The Left and the Policy of Letting the People Decide

Hosni Mubarak is out, and the people have won. Then again, maybe not. As one outsider has pointed out, now comes the “interesting” part, and I assume they were referring to the Chinese insult about living in interesting times. Undaunted by such thoughts, the left is thrilled by this departure, saying that the Egyptian people should decide these things and not have to put up with brutal American puppets. They also seem to think that conservatives wanted to prevent the Egyptian people from being free, which isn’t exactly right. But in any case, this is a bit of a reversal from their stance on Iraq, which was that a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein ought to stay, which entails that the Iraqi people should not be deciding these things on their own.

Let me do a brief examination of the left’s actions regarding letting the people decide, as I remember them. Start with the South in the early Sixties. The South then was like another country, and in fact it fought a war in the nineteenth century in order to become another country, a war that it lost. Leftists back in the early Sixties weren’t interested in letting the people of the South decide things, for the people of the South in fact had already decided things, and leftists didn’t like what they decided. So they swooped in to help blacks get out from under the control of white racists.

A few years later came the protests against the Vietnam War. Reversing their idea of intervening to help people out, leftists decided that we should stay the hell out and let the Vietnamese people decide these things on their own. (Eventually, the Vietnamese did, though it didn’t exactly work out well for them.)

During the 1970s, the left was angry about, among other things, the Shah of Iran and how brutally he treated his people. So, when the Shah left, it was finally the turn of the Iranian people to decide things. And guess what? They were divided. The Iranian leftists wanted socialism, but the mullahs wanted a theocracy. The mullahs won, and butchered a lot of leftists. Strangely enough, this didn't seem to bother any leftists in the West.

Almost immediately Saddam Hussein did the West a favor by attacking Iran, thus bogging the Iranians down in an eight-year war. The U.S. tilted toward Hussein, simply because Iran was so anti-American, though at one point Henry Kissinger said it would be nice if both sides lost. What was the left saying at this time? They talked about what a brutal dictator Hussein was.

Then came Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. At that point, he had outlived his usefulness to America, and the right abandoned him. Could left and right finally agree on something? No, because suddenly and incredibly the left took up his cause. As Nick Cohen puts it in What’s Left?:

The angry condemnations that had once flowed as freely as the rivers of Mesopotamia dried up. From then on, the loudest voices on the Left were raised in favor of the causes of Saddam Hussein.... [N]one of those who called for the lifting of sanctions in whole or in part went on to say that troops should be sent in to remove the dictator from power. The option they supported, but rarely stated explicitly, was close to the option Saddam wanted: no sanctions and greater freedom for his dictatorship to perpetuate its rule. [pp. 74-5]

What a swell guy that Saddam Hussein was!

In 1994 came the Rwandan genocide. This of course was blamed on the U.S. Were we supposed to have invaded so as to prevent it? Apparently.

By 2003 when we invaded Iraq, once again the left was against any intervention in other people’s affairs. The people didn’t want us there, we were told endlessly. All of Saddam’s sins were magically wiped away. Young leftists or those who hadn’t been paying attention earlier knew nothing about the abuses of his regime. (And as a soccer fan, let me say that his regime is, as far as I know, the only regime ever in the history of soccer to have tortured its soccer players after they lost a big game.)

Next came the tainted Iranian elections of 2009, and the left was awfully cool towards the protesters against the regime. Apparently, the people had already decided what they wanted, and that was that.

And now we see the protesters in Tahrir Square demanding (and succeeding in getting) the ouster of Mubarak, and the left is all for them. They too wanted Mubarak’s ouster, so that the people could decide. And so the people will, though the likelihood is that they will be divided into different factions with lots of bloodshed until one faction emerges and takes control.

Is there anything consistent in all this? Nothing that I can see, except that leftists tend to go against whatever the conservatives in America favor. When the regime in power is supported by America's conservatives, they want the regime to go and the people to decide, but when the regime is opposed by America's conservatives, then they want the regime to stay and the people to simply put up with it.

