In my experience, it’s the self-described “liberals” who will drive you the craziest of all when you are trying to have a reasonable dialogue about questions of power, politics, and policy. In debating racism, for example, it’s far better – I find – to have to talk to a flat-out bigot who is open in his disdain for African-Americans or Latinos (or fill in the blank) than to be subjected to the sweet rhetoric of a “liberal” urban social worker or school administrator who claims to be deeply concerned for inner-city children and parents but doesn’t believe that those children or parents are personally and culturally capable of engaging in democracy or worthy of meaningful public investment in their communities.
In my experience, it’s the self-described “liberals” who will drive you the craziest of all when you are trying to have a reasonable dialogue about questions of power, politics, and policy. In debating racism, for example, it’s far better – I find – to have to talk to a flat-out bigot who is open in his disdain for African-Americans or Latinos (or fill in the blank) than to be subjected to the sweet rhetoric of a “liberal” urban social worker or school administrator who claims to be deeply concerned for inner-city children and parents but doesn’t believe that those children or parents are personally and culturally capable of engaging in democracy or worthy of meaningful public investment in their communities.
If I have to choose between the openly sneering redneck who tells you he just can’t stand black people and acts accordingly and the white “friend of black people” who claims with a smile to know that most blacks are decent but flawed people who “just aren’t ready” for jobs or college or political power (or fill in the blank), I’ll take the former every time. Their open hatred is a much less powerful and significant obstacle to African-American equality than is the condescending pseudo-affection of the supposedly anti-racist liberal. It’s the liberals who set the most relevant and insidious barriers to racial equality.
And curiously enough, the liberals are actually much more resistant to genuine root-and-branch anti-racist arguments at the end of the day. The conscious racists can sometimes be turned to serious anti-racism but with the former…forget about it…their “smiling faces” --- the name of an excellent Motown song from the 1960s [or 70s] warning African-Americans to beware of false friends in the liberal community --- can’t be dented from the left.
It’s the same thing with capitalism. During my many years as a traveling Marxist adjunct professor, teaching at numerous colleges and universities, I began to notice that I was having my best and most useful dialogue with self-described “conservatives,” that is “pro-business” types who identified all too unfortunately with obscenely wealthy plutocrats and other aristocratic parasites. My most strained and unpleasant interactions were with self-described liberals, many of whom claimed to be uncomfortable with business or capitalist values but who nonetheless clung to the notion that business hegemony and capitalism were (a) irrefutably inevitable facts of life but (b) significantly susceptible to democratic and humanistic correction and progress.
The business enthusiasts and I agreed on the essentially egoistic, regressive, authoritarian, and rapacious nature or essence of the capitalist system. The difference was that I thought and think that that system is thoroughly evil and should be overthrown by a popular revolution (or whatever), whereas the business guys sort of liked it all and expected to become rich one day (since many of these students were in training to be engineers [or were already engineers taking night classes to get their full bachelor’s degrees], many of them have probably made out fairly well). This admittedly big moral-ideological difference aside, we could agree on the nature of the beast.
Not so the liberal students, many of whom I taught as the token radical in a graduate program in “Human Resources and Industrial Relations.” These students, most of whom already had their bachelor’s degrees from first or second tier colleges and universities (places like University of Wisconsin and Notre Dame) seemed convinced that we could square the circle of the bourgeois system and put a caring and human face on capitalism. Their often highly educated – really indoctrinated – take on the system’s supposed capacity for humanization made them far more resistant to radical-democratic thought. Many of the business loving students I’ve been in contact with since are one or two downsizing’s away from serious root and branch radicalization. Not so the liberals, who are ideologically inhibited by their faith in the democratic and humanitarian potential of the American System and the benevolence of its corporate overlords. Nobody believes in the system and its masters like the liberals.
All of which is a rather long-winded way of bringing me to mention an odious comment made by the celebrated liberal Harvard (director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center) human rights professor and academic media star Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on May 2 of this year. At the end of an article that purported to define a reasonable balance between civil liberties and national security in the post-9/11 world, Ignatieff concluded with the following gem of insufferable wisdom: “we are fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of democratic society and preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be.” “The rule of law,” Ignatieff intones, “is not a mask or an illusion. It is our true nature.”
This, I take it, is why “our” Iraqi Viceroy Paul Bremer has passed an order to, in Noam Chomsky’s words, “place the [Iraqi] economy effectively in the hands of western (mostly UAS banks and multinational companies.” It is to preserve democracy and the rule of law that Bremer has imposed a 15 percent flat tax “which, apart from its injustice,” Chomsky writes, “bars the way to desperately needed social spending and reconstruction.” And of course these glorious objectives are also behind our determination to maintain a long-term major military presence in Iraq, maintain a huge diplomatic mission there, and generally permit only the most watered down and superficial sovereignty for the Iraqi people for the indefinite future.
I find Ignatieff’s use of the word “prize” to be pretty interesting in light of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy planners' oft-quoted reference to Middle Eastern oil resources as the world system's grand “strategic prize.” The U.S. global control that hegemony over the “strategic prize” deepens is the biggest reason “we” are establishing permanent military bases and a client state in Iraq as the chief outcome of a the war that was sold to the American people on thoroughly deceptive and therefore anti-democratic grounds.
Any number of good open American imperialists will be happy to acknowledge this in no uncertain terms. They are thankful, no doubt, for the useful spectacle of liberal human rights professionals like Ignatieff, who are willing to advance the neo-Wilsonian fairly tale claims of democratic and humanitarian intent that have proved so convenient to the Bush administration after the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The fairy tale is resoundingly rejected by the Iraqi people. Late last summer, Gallup conducted a face-to-face interviews with 1,178 Baghdad residents. By the Washington Post’s account, fully “five (5) percent of those polled said they believed the United States invaded Iraq ‘to assist the Iraqi people,’ and only 1 percent believed it was to establish democracy there” (Walter Pincus, “Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows,” Washington Post, November 12, 2003, p. A18).
This was well before numerous recent authoritarian U.S. outrages, including the post-Fallujah repression and the prison revelations. One wonders if the number of Baghdad residents who see things Ignatieff’s way would break one half of one percent today. Time to export some liberals to the Middle East. Let it begin with Ignatieff and his friends at the Kennedy School.