The Resilience of the Adversary Culture

June 1, 2002 Tags: Islamism

The Resilience of the Adversary Culture

The terrorist attacks of September 11, whatever else they mean and
have wrought, provide a new vantage point for examining the recent
evolution and current condition of the American adversary culture.
This term, coined by Lionel Trilling in his 1965 book Beyond Culture,
refers to a discernible and durable reservoir of discontent, to a
disposition on the part of those Americans who habitually find the
United States--or at least its government--at fault in virtually
every conflict in which it is engaged. It is a culture whose
boundaries, both demographic and intellectual, defy precise
definition, but the concept has nonetheless been indispensable for
identifying a chronic domestic estrangement and the specific beliefs
associated with it.

As to the demographical boundary, most of those within the adversary
culture may be loosely described as intellectuals, or
quasi-intellectuals, and their followers; they are found in the
greatest concentrations on major college campuses and nearby
communities. Living near a campus generally inclines one to
overestimate the adversary culture's importance and influence,
whereas distance from such a setting tempts one to write it off as
inconsequential. A visit to a campus by someone not inured to its
atmosphere can illustrate the psychic distance between the two. About
five years ago, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked former
President George H.W. Bush what he had learned at a Hofstra
University conference about his presidency; Bush answered: "I learned
that there are some real wacko professors scattered out around the
country."

As to the adversary culture's intellectual boundaries, it is
generically far Left, its central animating views being unswervingly
anti-capitalist. For most of its 20th-century existence, these views
coincided with formal Marxist and less well-defined Marxoid
perspectives. But radical pacifists and anarchists were counted among
that culture, and with the collapse of Soviet communism and the
accompanying nadir of socialism, the mix of attitudes within the
adversary culture has changed and grown. Environmental,
anti-globalization and "multicultural" forms of radicalism have been
moving into spaces formerly occupied by conventional left-wing
parties and movements. Environmentalism fits the adversary culture
well, as we will see, because of its essentially anti-modernist bias.
Anti-globalization combines environmentalism and anti-corporatism on
a global scale to replace what used to be discrete anti-capitalism on
national scales. Multiculturalism fills the need to bind together the
several constituencies of the adversary culture, for no longer is
that culture dominated by white Protestants and Jews as it had been
before the first half of the 20th century.

So, too, has the adversary culture adopted post-modernism and
deconstructionism as the intellectual anchors for its politics. These
radically relativistic affections have been combined, curiously
enough, with denunciations of American society and Western culture
just as heartfelt as those of simpler days gone by. As before, these
condemnations rest on the non-relativistic assumption that there are
absolute standards available with which to condemn that society and
culture.

Adherents of the adversary culture can be found in a wide variety of
settings, organizations and interest groups. They include
postmodernist academics, radical feminists, Afrocentrist blacks,
radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, pacifists,
Maoists, Trotskyites, critical legal theorists and others. They often
have different political agendas but share certain core convictions
and key assumptions: all are reflexively and intensely hostile
critics of the United States or American society and, increasingly,
of all Western cultural traditions and values as well. The most
important among their beliefs is that American society is deeply
flawed and uniquely repellent--unjust, corrupt, destructive,
soulless, inhumane, inauthentic and incapable of satisfying basic,
self-evident human needs. The American social system has failed to live up to its original historical promise and, they insist, is inherently and ineradicably sexist, racist and imperialist.

It should also be noted that, for the most part, the adversary
culture took little notice of the collapse of Soviet communism, the
end of the Cold War and the retreat of state-socialist systems around
the world. Its increasing preoccupation with matters domestic
reflects the dearth of foreign alternatives to the alleged evils of
American society and capitalism. Of late, therefore, as suggested
above, critiques of globalization on the basis of its domestic
environmental and economic effects have become a substitute for more
explicit attacks on capitalism.

