Bush's Useful Idiots

Tony Judt has written a wide-ranging indictment of the liberal intelligentsia in this felicitously titled London Review of Books piece, Bush's Useful Idiots. We have made similar points about liberalism's strange place in American politics, especially in this recent review of Peter Beinart's new book. A few extracts of Judt's piece are pasted below, which we suggest you read in its entirety, with one reservation. While Judt's arguments are sharp, he fails to suggest why liberalism has ended up where it is, and therefore is reduced to simply wondering 'where liberalism went'. It is more appropriate not to look longingly backwards towards obsolescing ideologies, but to look forward towards developing a new body of ideas.

Selections:

"For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’."

"But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end."

"But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest."