When the Ayes Have It, Is There Room for Naysayers?

Americans do not by nature march in lock-step, least of all to war.

The peace marches planned for Washington, D.C., this weekend are part of a tradition that has just as often sent Americans striding away from the front as toward it. But the demonstrations occur at a moment in which that political footing has become treacherous: television personalities such as Bill Maher, have been censured for criticizing the military; writers such as Susan Sontag, have been pilloried for drawing a link between American foreign policy and the Sept. 11 atrocities; newspaper executives in Texas and Oregon have apologized for printing columns critical of the president, and in one case fired a columnist.

Political dissent in wartime, however, is an American tradition.

The revolution itself was opposed by so many colonists that in some regions it was fought as a virtual civil war. Doubts about the justice of war with Mexico were so widespread that they were shared by a young philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail, and by a young lawyer and politician, Abraham Lincoln, who lost his congressional seat over the issue. Irish Americans, trade unionists, social reformers--such as Jane Addams--and socialists--such as Eugene V. Debs--vigorously opposed U.S. participation in World War I. Domestic dissent eventually made prosecution of the Vietnam War impossible.

World War II is the great exception to this historical rule because public revulsion at the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor submerged the powerful currents of isolationism, nativism and ethnic attachment that had kept the United States out of the confrontation with European fascism.

Pearl Harbor altered the American political landscape as decisively as it did the global strategic balance. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon may have done the same. And, as the dim outlines of a post-Sept. 11 political climate begin to emerge, many public intellectuals--even those who have taken an unyielding line against Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist protectors--are beginning to wonder what place will be made for dissent and what the quality of that sentiment may be in the months and years ahead.

The campuses, once citadels of opposition to military action, generally are quiet, in part, said author and commentator David Rieff, because this generation of students is hamstrung by the “politically correct” education it has received since kindergarten. “The nice kids have been taught that all differences are to be celebrated,” said Rieff, currently a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, “and they’re in full cognitive meltdown. Their homeroom teachers and guidance counselors never told them that there are people in the world who mean them harm.”

To young people educated in this way, Rieff said, “it just doesn’t make emotional sense that cultural differences could lead to war and not greater understanding.” The events of Sept. 11 “have created a deep existential crisis for kids who grew up in a multicultural America in which no enthusiasm or cause excluded any other enthusiasm or cause and in which the very notions of tragedy and the irreconcilable were consciously rejected,” Rieff said.

Christopher Hitchens, a paladin of the British and American left, has been bitterly attacked by colleagues for the strong stand he has taken against Bin Laden and the Taliban. Nevertheless, he worries that what he sees as a prevailing “pseudo-unity” will choke off the spirit of dissenting individualism crucial to defeating what he and Rieff term “Islamic fascism.” According to Hitchens, “this is a war on civil society, so it is critical that there be debates and vigorous exchanges. What one wants is the spirit of initiative shown by those courageous passengers over Pennsylvania, who disobeyed every FAA regulation about staying buckled in their seats and went down fighting. Without that spirit, what we will end up with is capitulation abroad and authoritarianism at home, which is the worst combination imaginable.”

Such a combination already is visible, according to Father Daniel Berrigan, a member of Manhattan’s Westside Jesuit Community and a longtime advocate of nonviolence and civil disobedience. “My brother Phillip and another Jesuit, Stephen Kelly, are in federal prison for antinuclear protests. On the day of the attacks, my brother was thrown into solitary confinement because he was discussing alternatives to violent reprisals with other prisoners.

“This is tough repression, even for prison, and it’s already underway,” Berrigan said.

“I live in the penumbra of the World Trade Center,” said Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation, a left-wing weekly, and now a professor journalism at Columbia University. “I think there’s a lot of poison in the air, and that makes dissent very difficult.”

As an example, Navasky cited a military officer who appeared on the popular Fox News cable program “The O’Reilly Factor” and argued that people who do not support the government are “treasonous.” The host responded, Navasky said, by saying that people who criticized the government were justifying the terrorists’ attacks. “The ability to distort that position is one form of stifling dissent,” Navasky said.

“If you’re not 100% supportive and raise questions--which is the most valuable form of dissent, in my view,” Navasky argued, “you’re tagged as someone who has a position which you don’t have. The caricature is put forward as the reality.”