Nevertheless, the supporters of the adversary culture still tend to
sympathize with virtually every political force that opposes the
United States. These include the former Soviet Union, China under
Mao, Castro's Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, supporters of the uprising
in Chiapas, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia under Milosevic,
the PLO and various other anti-Israeli Arab groups, and, most
recently, even the Taliban. There have been occasional disagreements
among these critics regarding U.S. policy toward particular
adversaries: a few of them supported the Gulf War and more of them
the intervention in Kosovo. Most recently, some recognized that the
Taliban's hatred of the United States and all it stands for does not
necessarily make it an admirable ally or friend. Barbara Ehrenreich,
for example, was seriously disheartened that authentic enemies of the
United States were less than enlightened as regards the rights of
women: "What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist is that the
strongest response to corporate globalization and U.S. military
domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology."

But does any of this still matter? Many observers claimed in the
weeks after September 11 that the most remarkable thing about the
contemporary adversary culture is its silence. Hendrik Hertzberg, for
example, found that only "traditional pacifists . . . and a tiny
handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles" object "to the aims and methods
of the antiterrorism campaign. . . . Conservative commentators have
had a frustrating time of it rounding up the usual
blame-America-first suspects, because so few of those suspects are
out there blaming America first." Michael Kelly proclaimed "the
renaissance of liberalism" and argued that "what had been since the
late 1960s the dominant voice of left-liberal politics" has become
"marginalized" post-September 11. Even more pointedly, George Packer
argued in the New York Times Magazine:

September 11 made it safe for liberals to be patriots. Among the
things destroyed with the twin towers was the notion held by certain
Americans, ever since Vietnam, that to be stirred by national
identity, carry a flag and feel grateful toward someone in uniform
ought to be a source of embarrassment.

Loud dissent and telegenic demonstrations against the beginning of
U.S. military action in Afghanistan on October 7 were noticeably
muted, it is true--more so even than the modest protest accompanying
the Gulf War in 1991. But the adversary culture had not disappeared,
and as America's conduct of the war on terrorism gradually replaced
the images of the September 11 attacks themselves, it made a quick
comeback. The influence of the adversary culture has been most
obvious on the campuses, where anti-U.S. sentiments and statements
are conventional wisdom, and least apparent in towns and suburbs,
where its presence is all but absent. Generally speaking, the
adversary culture, entrenched in its academic strongholds and other
cultural institutions, still wields considerable influence even as it
has become increasingly isolated and weakened by recent defections.
In addition to the appeal of some of its messages of the moment, some
of the adversary culture's worldview has been absorbed over time into
what we casually call the mainstream through the media and, in a
different way, through the American commercial culture. (It is, for
example, commonplace for observers outside the adversary culture to
refer to the American international vocation as "imperial.") That is
why some observers had trouble locating the adversary culture after
September 11; they were looking in the wrong places.

They were looking, in particular, at the overtly political. While the
adversary culture still overlaps with the Left (old, new, and
left-over), a purely political definition does not do it justice.
Rather, the attitudes and beliefs in question also involve what is
peripheral to the political: a sense of identity, cultural norms,
matters of taste. Russell Jacoby's comment about alienation captures
what is distinctive about the adversarial disposition: "Alienation
once referred to social relations and labor, signifying an objective
condition. Later it turned into an irritation or annoyance. 'I am
alienated' someone will announce, meaning, 'I am unhappy or
uncomfortable.'"

Some Americans, it seems, have always been alienated; we should not
lose sight of the fact that many of the earliest American forebears
came here from the Old World precisely because they were alienated
there. A keen receptivity to the real or perceived injustices of
American society thus has a long tradition; high expectations and the
value placed on non-conformity have deep roots in American social and
cultural history. Strong beliefs in the perfectibility of human
beings and institutions have for centuries been an essential
attribute of the American view of the world, as has an indefatigable
optimism regarding the solubility of all social, political and
personal problems. The social critical temper of the adversary
culture has always fed on the high expectations that American social
and historical conditions have generated and nurtured, and such
expectations remain in place today.

