Coming from a different political place than Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens but sounding some of the same notes (see this post), British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma gets prickly about Radical Chic, vintage 2006:
The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines. [emphasis mine]
Buruma is calling for a “loyal opposition.”
Unfortunately, “progressives” and the netroots don’t recognize such a stance: they have decreed that unless you’re against All Things Bush, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
That’s the tenor over at Arianna’s place, too.
This will not end well. And there will be a lot more heartache, and a lot of blood on the floor.
2 comments ↓
what seems to be happening is a call for a left of center coallition to emerge, as their is a right wing one in the States.
The Republican party there is made up of Fsical, Religious, Libertarian and other factions united against “the left” and “liberals” and anything with Clinton as the suffix or prefix.
The problem is, that that coallition having survived for some 40 years is now on the brink of collapse and falling to the (relatively) Left of centre coallistion of the Democrat party.
The Democrats themselves are sharply split over Social, Religious and Economic grounds, and that coallition is being held together by a knowledge that the other sides guy (Bush) is worse.
I see this as a cross roads….. and it is now as clearly in focus as ever - do we continue with and go further with the American model of two parties being braodly left wing and broadly right wing with an almighty scrabble in the center?.
Or does everything fracture, like in Europe. Will we see perhaps 10 parties making up every conceivable position (right economics and social liberal, left and liberal, authoritarian right, authoratrian left, ad infinitum).
I think we could survive with a broadly two party system in the UK, witout the degeneration, under one condition - Labour moves off the Tory patch. If Labour came back to being anti-means testing, higher rate of top end tax, bring back social housing, end top-up fees, end the market in the NHS and Education….. if all that happened i think you would be able to secure the coallition of the left.
Without it?, we have a hung parliament for the forseeable future, the dissafected left contiinues to leave labour and drift to Respect and other socialist parties or to the Lib-Dems. We then enter, possibly, a seven year period with the Liberals holding the balance of power with no representation of the Economic left at all, anywhere.
Whatever happens the utopia of a united left backing Blairs project will not happen, even if Brown takes over.
Al
[...] On the failure to grapple with the stakes (which explains the popularity of “radical chic, vintage 2006“): The standard radical critique of American assertiveness ends up embodying the ethnocentrism it professes to transcend. Intent on ascribing its own disaffection to militant Islam, it fails to grasp the latter’s ideological character. (p. 73) [...]
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