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A Letter to the American Left
Translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell
By Bernard-Henri Lévy
02/23/06 "The
Nation" -- -- Nothing made a more lasting
impression during my journey through America than the
semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.
I know, of course, that the term "left" does not have the same
meaning and ramifications here that it does in France.
And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never
been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European
sense.
But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin
ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a
right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative
battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that
is both substantial and striking.
And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on
the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of
the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence,
a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or
Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old "young"
Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the
Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at
enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against
the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics
but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort,
treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent
to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the
anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot
in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the
ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the "enemy,"
staring in disbelief when I say I've spent quite some time
exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a
few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering
in my ear: "If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in
Ohio, let me know"; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton
who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage
the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle
of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the
money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like
fundraising automatons gone mad: "to raise more money"; and
then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the
lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and
women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals--I found a
curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or
irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that
in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq
War or the so-called "American Empire" (the denunciation of
which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to
say).
For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance,
that a number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to
wait for Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or
even learned about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty
blighting American cities.
For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas, it
is simply incomprehensible that more voices weren't raised long
ago, in the name of no less than the force of "the
Enlightenment," to denounce the ridiculous fraud of the
anti-Darwinian supporters of "intelligent design."
And what about the death penalty? How can it be that there isn't
yet, within the political parties, especially the Democratic
Party--which everyone knows will never budge on the question
without decisive internal pressure--a trend of opinion calling
for the abolition of this civilized barbarity?
And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in
Central Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer
applies? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I
know you have journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished
what our French press still hasn't finished forty years after
our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens
from their political duties? Why haven't we heard from more
intellectuals like Susan Sontag--or even Gore Vidal and Tony
Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other grounds) on this
vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of that handful
of individuals who, after September 11, launched the debate
about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be
justified?
And I'm not even talking about Bush. I won't even mention Bush's
gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except
for the sake of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of
course, that you denounce him--but mechanically, I am almost
tempted to say ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly
impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies and lied.
They impeached Clinton for a venial lie about inappropriate
conduct. How is it, then, that it took so long to draw a
parallel between those lies and a lie about which the least you
can say is that its consequences were anything but venial? How
is it that so few "public intellectuals" have been found, within
the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy,
who can bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?
Some will retort that the "public intellectual" is a European
specialty, that we shouldn't blame Americans for their
infidelity to a tradition that is not their own. What do such
killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur
Miller of The Crucible? Or of that golden age of civil rights
awareness, when great writers enunciated what was right and good
and true?
Others will object that the massive, resounding mobilization of
civil society is not an American custom. All you need to do to
convince yourself of the untruth of this is remember the 1960s
and the movement for civil rights, then for the rights of
minorities in general, which were the honor of the country and
did not stem, let it be emphasized, from any of the major
political parties.
Still others will wax ironic about the disease of writing up
petitions, a French specialty, warded off by American
pragmatism. Here the objection is more serious; and I know the
fatuity that can exist in the mania for nonstop political
engagement in the name of myriad causes--but aren't you
afflicted, my American friends, with the radically opposite
sickness? Hasn't the ethics of sobriety won once too often, with
you, over the ethics of conviction? And how could one not yearn
for a petition that would address our common nausea when faced
with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind, nearly deaf old man,
pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin execution chamber in
California?
I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the
country is waiting for this. Everywhere, in the innermost
reaches of America, you can meet men and women who hope for
great voices capable of echoing their impatience in a momentous
way. If I were an American writer, I would try to ponder the
lessons of the totalitarian century and those of democracy,
Tocqueville-style, all at once, in the same breath, and with the
same rigor.
Copyright © 2006 The Nation
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