Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:03 am Post subject: Debate: what happened to Liberal values? |
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A new book on liberalism is causing a bit of a discussion.
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The Fallout by Andrew Anthony
In 2001 Andrew Anthony was 39, a successful Observer and Guardian journalist who had just become a father. He was perfectly poised to settle into English middle-class middle-age life. A signed-up member of the liberal left, he�d even spent time supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 80s. There were assumptions that, like wallet and keys, he never left the house without: the greatest menace to world security was America; crime was a function of poverty; Israel was the source of all the troubles in the Middle East.
Then came the wake-up call: 9/11. Shocked by the response of liberal friends and colleagues � a belief that America had it coming, a determination to understand the perpetrator rather than support the victim � Anthony was forced to re-examine and unpick his prejudices. It seemed there were other threats in the world far more malicious and dangerous than America. Could he really go on tolerating the intolerable?
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I've just been reading a few responses to it, and thought some posters here might find it interesting.
Here are few snippets from here and there:
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Innocence lost
Guilt-ridden liberals need to start standing up for their ideals and values rather than falling out among themselves.
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I was working in Kosovo on 9/11 and so have no direct knowledge of how the event was reported or discussed in Britain. However, my first comment piece in the Guardian was commissioned by Seumas Milne while I was working in Afghanistan and was in direct response to a letter I had written to friends and family describing my feelings after the murder of a colleague by the Taliban. It seems to me incredible that I should have to preface an article critiquing US foreign policy with a condemnation of the murder of civilians yet, judging from the chapter "kill us, we deserve it", in Nick Cohen's invective-filled book, this is the level at which political discourse is now being conducted among a section of liberal-left opinion.
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Chill, Andrew
September 11 changed the world but only as much as you already wanted it to be changed.
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The western liberal response sometimes tries too hard to understand this and as Andy points out, shades into self-deception. But, to be honest, most of us live with the experience of contradiction, even false consciousness as we used to call it. For ridiculously old-fashioned feminists like me, the slogan the personal is political is not just a slogan, it is at the heart of understanding how power operates in every transaction, in every part of our lives. That we make choices and compromises sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
So I can't help but read Andy's book as a story of guy who suddenly takes the political very personally and feels extremely let down. I know the feeling. His passionate and well-argued defence of liberal values is laudable. But let's step out of Guardian land for a minute can we? I know this may be grounds for having me sectioned ... but there are all sorts of people out there who, like me, who don't feel guilty about despising Islamism, who don't want to see women dressed in shrouds, who are extremely unhappy about the results of multiculturalism. Some of them are in the Tory party, so this is an argument that no longer makes sense in terms of old left/right politics. |
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Where we went wrong
Andrew Anthony is right: liberals have indeed failed. Just not in the way he thinks.
Andrew Anthony's book - from which several extracts were published in this week's Sunday Observer - is the kind that makes my blood boil, and usually sends me into a small, darkened room for a few hours until I calm down again. For me, there is something particularly objectionable about a "reformed liberal" who has some form of "reality" epiphany - usually about crime and more than likely about youth crime - that suddenly makes our previously staunch CND marching, Nicaraguan Sandinista-loving, down-with-the-kids, right-on social worker turn overnight into a Daily Mail reader who starts to think, well, guess what: Mrs Thatcher had it right all along!
Of course there is nothing wrong with epiphanies per se but, in my experience, what they usually reveal is that the person going through this conversion was never really much of - in this case a liberal - in the first place. |
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