Left in the Lurch   

The liberal-left press finds itself under siege and bitterly divided in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The hate mail inundating Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, is so voluminous and occasionally vicious that his staff now keeps the Madison, Wisconsin-based magazine's front doors locked. "Call me when you're in New York," wrote one reader. "I'll take you to the local firehouse and we will all take turns bouncing your head off the sidewalk. We could call it 'progressive basketball.' "

Rothschild and his 93-year-old magazine oppose the American war against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. The man writing was the son of a retired New York City firefighter; he has many friends among the city's hero-rescuers from the fire department. He also lost a relative in the World Trade Center attack.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation magazine who says that war is the "wrong way to solve" the problem, received her own drubbing when she appeared on a radio show alongside former New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan, who had written that the "decadent left...may well mount a fifth column," accused Pollitt of supporting the Taliban. He also "likened me to someone who refuses to help a rape victim and blames her for wearing a short skirt," she complains.

Vanity Fair and Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, a man with sufficient radical roots to brand Henry Kissinger a war criminal, now has turned his barbed wit against his fellow leftists, flinging colorful insults at those who oppose the war in Afghanistan.

"These people know about as much about Islam as I know about aerodynamics," he says.

The events of September 11, when terrorists killed more than 3,000 people, have left the liberal-left press under siege and bitterly divided. "It's a tortuous time for the left," says Harold Meyerson, the longtime editor of LA Weekly who recently took over as executive editor of the Washington, D.C.-based American Prospect magazine. Adds Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, "From the beginning, there has been a welter of contradictory emotions."

Those opposing U.S. military action find themselves more isolated on a matter of national security than at any time since the months leading up to World War II. The American public's support for the war ranges in the 85 to 90 percent range, and only one lawmaker voted against President Bush's request to launch a military action. By contrast, the Persian Gulf War--which most of the leftist press opposed--split Congress down the middle, though once the war started lawmakers felt duty-bound to support the president. Today's antiwar journalists have been branded America haters, allies of Islamic fascists and worse. "Whose side are you on?" is a common refrain among their many foes.

Among their most ardent critics are fellow journalists on the left who support the war. Hitchens calls his antiwar colleagues "moral cretins," adding in an interview that "these are people who feel self-hatred for living in this huge, rich, heavily armed country." From his office in San Francisco, Roger Cohn, editor in chief of the liberal magazine Mother Jones, offered similar, if more measured, words of criticism. "Some of the reaction in the aftermath of September 11 was very disturbing," he says. "There was a knee-jerk sense that this must be America's fault: It's our fault because of the Iraqi sanctions. It's our fault because of the gulf war. It's our fault because of the Palestinian issue. I felt this was insensitive, especially in the days after September 11, and lacking proportion to the enormity of the tragedy. Some on the left can't see this as different from other military ventures. There's a lack of moral clarity" in their position.

The New Republic--whose foreign policy path diverged from other liberal publications during the Cold War, when the magazine staked out a hard-line position against Moscow--takes regular potshots at antiwar leftists. One New Republic writer compared writer Susan Sontag to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein after she infamously wrote that the September 11 slaughter was "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." The cowards, she insisted in a short New Yorker essay, were not the terrorists, as leaders such as President Bush proclaimed, but rather U.S. military strategists – "those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky."

But even those liberal-left journalists who support the war in Afghanistan are struggling to find relevance in a political atmosphere that has turned decidedly conservative. Most find their strongest voice not on the war abroad but rather on the home front--by voicing widespread concern that the Justice Department's internal crackdown on terrorism threatens civil liberties.

And some editors, particularly at The American Prospect, hold out hope that the public's renewed appreciation of government in the wake of September 11 will jump-start the liberal cause at home, generating support for spending money on public works.

"Americans only wear a collectivist hat during wartime," says Meyerson.

One of the biggest problems for the liberal-left press is a lack of groundbreaking reporting of the sort found in the mainstream press and magazines such as The New Yorker (which, despite the short Sontag piece, is a nonideological--if liberal-tilting--publication). There are some exceptions: The bimonthly Mother Jones, for example, published separate pieces by veteran intelligence reporters Ted Gup and Ken Silverstein on weaknesses at the CIA and another piece on the airline industry's successful efforts in the past to ward off security measures. And The Village Voice's coverage has been more reportorial than ideological. But, overall, the emphasis is on commentary rather than digging up new facts.

