Ackerman/Gitlin manifesto of liberal guilt

Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have attracted a lot of attention with a document billed as "manifesto for liberals in the waning Bush era." The manifesto is a response to an essay by Tony Judt arguing that most of America's liberal and centrist intellectuals were useful idiots for Bush.

The truth hurts. Stung by Judt's harsh words Ackerman and Gitlin wrote something with the catchy title "We Answer to the Name of Liberals."

"No faaiiiir" is a bad way to start any manifesto:

As right-wing politicians and pundits call us stooges for Osama bin Laden, Tony Judt charges, in a widely discussed and heatedly debated essay in the London Review of Books, that American liberals -- without distinction -- have "acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy." Both claims are nonsense on stilts.

Here's the shorter version of the manifesto:

1. We opposed the war all along.
2. Israel has a right to exist.
3. We are not pacifists.
4. The president is using his illegal war as a pretext to take away our civil liberties.
5. Signing statements are an affront to the rule of law.
6. The war is distracting us from domestic issues.
7. We owe every citizen the means to a decent standard of living.
8. Everyone should be equal under the law.
9. Voter suppression is a big problem.
10. The president is in denial about global warming.
11. The administration is at war with science.
12. Reason is good.
13. Torture is unnecessary.

I can't object to any of these principles.

However, it irritates me that this so-called manifesto appears to be motivated primarily by spite at Tony Judt's blunt assessment of America's recent intellectual history. Yes, Gitlin and Ackerman were early Iraq war skeptics, but even they were relatively mild and measured in their critiques.

It seems petty to pen a manifesto to exculpate yourself and your friends from a generally well-founded critique of the American left under Bush.

"We Answer to the Name of Liberals" exists to assuage the guilt of its signatories for not resisting harder and sooner.

Comments

[piton]

I think the issue here is whether Tony Judt's "blunt" assessment is intellectually honest. Judt throws around quite a bit of generalization in his essay, generalization that requires a reponse. Perhaps that was the intent of Gitlin and Ackerman's essay--to point by point establish what the American left has been doing, beyond the generalized smears that Judt represents as truth.
I think to say that Gitlin and Ackerman's essay is to "assuage the guilt of its signatories for not resisting harder and sooner," is itself a problematic and sweeping generalization, on par with Judt's.
I've almost always agreed with both your politics and your philosophy, but I can't shake the feeling that your response is itself, in part, motivated for some reason, by spite. Is this anger in reponse to those who did not "[resist] harder and sooner"?
Maybe we have responded "harder and sooner," and how can you claim you know we haven't?
It should be noted that Gitlin and Ackerman's essay is not written for the "[authors] and their friends" alone, insofar as the list of signatories is open to the public.
I actually used both of these essays in an introduction to philosophy class to illustrate both healthy dialogue, and more importantly, as the basis for a lesson on logical fallacies (Judt's essay).
Call this a friendly disagreement.

[Sven]

generalization that requires a reponse

Sure, sure, but the the response be any more lame? /chandlerbing

"What happened to the kind of in-your-face liberals who'd pen public manifestoes and stick up for their principles?"

[Hurried huddle and scribbling] "Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis? It's right here!"

[ballgame]

piton: I completely agree.

By not distinguisthing between the distinct groups of the American 'left', Judt's essay risks doing precisely what he claims to be criticising: namely, providing ideological cover for neocons to claim that 'liberals' bear just as much responsibility for the neocon Iraqi invasion as the neocons themselves.

There are three 'left' groups which one would need to distinguish for a legitimate analysis: media liberals, 'liberal' politicians, and genuine progressives. They overlap to some extent, but the first two suffer from the debilitating flaw of being vetted by the corporate establishment, and the extent to which their allegiance to genuine liberalism is subsumed by subservience to their corporate paymasters is open to legitimate question.

Failing to acknowledge this fundamental issue places you at risk for absurdities such as Judt invoking Paul Berman and Thomas Friedman as somehow being representatives of American liberalism.

I think it's far more useful to point out the corporate vetting process to which 'liberal' voices are subjected to than to criticise American liberalism as a whole for its supposed failure to stop the neocon assault on American principles. When looked at in that light, the Gitlin-Ackerman essay may be a useful counter to neocon claims that 'liberals did it too!'

[Ykcir]

When you disagree with an essay, the proper response is not to march into battle behind a phalanx of signatures as if this was a matter of world-historic consequence.

You write a critical essay in response.

