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
Saturday April 19, 2008
The 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.
Article continues
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 L=E9vy 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
sup****ter 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 member****p. 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 pro****tion 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 ****t 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 member****p 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, homo***uality 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, de****tation, 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-fa****oned way as Pakistanis and Banglade****s - 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 =A3300,000 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-ba****ng 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 sup****ted, 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 ***ual gains of the
60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and
***ual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual
sup****t", 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 Banglade**** 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
citizen****p 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 im****tantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contem****ary
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
contem****ary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian article
last June, he reiterated the im****tance 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.
Sup****t for human rights legislation that protects the rights of
religious as well as ***ual 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
homo***uality 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 relation****p were demonstrated when -
after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-
black leader****p of one of the main civil rights groups. Later,
feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for
the ***ism 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.
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