Why Michael Can't Read: Defining the American Left -- Part I
By David Horowitz
March 14, 2005
Editor's Note: Why Michael Can't Read: Defining the American Left -- Part II will be published March 16, 2005 on GOPUSA.
---
Professor Michael Berube is one of many fierce and shallow critics of our new database -- DiscoverTheNetwork, which is a comprehensive guide to the political left. In a recent attack (web site) on our site (on March 2) he reveals once again the intellectual laziness of the left when it comes to engaging opponents in, well, intellectual argument. On the other hand, tenured radicals like Berube have lifetime jobs and captive audiences, so what is their incentive not to be lazy?
When DiscoverTheNetwork was unveiled on February 15th, Berube was one of many leftwing bloggers to attempt a riposte with this mindless, tongue-in-cheek, assault (web site) focusing on one page in the website that featured a hundred or so individuals profiled on the site. Forget that the website is the product of years of thinking about the left and that its rationale has been laid out in a series of books beginning with Destructive Generation, which I co-authored with Peter Collier, and including The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions and Unholy Alliance (published last fall). Forget, too, that the new website, the result of tens of thousands of man-hours of work, is itself an attempt to redefine the political spectrum in a way that brings our political language into closer relationship with the reality it seeks to describe. That, in particular, it makes an argument for changing a situation in which radicals like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore are habitually described as "liberals" by mainstream media, along with ideological feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Argument? The left isn't interested. In a collective hissy fit (web site) the leftwing "critics" like Berube responded to the posting of DiscoverTheNetwork with howls of ridicule and anguish, fixating on a picture grid (web site) that appeared on the Individuals search page as the focal point of their ire. The grid had committed the unpardonable offense of "lumping together" a fraction of the individuals profiled in the base. As it happens, these individuals had been selected because they were famous and therefore recognizable, and thus likely to entice browsers of the base to enter its interior pages and view the content inside (each picture served as a link to a profile).
Berube's assault was typical. It was conceived (ineptly as it happens) as a satire of the alleged absurdities committed by the site's authors, and thus not as a serious argument. Berube guffawed over the fact that Barbra Streisand (web site) and Katie Couric (web site) were included in the base, as though no one could take these women seriously (imagine if conservatives had tried that) and because they (along with other leftists) were part of a site that included Islamic radicals like Sami al-Arian (web site) and the "blind sheik" Abdul Rachman. (web site) Al-Arian is the imprisoned North American leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad (web site) and Abdul Rachman is the convicted head of the Islamic Group (web site) which tried to blow up 200,000 commuters in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels a dozen years ago, and actually bombed the World Trade Center for good measure.
Behind the posturing, two real issues are at stake. First, in compiling a comprehensive encyclopedia of the left is there a legitimate rationale for including the full range of American leftists from radicals to moderates (all currently mislabeled "liberals")? Second, is there a rationale for including Islamic radicals like the aforementioned terrorists along with Americans who disapprove of terrorism (or like Berube, who disprove of terrorist tactics while locating their own strategic enemies in the environs of Pennsylvania Avenue)? Obviously, the second question is the one that has really got the leftist goat, so we will address it first.
Both Sami al-Arian and the "blind sheik" Abdel Rachman, as Michael Berube certainly knows, are no strangers to the American left. Indeed, al-Arian's Coalition to Protect Political Freedom was the spear-head of the anti-Patriot Act movement. Al-Arian was a colleague and comrade of the leaders of America's legal left which includes the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Now that al-Arian is in jail, where he belongs, his organization is headed by a longtime National Lawyers Guild (web site) executive (and fellow radical), Kit Gage. (web site) The "blind sheik," Abdel Rachman has been championed and abetted in his terrorist enterprises by a hero of the academic left, Lynne Stewart, (web site) who -- while under indictment -- toured American university campuses as a guest of their law school faculties. (web site)
How easy is it to be a guest of law school faculties like Stanford, as Lynne Stewart was? Ask Clarence Thomas and Judge Bork. The reason an indicted terrorist can get such invitations (and conservatives usually can not) is that law school faculties are dominated by leftist professors like Michael Berube who are linked by one or two degrees of separation to long-standing radicals like Lynne Stewart -- and thus no more than three degrees -- to terrorists like Omar Abdul Rachman and his Islamic Group.
