How They Get Away With It

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http://amconmag.com/2005_07_04/print/articleprint.html


July 4, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative



How They Get Away With It


Three reasons Washington’s empire-builders don’t have to worry about ’60s-style dissent—not including the volunteer Army


by Scott McConnell


It was surprising how many people seemed to take genuine pleasure in British MP George Galloway’s contentious appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. He was, after all, only a former left-Labor Party backbencher, a bit pink in his associations. And notwithstanding the vigor of his denials, the nature of his financial relationship to Saddam’s Oil for Food program was not entirely cleared up.

But it wasn’t Galloway’s protestations of innocence or his political character that made his turn noteworthy. What was striking was the sight of a man inside the Senate chamber using the full force of the English language to denounce the pack of lies behind President Bush’s Iraq policy. Galloway didn’t submit to the Democratic Party script and pretend that the war was due to a “massive intelligence failure,” that President Bush was somehow misinformed about Saddam’s weapons (or lack of them). He went instead for the jugular of the whole enterprise, reiterating what he had said well before the war—that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda—and on these crucial points he was right and Sen. Norm Coleman and the other Republicans hoping to milk his testimony for electoral gain were dead wrong. The fruit of their error, Galloway continued, was 100,000 dead, including 1,600 Americans, and another 15,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, many of them permanently maimed—not to mention that the United States now has the worst international image in its history or that the volunteer army can no longer meet its recruiting goals and may have its back broken by the burdens of an extended Iraq occupation.

One never hears words like this spoken in the Senate. A search for successors to William Fulbright or Wayne Morse or Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy yields only empty chairs. Big-name Democrats scramble for microphone time to denounce as “extremist” judges who are pro-life, but about the fomenters of a foreign policy that is manifestly extremist, they fall into timid silence. Howard Dean, the reputed mad dog of last year’s primaries, has turned toy poodle as head of Democratic National Committee, full of fighting barbs about Tom DeLay’s ethics but silent about a war that is hardly despised by his party’s big donors. It took a Brit to remind Americans turning on the evening news what it might be like to have an opposition party.

The failure of Americans to generate a politically significant domestic opposition to the war is now one of the most important developments in world politics. It means that the Bush administration can contemplate, without any fear of adverse domestic political consequences, expansion of its war to Syria or a large-scale bombing of Iran. The only constraints on its behavior are international.

In the year and a half after September 2001, observant outsiders could intuit much about the administration’s plans. It was clear that the neoconservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted war not only against Iraq but against six or seven countries in the Middle East. Details were filled in by memoirs such as Richard Clarke’s and the reporting of Bob Woodward. The recent publication of the so-called Downing Street memorandum, recording the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s top advisors in July 2002, confirms that Bush had already decided upon war and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The British document indicates that Bush was lying outright when he told the Congress, in the fall of 2002, “I hope the use of force will not become necessary,” that “if Iraq is to avoid military action … it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world’s demands,” and further, that the United States would go to war only “as a last resort.” The Iraqis at that point had no way to avoid Bush’s invasion, despite the fact that, in denying that they had any WMD, they were, in the words of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, “telling the truth.”

Not only was the administration silent about the Blair memorandum, a silence that confirmed its contents, but the rest of the political class ignored it as well—save for Congressman John Conyers and a rump group in the House. There were no major antiwar demonstrations this spring, no campuses shut down by protest, no marches on Washington big enough to notice. In the capital itself, a journalist can go to cocktail parties full of foreign-policy establishment types, all prudently opposed to the war, their talk spiked by witticisms about the failings and hypocrisy of the Bushites. But none are public about it, and the realists now say that an American assault on Iran is a virtual certainty.

For someone who grew up in the 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War dominated the culture, the question that raises its head almost every day is, “How do they get away with it?” Of course, the wars are different: Vietnam, however much Kennedy and Johnson erred in terms of overestimating what U.S. Armed Forces could accomplish in Southeast Asia, at least corresponded to a general strategy of containment and of maintaining the existing East-West boundaries. On the borders of the Cold War, divided states like Germany and Korea had become a kind of norm, and the United States was protecting in South Vietnam a weak and unstable status quo. Iraq was clearly something completely different: a war initiated under the falsehood that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and clearly in violation of international law.

In terms of the domestic climate, one key difference is the absence of a draft: we fight in Iraq with a volunteer Army, working-class in origin—men and women who may have signed up originally for good pay and benefits or the possibility of a college education they couldn’t otherwise afford. The professional class is hardly represented, the political class not at all. Unlike the 1960s, the children of the establishment don’t have to calculate how they will avoid service or maneuver to find safe spots in the National Guard. This changes the political atmosphere on campus considerably, where there is now as much a likelihood of unrest about something to do with gays and lesbians or the wages of janitors as an aggressive war.