The current adversary culture bears the imprint of the last high
watermark of American social discontent: the "Sixties." More than a
result of the Vietnam War, however, as is usually assumed, the
contemporary phase of the adversary culture owes its strength to a
period of great changes after World War II. In this most modern of
all societies, the pains and problems of modernity--especially its
corrosive effect on sense of purpose, community and identity--are
inseparable from the discontents that the adversary culture embodies
and projects. Since we may be sure that the next half century will
bear as much disconcerting change as the last half, it is a good bet
that, for better or for worse, the American adversary culture will
persist and thrive. Surely, the actions of a few dozen terrorists are
not enough to stymie it.

It was therefore inevitable that early proclamations of the decline
of the adversary culture would prove short-lived. Rather than
undergoing major change, the left-liberal side of the American
political community underwent a split after September 11. The
stalwarts of the adversary culture--Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Gore
Vidal and others--blamed the United States for the attack against it,
and some even cheered it. All their familiar ideas were on display,
as well: Vietnam War metaphors, therapeutic analyses designed to turn
murderers into victims overwhelmed by the "root causes" of their
deeds, appeals to oppose America's inherent racism and militarism,
and whatever other pet obsessions happened to be at hand. But there
were also new and important voices dissenting from the conventional
adversarial wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz put it: "September 11 served
as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical leftists of today.
What it did was raise questions about what one of them called the
inveterately 'negative faith in America the ugly.'"

Dissidents from the adversarial predisposition have included Michael
Walzer who, for example, emphatically rejects the idea that poverty
and inequality explain terrorism. He favors a
"cultural-religious-political explanation" that emphasizes the
obsession with an Enemy embraced by people who are "ideologically or
theologically degraded." He has even signed up, conditionally, for a
military campaign against Iraq. Christopher Hitchens has criticized
those on the Left who were reluctant to acknowledge that "the bombers
of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face." He reminds
fellow leftists that what Islamic militants "abominate about 'the
West' is not what Western liberals don't like." Ellen Willis, a
columnist for the Village Voice and a journalism professor at NYU,
has argued that "the lessons of Vietnam" do not apply to Afghanistan,
and favored committing ground troops in the war. Richard Falk has
argued that a U.S. military response to 9/11 could be justified and
himself sought to provide a legal-moral framework for "a just
response"--although he did feel compelled to observe that "a frenzy
in the aftermath of the attacks [is] giving us reason to fear the
response almost as much as the initial, traumatizing provocation."

As a result of all this, Michael Kazin has predicted the
disappearance of the prospect for a "unified left." Echoing
Hertzberg, Kelly and Packer, Andrew Sullivan reached the logical but
surprising conclusion that the Right was also split by September 11:

" . . . perhaps the biggest conservative victim of the war has been
cultural pessimism. Not long ago leading paleoconservatives were
denouncing America as a country . . . 'slouching toward Gomorrah.'
Moral decline was almost irreparable; civil responsibility was a
distant memory . . . the evils of feminism, homosexuality and
Hollywood were corroding the country's ability to believe in itself
and defend its shores. . . . The response of the American people to
the events of September 11 surely disproved these scolds. . . .
Surely what post-9/11 America has shown is that those who viewed this
country as socially decadent, morally confused, culturally bankrupt,
and in need of drastic spiritual revival were baldly,
incontrovertibly wrong."

Some conservatives, it seems, are not persuaded by Sullivan's
argument. The split on the Right persists--between those who justify
America's response to terror based on national interest, and those
who do so on the basis of a metaphysics of American exceptionalism.
Those of the latter persuasion have retained their cultural
pessimism, and still see the left-liberal establishment as a potent
negative element in American social life.

It is hard to know what proportion of left-liberals have allowed
newfound patriotic impulses to overcome their adversarial outlook in
the aftermath of the September attacks. More pertinent, perhaps, it
is hard to say how long the restraint of the dissenters will last. In
any event, most responses to September 11 from the adversarial Left
suggest the persistence of sentiments and attitudes traceable to the
late 1960s.

