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."

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