"This is not a great moment for the left press; in some cases it has defaulted to ideological reaction as opposed to, say, reportage," says Jason Vest, an American Prospect regular who has cultivated sources in the military and intelligence agencies. "Once bombing commenced, progressive journalism's focus should have been to do everything possible to shine a light on internal administration policy debates and aggressively home in on the hawks who want to expand the war. But the left tends to see the Pentagon and CIA as monolithic institutions--it's good at dehumanizing that which it doesn't like or doesn't understand."

The lack of fresh reporting--a contrast to the Vietnam era--also stems from the domestic focus of the press and political establishments over the past decade. New Republic Editor Peter Beinart says that during this period most of the leftist press approached foreign policy through the lens of the anti-globalization movement. "All you needed was a position on the WTO [the World Trade Organization]," he says. "Then you did reporting on what corporations were doing overseas.

"We're only now realizing how domestically focused most publications had become," Beinart adds. "They had to go through an instant reinvention of their foreign policy [approach]. That was easier for us at The New Republic because we had done more deliberate thinking about how we should approach foreign policy in the post-Cold War '90s."

The good news for the liberal-left press, however, is that debate over the war is attracting readers, particularly online. The 136-year-old Nation, which has a circulation of 110,000, saw the number of visitors to its Web site increase from about 60,000 to 100,000 a day after September 11. The much younger American Prospect, founded in 1990, has a hard-copy circulation of 48,000. It reports that its Web site hits, after climbing steadily throughout the year, were four times higher in September 2001 than they were a year earlier. The Progressive's circulation of 38,000 is "higher than it's been in a long time," Rothschild reports, and Web site hits have nearly doubled to 326,000 a month.

Mother Jones has been in the midst of a refurbishing campaign since Cohn, a former staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and executive editor of Audubon magazine, took over more than two years ago. Paid circulation has grown from 132,000 to 185,000, and Cohn expects the public's renewed interest in such issues as national security will help boost readership further. The numbers suggest that these publications enjoy a growing influence with a segment of the public concerned about the war.

With few liberal-left political organizations or leaders with the stature to set the terms of debate, journalists assume a more prominent role. In this atmosphere, as Meyerson notes, "it's the press who stakes out positions in advance of the moment."

The American Prospect ran an editorial cartoon of President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell reading the writings of leftist writers Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag in the White House. The image, of course, is funny for its implausibility--the liberal-left press is not going to influence the course of this Republican administration. Nevertheless, Meyerson argues, "the best stuff lays down cautionary markers about what you don't want government to do. Liberals have created a sense of proportionality that the Bush administration has to have heard."

The major players in the antiwar faction include The Progressive, In These Times, and Nation columnists Alexander Cockburn, Robert Scheer (also a Los Angeles Times contributor) and Katha Pollitt. Chomsky weighs in regularly in The Nation and in the online Z Magazine.

Underlying their antiwar sentiment is an instinctual aversion to the use of American force overseas. This is the legacy of Vietnam and American military action against leftist forces in South and Central America, which then carried into the 1990s as leftist journalists lent support to anti-globalization protesters. Pollitt neatly captured this aversion to American power when she wrote--in a column that drew widespread derision--that she wouldn't permit her teenage daughter to fly the American flag after September 11 because it "stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." (No, her daughter replied, it "means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism." Pollitt relented and permitted her daughter to buy a flag with her own money and keep it in her room.)

In the current conflict, antiwar commentators frequently accuse the U.S. of spawning anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Islamic world by--among other things--bombing Iraq and imposing sanctions that hurt its people, and by supporting a heavily armed and aggressive Israel against Palestinians seeking to establish their own state.

In one recent column, Scheer argued that the nuclear arsenal of the world's leading nation was far more of a threat to the world's security than bin Laden. "When it comes to genocide, bin Laden is a minor contender," he wrote. "The United States caused the death of millions in Vietnam in a more recent war that never bore any reasonable connection to our security."