Needless to say, this is rather shallow. The more principled stance is simply to look at each regime on its own regardless of who else supports it and why, and then ask, Is this a regime that is worthy of being supported by leftists? If so, then one supports it, and if not, then one opposes it, and if it’s somewhere in between, then one will give it a degree of support. This is pretty simple, no? I myself have never supported the regime in Iran because it has always seemed so anti-left, and I gave Saddam Hussein grudging support during the Iran-Iraq war simply because he helped us counter the anti-leftist regime in Iran. By contrast, there has never been any reason based on their values (aside from anti-Americanism) for leftists to support the current Iranian regime; likewise, there was absolutely no reason for leftists to switch their position on Saddam Hussein and talk of him as though he were not what they had formerly said he was: a brutal tyrant.

So much for regimes. As for “the people,” this is much trickier. Sadly, people in non-Western cultures are likely to carry a lot of reactionary baggage with them. (A liberal friend whose wife and daughter went to Egypt a couple years ago reported that they didn’t like the Egyptian people very much; and no wonder since, as two women alone, they were probably harassed a lot.) Hosni Mubarak, according to this article, tried to eliminate female genital mutilation, which one might assume would be a leftist cause. As its author, Spenglar, observes:

The Mubarak government announced a ‘complete’ ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak’s authority?

Trying to craft a leftist response to people who are both oppressed by the West (or their puppets) and at the same time reactionary by Western standards is a bit of a problem, but somehow most leftists refuse to see this and simply see the oppression by the West. Under the influence of cultural relativism and multiculturalism, any attempt to point out how reactionary Third-World peoples can be is now considered racist and will in any case be ignored utterly by the mainstream of the left. Of course, such an attitude would not have been tolerated in connection with racist Southerners. No excuse has been tolerated for their racism, despite the fact that one could look at the South as a different culture, one could look at it as the victim of Northern imperialism, and one could look at it as a Third-World country in terms of its poverty. Imagine how the left would react if Southerners migrating to the North demanded their own schools, which they would of course segregate, demanded their own bus system so that they could put blacks at the back, and so on. I assume they would find that horrifying, but if it’s ok for reactionary Muslims to live by their own rules in the West, why is it not ok for reactionary Southern rednecks to do the same in the North?

This is why it’s best, from a leftist viewpoint, simply to eschew cultural relativism and the more extreme sorts of multiculturalism. Muslims coming to the West? Yes, by all means. Keeping all of their own culture? No way. They need to become Westernized.

Comments

[Salem]

This was an excellent post, and you've inspired me to start writing something of my own about this.

[Bradley J Borougerdi]

Excellent post (although I did not read all of it). You are very right on the Iranian issue. Actually, the left in Iran (which I wrote an M.A. thesis over some years back) ironically helped the Mullahs come to power, which was a very bad mistake on their part (as you pointed out). They still have not recovered from the defeat, and were actually much better off under the Shah!

If you mean by Westernize that they need to be accepting of others' views but can still keep theirs, then I agree with you. Immigrants can come to this country and practice their own culture to the fullest, as long as they realize that others do not have to follow in their foot steps.

Another comment I would like to make is on the issue of third world countries and the problems that usually stem from the people deciding. In most third world countries (particularly in the Middle East and Africa), tribalism significantly outweighs the nation state, and I think this countributes to a great deal of factionalism which caused many of the problems you point out.

Finally, I am still confused about this term multiculturalism. As far as I have understood it, this term refers to the diverse nature of a given society in regards to the number of cultural groups that exist in that society. The United States is multicultural because we have multiple cultures. When did this term start referring to something different?

[John Pepple]

Hi Bradley:
Thanks for the post. As far as I can tell, multiculturalism means something beyond the mere fact that people of different cultures live here in the U.S. The old description of this was that we lived in a melting pot, but the left didn't like that idea. It preferred the idea that different cultures should be allowed to keep their own cultures instead of having to assimilate.

One obvious problem that this entails is if you have culture A whose members are bound and determined to wipe out all members of culture B, and vice versa. Another obvious problem is when immigrants decide they want to remake all of the West to be just like their culture back home. Why come here at all, then?

People who come here to the West need to make some compromises in terms of assimilating. I don't think the old method was great, but it's better than simply allowing people who hate the West to live here and take over.

And then there's the problem that I pointed out in my soccer book, that multiculturalists here in America say that immigrants don't need to assimilate and say that Americans ought to respect other cultures, but give no indication that any of this applies to the sports of those other cultures.

[John Pepple]

Bradley, I should add that during the 1970s and 1980s when I was a grad student, I spent lots of time playing soccer with (though mostly against) many Iranian foreign students. I don't regret a minute of it and was glad they were around.