Cheerleaders for American Defeat

January/February 2007 -- In her famous speech at the 1984 Republican convention, the late UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously attacked those whose reflexive reaction to anything bad happening anywhere on earth was to “blame America first.”

But why do liberal knees jerk so predictably against the one nation that has given them, and the rest of the world, so much?

The answer, I believe, lies in the left’s twisted notion of “morality.”

Last November 6, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll counseled Americans “to face the harsh fact that the only way out of the war [in Iraq] is to accept defeat.” Our nation’s military defeat, he argued, actually would be a big step toward justice. “For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives,” he wrote, “can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?”

Commenting at TechCentralStation Daily about Carroll’s outrageous anticipation of American humiliation, Josh Manchester observed, “It is difficult not to conclude that there is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the United States like him who don’t merely feel as they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way all the time.”

Well-intentioned? By what standard?

Manchester cites German scholar Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “To see victory as a curse and defeat as moral purification and salvation is to combine the ancient idea of hubris with the Christian virtue of humility, catharsis with apocalypse.”

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“The virtue of humility” is just one ethical source of America-bashing.Indeed. “Pride goeth before the fall” is a central theme in ancient Greek mythology and the New Testament. Hubris—to Christians, the “sin of pride”—is to be countered by inculcating the “virtue of humility.” But applied to the geopolitical arena, the “virtue of humility” becomes the politics of humiliation: cheering the downfall and defeat of the greatest nation on earth, the high-and-mighty United States of America.

“The virtue of humility” is just one ethical source of America-bashing, however.

One of my favorite pundits, Charles Krauthammer, published a brilliant column in the March 2003 New Republic,“Liberalism v. National Interest.” Anticipating the key point of Sherrie Gossett’s cover feature in this issue, Krauthammer noted:

It is…a mistake to say that liberalism is hostile to the exercise of power in and of itself. When given authority, liberalism rained hell on Serbia, killed a host of Somalis, and used the threat of overwhelming force to take over Haiti. The problem for liberals is not the notion of power. It is the notion of national interest. It is not that they oppose power in principle but that they have great difficulty seeing national interest as a justification for wielding power. Their ostensible aversion to power is really an aversion to deploying it selfishly, as they see it, in pursuit of parochial American interests; they are quite willing to use power—indeed, promiscuously so—for disinterested reasons of humanitarianism as detached as possible from any concrete American national advantage. They like their power pure.

For post-cold-war liberalism, self-interest is tainted and corrupting. It is not just a dispensable criterion for intervention, it is disqualifying. The apparent liberal flip-flops on intervention now begin to make sense. In Kuwait, in 1991, where American national interests were seriously engaged (inaction would have left the Arabian peninsula in the control of Iraq and quickly transformed it into a nuclear regional superpower), they opposed the use of force. In Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, where American national interests are at most only tangentially engaged, they themselves sent in the cavalry.

Liberals intervened in these strategically marginal locales...out of a deep desire to purify, to redeem America by making her an instrument of justice. Liberalism…believes that it is ennobling the United States with a foreign policy of altruism. . .To have a strategic reason…that satisfies a selfish national interest, is thus a moral taint. . .The very thought that there might be some unintended auxiliary economic benefit from a war on Iraq—namely, control of Iraqi oil fields—is enough to make some liberals oppose the venture regardless of its other merits. If Kosovo had oil, liberals would have been found demonstrating against its liberation. [emphasis added]

Conjoined with the alleged “virtue of humility,” the conventional, altruist view of ethics logically leads many to welcome American defeat in any “selfish” wars—while simultaneously squandering American blood and treasure on military adventures in which we have no conceivable national interests. Exaggeration? Just as James Carroll looks forward to U.S. humiliation for its “hubris” in Iraq, others defend “selfless” military campaigns by alluding explicitly to the ethics of altruism.

Consider a remarkably revealing column by William Saletan back in the July/August 1999 issue of MotherJones. Responding to conservative critics of Bill Clinton’s Kosovo crusade, Saletan offered this moral case to inspire fellow leftists:

Disgusted by the Kosovo mission, conservative thinkers have been articulating and attacking what they call “liberal interventionism.” Liberals, they allege, are guilty of preferring to fight for humanitarian reasons rather than for oil; of seeking international consensus and legal justification for intervention rather than taking the lead; of deploying American military personnel and expending resources to protect and rebuild countries shattered by war; and of using force not to destroy outlaw regimes, but to drive them to the bargaining table. This is an indictment to which the left should proudly plead guilty. [emphasis added] But let’s hear the prosecution’s case, count by count.

1.    Altruism “It is precisely the absence of (sordid) self-interest that assures liberals of the [Kosovo] operation’s virtue,” wrote conservative foreign policy theorist Fareed Zakaria. “When we did have vital interests at stake—in the Gulf War—most liberals were staunchly opposed.” Republican hawks define vital interests as oil, economic gain, and political and military power. They disparage liberal interventionism motives such as “altruism,” “decency,” and “high-minded morality”… In other words: Liberals are selfless. [emphasis in the original]

Incredibly, that’s all that Saletan offers in rebuttal to critics who say we had no good reason to go to war in Kosovo. Here, he was counting on his readers’ agreement with the conventional view that equates “selflessness” with “morality.” The mere assertion that liberals are selfless was supposed to trump any rational considerations of national interest—considerations which, on their face, are morally tainted.

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Each of us must reconsider exactly what passes today as ‘morality.’

Saletan then builds on this altruistic premise. “‘Liberalism,’ in the words of conservative essayist Charles Krauthammer, ‘sincerely believes that multilateral action—and, in particular, action blessed by the U.N.—[is]...more justifiable than the United States unilaterally asserting its own national interest.’” Saletan’s response?  “In other words: Liberals believe in a democracy of nations.” (My translation: America should subordinate its interests to those of an international collective.)

Similarly, to the criticism that American liberals are sacrificially defending those who should be defending themselves, he retorts: “In other words: Liberals are their brothers’ keepers.” And to the criticism that liberals fail to treat enemies like enemies, he says: “In other words: Liberals seek rehabilitation, not retribution.”

Etc.

Observe that in each reply, the moral validity of “selflessness” is tacitly taken for granted—an unchallengeable “given” that even his political adversaries are presumed to accept. Sadly, most of them do. I invite you to reread my editorial in the Fall 2006 issue, where I quote a host of prominent conservatives who endorse the ethics of self-sacrifice, and on that basis explicitly advocate various political assaults on capitalism.

The almost-universal popularity of the “virtues” of humility and self-sacrifice explains a great deal.

It explains, for example, why any manifestations of self-assertion and self-interest—guns, the automobile, space exploration, big businessmen, material luxuries, economic profits, cities, the capitalist system itself—are so widely damned.

It explains why America—the one nation that embodies and embraces all these symbols of self-interest—is so widely damned, as well.

And it simultaneously explains why so many—even many in our own midst—have become cheerleaders for American defeat.

To avert humiliation and defeat—as a nation, and as individuals—each of us must first reconsider exactly what passes today as “morality.” For if we truly want to surrender our self-esteem and best interests, I can recommend no better ethics than that which promotes humility and self-sacrifice as virtues.

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