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September 15, 2006
Tony Judt, in an article subtitled the Strange Death of Liberal America in the London Review of Books asks a good question that resonates in Australia:
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration's sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
Can't this question also be asked of liberals in Australia? Judt's op. ed. is noted by Anthony Lowenstein but it is not commented upon in his post. We have a state of exception justified by the War on Terror.
What does Judt say about the silence? He suggests that it has to do with:
....the collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.
This form of liberalism is what we would call social democracy in Australia.
Judt adds that since the Clinton Presidency in the 1990s:
the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre--- the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself---fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media.
Similarly in Australia: 2001---9/11---was the turning point.
Judt says that in today’s whilst America neo-conservatives generate brutish policies as they engage in the unilateral promotion of empire the liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. He adds:
So we have the discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world ---in Palestine and Lebanon---were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent.
So do Australia's, even though the Israeli stategy was to flatten Lebanon to preserve its own deterrent credibility.
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