Are We Desperate for Public Intellectuals?

We subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly, but it’s not because they sometimes feature Andrew Sullivan’s writings. In fact, I reckon Sullivan is a wanker whose views on matters are hardly worth considering. Take his most recent work in The Atlantic in which he writes about Senator Obama.

Sullivan thinks that America is facing a most “lethal enemy” in the troglodytes of Al Qaeda at the same time that it is bitterly divided in an unprecedented way by haters on both the left and right. Obama is a possible savior:

“At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.”

Seriously, Sullivan sees America this way? And he sees Al Qaeda as such a monumental threat? What is his evidence?

“ The traces of our long journey to this juncture can be found all around us. Its most obvious manifestation is political rhetoric. The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.”

The posturing Of Bill O and Hannity and Coulter are not comparable to the examples on the left. MoveOn and Olbermann and Moore are at least thoughtful and resort to reason while the right wingers are just plain hateful. The left isn’t calling for mass murder or detentions of dissenters. Bill O, Hannity and Coulter are clowns, and they speak for only the wingnut minority of hard core authoritarians. You can’t seriously hold them up as evidence of anything other than a kind of twisted form of entertainment for yahoos.

Who is to blame for this unprecedented division? Baby Boomers, of course:

“The answer lies mainly with the biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby Boomers. The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.”

Really? This is how the Boomers divide themselves? I’m a Boomer. I was too young to fight in Vietnam or even to have much in the way of an opinion about it. There are millions of Boomers in my position, so we are presumably not engaged in the non-violent civil war in Sullivan’s imagination. Most Boomers did not fight in the Vietnam War, and many who did were conscripts. Many protested, but most people jut tried to get on with their lives in the hope that the government wouldn’t get them killed. Women mostly didn't have to fret about serving against their will.

And look at the Boomer leaders of the right who ought by Sullivan’s reckoning to come down on the non-fighting side: Bush and Cheney fought not. Most of the wingnut punditry sat out Vietnam. The neo-con cabal never served in Vietnam. For crying out loud, does Sullivan just pull this stiff out of his ass?

GW Bush has his chance to set things right after 9/11:

“With 9/11, Bush had a reset moment—a chance to reunite the country in a way that would marginalize the extreme haters on both sides and forge a national consensus. He chose not to do so. It wasn’t entirely his fault. On the left, the truest believers were unprepared to give the president the benefit of any doubt in the wake of the 2000 election, and they even judged the 9/11 attacks to be a legitimate response to decades of U.S. foreign policy.”

I can’t think of a single person on the left (other than arguably Ward Churchill) who ever opined that the attack on the World Trade Center was “legitimate”. It was “understandable” in light of American foreign policy but not “legitimate”. Frankly, there aren’t haters on the left that come close to the haters on the right. That’s why the left is so susceptible to the right’s maneuvering and manipulations and why the left even now is unable to to do much. The left aims to be inclusive, to have dialogues, and what have you. The right just wants to win.

I have not read any cultural analysis ever that was so far off the mark as this article by Sullivan.