[Marxism] The new generation of renegades

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

With friends like these . . .

When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 
'brain-dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from 
Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have 
moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar 
challenges the new generation of renegades
David Edgar
Saturday April 19, 2008

Guardian
One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been 
overlooked in the current nostalgia fest.

Despite Robert Frost's stern warning against the dangers of youthful 
idealism ("I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would 
make me conservative when old"), remarkably few of those formed by 
1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That 
is, until now.

In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan's key 
thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war 
on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been 
dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism 
and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political 
defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by 
personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition 
the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing 
communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential 
writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, 
intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between 
progressive liberalism and the poor.

I became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s. 
I'd written a play about the far right (Destiny), but as the National 
Front crashed to ignominious defeat in 1979, it was clear that its 
thunder had been stolen by a resurgent conservatism that owed much of 
its passion and its principles to deserters from the left. As the 
death-agony of the 1974-79 Labour government unfolded, former 
socialists and communists contributed to proto-Thatcherite tirades 
with titles like "The Future that Doesn't Work" and "An Escape from 
George Orwell's 1984". In 1978, former leftwingers such as Kingsley 
Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont 
anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn.

In my play about defection (Maydays, produced by the RSC in 1983), I 
speculated about how the British class of '68 might move to the 
conservative right. Essentially transposing the experience of earlier 
generations into the 70s, I don't think my central character's 
trajectory was implausible. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy and other 
nouveaux philosophes had provided a vocabulary of retreat for the 
veterans of the Paris events of May 1968. Some American popular 
radicals had fled to business (Jerry Rubin) or to the religious right 
(Eldridge Cleaver), and former Ramparts editor and Black Panther 
supporter David Horovitz was to mount a 1987 conference, Second 
Thoughts, at which former 60s radicals such as Michael Medved and PJ 
O'Rourke confessed and renounced their errors. Nonetheless, most of 
the leading figures of the period - from Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin and 
Bernardine Dohrn in America via Danny Cohn-Bendit in Germany to Tariq 
Ali, Robin Blackburn and Sheila Rowbotham here - have remained 
faithful to their previous ideals. And while Alan Milburn, Alan 
Johnson, Alistair Darling and Stephen Byers have clearly moved a 
considerable distance since their days in or about the Trotskyite far 
left, they would doubtless claim to be pursuing a drastically revised 
version of the same, socially progressive agenda. Until very 
recently, almost everybody disillusioned with the far left felt there 
was still a viable near left they could call home.

Now, that appears to be changing. Bookshop shelves are not quite yet 
groaning with defection literature, but Nick Cohen (What's Left?), 
Andrew Anthony (The Fallout), Ed Husain (The Islamist) and Melanie 
Phillips (Londonistan) are all self-confessed deserters (Phillips 
wears the "apostate" label with pride). Although Martin Amis was 
never part of the revolutionary or communist left (and attacked both 
his father and his friend Christopher Hitchens for so being), The 
Second Plane is an assault on the kind of liberal, literary 
intellectuals among whom Amis has moved throughout his life. And 
although Cohen, Anthony, Phillips et al have poured particular 
vituperation on leftwing playwrights (David Hare and Harold Pinter in 
particular), they have now been joined by one - David Mamet, who last 
month wrote a piece for the Village Voice entitled "Why I am no 
longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (he no longer believes that "people 
are basically good at heart"). Like previous generations, these 
defectors have been there, done that, and can now bear witness to 
their former misbeliefs. In so doing, they are joining a club with an 
extensive membership. Most of the radical and progressive 
achievements of the 20th century - including the Russian revolution - 
were brought about by an alliance between the oppressed and the 
intelligentsia, and a good proportion of them - particularly the 
Russian revolution - were followed by disappointment and desertion. 
For some, disillusion set in as early as 1921, when the Bolsheviks 
suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt, the port of St 
Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution. Subsequent 
"Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the 
1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in eastern 
Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in 
February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year.

As a result of these crises, ex-communist writers such as Arthur 
Koestler and Stephen Spender moved to the liberal centre. Others, 
like WH Auden, withdrew from political involvement altogether. For 
many, like the American poet and bohemian Max Eastman and the 
fellow-travelling novelist John Dos Passos, the cold war provided a 
changing room from which they emerged - with new stars in their eyes 
- as full-blown, traditionalist conservatives.

