. I'm really not *always* a cranky ranting guy. Honest. :^}

Bryant says:

"I'd hoped that since McCarthy's era, we'd gotten past the assumption that associating with Communists made one unfit for human company. "

Funny, I thought his sins were (1) Trying to have people fired from non-governemtn jobs, rather than merely pointing out their ideas and allegiances and letting others decide what to do about them and (2) making false accusations.

Patrick says:

"I certainly have little patience for the RCP and similar gargoyles, but as Max Sawicky has ably argued, sometimes it's not the most important issue. No, you won't find me listening respectfully to any speakers praising Hizbollah, but if somebody organizes a big, broad-based anti-Iraq-war march in NYC and I go, I'm not going to squeal "eek, cooties" because somebody is wearing a button I disagree with."

If you agreed with the cause, would you go to a march organized by the KKK?

Hang out with murderers and apologists for murderers (which the RCP assuredly are)
and people will question your judgement and taste. And rightly so.

For the record, I haven't been to anything organized by the RCP.

But the analogy between the RCP and the KKK is flawed. The KKK is an organization with a well-documented history of violence. The "Revolutionary Communist Party" founded by Bob Avakian is an organization with a well-documented history of publishing pamphlets and writing "All hail Albania, bastion of socialism" on outdoor walls in Seattle.

(In point of fact, the only violence I'm aware of the RCP participating in was when they betook themselves to the Seattle shipyards to try to mobilize the proletariat, speaking their usual mixture of pomo Enver Hoxha gibberish. Through bullhorns, of course. The proletariat responded by beating them up.)

Anyway, I appreciate your eagerness to safeguard my moral integrity, but you're missing the distinction I'm making. No, I'm not terribly interested in endorsing or participating in events or causes that are being spearheaded by creatures like the RCP. But on the other hand, I'm not interested in left-on-left witch-hunting, either. Any broad-based coalition is going to include some weirdos. For instance, innumerable conservative coalitions and causes these days include participation by one or another of the many entities owned or controlled by world-class authoritarian creep Sun Myung Moon. Does this obviate the arguments and moral claims of every other person involved in these coalitions? Certainly not.

I'd have to agree with much of what Eric says. Their only straw men if the categorizations are baseless.

Asking someone if they've stopped beating their wife is simply not the same as asking "If the US and UN don't support a hard line against Iraq, are we facilitating his acquisition of weapons of mass destruction?"

I don't see a lot of rousing support for Saddam Hussein, but the Stand Down site that you've linked to is flush with people who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

No, Iraq doesn't have WMD. The only reason they want them is because they feel threatened by us. The only reason they'd use them (or threaten to use them) is if we backed them into a corner. These aren't straw men. Stand Down is full of this sort of stuff.

Ralph I think a better question would be, "Would you go to a march that you knew the KKK was going to attend."

Do you give up on a cause you believe in because unsavory people agree with you on that issue, or do you press on and hope people can tell the difference?

Once again, the mere attendance of the extremists at the rallies isn't the issue. The ORGANIZING of the rallies by the extremists and their MONOPOLIZATION of the SPEAKERS' PLATFORM, and the damage this does to the anti-war movement's effectiveness, is the issue. If their repellent rhetoric can turn off a peacenik like me, I'm certain it is turning off millions of fence-sitters.

Why must we make things so easy for our opponents?