and Germany and Holland and Russia, are coming together and coalescing as an international movement as they did in the 1930s. I think that is what we’re seeing today. The people who are attracted to this movement in America certainly have their roots in White Supremacy, but that is true in Europe and other places as well. Unless you can see the global component of this and how these groups are supporting each other, you are going to be up a tree.
What are your thoughts about rightwing groups’ claims that leftists are trying to suppress free speech on college campuses?
I think it’s important to oppose giving a platform to people who are really Nazis and fascists and Klan people. However, if a Harvard idiot sociologist writes bad things about black people, he should be answered by arguments, not by closing him down. The whole tendency to try to shut down discussion is very bad for the Left. I think we need to distinguish between people who are just idiots or have a rightwing agenda, and fascists who are advocating the murder of certain groups and hate crimes. I’m not a free-speech absolutist because I think we do have to identify people who are encouraging hate crimes and try to prevent their word from spreading. I’m talking about people who literally say, ‘go out and kill Muslims’.
Some commentators have said that identity politics has hurt the American Left. What are your thoughts on this topic?
I think it’s important to think about the politics of identity in a complex way. Everybody has multiple identities. That’s what intersectionality is all about. For example, I’m a Jew, I’m a leftist, I’m a feminist, I’m old. The problem isn’t that people bring their identities into politics, it is when they have no politics other than their personal identity. That subjective approach leaves out people and it fragments movements. This is the kind of stuff that goes on at college campuses, according to some of the students I talk to. Identity politics can be very reductionist. For instance, the people who stress class politics often underestimate race; and in the US a lot of issues come down to race. And they also tend to leave out the oppression of women. I think such mechanical materialism has to be countered by a more holistic analysis that would attract people to a better way of doing politics.
Do you think that the commentators who claim democrats have to choose between supporting marginalized groups and promoting a class-based form of politics are offering a false choice?
Absolutely. You have to do both. You can’t frame the working class solely in terms of white people. The working class is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. It holds a lot of immigrants, including ones that are undocumented. If you want class politics, you have to look at all that. You also have to deal with the contradictions within the working class. For example, the conflicting positions on the environment between some of the skilled workers and construction workers who supported the Keystone Pipeline and everybody else who wants their children to be able to breathe and survive. I also don’t think we can leave climate change out of this topic. Climate change has to underpin everything that we do. We need to build a vast coalition that insists the planet isn’t completely destroyed. ■
MICHAEL WALZER
JON FRIEDMAN
Michael Walzer is one of the US’s most prominent intellectuals and has co-edited the leftist magazine Dissent for several decades. He is the author of many books, including Just and Unjust Wars and What it Means to be an American.
What would you change about the international Left today?
Leftism is primarily a domestic politics. It has always been primarily a domestic politics. On domestic politics, we are pretty good. We favor greater equality, we favor welfare, we favor education, we favor State action on behalf of minorities, etc etc… Socialism at home is easy for the Left.
Internationally the Left has a very bad record. We have supported and apologized for tyrants and dictators and terrorists. We have failed to acknowledge the realities of the world we live in. Many European leftists opposed rearmament against the Nazis all through the 1930s. Appeasement was a policy of the English Right with a lot of support on the Left. We don’t have a great record.
So, I want an international Left that is alert to the realities of the world and honest in confronting them. Let me use the example of the Iran nuclear agreement right now. The Iran deal [concluded by the Obama administration] is, I think, a good deal but people on the Left are supporting it who know absolutely nothing about it, who aren’t interested in learning anything about it and who would support it even if everything the Republicans say about it were true… everything. That’s an irresponsible Left, and there are too many leftists of that sort. One international Left organization that I belong to but won’t name here circulated its statement in support of the Iran deal a month before the deal was signed, and a month before they knew any of the details of the deal. That is irresponsible. People on the Left have a great deal of difficulty imagining themselves in power and responsible for the wellbeing of their fellow citizens.
I want a responsible international Left with active, engaged citizens who are capable of recognizing the dangers of Nazism in the 1930s, the dangers of Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s and the dangers of Islamism today. I want the international Left to criticize their government, but to also be aware of the dangerous world we live in. So, there is my soul exposed. I really hate those leftists who don’t think about the wellbeing of the people they claim to be acting on behalf of.
The narrative that all US wars are fought for our freedoms is widespread in American culture. What will it take to foster a culture where Americans can look at their history and say, ‘OK a couple of these wars were to protect our freedom, but most of them were not’?
We thought we were achieving that in the 1960s with the anti-war movement. We thought we were persuading Americans to look at an American war and say, ‘no, it’s wrong’. Obviously, we didn’t do that. I was very engaged with the anti-war movement. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, we organized a group called the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on Vietnam, which did SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]-type community organizing against the war. We forced a resolution on the ballot saying the city of Cambridge was opposed to the Vietnam War, and we got 40 per cent of the vote. We carried Harvard Square, but we lost all the ethnic and working-class neighborhoods in Cambridge.
A sociology graduate student did a study of the vote and found that the higher the value of your house, the higher the rent you paid, the more likely you were to vote against the Vietnam War. We were losing the working class, and one reason was that we marched around with Vietcong flags, we spelled America with a K, and their kids were fighting over there and our kids weren’t. We were right to be against the war, but we opposed it in a way that alienated the very people we should have been trying to convince.
Do you think a better strategy could have convinced the working class to look more closely at American interventions?
You have to try to devise a strategy that evokes their patriotism against American crimes and I think that can be done. I think we could have done a much better job in the 1960s.
Does it worry you that the US military is the one group that is considered above scrutiny for a lot of people in this country?
You know, I wrote a book called Just and Unjust Wars that was adopted as a required West Point text by a group of Vietnam veterans who had been so shaken by the war that they wanted the cadets at West Point to read my book, which included a critique of the war. Because they are using my book, I sometimes lecture there, and I can tell you the officer corps of the United States Army is much more critical of US foreign policy than most Americans are.
They are critical of some of our wars. They are unhappy about the way we fight some of our wars because too many civilians are being killed. They hate the business of military contractors fighting alongside our soldiers. In Iraq we had as many military contractors as soldiers and the contractors were not subject to normal military discipline