Chomsky's celebrity status helps explain the persistence of his political beliefs, reinforced by the favorable response of audiences who take pleasure in the combination of moral certitude and fulminations.

The Younger Generation

Nine years after the Soviet empire imploded, radical leftists and anarchists alike were thrilled by the publication of Empire (2001), written by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The jargon-ridden volume was not merely an example of resistance to disillusionment, it was a major effort to revitalize radical leftist values and beliefs. As Alan Wolfe put it, "Empire is best understood as an attempt, using Marxist jargon, to bring back to life . . . anarchism and particularly the more destructive forms of anarchism . . . ." Two major themes animate the book: the impassioned reaffirmation and romanticization of political violence, sanctified by the evil it was designed to combat. Negri and his supporters (and predecessors in the 1960s) argued that given the "essential" or "inherent" violence of capitalism, violent actions against it were morally unproblematic. Negri, a leader of the Red Brigades--which in the 1970s committed numerous high profile terrorist acts in Italy--was charged with armed insurrection and given a prison sentence (which only required him to spend nights in jail). In the 1970s he provided a remarkable example of false consciousness, imagining himself as a member of the Italian proletariat:

I live the life of the sniper, the deviant, and the worker who doesn't show up at his job. Every time I put on my ski mask, I feel the warmth of the proletarian, worker community around me . . . . Every action of destruction and sabotage seems to me a manifestation of class solidarity. Nor does the eventual risk bother me: rather it fills me with feverish excitement as one waiting for his lover. Nor does the pain of my adversary affect me . . . .

Negri's status as a convicted felon doubtless added to the attractions of the book, seen as he has been by his admirers as a fearless man of ideas as well as action. Rather than ignored as an expression of discredited revolutionary fantasies, Empire has "come as close to becoming an international best seller as a university press book . . . is likely to get", Alexander Stille noted in the New York Review of Books.

A shallow and muddled utopianism probably added to the appeals of Empire, as it promised "a revolution no power will control--because bio-power and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."

Among other self-proclaimed former revolutionaries, the case of Bill Ayers is especially noteworthy. His memoir, Fugitive Days (2003), was a comprehensive record of the radical beliefs of his generation of activists. But he differed from many former radicals who, with the passage of time, retreated from their virulent youthful commitments and convictions. Ayers recalled the bombing of the Pentagon with undisguised nostalgia: "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them." Che Guevara was among his role models, who "spoke to us every morning from a huge poster above our bed." He was among the privileged youths coming of age in the 1960s who found middle-class life unbearably stultifying and inauthentic: "I think back to my childhood, to the houses in trim rows and the identical lawns and the neat fences. . . . Where we lived . . . the grass was always green, the moms were always smiling. . . . Our kitchen was sparkling. . . ." To overcome decisively such suburban, middle-class inauthenticity, he declared that "the personal is political, and we meant that . . . everything was part of a grand experiment in liberation. . . . I felt suddenly transported . . . swept along by the dream of peace and the captivating idea of social change . . . ." The disappointments of private and family life converged with the discovery of social-political injustices such as racism and the Vietnam War; these injustices vindicated the smoldering alienation from the suburban, upper-middle-class life that preceded the war and the discovery of racial inequalities.

Following his emergence from the underground, Ayers became a tenured professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. While his current way of life is not compatible with setting off bombs or hurling rocks at policemen or shop windows, his old beliefs and commitments remain cherished and a source of an enduring moral identity. The persistence of these commitments is further indicated by expressing admiration at the end of his memoirs for Jamil al-Amin (Rap Brown), Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, Mumia Abu Jamal, Anthony Ortiz and Leonard Peltier--most of them convicted murderers.

The "Old Guard" sought historical justification for the sufferings imposed by communist systems and movements; the young radicals were enamored by heartfelt, authentic political violence in the service of noble ends.

The Islamic Factor

It is among the peculiarities of the present day cultural-political climate in the United States and other Western countries that old-leftist sympathies for various communist states and movements have to varying degrees been transferred to the Islamist movements and adversaries of the United States. This development has been rather paradoxical, since the progressive, secular beliefs of both the old and new Left are hard to reconcile with Islamic reverence for tradition and the religious fanaticism of contemporary Islamic radicals. Yet the Arab-Islamic adversaries of the United States have become new objects of sympathy and solidarity for some figures on the Left, enlisted among the many "victims" of American policies who further vindicate hostility to the United States.

Following 9/11, the "root-cause" school held the United States responsible for the terrorist attacks it was subjected to and simultaneously became a champion of Arab-Islamic causes. Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who belongs to this school, is best known as the unsuccessful defender of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the global jihad, sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for conspiring to wage a terrorist war against the United States. Like the late William Kunstler, she became "a movement lawyer" who "didn't just defend the legal rights of her clients; she also advocated their politics", as George Packer noted in the New York Times Magazine. She became Rahman's lawyer at the urging of Ramsey Clark, who also deserves our attention on similar grounds. Subsequently, Stewart was indicted for helping Rahman communicate from prison with his followers. In Stewart's eyes, Packer wrote, Rahman was "a fighter for national liberation on behalf of people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism. She came to admire him personally too . . . ." As other radicals, she was irresistibly attracted to the enemy of her enemies. She was propelled, she said, by her true goal to always be "on the right side of history." That entailed an abiding hostility toward capitalism, which she described as "a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless; an enemy motivated by insatiable greed . . . ." She also said, "I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous." Her radical sympathies and support for convicted terrorists, domestic and foreign, did not make her an outcast in the legal or academic world.

Ramsey Clark, the U.S. attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has in common with Lynne Stewart an avid interest in defending the adversaries of the United States, domestic and foreign, but the evolution of his political attitudes is more complex. After his career as attorney general, he joined William Kunstler to represent two of the so-called Attica Brothers accused of killing a guard during a prison uprising. He also provided legal assistance to Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb general indicted for war crimes, and gave legal advice to Slobodan Milosevic. More recently, Clark joined the team defending Saddam Hussein, of whom he made warm remarks while he was still in power: "I've met with him four times, probably averaged two to three hours at a time . . . . [H]e is reserved, quiet, thoughtful, dignified you might say, in the old fashioned sense", as he was quoted in the New York Observer. In a Face the Nation interview, Clark refused to describe Saddam as an evil force. "I don't judge people as good or evil", he said. He displayed no such reticence in his judgments of American policies and politicians.

It is not self-evident why Clark became an embittered critic of the United States. During the Vietnam era he prosecuted prominent opponents of the war such as Dr. Spock, William Sloane Coffin and Muhammad Ali, and he might have come to regret this, given his emerging political convictions. Also significant, soon after becoming attorney general, he dropped the case against Judith Coplon, who was charged with passing secrets to a Soviet lover. It was none other than Clark's father who brought the case against Coplon when he was attorney general. Approaching eighty, it is safe to predict that Ramsey Clark will persevere in his beliefs.

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