Anyone else is pretentious and pathetic.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

The authors say that they need a manifesto to define liberalism because it is so misconstrued and shabbily treated. They say it's time for the left to redefine itself. Frankly, if liberal intellectual establishment had been sticking up for those principles clearly, forcefully, and effectively, there would be no need for a manifesto. People would know where they stood.

All intellectual history is generalization. Instead of countering Judt's specific examples of mainstream liberal figures siding with Bush, the authors construct a document asserting that they, and the others undersigned, were right all along.

That's a pretty shabby strategy, unless they're prepared to cite evidence that they were in fact speaking out forcefully rather than acquiescing to the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Let's say that the authors of the manifesto and the signatories can all point to long lists of publications denouncing the Bush administration's foreign policy early, often, and in the strongest possible terms.

The list still doesn't address Judt's targets: The liberal hawks, The pro-war New Republic, so-called centrists like Thomas Friedman, etc.

[ballgame]

But if it walks like a cat and meows like a cat, maybe the better response is to point out that it's not a duck.

[Jeffrey Zacko-Smith]

Brilliant assessment, and I think you are very much right on. It seems to be more an instrument of personal explication than anything, not that there is something wrong with that, per se...

[Christmas]

The list still doesn't address Judt's targets: The liberal hawks, The pro-war New Republic, so-called centrists like Thomas Friedman, etc.

And the real problem is that these are still the dominant figures of the American left. The New Republic is still considered a respectable liberal publication, and despite its falling subscription numbers its writers and editors have more prominence and visibility than those at Mother Jones, The American Prospect or The Nation. Thomas Friedman is still listened to as though he were a legitimate thinker instead of a clownish buffoon. And Hillary Clinton is the presumed frontrunner for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. I mean, Jesus Christ, if the most outspokenly hawkish Democrat this side of Joe Lieberman gets elevated to the head of the only party the left's got, that's pretty much game over.

Judt wasn't saying that there were no war critics on the American left. He was saying that what few were there didn't matter - that they either had no voice or were effectively silenced and ostracized by their louder, more hawkish counterparts. That this could still be true at a time when two-thirds of the public thinks the war was a mistake is an outrage, but if you look at the dividing line of who's considered "the far left" today versus who's merely "liberal," the difference is between who opposed the war from the start and who tried to shut them up.

[Gary Sugar]

I think Judt's language is too general throughout the article. Whatever. Is that cause for a manifesto?

Judt's argument isn't just that most American liberals were silent or complicit. He argues that most American liberals readily abandon their liberal principles to justify illiberal policy in the Middle East because they love Israel. I believe it's mostly the pro-Israel bias part that made the signers of this silly manifesto so angry.

[Ismael]

Here's the shorter version of the manifesto:

1. We opposed the war all along.
2. Israel has a right to exist.
3. We are not pacifists.

-------

does this trasnlate to fuck those arabs, Israel always right or you are appeasing the terrorists?

what happens to equal justice for all? Human right, freedom of speech?

( oh that's right. that mean we have to fuck Israel for what they have done if one would put liberal agenda in intelectually honest way)

[Sven]

Frankly, if liberal intellectual establishment had been sticking up for those principles clearly, forcefully, and effectively, there would be no need for a manifesto.

Exactly. There's been some discussion about Max Cleland's (God bless 'im) frank admission that he voted for the Iraq resolution out of political expediency and against his own better judgement. Granted, voting against it really must have felt like pissing into the wind at the time, especially for a politician from Georgia. But such moments are the makers - or breakers - of long-term credibility.

[Utica]

remind me again why israel has a right to exist? right in the middle of the arab world? for us, it's an issue or righting wrongs done to the jewish people, but why is it appropriate to respond to an attempted genocide (by europeans) with the further colonization (again, by europeans) of african land?
we were complacent about iraq. we marched and blogged, but we (vast vast majority) decided that keeping our jobs and middle class lifestyles was more important than stopping this war. in retrospect, why not admit we were wrong? further, why not use this terrible cock-up to question our attitudes towards the broader middle-east? we could start by at least soberly judging whether or not we should continue to militarily support a colonial nation whose very existence remains the primary rallying cry of most anti-american and anti-european sentiment.
muslims were displaced so that european jews could live a comfortable existence far far away from europe. that would be enough to raise eyebrows on its own, but it doesn't help that in so short a history, the nation of israel has shed a staggering amount of blood, and there is absolutely no reason to think it will stop doing so. (did the heinous bombing of lebanon really not cost israel ANY international support?) our unquestioned miliitary backing of european colonialism in africa has done more to discredit us in that region than maybe even the iraq wars have. if we want to solve the problem of islamic terrorism (not to mention the problems of widespread poverty and poor health care), it would help if we stopped standing idly by as tens of thousands of arabs get massacred over and over again.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Israel has a right to exist because it's a country, like Canada, or Germany, or the United States. It's part of the community of nations. There's no alternative.