Of Course They Hate Us

Two major, closely linked arguments have been pursued among those on
the adversarial Left that converge in assigning ultimate
responsibility to the United States for the attacks. The first
proposition is that if Arab terrorists harbored profound hatred for
this country, this hatred had to be well founded; in other words, the
United States must be hateful if it is hated. This proposition has
provided a welcome opportunity to enumerate America's historic
misdeeds, which is what members of the adversary culture seem most to
enjoy. Many of those who maintain this position nonetheless believe
that not all hatreds are justified. They firmly believe in the
reality of irrational hate crimes committed against their favorite
victim groups. They apportion guilt and advocate severe punishment
for such wrongdoers.

The second proposition focuses on the alleged "root causes" of this
hatred. The root causes of terrorism and the hatred of the United
States (which shade into one another), adversary culture members
believe, should be understood rather than condemned. Emphasis on root
causes leads to a deterministic, therapeutic view of the terrorists
who are seen as "products spawned" by compelling social-political and
economic conditions beyond their control or full comprehension. They
and their beliefs are held to be products of authentic grievances:
poverty, inequality, backwardness and social injustice. (It is not
easy to explain how bin Laden, his associates, and well-educated
middle class suicide pilots fit into this argument, but never mind.)
The "root cause" approach also proposes that hostility toward the
United States is inspired by American support for corrupt and
repressive political systems such as those in Pakistan, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia--as if Islamic terrorists opposed to these governments
were anxious to replace them with political democracies, or as if
these regimes would not be more or less as they are without U.S.
support.

Responses of the adversary culture to September 11 illuminate well
the persistence of the convictions of its best-known figures. Their
moral indignation and anger focused almost entirely on the actions
and policies of the United States, and was largely devoid of
corresponding sentiments regarding its avowed and murderous enemies.
Gore Vidal thus observed that "the USA is the most corrupt political
system on earth"; bin Laden was merely "responding to U.S. foreign
policy." Elsewhere Vidal suggested that "You [the United States] keep
attacking people for such a long time, one of them is going to get
you back." A particularly curious form of this argument was proposed
by a speaker at a Green Party conference: "The World Trade Center
Disaster is a globalized version of the Columbine High School
Disaster. When you bully people long enough they are going to strike
back." According to Professor Thomas Laqueur of Berkeley, California,
"on the scale of evil the New York bombings are sadly not so
extraordinary and our government has been responsible for many that
are probably worse." Frederic Jameson argued that "the Americans
created bin Laden. . . . This is therefore a textbook example of
dialectical reversal." Susan Sontag was far more enraged by the White
House, our "robotic President" and public figures who stood united
behind him, than she was by the terrorists:

" . . . this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or
'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the
world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of
specific American alliances and actions. . . . The unanimity of the
sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American
officials and media commentators in recent days seems . . . unworthy
of a mature democracy."

Norman Mailer, always ready to outdo his peers, told a Dutch audience:

"The WTC was not just an architectural monstrosity but also dreadful
for people who didn't work there, for it said to all those people:
'If you can't work up here, boy, you're out of it. . . .' Everything
wrong with America led to the point where the country built that
tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed."

There was an unmistakable discrepancy between the volume of
compassion extended to the wholly unintended victims of U.S. air
strikes against the Taliban and the terrorists and the expressions of
compassion for the wholly intended victims of the suicide pilots.
American militarism thus managed, once again, to become a major theme
of the adversary culture. To the very end of the bombing campaign
there was an adamant refusal to accept the possibility that the U.S.
military could accomplish its purpose without wreaking
counterproductive bloodshed; rather, it was viewed as another display
of mindless and malicious destructiveness. Noam Chomsky, perhaps the
most durable and representative figure of the adversary culture,
proposed that the attacks of September 11 were eclipsed by the
American bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and
numerous other American atrocities. He asserted that "the United
States had killed thousands of innocent civilians in Somalia, Sudan
and Nicaragua--actions far more 'devastating' than the September 11
attacks--and was now trying to 'destroy the hunger-stricken country'
of Afghanistan." Edward Said, similarly prominent, made clear (in the
Egyptian daily Al-Ahram), that he sees the United States as a
genocidal powerwith a "history of reducing whole peoples, countries
and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust." Michael
Mandel, a law professor in Toronto, believes that, "The bombing of
Afghanistan is the legal and moral equivalent of what was done to the
Americans on September 11." Eric Foner of Columbia University could
not decide "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New
York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White
House." Michael Klare, a professor of "peace studies and world
security studies" at Hampshire College (Amherst, ma) became
"despondent" because "the United States was ratcheting up a strong
military response to September 11." He professed to be consumed by
fear "that U.S. military reprisals would set off a renewed cycle of
terrorist attacks and violence."