Even against that backdrop of opposition to U.S. military strategy, however, the unprecedented attacks of September 11 put leftist writers in a difficult spot. There was, first of all, the scale of this mass murder on American soil. Second, the protectors of the terrorist perpetrators--though based in one of the poorest corners of the developing world--stood for everything the left purports to despise; the Taliban is theocratic, oppressive, antisemitic and prone to rounding up women who don't meet their fundamentalist standards and shooting them in soccer stadiums. Hitchens dubbed the Taliban regime "fascism with an Islamic face."

Most of the leftist press has handled this quandary by condemning the September 11 attacks as "hideous," "horrendous" and so on, but asserting that the U.S. should treat the event as a crime, not launch a war. "View it as a crime against humanity," Progressive Editor Matthew Rothschild wrote. "Pursue the crime with all the law-enforcement tools at the disposal of the U.S. and the international community."

The Progressive, founded by Sen. Robert LaFollette in 1909, took a similarly pacifist stance in the 1930s. On December 6, 1941, the magazine editorialized, "It is not as late as the war party thinks." The next day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the magazine changed its position. But Rothschild rejects the comparison to World War II and says there has been no in-house dissent to the magazine's antiwar stance. "We almost never think war is the answer," says the Progressive editor. "We want to find another way besides brute, cruel force. From the start, we thought that war would kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan to avenge a loss of 4,000. We also thought that war was not going to make us safer but more imperiled.... I don't think this is comparable to World War II. Osama bin Laden isn't threatening to conquer the world and put 6 million people in concentration camps."

The torment of the leftist press can best be seen in the pages of The Nation, traditionally a staunch critic of U.S. military policy, and in the words of its editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel. In an interview, vanden Heuvel said it was important for her magazine to continue to explore the roots of anti-American rage in the Islamic world--but over and over she insisted she had no intention of justifying the actions of terrorists. "It's sad," she says, "but it's a testament to the political culture and debate in this country that one is not allowed to look at what the U.S. has lent to [the situation]. That's not to justify anything, but to understand what's ahead and what needs to be addressed. There is such a virulent reaction against those who try to understand the root causes." And then she adds, again, "that's not to justify" the terrorist acts.

In the aftermath of September 11, vanden Heuvel published an article by longtime peace advocate Richard Falk, which called U.S. military action in Afghanistan the first "just war" since World War II. The magazine's editors gingerly editorialized in favor of limited military action. Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton, crafted a careful legal argument making the case that the war on terrorism "can be won only if tactics adhere to legal and moral constraints.... Excessive use of force in pursuing the perpetrators of September 11 will fan the flames of Islamic militancy and give credence to calls for holy war."

Meanwhile, the magazine's regular columnists--representing diametrically opposing views--have engaged in a rugged slugfest with each other and their own editors. Cockburn, who is staunchly antiwar, mocked The Nation's "just war" theorists. "The left is getting itself tied up in knots about the Just War and the propriety of bombing Afghanistan," he wrote. "I suspect some are intimidated by laptop bombardiers and kindred bully boys handing out white feathers and snarling about 'collaborators' and being 'soft on fascism.' " Meanwhile, Hitchens accused antiwar writers of "rationalizing terror." "Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan?" he wrote. "It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort." What the terrorists hate about the West, he added, "is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by [Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content."

The ugliest spat has been between Hitchens and Chomsky; it has become a favorite destination at The Nation's Web site. Chomsky has repeatedly downplayed the September 11 attacks, arguing that the U.S. inflicted a far larger death toll on the Sudan when former President Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory there in 1998, depriving the African country's desperate population of needed medicine.

Hitchens, a critic of the Sudan bombing, rejected the comparison, noting that the Sudan incident was not a case of premeditated murder. He concluded that Chomsky has become "robotic" in both his positions and his prose and "has lost or is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor" during Vietnam. Chomsky, in turn, accused Hitchens of "racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime." Hitchens, he added, "evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, and there is no reason for anyone else to do so."

