Our Muste Moment?

 Norman Mailer writes at one point in The Armies of the Night that, whatever else the Vietnam War did, it brought the American Left back together again. 

For the decades before the war, after all, the Left had fractured down the middle over the issue of communism and the Soviet Union. "Consider a countdown of the punches," Mailer writes; "famine in the Ukraine; Moscow trials; Hitler-Stalin pact; slave-labor camps; Cold War"—and on. 

The antiwar movement, though, was finally something everyone could agree on. No matter what you thought of the Soviet Union, most leftists worth their salt could see that napalming villagers and carpet bombing North Vietnam was not the answer. 

So all of a sudden, everyone was fighting on the same side again. Dwight Macdonald (who in the early Cold War had grudgingly declared, on a debate stage with Mailer, "I Choose the West") could now share a protest march with people waving NLF flags. 

The great pacifist radical A.J. Muste, Mailer writes, said he for one "would no longer eschew participation in radical activities which contained Communists." 

Muste "had an instinct to end the old hopeless Left Wing war, extend a Christian anarchist's hand to the fallen, and go out to do battle, not together—but not apart"—Mailer writes. 

For some years now, I've been wondering: what will be our Vietnam? And only in a limited sense of yearning to recapture a lost unity—to do battle, if not together again, at least not apart—I've almost been wanting it to come. 

That's partly why I've been listening to that podcast I keep telling you about—the one with the dirtbag left bros I used to follow from the days of the great crusade against the neocons. 

They now annoy me to tears. But I keep coming back to them out of a sense of nostalgia—like someone scrolling through old photos of a significant other long after a painful breakup.  

Ever since the start of the Trump era, after all, there has been a pretty sharp fracture in the Left. What's even more absurd is that we seem to have split up over the same issue that divided the Old Left —except that we don't even have a Soviet Union to argue about anymore. 

It all started with Trump's 2016 election. Liberals and the main stream of the "Resistance" Left started to notice that Trump and several of his campaign advisors had an eerie degree of affinity for Putin. We had to wonder—what's up with that? 

This was when we came to learn that there is a surprisingly large contingent of the Left that still gets its foreign policy from Moscow—even long after the dissolution of the USSR. And these people very adamantly did not want anyone asking "what's up" with the Trump-Putin bromance. 

Many of the writers I had followed and admired as critics of U.S. foreign policy during the fight against Bush-era neoconservatism or Obama-era drone strikes were now devoting most of their time—not to criticizing Trump—but to signing up with him in deriding what they jointly called the "Russiagate hoax."

I kept waiting for this issue to go away so that Mom and Dad would stop fighting and we could all be on the same side again. I was waiting for our Muste to come along and get us back marching again at the same demos—maybe not together, but at least not apart. 

But Putin had a way of making himself the main story, even long after the Mueller report and all that had been put to bed. Even long after "Russiagate," there was still just plain old Russia. Putin was amassing troops on a neighbor's border—then he went ahead and invaded. 

A lot of the old anti-neocon Left knew that they couldn't really defend Putin on this war; but this only seemed to make them more mad at the rest of us. They couldn't really say we "Resistance libs" were wrong on the substance, so they had to attack us all the harder on style. 

We were annoying elitists, it was said; we were parroting talking points from the Acela corridor national security state elites, and so on. 

All this time, I kept wondering: "Can we please stop fighting each other and focus on Trump for a minute? He is president of the world's most powerful country, and he is actively tearing apart our democracy. He seems like the elephant in the room right now. Can we put our differences aside and all be against him?"

Well, but you all liked Hillary Clinton and Obama's drone strikes!

To which I reply, for the hundredth time—I never liked Hillary Clinton, and I always opposed Obama's drone strikes. 

But in case you haven't noticed, these two are not exactly in power right now. Can we please concentrate for one second on the guy who is in power, and whom we should all agree we dislike? 

But there was something about Trump that just didn't really register as a big problem with the Moscow-aligned left. Maybe because Putin always seemed to find him a potentially useful idiot. Maybe because people were deceived for a time by Trump's vague gestures toward "isolationism" as a foreign policy. 

Or maybe it's just because Trump hates Hillary Clinton and the Brookings Institution as much as they do, and they can't really see past it or think about anything else. There is nothing more dangerous in political life, after all, than what William Hazlitt called the "person with one idea." 

But I kept thinking: Okay, once Trump actually starts a new major war; once he hauls off and invades some helpless country—then we will finally all be on the same page again. Then people will see he's no better than the neocons we all joined forces to oppose two decades ago. 

That, I thought, will be our Vietnam. That will be our A.J. Muste moment. 

And at the start of this year, I briefly thought it had actually come. Trump bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its head of state. Here at last—I thought—was something we should have no trouble all being against. 

Whether you opposed this action because of anti-war sentiment, after all—or because you took orders from American adversaries and robotically echoed whatever foreign policy line emerged from Moscow—you should have no trouble agreeing that this was bad. 