The events of 1956 changed the rules of membership of the 
ex-communist club in two ways. The creation of a self-consciously 
non-Stalinist New Left gave people disillusioned with communism 
somewhere else to go. On the other hand, the subsequent activities of 
the New Left became a recruiting agency for the right among older 
radicals, socialists and even liberals. For ex-communist Kingsley 
Amis, opposition to the expansion of higher education ("more will 
mean worse") was the first of many Conservative causes which 
transformed the author of Lucky Jim into a Thatcherite cheerleader. 
Similarly, what became the Reagan coalition was given considerable 
intellectual ballast by a group of New York intellectuals surrounding 
ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, for whom the hippy counter-culture, 
Black Power and later the women's and environmental movement 
demonstrated the infantilism and nihilism of the New Left. 
Self-defined as "liberals mugged by reality", Kristol, Norman 
Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were genuinely 
neoconservatives, having previously been revolutionaries (Kristol), 
radicals (Podhoretz, Glazer) or at the very least democratic progressives.

As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a 
unique authority. But there is something quite particular about 
spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. 
Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and 
do now is coloured by what they thought and did before. Most people 
who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left 
organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their 
contempt for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end 
justifies the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to 
take anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement 
as cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as 
"bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the 
first place. As Spender wrote in The God that Failed (1949), "the 
communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the 
reasons which made him one".

But, often, something else is going on. Frequently, there is a sense 
among defecting intellectuals that it's not just the party that has 
let them down. Most people move left either because they are outraged 
by the victimhood of the oppressed (Spender's distress at men and 
women "sealed into leaden slums") or because they are inspired by the 
left's revolutionary ardour (as many of my generation were by the 
Black Panthers and the Vietcong). The discovery that the poor do not 
necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining 
resignation is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they 
don't always behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.

Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you 
deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their 
poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this 
realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns 
outwards into blame.

One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become 
very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in 
his quip about John Dos Passos: "On account of Soviet knavery / He 
favours restoring slavery". Dos Passos was not the only American 
Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the 
arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. 
Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class 
emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on 
"mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former 
beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a 
death wish and feminism a plague.

Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral 
inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in 
America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites 
in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh 
discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh 
expectation".

Like Eldridge Cleaver, the neocons argued that the welfare state had 
turned the poor into parasites; James Q Wilson asserts that, in the 
black community, welfare became for black women what heroin was for 
black men. For Podhoretz, far from being "persecuted and oppressed", 
the blacks he knew were doing the persecuting and oppressing.

The directness and lack of apology in neoconservative polemic is a 
result of the fact that its authors had discharged the same ordnance 
in the opposite direction, and knew the likely weight and calibre of 
the returning fire. Most political defectors leave the left because 
its authoritarian practices stand in such stark contrast to its 
emancipatory ideals. For many, however, there is a double paradox: on 
opening their suitcase at the end of the journey, they find not just 
that the libertarian ideals they left the left to preserve have gone 
missing, but that the only thing remaining is the very cynicism and 
ruthlessness which they left the left to escape.

So, as on the far left, there is a tendency to see the world in 
stark, binary terms. Kingsley Amis once admitted that "it's all 
pretty black and white to me now. If you decide, as I have, that 
there are only two sides to the argument, then it's all quite 
simple." Kristol insists that environmentalists aren't really 
interested in clean air or clean water; what they're really after is 
authoritarian political power. And a condemnation of the practice of 
radicals and revolutionaries justifies the abandonment of the groups 
they seek to defend. For neocon Nathan Glazer, 60s radicalism was "so 
beset with error and confusion" that even its mildest manifestations 
- such as affirmative action for African Americans - had to be swept away.

Is this pattern reflected among those defectors for whom the 
"Kronstadt moment" was 9/11? Certainly, Husain's The Islamist 
describes a progression towards and then away from the non-jihadist 
but pro-Caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will be familiar to any 
reader of defection literature; he is now working with the 
Conservative thinktank Civitas. Commentators Nick Cohen, David 
Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were 
involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in 
the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious 
University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" 
to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole 
progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal 
intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a 
fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian 
alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with 
the far right.

The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, 
represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen 
to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those 
who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 
15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting 
that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what 
Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war 
alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic 
agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial 
Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched 
beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are 
giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to 
quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair 
enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't 
want a theocratic empire after all'".

No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of 
the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied. And 
those of us who dismissed the oppression of women and gay people as 
"secondary contradictions" in the early 70s are correctly wary of 
putting those issues on the back-burner now. Certainly, the 
progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views 
run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years 
on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which 
is partly about the temptation - on these understandable grounds - to 
reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist 
Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, 
beleaguered and demonised community.

For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object - 
the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give 
visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between 
a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. 
Martin Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion 
Muslims, but his "thought experiment" about meting out collective 
punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip 
searching) "until it hurts the whole community" makes no distinction 
between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque.

Cohen is careful to point out that "Islamism has Islamic roots", and, 
clearly, the group that he dubs the "far right" goes beyond the 
adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami. It's also a group that - defined in the 
old-fashioned way as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - remains at the 
bottom of the socioeconomic heap. As Trevor Phillips pointed out in 
his "sleepwalking into segregation" speech, made after 7/7, a 
Pakistani man with identical qualifications to a white man is still 
going to earn £300,000 less in his lifetime.