Anti-militarism has long been an attitude that adversary culture
Marxists and religious pacifists could share. So it remains today.
Thus the General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee
said: "[O]ur history teaches us that bloodshed leads only to more
bloodshed. . . . We call upon our president and Congress to stop the
bombing. . . . Our grief is not a cry for retaliation. Terrorism must
be stopped at its root cause." This too was the considered judgment
of Vivian Gornick (author of The Romance of American Communism):
"Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not
retribution." If force is not the answer, what is? Love and joy,
apparently. Alice Walker "firmly believe[d] that the only punishment
that works is love." Richard Gere, the actor, similarly advised: "If
you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick . . .
the medicine is love and compassion." Oliver Stone, however, detected
no illness; he called the September 11 attacks "a revolt." He equated
the Palestinians dancing on the streets at the news of the attacks
with those who publicly rejoiced at the news of the French and
Russian Revolutions.

Another oft-repeated theme of the adversary culture soon reappeared,
as well: that of America being untrue to its own best values. Thus
Russell Means, the American Indian activist who lead the 1973
uprising at Wounded Knee, said:

"It's what I used to see when I was behind the so-called Iron Curtain
touring Eastern Europe. It's what I used to see in Nicaragua and
Colombia . . . [namely] the ongoing deprivation of individual
liberties and violations of the U.S. Constitution by the Federal
Government . . . the government lost all constitutional
responsibility and has become an outlaw."

Terry Eagleton was equally convinced that "They [the Bush
Administration] will use the crisis as an excuse to trample on our
civil liberties", and the cover of Gore Vidal's new book, The End of
Liberty--Towards a New Totalitarianism, shows the Statue of Liberty
gagged with a U.S. flag.

Alexander Cockburn averred, yet again, as though the Cold War had
never ended, that the war was "about the defense of the American
Empire." Two feminists found no difference between the practices of a
religious police state and the influence of fashions on portions of
the population:

"Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they
enter the public realm. . . . During the 20th century, American
culture has dictated [sic] a nearly complete uncovering of the female
form. . . . The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness
of the ways in which women's bodies are controlled by a repressive
regime in a far away land, but what about the constraints on women's
bodies here at home . . . ? The burka and the bikini represent
opposite ends of the political spectrum."

Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was led to conclude that "there is an
escalation of the corporate takeover of the United States. The ground
and soil are ripe for a revolt by the American people."

The best example of an almost purely visceral response, in this case
to the flag and what it stands for, came from Katha Pollit of The
Nation, who, for one, did not join the newly unembarrassed patriotic
liberals. She revealed that "my daughter who goes to Stuyvesant High
School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly
an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag
stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." A physics professor at
the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) shared these sentiments:
"To many ordinary people . . . around the globe the U.S. has done
terrible things. . . . If I think about the flag, I have to think
about it from the point of view of those people." At Amherst College
war protesters (allegedly students from nearby Hampshire College)
burned the flag while chanting "this flag doesn't represent me."

It was not only the celebrities of the adversary culture who found
the events of September 11 an appropriate occasion for reaffirming
their animosity toward American society. One would not know it from
the early writings of Washington-based pundits, but there were
demonstrations on nearly 200 campuses and in several major cities as
a "nationwide network of more than 150 student antiwar groups . . .
[emerged] holding campus vigils, protests, and teach-ins." The
correspondence columns of local newspapers in and around college
campuses were flooded with letters expressing sentiments similar to
those of the better known critics of the United States quoted above.
These critics have a following.

