American Conservative thought, defined as a marriage of libertarian economic positions with a traditionalist stance on social issues, is relatively new. It probably doesn't exist before the 1950's, and begins to emerge only with the publication of such works as William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. Perhaps for that reason alone, Conservatives have had fewer opportunities to embarrass themselves by embracing foreign monsters than have their counterparts on the left. There just haven't been a lot of conservative revolutions around the world in the last 70 years. But there were plenty of radical leftist revolutions, and the American Left fell in love with each and every one of them in turn. This always turned out badly.
"My favorite atheist," Christopher Hitchens, has a review of Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book: Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism in the New York Times. Lévy is perhaps the most highly regarded philosophe in contemporary France, so much so that he is widely referred to there simply as BHL. When now President, then candidate Nicholas Sarkozy called him up to ask for an endorsement, BHL was in an awkward position. On the one hand, he considered the Left "his family," and felt obliged by filial piety to vote for the leftist candidate. On the other hand, Lévy was firmly committed to opposing totalitarianism and barbarism in all their forms, and it was hard not to think that the French right, led by Sarkozy, was more likely to take a firm stance against the one and the other than the French Left.
I haven't read the book, but from Hitchens' review, I gather it is a lengthy apology for the Left, combined with a serious critique of the Left. Here is a gem:
"I'm convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy."
If this is not precisely true, even of those nostalgic for "Fidel," apologetic about Hugo Chávez, credulous about how "secular" the Baath Party was, or prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the "encircling" of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia, still it does contain a truth. One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islamism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe "resistance" in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: "Hitler's speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe."
That gives you a sense of the issues that BHL has with his "family." This is dead spot on. With so many communist regimes out of business, or having legalized business, it is possible for young Leftists, at least, to dream again of a red dawn.
And then there is the French Left's distaste for America, shared widely across Europe.
In his last book, a retracing of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Lévy appeared in the role of mediator at a time when French-American relations were in a sorry condition. Here, too, he takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is envy and resentment, deriving from the fact that the United States has several times intervened to save Europe from itself and from the consequences of its ideological dementias. The second, perhaps not unrelated, is a no-less-envious perception of America as a handmaiden and vassal of the Jews.
That is Hitchens' view of Lévy's take on European anti-Americanism. It would be entirely unfair of me to point out that these are the people who passionately hoping for Obama to win the American presidential election. So I will not mention that fact. I will only point out that, whether you are on the right or the left, you had probably better come to grips with the truth that Lévy points out.
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