But three other developments, of impact perhaps even greater than the absence of a draft, make a culture of protest harder to sustain than it was in the 1960s.

The first is a different, less industrial, more service-oriented and more globalized American economy, which produces as great a change in the way citizens think about economic life as it does in the goods they consume. The United States of the 1960s was “The Affluent Society” in the John Kenneth Galbraith phrase, and it was a secure affluence. Tens of millions of relatively well-compensated manufacturing jobs were available, it seemed, for anyone willing to take them. You were supposed to finish high school, and a diploma was necessary to get a secure job, but a college diploma was not yet what it is now—the required admission ticket for any kind of upward mobility. So there was no burden on parents to worry about how they were going to afford college for their children—at least in comparison to today. Similarly, no one seemed to worry about health insurance; medicine could obviously accomplish less, but the United States was in that interlude between the time when a family could get wiped out by the costs of a child’s long-term illness and the present, when the cost of health insurance and the fear of losing it weighs on the calculations of nearly everyone in the middle and lower classes.

In the 1960s, therefore, a huge proportion of Americans felt little fear of losing their jobs. In affluent America, one could “drop out” of the regular career train—many did for reasons more cultural than political—and then rejoin the rat race at the time and place of one’s choosing. Those who dropped out didn’t fear slipping into poverty. For those with reasonable modern-economy skills, lower-middle-class jobs were there for the asking—and there was no reserve army of desperate Latin Americans ready to work for almost any price. This was a political economy that not only allowed dissent, but indeed one that seemed to make it, in economic terms, nearly cost-free. The contrast with the present day—where one hears continually from those with a stake in the middle-class that dissent is something only the wealthy (or very poor) can afford—could not be more striking.

A second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of neoconservatism. It is clear to anyone remotely interested in the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old. Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national conscience. By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.

The Jewish turn from the New Left, marked by such signposts as the collapse of the black-Jewish alliance in the late 1960s and the recognition that the Pentagon and an airlift ordered by Richard Nixon might have been necessary to Israel’s survival in October 1973, may have been a turnabout in the mentality of no more than a few hundred activists and polemicists, but the effect on the political tone of the country shouldn’t be underestimated. The political biographies of Marty Peretz and David Horowitz, two emblematic figures of this sea change, with a corresponding shift in the mentality of thousands of politically astute and engaged people in their cohort, had a huge impact on the country’s political culture.

Of course, it is true that most American Jews are still politically liberal and a majority now tell pollsters they oppose the Iraq War. But this is beside the point. Nowadays, political passion, engagement, and activism are as likely to be found on the Jewish Right—at least a Right favoring a pro-war, pro-imperialist (and very pro-Israel) foreign policy—as they are on the Left. Nothing could be more different from 1968.

A third way in which the America is a very different country today can be traced to the political transformation of American Protestantism. In his outstanding book The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich describes how evangelicals—who once were both politically quiescent and skeptical of the culture that surrounded military life—came, in the wake of Vietnam, to embrace the military as a sort of bulwark against national moral decay. With the corresponding decline in political numbers and influence of the mainline Protestant churches, this increased energy on the evangelical Right changed dramatically the way most American Christians regard war. In the hands of evangelicals, Just War principles became, in Bacevich’s words, “not a series of stringent tests but a signal: not a red light, not even a flashing yellow, but a bright green that relieved the Bush administration of any obligation to weigh seriously the moral implications of when and where it employed coercion.”

And thus, in the developed world’s most devout country, Christian witness against war “became less effective than in countries thoroughly and probably irreversibly secularized.” Evangelicals have in great part transformed the Christian view of Just War into a crusade theory in which the United States is believed to embody God’s will and its enemies are “God’s enemies.”

For those yearning for a revival of a peace movement that might slow down this administration, there is nothing reassuring about this analysis. It is far from clear that even the revival of the draft could ignite the kind of campus protest that would make an impression on Congress and the administration. Where would the leaders of campus protest come from? For if they are less likely, given the rise of neoconservatism, to come from ranks of activist Jews, it is even more implausible to imagine them emerging from the remains of the WASP establishment, whose children are not the academic and social leaders on the nation’s elite campuses. It is perhaps only slightly more likely to come from the new Asian immigrant groups, who are generally still focused on professional advancement or purely ethnic concerns. And only the wooliest of neo-Marxist romantics can see it emerging from the poor or working classes.

In the absence of an antiwar movement or serious domestic political opposition, only the outside world can put the brakes on American policy—only when Bush’s war plans come up against foreign obstacles that produce a dramatic defeat or humiliation or generate a financial crisis that the administration can’t overcome. Barring that, the American future may be war for as long as anyone can foresee.  

July 4, 2005 Issue

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second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of neoconservatism. It is clear to anyone remotely interested in the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old. Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national conscience. By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.