Thus, a professor of journalism at Amherst regarded the attacks as
the "predictable result of American policies . . . [which] ignored
the suffering of Palestinians. . . . How can we fail to see that our
policy has created zealots and suicide bombers." He, too, was
convinced that the adversaries of the United States are helpless
pawns of social and historical forces; only the United States and its
amoral leaders have alternatives to choose from and can therefore be
held morally culpable. A professor in the sociology department at the
same university proposed that we must "find a way to reduce those
alienating actions whereby we create our own enemies." At a Haverford
College meeting on September 14, an emeritus professor suggested that
"the United States was the most violent nation on earth and ended by
saying, 'We are complicit.'" At a teach-in at the University of North
Carolina, "one lecturer told the students that if he were President
he would first apologize to the widows and orphans, the tortured and
impoverished and all the other millions of other victims of American
imperialism." University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen told his
students and peers that the attack "was no more despicable than the
massive acts of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government had
committed during my lifetime." Barbara Foley, professor of English at
Rutgers University, warned her students: "Be aware that whatever its
proximate cause, the ultimate cause [of the attacks] is the fascism
of u.s. [sic] foreign policy over the past many decades."

Members of the Middle East Studies Association, an academic
professional group, also reached the conclusion that the United
States bore primary responsibility for the terrorist attacks (which,
by the way, they refuse to call by that term). At the 2001 annual
meeting of the Association one panelist said, "We have not shown that
our actions differentiate us from those who attacked us." An elderly
professor in the audience declared, "'We ought to be reminded of our
responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and understand that we are
not so good', he received a round of applause." The moderator fully
endorsed his view.

The Attractions of Obscurity

The members of the adversary culture, famous and not so famous, have
something else in common, too, for the most part: an irresistible
attraction to obscure theorizing and arcane jargon. Two explanations
stand forth as to why many social critics prefer esoteric turns of
phrase and opaque abstractions to concreteness and specificity. One
is the parochial elitism of numerous academic intellectuals who write
mainly for one another and whose inaccessible language and
terminology "signifies" their vanguard status. The second explanation
may be the more important, however.

The discontent that animates many critics of American (and Western)
society, and that has become a major source of their sense of
identity and self-esteem, is murky and shapeless. Its origins may not
be clear even to those consumed by it; such diffuse and contradictory
grievances, impulses, unfathomable sentiments and personal
resentments are inherently difficult to express in precise and
accessible language. Form follows function: lack of clarity in style
reflects amorphous motives and beliefs; Jacoby calls them
"postcoherent thinkers." A statement of the "Transnational Feminist
Practices Against War" illustrates what he has in mind:

"As feminist theorists of transnational and postmodern cultural
formations . . . we offer the following response to the events of
September 11 and its aftermath: First and foremost, we need to
analyze the thoroughly gendered and racialized effects of nationalism
and to identify what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are being
enacted. . . . We see that instead of a necessary historical material
and geopolitical analysis of 9-11, the emerging nationalist
discourses consist of highly sentimentalized narratives that . . .
re-inscribe compulsory heterosexuality and the rigidly dichotomized
gender roles. . . . A number of icons constitute the ideal types in
the drama of nationalist domesticity."

It is among the attractions of obscurity that what people cannot
fully comprehend is more difficult to criticize and refute. But it is
also the case that some people are impressed by what they cannot
fully understand, what promises some great, lurking, not fully
penetrable revelation. A paragraph from the newly popular volume
Empire, co-authored by an American literary scholar and an imprisoned
Italian terrorist, provides further illustration:

"In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a
separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity
turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely
intimate. The process consists, in fact, of the moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the extreme. In the colonial imagination the colonized is not simply an other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon.  