Most countries don't have glorious origin stories. The United States and Canada stole theirs from the native inhabitants of the land, but it doesn't follow that these two countries don't have a right to exist. Of course, these countries also have an obligation to to right by the descendants of the people they usurped/slaughtered/impoverished, etc. Same with Israel.

Iraq had the right to exist too, and the partitioning of Iraq will be just one more unjust consequence of the US invasion.

[Uncle Kvetch]

I couldn't agree more with Lindsay (and Christmas and others) on this. Thank you

I started to sour on Gitlin some time ago--in the aftermath of 9/11, in fact, when he was one of those on the left trying to claim mindless flag-waving as a "liberal" virtue.

As has been pointed out on other sites, the fact that Israel's right to exist needed to be addressed in the second paragraph of the manifesto tells me all I need to know. This is the kind of purely reactive politics that has kept the left marginalized for so long: "We are not anti-Semites!" "We are not traitors!"

Apparently the American "left" still can't come up with anything more substantive than "All the horrible things the other side is saying about us aren't true." Seems to me that Judt's point stands.

[Gary Sugar]

why is it appropriate to respond to an attempted genocide (by europeans) with the further colonization (again, by europeans) of african land?

That was a good question sixty to eighty years ago. But now, there are millions of Israelis who were born there. Nothing good can come from questioning their right to self-determination in the place where they were born and live. I agree that the onus is on Israel to get out of the occupied territories. That's taking sides enough.

[cfrost]

I would like to think all this matters in a country where Spiro Agnew and everyone else before and since knows that phrases like “pointy-headed intellectuals” and “effete corps of impudent snobs" are certain vote getters.

I'll bet that had all the signatories of the manifesto committed a collective protest self-immolation on the capitol steps, the Iraq invasion would not have been delayed by one minute.

[Utica]

i am flummoxed by some of the support of israel. to say that there is no legitimate argument for uprooting people who are born of the land would have more sway if israel hadn't done exactly that upon its founding less than a century ago. even further, they continue to make refugees of civilians, year after year. southern lebanon is blanketed with bombs, most of them dropped in the two days before cease-fire, and people supporting israel have the nerve to say that israelis are natural citizens now and it would be very immoral, very immoral indeed, to move them from their homes.
this moral asymmetry needs to stop. just because white colonialists (and they remain, generations later, white colonialists) would put up a hell of a fight before leaving the territories they've occupied doesn't mean they have a right to stay. it doesn't mean they have a right to go around the region bringing destruction to anyone who's still a little miffed that they have the land in the first place.
another poster pointed out that the u.s. and canada were former colonial empires that became nations. but, um, we killed most of the indians, killed pretty much all of them. here's why they stopped fighting it: because our superior weapons allowed us to believe that we were justified in taking what we wanted just by virtue of wanting it. it was a diseased frame of mind that allowed us to devalue indigent life because we were so strong that nobody could stop us. and it is happening again, those exact same arguments. we look the other way because we see it as an inevitability. BUT WHITE PEOPLE CAN EASILY STOP KILLING DARK PEOPLE SIMPLY BY STOPPING. and israel would be much more motivated to stop killing arabs if they didn't have the world providing all-encompasing military and political support, regardless of their increasingly hostile attitude towards the people from whom they took the land.

[Utica]

i am flummoxed by some of the support of israel. to say that there is no legitimate argument for uprooting people who are born of the land would have more sway if israel hadn't done exactly that upon its founding less than a century ago. even further, they continue to make refugees of civilians, year after year. southern lebanon is blanketed with bombs, most of them dropped in the two days before cease-fire, and people supporting israel have the nerve to say that israelis are natural citizens now and it would be very immoral, very immoral indeed, to move them from their homes.
this moral asymmetry needs to stop. just because white colonialists (and they remain, generations later, white colonialists) would put up a hell of a fight before leaving the territories they've occupied doesn't mean they have a right to stay. it doesn't mean they have a right to go around the region bringing destruction to anyone who's still a little miffed that they have the land in the first place.
another poster pointed out that the u.s. and canada were former colonial empires that became nations. but, um, we killed most of the indians, killed pretty much all of them. here's why they stopped fighting it: because our superior weapons allowed us to believe that we were justified in taking what we wanted just by virtue of wanting it. it was a diseased frame of mind that allowed us to devalue indigent life because we were so strong that nobody could stop us. and it is happening again, those exact same arguments. we look the other way because we see it as an inevitability. BUT WHITE PEOPLE CAN EASILY STOP KILLING DARK PEOPLE SIMPLY BY STOPPING. and israel would be much more motivated to stop killing arabs if they didn't have the world providing all-encompasing military and political support, regardless of their increasingly hostile attitude towards the people from whom they took the land.

