Today openDemocracy published a further response by Bruce Ackerman to the criticisms Tony Judt aired last month in the London Review of Books. Judt savaged the American liberal (dis)establishment, describing its intellectuals as a "serving class" and as "useful idiots of the War on Terror". Their sham principles reek of bad faith, and worse, self-delusion:
It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide.
In Judt's view, contemporary politics rose from the ashes of World War II. Intellectuals, even those forward-thinking American liberals so fond of the term "progressive", still struggle to free themselves of the dust of the Cold War.
His biting words, of course, didn't go over so well in the States. Led by the respected writer-academics Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin, the Amercan liberal wrote back, issuing a "manifesto" in the Washington DC-based "leftist" rag The American Prospect.
The "manifesto" is notable for two reasons:
1) far from a robust declaration of conviction and purpose, it's little more than a cobbled-together list of predictable talking points, something you would expect more from a chapter of college Democrats than America's esteemed intelligentsia
2) that it was published in The American Prospect
The Prospect's New York-based counterpart The Nation has notably weighed in... on the side of Judt (who also happens to be a contributor of the mag), supporting Judt's disillusionment with the spectrum of liberal America. Unlike most left-of-centre magazines in the States, The Nation has been consistently against pre-emptive invasion, against the occupation of Iraq, and critical of Israel's role in the middle east conflict. The last sticking point runs through Judt's piece: why are American liberals so reluctant to criticise Israel?
In a sense, there is a widening divide within America's liberal intellectual elite (an admittedly small and often self-referential gang) between two tendencies: the dreary DC-politicking of the Prospect, and the brash, often simplistic, zeal of the Nation. This is in truth a DC-New York divide: punditry that checks itself against the beltway vs. the righteous (sometimes sophistic) heirs of the urbane tradtion.
Ackerman and Gitlin are not based in DC, but a glance at the language of the "manifesto" and one feels smothered in its milquetoast paeans to Reason, its regurgitation of the "issues", and its creeping sense of inadequacy. Can such a manifesto jumpstart liberal politics, and if it can, what does that suggest about liberal politics?