Doubtless there are connections and affinities between the attractions of obscurity, profound political misjudgements and commonsense defying beliefs. As Orwell observed, only intellectuals are capable of believing certain kinds of nonsense. Could, for example, anybody without the benefits of higher education and not living in an academic setting believe (with Michael Hardt and Antonini Negri, the authors of Empire) that the 1992 Los Angeles riots were "the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the 20th century"?  
    
Then and Now

The adversarial generation of the 1960s holds on to a conception of America as malignant and inauthentic and a sense of identity of the fearless fighter for truth and social justice. This is the generation that had the opportunity and pleasure to glorify its youth by linking it to the good causes of the 1960s. Perhaps therein lies the key to its durability, and in their critical mass who came of age together and whose youthful idealism converged with the rise of idealistic social movements and causes of the time.
But age and mortality are taking their toll on the 1960s adversary culture; William Kunstler passed away a few years ago as did I.F. Stone and Eqbal Ahmad. Other influential representatives of this culture are aging; most are well over sixty, often seventy, including the Berrigan brothers, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, William Sloan Coffin, Angela Davis, David Dellinger, E.L. Doctorow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Stanley Fish, Tom Hayden, Frederic Jameson, Jonathan Kozol, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Michael Parenti, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Paul Sweezy, and Howard Zinn. Even Bill Ayers, the cheerfully unrepentant Weatherman-bomber, is approaching sixty. The beliefs of this aging subculture, however, are clearly being passed on to segments of the younger generation, no doubt in part because American society since the end of the Cold War has continued to produce high expectations (which cannot be met) and the corresponding disappointments that often turn into social criticism. Some young people are consumed by the same blend of incoherent discontent and diffuse idealism that characterized the protestors of the 1960s. They, too, seem to be in the grip of the conviction that "something is terribly wrong" with this society-a conviction that precedes the identification of any specific wrongs. When subsequently identified, the specific flaws become proof of the prior, underlying belief in pervasive corruption and nameless wrongs. 

This smaller generation of "peace activists" today also resembles earlier ones in that they appear to be not so much opposed to all wars but only those waged by the United States. Given their conviction that American society is a profoundly unjust system, any war its government may wage has to be inexcusable. However, should there appear on the horizon some new "national liberation movement" or militant cause that uses a congenial and idealistic rhetoric, this putative devotion to peace vanishes and is replaced by support for the new, just, liberating, and authentic revolutionary violence (Chiapas? Shining Path? Maoists in Nepal?).

A recent sympathetic portrait of such young people in the New York Times Educational Life supplement demonstrates how present attitudes replicate those prevalent in the 1960s. The "typical student activist" of our times portrayed in the article is one of the leaders of "Students for Social Equality." He "is fueled by a nagging anger over the fact that there are haves and have-nots, oppessors and the oppressed." (His father is a general contractor on Long Island, and both parents are Republican.) His favorite words are "love", "unity", "solidarity" and "justice", along with "beautiful"-as in "unity is beautiful." In his conversation with the reporter "he searches for the roots of his unrest." This activist and others like him, one radicalized by the writings of Howard Zinn, radiated "an ardor not seen for several decades." The main character in the article was smitten by an anti-globalism demonstration: "It was amazing how many people were out acting on their beliefs and coming together. It was beautiful." A protest at the military training center at Fort Benning, too, "was a really beautiful protest, really spiritual." Union Square in New York city became a "magical place of unity" at an anti-Afghanistan war demonstration. Among the activists, the reporter observed, "there is a lot of raging against the machine."

Many readers, at least of a certain age, will recall that "raging against the machine" was the main theme of Mario Savio's fiery oration during the Free Speech demonstrations at Berkeley in 1964. Then and now "the machine" stood for impersonality, lack of community and feeling, "profits above people" and the fear of being crushed by forces over which one has no control. Then and now, too, for some people the personal ultimately dwarfs, defines and displaces the truly political. American society will continue to generate a mixture of expectations, unease and discontent. That is the hallmark of its nature and its true modernity, and it found new expression in the peculiar dynamics of the personal and political in the adversarial responses to 9/11.

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