The Jewish turn from the New Left, marked by such signposts as the collapse of the black-Jewish alliance in the late 1960s and the recognition that the Pentagon and an airlift ordered by Richard Nixon might have been necessary to Israel’s survival in October 1973, may have been a turnabout in the mentality of no more than a few hundred activists and polemicists, but the effect on the political tone of the country shouldn’t be underestimated. The political biographies of Marty Peretz and David Horowitz, two emblematic figures of this sea change, with a corresponding shift in the mentality of thousands of politically astute and engaged people in their cohort, had a huge impact on the country’s political culture.

Of course, it is true that most American Jews are still politically liberal and a majority now tell pollsters they oppose the Iraq War. But this is beside the point. Nowadays, political passion, engagement, and activism are as likely to be found on the Jewish Right—at least a Right favoring a pro-war, pro-imperialist (and very pro-Israel) foreign policy—as they are on the Left. Nothing could be more different from 1968.

An example of this point:

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1111&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Commentary: David Horowitz: College Assassin for Hire

   
  Former left-wing radical turned right-wing gadfly David Horowitz is engaged in a well funded mission to seize control of America's so called "liberal" universities to silence their opposition to the radical right.
By Frederick Sweet


David Horowitz is the co-founder of the right wing Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Horowitz was a young 1960s radical leftist who has switched sides to become an old hard-core rightist. During the past decade, Horowitz spread propaganda, misinformation and disinformation about everything and everybody that questioned ultra conservatism. His favorite targets in the past have been African-Americans, Bill Clinton, homosexuals, women, and the people who support them. Horowitz's premise is simple: these groups attacked and destroyed the institutions and traditions of America in the 1960s with a “socialist” agenda, and his response is to “debunk their lies.”

In a fundraising Letter posted on the conservative on-line news web site, NewsMax.com, Horowitz states, “I founded the CSPC because I know the danger posed by the left in general and the academic left in particular, the so-called ‘liberals’ who can’t tolerate a different point of view. Back in the 1960s, I was one of them. But I eventually saw that their agendas were anything but ‘progressive’ -- as they like to describe themselves. They wanted the United States to lose the Vietnam War, just as they want America to be defeated in the war in Iraq today.

“The anti-Vietnam left was successful. America withdrew from the battlefield in Vietnam and the Communists won, just as the left hoped. After the Communists won, they proceeded to slaughter two and a half million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam. There were no protests from the left over that.

“That’s when I realized how destructive my fellow leftists (today’s so-called liberals) were. That’s when I renounced my leftist politics, voted for Ronald Reagan, and joined the conservative cause.”

These days Horowitz is focusing his propaganda machine on silencing “liberal” professors at America’s universities. He pushes this effort with Orwellian Newspeak: Horowitz refers to himself as a “free speech advocate” and champion of “academic freedom” (for conservative and radical right wingers, of course).

Chutzpah: Quoting Ellen Goodman

Horowitz’s fundraising Letter goes on to say: “According to Ellen Goodman ... the leftwing [sic] syndicated columnist … who writes for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and dozens of elitist papers states ... 'While many of us assume that the right is busily targeting the highest court as their last unoccupied power base, a whole subset of conservatives is after higher education. One group led by David Horowitz has been pushing an "academic bill of rights" aimed at what is called liberal bias.’

“Actually my bill of rights is viewpoint neutral [sic]. It will protect leftwing students from harassment by conservative professors and conservative students from harassment by "liberal" professors. The fact is, however, that thanks to a 30-year blacklist imposed by the left, 90% of college professors are political leftists, and in the coming years this imbalance is going to get even worse.

“Goodman explains why I [Horowitz] am so dangerous: ‘Conservatives have long regarded universities as the last spider holes of liberalism. They regard professors as lefty holdouts who spend their days indoctrinating the younger generation on the virtues of Che Guevara.’
On this point Goodman is 100 percent accurate!”

Pleading for Hundreds While Sitting On Millions

His “urgent” fundraising Letter begins: “Dear NewsMax friend: Recently, one of the most liberal columnists [Ellen Goodman] in the nation sounded the alarm to her political allies, claiming that my efforts to promote academic freedom and intellectual diversity on college campuses are the greatest threats to their agendas.”

Horowitz then gets to the point: “We need funds to continue this work. Students for Academic Freedom depends entirely on CSPC [Center for the Study of Popular Culture] for its funding. And we at CSPC depend entirely on voluntary contributions from people like you.”
Despite his pleas for contributions, Horowitz is very effective in roping rich, radical right-wing foundations into giving him multi-million dollar grants to fight what he calls “liberalism.” Most of CPSC’s money comes from the same foundations that had been responsible for supporting and dignifying scientific racism, defunding PBS, and crippling public education through vouchers for “choice.” They include the Olin Foundation ($1,935,000), Bradley Foundation ($10,550,500), and the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($3,950,000). These organizations have also funded Philip Rushton, Charles Murray and Ward Connerly’s attacks on people of color. They employ the tactic of supporting mouthpieces to poison public discourse while pretending to do just the opposite.