It is also a group that suffered, particularly during Cohen, 
Aaronovitch and Anthony's formative years. Throughout the 70s and 
80s, Paki-bashing created an image of Britain's south Asian 
communities as a traditionally submissive group, victimised by 
unwarranted aggression. For some, this image was complemented by 
admiration for groups such as the Bradford 12, who sought to defend 
their communities against fascist attack, and won the right to do so 
in court. When, in 1989, Bradford's Pakistanis found a sense of 
self-confidence and identity through burning books rather than banks, 
it's no surprise that liberal progressives who had supported, maybe 
even pitied, that community felt a sense of betrayal. In their books, 
Cohen and Anthony frequently point out how people on the left grow 
bitter when the poor fail to live up to the romance of unbridled 
heroism or untainted victimhood. They don't fully take into account 
the effect of that delusion on themselves.

Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the 
current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a 
reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly 
unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking. 
Despite his defence of women's and gay rights against Qur'anic 
scholars, a distinct strain of hostility to the sexual gains of the 
60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and 
sexual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual 
support", dips more than a toe into the Daily Mail's critique of the 
welfare state (breaking up families, privileging immigrants), and 
blames the Respect party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi unemployment.

Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming 
obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to theocracy" 
("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent 
interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine 
(who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority 
and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for 
a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in 
schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the 
raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy 
and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of 
certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction 
of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government 
policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of 
British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary 
defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between 
British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New 
Statesman's Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim 
Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his 
remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses 
brought Muslims together and "helped develop a British Muslim identity".

In fact, Bunglawala's attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of 
whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or 
the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian 
article last June, he reiterated the importance of the anti-Rushdie 
campaign in building self-confidence among a small, isolated, 
beleaguered and frequently victimised community, but went on to 
"readily acknowledge we were wrong to have called for the book to be 
banned". Now, he confesses, "I can better appreciate the concerns and 
fear generated by the images of book-burning in Bradford and calls 
for the author to be killed". Not least because, as he wrote in 
response to a critical blog, the same laws that allowed Rushdie to 
write The Satanic Verses protects the rights of Muslims to say what 
they think, too.

Support for human rights legislation that protects the rights of 
religious as well as sexual minorities is controversial within the 
Muslim community, as are other examples of supposedly diehard 
Islamists responding to liberal criticism. For example, the MCB came 
under fire when it decided - not before time - to participate in 
Holocaust Day ceremonies. Azzam Tamimi is a leading member of the 
main Muslim organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, the British 
Muslim Initiative, a group much reviled for its close ties with the 
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian equivalent, Hamas. 
Tamimi's book on Hamas (published in America as Hamas: A History from 
Within) contains a sustained critique of Hamas's constitution, its 
treatment of the Jews, and its quotation of the tsarist antisemitic 
forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another leading member 
of the BMI, Anas Altikriti, points out that the Qur'an says nothing 
about homosexuality beyond relaying the biblical story of Sodom and 
Gomorrah (and, for that matter, does not call for the execution of 
apostates). Altikriti negotiated for hostage Norman Kember's release 
in Iraq, campaigned against escalating protests over the 
Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark (while sympathising with Muslim 
anger against them) and argues that, unlike the British government, 
he has been fighting separatist Muslim extremism since long before 1997.

Despite the drumbeat of demonisation by media and politicians, these 
and other Muslim leaders are increasingly open to the argument that 
their shared interest in universal human rights trumps what we 
rightly regard as illiberal beliefs. They are, in other words, going 
in precisely the opposite direction from that which their detractors 
describe and predict. Are they really (to use Hitchens's formulation) 
to be anathematised as "fascists with an Islamic face"?

All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the 
west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare 
states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the 
war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance 
between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The 
civil rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with 
communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the 
south. The difficulties of that relationship were demonstrated when - 
after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an 
all-black leadership of one of the main civil rights groups. Later, 
feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for 
the sexism of both their political practice and personal behaviour. 
Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance 
which successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?

Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to 
provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon 
the poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between 
left and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For 
atheists, it is between secularism and religious belief. For some 
American and European feminists, it is between women's rights and a 
multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of 
former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a 
conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.

What all these fault-lines have in common is that they pit 
progressives against the group that is under the most sustained 
political attack, here and abroad, and that those who draw them 
include people who have the authority of the convert, having seen the 
error of their ways. It behoves those of us who have also been there 
and done that, not to defend the indefensible, but to protect the 
vocabulary of alliance that has done so much good in the past and is 
so necessary now.

· Testing the Echo is at the Tricycle Theatre, London NW6, until May 
3 (box office: 020 7328 1000), and at the Birmingham Repertory 
Theatre from May 7 to 10 (box office: 0121 236 4455). 


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