The tone of debate is far more earnest at The American Prospect, founded by three figures known for their preoccupation with domestic issues: sociology professor Paul Starr, writer/economist Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, who served as Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration. While a domestic focus served the magazine well in the 1990s, it has had to find its voice on foreign policy since September 11. Under Meyerson, who moved from Los Angeles to Washington in July to take over as editor, the magazine is expected to break out of a strict mold of liberal-left commentary and to offer stories featuring more reporting and what Meyerson calls a more "nuanced" worldview. "We would like to be the left wing of the possible," he says.

The American Prospect supports a limited war in Afghanistan. "Our premise, which differentiates us from much of the left, is that this was not simply an event about America, this was not a refraction of what America does wrong in the world," Meyerson says. "This is a long battle largely of values with an opponent that has a fascist commitment to a unified society. We're fighting for pluralism. But that doesn't obviate the problematics of what America does in the world. We should say what America does wrong but not claim this as the cause of September 11."

Meyerson, a veteran of the leftist press, says his antiwar colleagues are "making the same mistake as generals and political activists--they always fight the last war. Just as the pacifists of the 1930s were reacting to World War I in refusing to support World War II, today's pacifists are looking at Vietnam. But it's ridiculous to say that the North Vietnamese are the moral equivalent of bin Laden." He also rejects the view that the terrorist attacks should be treated as a crime, insisting this is a utopian response. "How are you going serve a subpoena on bin Laden?" he asks.

But unlike the more hawkish New Republic, the Prospect is queasy about a wider war. The magazine has applauded the Bush administration's nonmilitary actions, such as humanitarian food drops, and has proposed ways to "lower the temperature on Arab and Islamic streets.... Bombing nations and toppling governments do not" help future security.

The only way to win a war against terrorism is "by fighting terrorism itself," the magazine editors argue, with better intelligence and improved ability to track and control chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

But much of the magazine remains focused on domestic policy. Meyerson hopes to rally the liberal troops to support government initiatives at home. "Our heroes of the moment are not corporate executives or sports stars or popular-culture icons, but firemen, policemen and the mayor of New York City," Jeff Faux wrote in an article. "What we must hope for in the difficult period ahead of us is for government to remain a trusted, valuable and well-regarded ally of its citizens and not--as it so recently was--a widely reviled and repudiated force in our national life." In a different issue, the magazine--recalling Clinton's famous line about big government--suggested that "the era of despised government...is over."

Holding down the fort at the far end of the pro-war left is The New Republic, a magazine that most leftist editors chide as no longer deserving of the "liberal" label. Indeed, it is hard to find much distinction between The New Republic's approach to the war and that of its counterpart on the right, The Weekly Standard (see "Thunder on the Right," December). Like The Weekly Standard, the magazine's editors want the U.S. to wage war against other states sponsoring terrorism. Like The Weekly Standard, the magazine is harsh on more dovish figures such as Secretary of State Powell, whom it accused of "busily forfeiting America's capacity to respond effectively to the attacks of September 11."

But New Republic Editor Peter Beinart insists that his magazine remains a liberal standard-bearer. Liberalism "means that human rights, democracy and individual rights are universal values--and we should approach the world with a high degree of confidence about that," he says. In contrast to most of the left,

The New Republic views America as a force for good abroad. "Without American power, the world would be a much darker place," says Beinart. The New Republic's divergence from other liberal publications began in the 1980s, when the magazine took the view that "the Soviet Union should be resisted forcefully," as Beinart put it. "In the 1990s," he adds, "that was carried over to [a view that] human rights, protected by U.S. power, was germane, even if there was no Soviet Union." So after the September 11 attacks, "our moral template was quite clear," says Beinart. "Bin Laden is an ethnic cleanser. He wants to purify the Muslim world." And the U.S. is the only one with the "moral and military capacity" to take him on.

Like its peers on the left, The New Republic believes that anti-Americanism was at the root of the attacks. But the anti-Americanism The New Republic speaks of has nothing to do with American military strategy overseas. "Anybody who hates modernity hates America," the editors wrote on September 24. "Anybody who hates freedom hates America. Anybody who hates human rights hates America. Anybody who hates ballots and bookshops and newspapers and televisions and computers and theaters and bars and the sight of a woman smiling at a man hates America."