I was quoting earlier this morning from John Dolan's excellent book Erdogan Pizza. And doubtless you will find me gushing about it again. The book is a delight. I was a fan of Dolan's "War Nerd" columns back in the day, and I was thrilled to realize that his prose has retained all its sparkle and wit over the years.
Dolan was and remains a brilliant writer. His secret? To make sure he is always saying something interesting. You'd be surprised how many "great writers" don't—or can't—accomplish as much. It calls to mind one of Bukowski's observations:
the thing that bothered
me
about everybody
is that they took so long
to finally say
something lively and /
or
interesting.
thought I had it
over everybody
then.
Dolan has something over everybody still. (Which may be why he is still so little known—as Bukowski goes on to observe, many a publisher is frightened off by too-interesting prose.)
If he's so great, though—why did it take me so long to look up his more recent work? Partly, I confess, I had a certain amount of trepidation.
One always grimaces when preparing to catch up on the more recent work of some commentator who was considered a cool and edgy leftist in the Bush or Obama years. The Trump era had a way of unhinging many of their brains.
Trump's completely bad-faith, inconsistent, and disingenuous occasional "isolationist" rhetoric threw more than a few of them off the scent.
An anti-war, anti-interventionist leftist who spent the '00s and 2010s complaining about "neocons" may have developed in our era into a normal left-liberal who hates Trump. But then again, they may not have...
Perhaps we should "thank whatever gods may be,"* for instance, that Gore Vidal died in 2012, or as we now know it, the year 3 B.T. (*to borrow a Swinburnean phrase that Dolan also uses).
So I was a little nervous to see "what ever happened to the War Nerd" in the post-Bush, post-Obama era.
My fears were neither completely confirmed nor fully assuaged.
Dolan, as far as I can tell, has stopped short of completing the horseshoe. He has not yet pulled a full-Greenwald. I don't think you'd catch him cozying up to Tucker, say.
So, I don't quite need to get out my Shelley-to-Wordsworth for the thousandth time: "Thou wert as a lone star [....] Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve...."
Not yet, anyway.
Indeed, I think if pressed, you could get Dolan to endorse some version of the two statements: 1) "Putin is bad"; and 2) "Trump is bad."
Nonetheless—he seems (like many of his colleagues of a similar ideological kidney)—to be very mad at liberals for disliking Putin and Trump too much, or in the wrong way.
Dolan thus plainly belongs to what John Ganz aptly calls the "anti-alarmist left."
The reason I personally dislike Putin and Trump is that they are reactionary authoritarians who stand squarely in opposition to everything I have ever regarded as social progress or human decency.
The same reasons, in short, I would have thought everyone on the left would hate these two men.
But many a leftist has been so long annoyed by the smaller differences between themselves and those much-maligned "establishment liberals" that they have rather lost track of the much bigger differences one would have thought divided them from the likes of Putin and Trump. ("Narcissism of minor differences" much?)
Dolan himself understands the psychology of this. Writing about the Presbyterian settlers of a small town in New Zealand, he observes that they divided the world into two enemies: the "Great Enemy" (the world outside their congregation), and "the Little Enemy" (those of insufficient faith and orthodoxy within their congregation).
"And I'd bet serious money that they hated 'The Little Enemy' more fiercely than 'The Great Enemy,'" Dolan writes.
Dolan himself—one gets the sense—may be guilty of hating the little enemy more than the big one, when it comes to intra-left disputes.
In a disarmingly self-aware passage, he gives us a peek into the way he thinks about Putin, for instance—and why he takes the stances on these issues that he does:
"I have reason to dislike" the Russian autocrat, he writes, "dating back to the grim death of The eXile in Moscow. But I have deeper, longer reasons—a lifetime of reasons—to be sick to death of Anglo self-righteousness. It's a speed-ball of schadenfreude and lingering dislike of Putin and his reactionary authoritarian clique. But just this once, I think I'll let the schadi win."
That passage is dated to 2015. But one gets the sense that Dolan may have "let the schadi win" a few times more, in the years since then.
Indeed, this is the only time in the book when he utters any criticism of Putin. I could have gone for some self-reflection on how maybe Putin's Ukraine war is bad, and how maybe it calls into question Dolan's years of efforts to downplay the reality of the Russian military threat to its neighbors.
Schadenfreude is tempting. Establishment liberals and DC hacks are indeed annoying and self-righteous. But just because people are self-righteous, that doesn't always mean they're wrong.
Annoying self-righteous neocon interventionists wringing their hands about Russian troop build-ups on the Ukraine border in early 2022 turned out to be much more right than I had wanted them to be, for instance.
And for all the truth behind Dolan's long-standing argument that Russia is so militarily incompetent as to be non-threatening—they managed to steamroll Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the previous century, didn't they?
Competent or otherwise—if you have enough tanks under your command, you can still cause a lot of damage.
"Ogres do what ogres can," as Auden wrote of the 1968 Soviet invasion. (Though Dolan hates Auden.)
We all hate the self-righteous. We all feel a tinge of the "schadi" at seeing them fall on their faces. But if that becomes the sole rationale behind our political positions, we soon end up doing the same thing as the man in ancient Athens, who voted against Aristides just because he was sick and tired of hearing him described as "The Just."
Ostracizing a man "because his reputation for justice was annoying," as Bertrand Russell writes of the anecdote, in one of his essays, may be a common enough form of "democratic envy." But it is hardly a sound basis for a comprehensive worldview.
Having concluded that the alarmists are annoying (which I do not dispute)—that cannot be the end of the discussion. One still has to ask whether they are right to be alarmed.
And I think both Putin and Trump by their actions—the number of people they have murdered or sent to be tortured, the number of needless wars they have initiated—have fully justified any degree of alarmism one might have expressed about them.
This doesn't mean that the Establishment is perfect. Yes, the Obama Democrats waged wars and conducted illegal drone strikes and assassinations too.
But if what was bad about the pre-Trump establishment is that it killed too many people and waged too many wars and disregarded too many people's civil liberties and constitutional rights—then surely the answer is not to downplay the threat posed by someone who promises to do even more of all those things (and who does in fact proceed to do them).
To quote an ever-relevant observation of Arthur Koestler's: "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse."
He wrote elsewhere—in a slightly later collection of essays:
"[T]o defend our system against a deadly threat does not imply acceptance of everything in this system, does not imply giving up the long-term fight to improve it;" and by the same token, "our criticism of the shortcomings of this system does not free us from the duty to defend it, despite its ambiguous grayness, against the total corruption of the human ideal."
The pre-Trump establishment was bad in very many ways. We must still be committed to improving it.
But Putin and Trump represent, and have represented from their first appearance on the global stage, the "total corruption of the human ideal."
And they must be resisted—with as many alarm bells as required—and even if it means linking arms with some people one would otherwise find annoying—even, say, an Establishment liberal or a neocon "Little Enemy" or two.
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