Navasky also described a televised discussion with CBS newsman Dan Rather about whether television anchors should wear U.S. flags on their lapels. “While they were having the discussion, a symbol of the flag was on the lower left-hand side of the screen,” Navasky said. “That flag becomes a statement: ‘If you disagree with me, you’re not patriotic.”’

Navasky’s longtime colleague, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, agreed. The climate for left-wing dissent is bad, she said, because in her view the left’s response to Sept. 11 is complicated “and complexity is unsuited to the television medium,” she said.

“We are not pacifists,” she said. “Military measures may be needed.... I do worry there will be a willingness to stereotype those in the progressive community to find those who are most extreme and say that is the peace movement and the left. The political and media institutions are constructed in a certain way at this time in our history to do just that.”

Michael Walzer is the author of “Just and Unjust Wars,” a professor of social science at Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and co-editor of Dissent Magazine. As a self-described social democrat and veteran of many an internecine left-wing quarrel, he strikes a watchful note. So far, dissenters have had little to protest beyond their anxiety over what may happen, he said. Ultimately, dissent’s tenor will be determined by what the Bush administration actually does, he said. “If we’re not doing terrible things, like in Vietnam, bombing peasant villages, killing civilians, maybe there’s less reason to protest,” Walzer said.

He does, however, see reason to be vigilant concerning civil liberties. “I think the burden of proof has shifted in a significant way. Before Sept. 11, a police agency that wanted to expand its powers had to make its case. After Sept. 11, if a police agency comes forward and says we need these additional powers to prevent another terrorist attack, the burden of proof is on those who want to say ‘No.’

“There are people on the left who are not prepared to accept that burden of proof,” Walzer said, though it also is true that conservative Republican lawmakers, like Georgia Congressman Bob Barr and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, also have raised questions about the administration’s requests for additional police powers.

In fact, to Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative opinion magazine, “The debate about the war seems pretty robust and free. Many publications, from the New Yorker to the Nation, feel perfectly comfortable printing anti-American articles and that’s fine. That’s what the First Amendment is all about.”

Why the epithet?

“If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American,” Lowry said. By contrast, the articles his magazine prints are “universally going to be pro-American and pro-Western and pro-war,” Lowry said. “It’s our business to make the case for that point of view.”

The right as a whole is more unified on this crisis than the left, Lowry said, “The only dissent is from a splinter conservatism, the old right, the paleo-conservatives. This is the Pat Buchanan school. They never gave up the fight for America First. This is where the far right meets the far left. Both camps think it’s the unjust and overweening exercise of power in the world that causes reactions like this.”

Harold Meyerson, executive editor of the American Prospect, a left-wing journal of analysis, argues that dissent--mainly on the left--has played a key role in creating a climate different than those that have prevailed at other times of national trauma. He cites, for example, frequent appeals from officials and the mainstream media that there be no scapegoating of Arab or Islamic Americans. “That reflects a tremendous difference between 1918 and 1943 and now,” he said, “and in that we can see the legacy of the civil rights movement has been a hugely positive development for which we need to thank earlier dissenters.”

However the climate of dissent or repression develops, the National Review’s Lowry argued, the U.S. left may find itself increasingly marginalized by the overwhelming popular support for military action. “The portions of the left that oppose it will go the way of the America Firsters during the last world war.” In 1942, he pointed out, America First was a respectable sentiment held by people convinced that the United States should avoid European entanglements, which they believed had corrupted America and led to the terrible bloodletting in WWI. “This theory of the world was intellectually discredited and politically made totally unsustainable by the mobilization of the country after Pearl Harbor,” Lowry said.

“American popular sentiment in circumstances like this is quite bloodthirsty, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily.” It is a fundamental mistake, he said, “not to realize what a force for good the righteous anger of the American people and our war-fighting capability can be. It’s what ended slavery in the Civil War, what defeated Nazism in World War II, what defeated communism in the cold war. Social and political achievements like that would have been impossible without making war.”

Communal anger--righteous or otherwise--is something Daniel Berrigan views in a different light. He finds hope instead “in the many fine people praying that we will have a national change of heart from vengeance to compassion.”

“The toughest thing for me,” he said, “is the official line that terrorism arises from a kind of spontaneous combustion against the virtuous.” That notion, Berrigan said, “excludes the thought that one appropriate response is a national examination of conscience. This is just the latest extension of an older American idea that the evil kingdom is always somewhere out there and the virtuous kingdom is always somewhere within our borders.

“But I don’t despair,” the longtime advocate of nonviolence said. “There are enough decent people to keep liberty afloat.”