According to a recently posted report by Media Transparency, Horowitz has received $18,925,500 from these and other similarly minded organizations. At the same site, it is reported that one of Horowitz’s grants provides him a salary of $179,913 plus $11,838 in benefits.

Florida’s Legislature Ending “Liberalism” In Schools

Right-wing politicians in several state legislatures have adopted Horowitz’s positions and are now advancing new laws to “protect” students with conservative viewpoints in “liberal” college classrooms.

One Horowitz disciple is Florida State Representative Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who recently sponsored the so-called “The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights.”

Baxley asserts that “Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
Opponents of Baxley’s bill, like Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warn that this bill could even open professors to lawsuits from students who disagree with historical facts. For example, a professor could be sued by a student enrolled in a Holocaust history course who believes the Holocaust never happened. Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, or even medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.

“This is a horrible step,” Gelber said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs -- even if they win -- from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.”

But during the committee hearing, Baxley cast opponents of his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.” He compared the state’s universities to children, saying the legislature should not give them money without providing “guidance” to their behavior.

“Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?”

Florida Governor Jeb Bush Embracing Horowitz's Plan

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has called David Horowitz a ‘fighter for freedom’ for his work to save America’s college campuses.”

“The idea that speech rights are given comfortably to one side but not the other is wrong,” Bush told the Palm Beach Post. “Universities need to be sensitive to the fact that some people feel their rights are restricted and they feel isolated.”

“It is not the place of teachers to force conclusions on controversial matters,” Horowitz told the House Education Council in support of Baxley’s bill. “This is not a controversial bill. It has been made controversial by people who have a vested interest in keeping universities as their political platforms.”

According to NewsMax.com: “The bill provides that students should not ‘be infringed upon by instructors who persistently introduce controversial matter into the classroom that has no relation to the subject of study and serves no [teaching] purpose.’”

Baxley also had students who testified before his committee about prejudices they suffered at the hands of liberal professors. “I find it humorous that we are pretending our universities are not bastions of liberal thought,” Baxley said. “Conservative students have to go underground or face retribution.”

According to NewsMax.com, “Despite protests by liberals that the nation’s colleges and universities are not locked in a stranglehold by far-left faculties, a recent study demonstrated the extent of their domination of most institutions of higher learning.”

According to the study by the Randolph Foundation:

“Seventy-two percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and just 15 percent are conservative - by their own description.
“Fifty percent of the faculty members surveyed identify themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
“It’s even worse at the nation’s most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.”

The Road to Tyranny

Having the motive, the means, the media, and the opportunity provided to him by radical right wing largesse, Horowitz is gunning for classically free thinking American professors. Pushing the myth that “conservative” students are singled out for intimidation, being silenced, and even failed in courses by heavy handed liberal and left wing professors, Horowitz promotes the Big Lie.

In my lifetime as a university professor, I have witnessed a fairly even distribution of politically conservative and liberal faculty members. Truthfully, the liberals are in a slight majority. But what all stripes of competent teachers (right or left) insist on is that students do their course work and learn to think independently.

I have never seen or heard of a student being punished for views expressed in a classroom. My wife, also a lifetime academic, has also never seen or heard of a student being punished for views expressed in a classroom. So then what is the reality?

What does happen is that some students (on both the left and the right) substitute mindless political rhetoric for honest schoolwork, and are penalized for not doing their assigned work. They then whine about political persecution. That I have seen during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and through the covert Central American wars in 1980s (when mindlessness was the province of the left), and I saw it during the Gulf war in the 1990s and now in the current Iraq War (when mindlessness has shifted rightward).

So what has changed during the past four decades? To begin with, the left-wing anti-war student whiners in college didn’t have big money and big organization behind them. But now comes David Horowitz flush with money and organization provided by extreme right-wing ideologues -- promising “conservative” student whiners help in getting even with their “liberal” professors. And that’s the simple truth. The consequences for American universities can be devastating as this contrived anti-liberal rhetoric moves from the demagogue’s mouth into laws passed by state legislatures.

The dictionary defines tyranny as “absolute power, especially when exercised unjustly or cruelly.” That’s what Horowitz is selling to American education. Not satisfied with owning the three branches of the U.S. government, right wing ideologues wish to own America’s classrooms as well. It is Horowitz’s job to spearhead the effort to assassinate “liberal” colleges. If successful, American democracy’s demise will accelerate and classical tyranny will have taken its place.


Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your comments to Fred@interventionmag.com