9-11: War May End the Primacy of Leftwing Culture

I spent the last week doing media, trying to help people make a little sense out of the military aspects of the current insanity. Maybe it did a little good. By academic training and first love, I’m an American cultural historian (Yale, Georgetown), and taught at Georgetown for fourteen years before moving to Seattle. Among my favorite courses there: “War and U.S. Society: 20th Century.” I’d like to share an approach from that course, then pose a question.

In that course, we never used the term “Home Front.” The subject was always “The Conduct of the American People.” Nor did we ever use the term, “War Hysteria.” Rather, to understand why people behaved as they did – perhaps why they’ll behave as they will – I offered four guidelines.

First, you rarely hear about the incidents and abuses that don’t happen. The people who don’t go out at night lynching neighbors and bombing buildings don’t make the news. Neither do the governmental depredations that never come to pass. I first became aware of this truth when studying for my doctoral comps. All the books cited the same outrages, usually quoting each other. How many outrages is too many? One. How many didn’t happen? Lots more.

Second, to quote an old Yiddish (or maybe it’s Chinese or Swahili) proverb, “There are more horses’ assess in the world than horses.” Peace or war, some people are jerks. Sometimes their jerkiness makes the news.

Third, it is impossible to understand why Americans behaved as they did (or will behave) without reference to prewar agendas. Sometimes these agendas are overtly political – the assault on the IWW during World War I, for example, conducted with the very non-hysterical blessing of ole Sammy Gompers. Sometimes they’re economic and cultural –- the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II as a means of “redistributing” their property. Sometimes the agendas are personal and psychological – the Bill Clinton style of draft-dodging, for example, constructing elaborate intellectual cathedrals to justify and evade the facts of physical and moral cowardice. If you’ve never read Jim Fallows’s “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” do look it up.

Finally, beware, always beware, the Professoriat, the Chattering Classes, the Intellectuals. Their agendas can be the most pernicious of all.

Sometimes they fall all over themselves to participate, as during the World Wars and (sadly) in recent months, some associated with the Weekly Standard, which seems determined to meet the same fate as the 1918 – 1919 “New Republic.”

Sometimes they fall all over themselves to oppose, as during Vietnam (its latter stages, anyway). Daniel Hallin’s The Uncensored War makes some dandy points here.

Sometimes they simply regard war as an opportunity to strut their intellectual stuff, to demonstrate their personal moral superiority, to sneer at their country and their less enlightened brethren. New York Review of Each Other’s Books, anyone?

But most of all, the academic and intellectual classes have witnessed, over and over again, the destruction of favored liberal and left agendas by war. World War I ended the Progressive Era. World War II finished the New Deal. Korea ended whatever Truman’s Fair Deal might have accomplished. The Great Society and Vietnam – nuff said. Desert Storm threatened (for a moment) the primacy of liberal and left culture as well as political agendas.

What next?

At issue here is the survival of what American culture has become: a rights-and-entitlements obsessed, victim-worshipping, psychologized affair in which anything goes and nothing matters . . . and in which discourse has been reduced to little more than the frantic pushing of accusation buttons: racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, whatever. And the politics and governance attendant thereon.

Could this world be ending, this world so favorable to the Intellectuals and the Pundits and the Professoriat? If so, how much of it will they try to salvage, and how?

To be continued, should anyone care to take me up on this.