And for about one 48-hour period, that seemed to be true. Leftist groups were out in the streets here in downtown Providence carrying signs that read "Hands Off Venezuela!" It's finally happening, I thought. Our Vietnam, our Muste moment, has arrived!

But then an odd thing happened. Venezuela's supposedly "Bolivarian" government cut a deal with Trump for the sake of clinging to power. In exchange for U.S. help in delaying overdue elections and keeping the democratic opposition out of the country, Venezuela's corrupt "socialist" leaders agreed to become a supine U.S. client state from which Trump could extract oil. 

On a dime, the left-wing protests stopped. I haven't seen another march or protest sign about Venezuela from that day to this. 

These are the kinds of eerie overnight shifts in "party line" that were supposed to only happen in the bad old days of the CP-aligned Left. It was like news of the Hitler-Stalin pact had just come out, and within minutes, the same people who had been preparing for collective defense against Hitler were now suddenly arguing that only "imperialists" opposed him and that true leftists must sabotage the war effort.

Arthur Koestler recalls overhearing some good comrades in the French internment camp they all shared as anti-Hitler refugees. These Party members had fled Hitler's regime in Germany under penalty of death; yet, here they now were—under lock and key in a French concentration camp—adhering to the official Moscow line that all nations should remain neutral toward Hitler's invasion of Poland and France. 

Though privately, some Party members and fellow travelers would occasionally admit to doubts. As one of them says in Koestler's novel Arrival and Departure: "It was not easy to understand why we remained neutral after having preached the crusade, and even made a pact with them."

And so now we have a situation where Marco Rubio apparently rules Venezuela as a personal satrapy, ensuring a pliant authoritarian government that aligns with U.S. interests for purposes of resource extraction, and preventing democratic elections indefinitely while conspiring to not even allow the head of Venezuela's main opposition party to land in the country. 

This is about as classic, straightforward "U.S. imperialism" as it gets. Of all factions, the anti-imperialist Left should be most against it. 

But as so often happens, Trump's cynicism and lack of principle seems to have tripped them up. He's now on the same side as Venezuela's nominally "Bolivarian" leaders. Moscow doubtless approves of the relationship and much prefers it to a free election, where the democratic opposition party might actually win and try to reset the country's relationship with Putin. 

And so, the Moscow-aligned Left suddenly goes quiet. I guess they approve of Trump's ruling Venezuela from afar as a neo-colonial puppet state now. Or at least, the message has somehow filtered down that they are not allowed to criticize it overtly—however much they may feel in their hearts, like the woman in Koestler's novel, that "it was not easy to understand why we [...] even made a pact with them."

But if this segment of the Left now finds they have to defend Trump on Venezuela—or at least go quiet and not talk about it so much—what is left for them to talk about? Well, Israel for one thing. 

Doubtless much of the reason that the Left in the U.S. in recent years has become practically a single-issue Gaza bloc is because of how brutal and barbaric Israel's retaliation in the enclave really has been. But part of it too may be that it's the only issue on which the Moscow-aligned Left can safely attack Trump's foreign policy without crossing any of the Kremlin's unspoken red lines. 

And so, all of their pent-up moral energy that they can't direct against anything else Trump is doing gets funneled into this one issue—in the same way that Arthur Koestler describes how—in the years when he was still a Communist Party member in good standing—he became obsessed with the Armenian Genocide as an atrocity against which he could sublimate all the outrage he couldn't express against, say, Stalin's famine in Ukraine. 

Now, I thought the Iran war might finally change this dynamic. I thought: here is a U.S. war of aggression against the most traditional of Moscow-aligned, neocon-hated U.S. adversaries—so surely there can be no confusion this time. We all ought to be 100% on the same page on this one. 

But even here, the unity was short-lived. As soon as Trump signed his "MOU" with Iran, the Moscow-aligned Left could start saying "well, at least he's doing the right thing by trying to end the war now, even if he's the one who started it"—and they could redirect all their attention to attacking Israel and neocons who felt betrayed and blindsided by Trump's deal with Iran, instead of attacking the man in the White House who actually ordered these illegal strikes. 

Now that the ceasefire deal has fallen apart and we're back in an open shooting war with Iran, the Left can finally come together again. The principled anti-war Left and the Moscow-aligned Left can at least be on the same side of the picket line, however grudgingly. 

But the same coalition has fallen apart enough times now that I'm starting to think that perhaps the Moscow-aligned Left does not want to patch over their differences with the rest of us. And perhaps I shouldn't want to heal my division from them. 

Perhaps these people are simply not making any of their political choices for anything close to principled reasons, and we should give up on them. A stopped clock may be right twice a day, after all—but one still has to live somehow during all the other minutes and hours. 

As Koestler wrote of the Hitler-Stalin pact: "That was the end... [F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary." And so too, if the Old Left has gotten so completely corrupted from their original purpose that they are now effectively Putin's and Trump's allies, perhaps it's time for us to simply stop caring what they call us. 

Our Muste moment may never arrive, then. We'll never be back on the same stage. But perhaps that's something we can live with.