Are these degrees of separation important? Of course they are, and our database recognizes that fact. We have identified and distinguished Totalitarian Radicals, like Ward Churchill, (web site) who supports the terrorists from Moderate Leftists like Bill Clinton, (web site) who fought the terrorists. The New Republic's editor Peter Beinart (who is not yet in the database) is such a moderate. Beinart is currently leading a movement to get moderate leftists ("liberals") to dissociate themselves from leftwing individuals, organizations and publications (try CounterPunch) (web site) who support the terrorists, and among whom are prominent leaders of the broad "anti-war" (web site) left of which Michael Berube is also a part. We applaud Beinart's efforts and note that if successful they would create much more healthy degrees of separation than the existing ones. We wait for Michael Berube to join him.
In fact I have made a detailed and lengthy case for including Islamic radicals in a database on the left in my most recent book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (web site) I even included in this book a lengthy portrait, "The Mind of the Left," which traced the continuities in radical thought from the generation of Stalinist intellectuals, like Eric Hobsbawm (web site) (an icon of the academic left) through Professors Noam Chomsky (web site) and Todd Gitlin (web site) who hate each other but also share a common hatred of America (by which I mean "actually existing America" and not some fantasy of an American future shaped by radicals).
It is this common anti-Americanism that makes American radicals allies of radical Islam in their attack on the war to bring freedom to Iraq. Both think of America as the Great Satan (and Israel as the Little Satan) -- the root cause of social evil in the world. It also makes American radicals allies of convenience with Arab fascists like Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden described this collaboration in a fatwa issued on al-Jazeera TV just before Tony Blair and George Bush removed Osama's bloody ally in Iraq: "The interests of Muslims and the interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the crusaders." He had in mind the ten million leftists worldwide who went into the streets a month earlier to save Saddam's bacon.
As a not unimportant footnote, my conclusion that the left is currently defined by its anti-American and anti-Israel agendas was recently confirmed (web site) by an academic leftist, Andre Markovits, in an insightful essay, "The European and American Left Since 1945," which appeared in the leftist magazine Dissent. (web site) But radicals like Berube can't be bothered to actually read anything that ruffles their feathers, let alone be concerned about the fact that their entire political focus since 9/11 has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook. (Doubters can consult the archives of The Nation, (web site) The Progressive and any number of leftwing sites on the web to confirm this.) Not a single leftwing journal or blogger, for that matter, noticed Unholy Alliance, or addressed its arguments, despite the fact that there is no better known critic of the left than myself or that I have focused millions of words on widely trafficked website to their activities and attitudes. It is only because I have now constructed a website with pictures reflecting the same conclusions they have been roused from their torpors.
More thoughtful people than Michael Berube were initially puzzled about the principle of inclusion behind DiscoverTheNetwork and the famous grid, which led me to the decision to modify it. (web site) I did this not by excluding any of the leftwing individuals already in the database -- but by introducing five categories to the grid that differentiated the spectrum of the left. These categories are
1. Totalitarian Radicals: Ward Churchill, Alexander Cockburn, Abul Rachman
2. Anti-American Radicals: Katrina Van Den Heuvel, Jane Fonda, Mumia Abu Jamal
3. Leftists: Hillary Clinton, Bill Moyers and Justice Ruth Ginsburg
4. Moderate Leftists: Bill Clinton, Peter Jennings, Maureen Dowd
5. Affective Leftists: Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Martin Sheen
Of course I never fooled myself into thinking that Berube and other leftists would be satisfied by these distinctions. In their minds, the first two categories are "McCarthyism" and last three don't describe "leftists" at all. These are liberals.
But are they? In fact, the entire database DiscoverTheNetwork.org (and a lot of my analytic work on the left contained in previously referenced books and in articles on the web) is designed to show that the common usage of the term "liberal" is a calculated obfuscation by leftists to provide themselves with an advantage in the political contest -- an advantage that conservatives obligingly (and infuriatingly) seem willing to give them.
------------
Editor's Note: Why Michael Can't Read: Defining the American Left -- Part II will be published March 16, 2005 on GOPUSA.
--------------------
Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.