[Utica]

i am flummoxed by some of the support of israel. to say that there is no legitimate argument for uprooting people who are born of the land would have more sway if israel hadn't done exactly that upon its founding less than a century ago. even further, they continue to make refugees of civilians, year after year. southern lebanon is blanketed with bombs, most of them dropped in the two days before cease-fire, and people supporting israel have the nerve to say that israelis are natural citizens now and it would be very immoral, very immoral indeed, to move them from their homes.
this moral asymmetry needs to stop. just because white colonialists (and they remain, generations later, white colonialists) would put up a hell of a fight before leaving the territories they've occupied doesn't mean they have a right to stay. it doesn't mean they have a right to go around the region bringing destruction to anyone who's still a little miffed that they have the land in the first place.
another poster pointed out that the u.s. and canada were former colonial empires that became nations. but, um, we killed most of the indians, killed pretty much all of them. here's why they stopped fighting it: because our superior weapons allowed us to believe that we were justified in taking what we wanted just by virtue of wanting it. it was a diseased frame of mind that allowed us to devalue indigent life because we were so strong that nobody could stop us. and it is happening again, those exact same arguments. we look the other way because we see it as an inevitability. BUT WHITE PEOPLE CAN EASILY STOP KILLING DARK PEOPLE SIMPLY BY STOPPING. and israel would be much more motivated to stop killing arabs if they didn't have the world providing all-encompasing military and political support, regardless of their increasingly hostile attitude towards the people from whom they took the land.

[mudkitty]

Let's get back to the New Deal and punt.

[burritoboy]

One problem is that this manifesto isn't actually a manifesto. It's simply a collection of disaggregated statements. The various opinions aren't founded in anything that ties them together. You might as well write a "manifesto" that declares that "Krispy Kreme is great" and "We like Deadwood" and "Jessica Alba is smokin' hot". OK, but all that is meaningless unless there's some reason or theory that makes all of those necessary positions - i.e. Jessica Alba MUST be smokin' because of A, B and C which is also why Deadwood is awesome and so on. This ain't that.

[BenA]

Judt wasn't saying that there were no war critics on the American left. He was saying that what few were there didn't matter - that they either had no voice or were effectively silenced and ostracized by their louder, more hawkish counterparts.

Exactly. And it's extremely telling that the occasion for this "manifesto" is not the continuing powerlessness of the war critics, but rather liberals being called out by Judt. Did Judt paint with too broad a brush? Perhaps. But the manifesto's response, which is to ignore all the examples Judt provides of important liberal hawks, and simply say "nobody here but us doves" is to much more profoundly miss Judt's main point.

That the signers of this statement are more upset about Judt than about, say, the continuing refusal of the Democratic Party to take a united stance against the war in Iraq--or even against torture--goes a long way toward explaining why Judt felt moved to write his piece in the first place.

[Count Zero]

Gem of the morning on CSPAN:

Mark Steyn, Author, “America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It”

Calls G.W. the "most forward thinking leader he knows". I choked when I heard that one.

[ptcruiser100]

At the high risk of being accused of being an anti-Semite the placement of "Israel's right to exist" as the number two point in the Gitlin and Ackerman manifesto helps, at least for me, to clarify their relatively mild opposition to the Bush Administration's run-up to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, it reinforces my belief why so many liberals, especially those who belong to the punditocracy, either supported or faintly opposed invading Iraq.

If Israel has a right to exist in the manner and meaning of those who utter the phrase then the Palestinians have an equal right to return to their homelands and to establish a Palestinian state. The acceptance of the reality of the existence of Israel does not mean that one must accept any policy put forth by the Israelis or their supporters as justified because Israel has a right to exist. At the very least it cannot drive U.S. foreign policy decisions.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Yeah, Dubya'a forward thinking. Got his eyes on the Prize. The Rapture...