Obama wins over the ‘decent left’

When candidate Obama selected Samantha Power to be his foreign policy adviser, this was a clear signal that he endorsed the idea of liberal imperialist intervention that she embodied. In contrast to Bush’s “failed” interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Power stood for a more adroit application of imperial power. Like Obama, she thought that the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised but did little to offer resistance to it. Indeed, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy that she has long been associated with has collaborated with the Pentagon in figuring out how to deploy anthropologists and other academic experts into the battlefield in order to deal with restive native populations.

Among the first proponents of liberal imperialist intervention, best known as the ‘decent left’ in Great Britain, to get on the Obama bandwagon was Marc Cooper, an enemy of the Latin American revolution who has cheered on outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy bent on subverting genuine democracy in Venezuela and elsewhere.

(UPDATE: Just to avoid any confusion, I have replaced the words “labored mightily on behalf of” with “cheered on” in the sentence above. I have never accused Cooper of working for the NED, the CIA or any other such agency of the US government. I have only claimed that he shares their desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba.)

The British “decent left” has also shifted its allegiance from the Republican Party to Obama’s muscular liberalism. His more obnoxious supporters can be found at “Harry’s Place”, a blog infected with hatred for political Islam and the radical left. One of them, a Likudist who signs his posts David T., recently chided Alice Walker in an entry titled Nutters: “We’re Already Disappointed by Obama” for her temerity in stating:

Each time Mr Obama has said “we will kill” Osama bin Laden I have felt a testing of my confidence in his moral leadership. And I support him, and demonstrated that support, to the very limits of my finances and my strength. Could it be that, like millions of children around the globe, who are taught “Thou shalt not kill”, I am reacting with disappointment and shock to someone blatantly declaring their intention to kill a specific person?

One can understand why David T. would be upset by Alice Walker given his complaint on October 30^th: “I’m sorry, but I have now completely lost faith in this Government’s ability to counter the Islamism in the United Kingdom.”

One of the earliest “Marxist” supporters of the invasion of Iraq was Norm Geras, who helped write the Euston Manifesto. He too is smitten with Obama and has also rebuffed Alice Walker in a November 6^th entry. It appears that the “decent left” and the Republican right are both wedded to the methodology of “talking points”. Time after time, I have seen some salvo directed against Hugo Chavez repeated by Cooper, Geras, Harry’s Place and the like. Apparently, a dispatch from the Israeli press helped wean Geras away from Dubya into the “change” camp:

Here you can listen to some former generals of the IDF and Mossad officials getting behind Obama for the presidency. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, the video – made by the Jewish Council for Education and Research – is misleading, with some of those concerned now saying that their words have been taken out of context. But with the exception of the contribution of Uzi Dayan, quoted to that effect by the JP, it’s hard to see the context that would make what these men say anything but a warm endorsement of Obama’s candidacy.

Probably the highest-profile endorsement from the pro-war, pro-intervention “left” came from Christopher Hitchens. On October 13^th, Hitchens advised his Slate readership to vote for Obama, stating:

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.

Perhaps the best way to understand Hitchens’s conversion is just as another sign of neoconservative disaffection from the McCain-Palin ticket. From that perspective, he might be grouped with David Brooks, Christopher Buckley and other Republican Party apostates who shared his view that Sarah Palin is “a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.” Given Hitchens’s performance over the past 7 years, this only confirms once again that it takes a thief to catch a thief.

But there is probably no better example of the politics behind all this than George Packer’s long article in the current New Yorker magazine titled “The New Liberalism“.  Like some other supporters of the war in Iraq, Packer has had a change of heart no doubt inspired by the failure of the intervention to produce the desired results.

Packer frames his discussion in terms of two different perceptions of what an Obama administration might hold in store. The first comes from Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor and author who was Obama’s long-time colleague at the University of Chicago Law School. Looking into the Obama ink-blot, Sunstein sees a “visionary minimalist”:

Sunstein’s Obama is the post-partisan one. He calls Obama a “visionary minimalist,” meaning someone who wants to pursue large goals in a way that offends the deepest values of as few people as possible. Governing in this way would make him distinctly un-Rooseveltian. F.D.R. entered office with broad good will and a platform that offered almost all things to all people, but by the time he ran for reelection in 1936 his Presidency had become aggressively partisan: he attacked “economic royalists” and said of them, “They are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred.” In 2007, Paul Krugman, the Times columnist who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics, commended these remarks to Obama, advising him to sharpen his ideological edge, and warning that his search for common ground with Republicans would be his undoing. But Sunstein said of Obama, “I think he believes-and this is his big split from Krugman-that if you take on board people’s deepest commitments, or bracket them, show respect for them, then you make possible larger steps than would otherwise be imagined.” It would not be Obama’s way to trumpet the arrival of a new era of liberalism-a word, Sunstein said, that is too laden with baggage, and too much of a fighting word, for Obama’s taste.

Sunstein had a debate with Robert Kuttner at Harvard University in September. Probably more than any other Democrat, Kuttner is associated with the idea that Obama should carry out a new New Deal. Packer reports:

“Sunstein’s minimalism is exactly what’s not called for,” Kuttner told me, and he later added, “We’re on the verge of Great Depression Two. All bets are off. The people who talk about post-liberal, post-ideological, they have been completely overtaken by events. It’s the same abuses, the same scenario, that led to the crash of ’29. It’s the same dynamics of the financial economy dragging down the real economy-these are enduring lessons. Everybody who was talking about being in a kind of post-liberal world, they’re the ones who don’t have much purchase on what’s going on. The question is whether Obama will come to this.” The answer will depend in part on the advisers he chooses. In Kuttner’s mind, the deficit hawks and deregulators of the Clinton Administration-Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers-have been discredited by the financial crisis, and he thinks that it would be a big mistake for Obama to give them powerful roles in his Administration. (Summers is considered a likely candidate for Treasury Secretary, and his top economic advisers are connected with the Hamilton Project, a center-left affiliate of the Brookings Institution.) But, beyond macroeconomics, Kuttner, who plans to hold a conference in Washington called “Thinking Big,” shortly before Obama’s Inauguration, thinks that the Democrats have a clear political agenda: “the reclamation of an ideology.”

Oddly enough, Packer has little to say about the foreign policy imperatives that Obama is expected to obey. The words Iraq and Afghanistan are not mentioned once. Given his tarnished reputation about such matters, one supposes that the less said the better.

Leaving aside Obama’s “change” mantra, the foreign policy of the new administration will most certainly hew closely to that of the Clinton administration. If you keep in mind that much of the “decent left” emerged out of the pro-war fervor during the Clinton years among Western journalists and intellectuals who convinced themselves that Milosevic was the new Adolph Hitler, it is not that surprising that the same people are coming home like the Prodigal Son. After all, in the final analysis, it has been the blood-drenched Wilsonian idealism of the WWI era that has united hawk and dove alike in its determination to police the world in the interests of multinational corporations under the banner of human rights.