Todd Gitlin at TPM Cafe reproduces parts of a talk he gave in November 2002 in which he tried to make the case for a sane anti-war rationale before the invasion. It’s difficult to do, because so much of our political discourse is about style rather than substance:
But the peace movement in its way is also slapdash. If there is war in Iraq, it seems to me that the odds of one or another catastrophe in the short, middle, or long run are terribly high, and the chances of a smooth, slick, low-cost, high-gain victory are terribly low, so surely, the moment cries out for a smart, extensive, inclusive popular movement against the gangbusters approach that the Bush administration favors. Surely, the sobriety and skepticism of the American people deserve organization and mobilization. But at some of the mass rallies, the strongest arguments against an Iraq war, which are pragmatic, are barely in evidence; and people of good will, religious, secular, whatever, are drowned out by various flavors of Old Left nostalgia. Much of the antiwar initiative was taken by left-wing groupuscules who cannot find it in their hearts to find fault with Saddam Hussein; who consider the no-fly zones that afford some protection to Kurds and Shiites illegitimate; who for that matter think the military action in Afghanistan illegitimate, and whose essential views amount to: U. S. out of everywhere, on principle. These Old Left remnants cherish their own version of bulldozer politics. That limits their potential—not just against the Iraq war, but against others that might well be in the offing as the Bush doctrine comes into play in the years to come….
I was one of the millions of people who marched on Feb.15, 2003, to protest the by-then inevitable U.S. invasion of Iraq, but it bothered me that the event was so coopted by the "left-wing corpuscules," as Gitlin calls them. I suppose that it’s inevitable that in a media, sound-bite age it’s the easily recognized cartoon characters who become the public face of any given political position or movement.
But the consequences are significant, because lots of people who don’t have the time or the energy to do their own research and reading and thinking make decisions based on style rather than substance. If I, who was so adamantly against the war from the beginning, felt estranged by the lefty, sanctimonious cant of the march and have avoided all public demonstrations against the war since then, should anybody be surprised that those who felt more ambiguously about the coming war were driven into the pro-war camp?
"If being against the war means being associated with these people, I’m for it," such people think to themselves. Or don’t think. Their antipathy toward the left style drives them unconsciously to accept the substance of the the pro-war argument, which was framed in all this naive idealism about spreading democracy and stabilizing the middle east.
Is this just the way or politics has to play out? Is there any hope of developing a sane, sensible, progressive politics that also has a style that attracts sane, sensible Americans rather than repelling them?
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