A letter

A Letter to the Left:

Readers of Opinion Journal's Best of the Web know that author James Taranto has a long-running joke by which he refers to Kerry as "the haughty, French-looking Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam," or one of several variants of that line. Kerry, of course, does look somewhat French, and more to the point he acts somewhat French. The joke, which reached chief prominence during the 2004 election season, allowed Taranto to ridicule Kerry -- and, as Kerry was its standard-bearer, the entire Democratic Party -- by association with the French.

I mention this today because of the "Letter to the American Left" translated from the French for The Nation, having been composed by French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy. Levy isn't writing to me, obviously; his interest is in the Americans who are -- to use Taranto's formula -- "French looking," not so much in the face as in the brain. By the same token, he describes his recent book about America to be a letter to France, in which he is trying to build the bridge the other way -- to show French readers that there is an American that is French-looking. "Anti-Americanism is a plague," he said, "Say what you will about America - but it still stands for fighting for truth and justice."

Well said, although sadly by "truth and justice" he means something different than I would by the same words. I must also pause to register the firmest objection to his conceptualizing America as a woman who had been his mistress. What he said would have been ungentlemanly and inappropriate even had he been speaking of an actual mistress.

This only proves, of course, that M. Levy is not my kind of man. He should have had more luck with Garrison Keillor, but he didn't. Keillor is the kind of man M. Levy is trying to reach, and without great success:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book.

I shall be kinder to these two gentleman, who are not political allies of mine, than either are being to the other. Mr. Keillor runs a wonderful radio show, one that (in spite of occasional unfair jibes at Red Staters) is a genuine treasure. It offered my first window into an America I hadn't known still existed: one that, like my own, is rural and religious, delighted with folk music and old cowboy stories; but that, unlike my own, draws from those same roots the fruit of left-wing politics. It is an America I thought had vanished, perhaps best explained by its view of New York City: where the urban Blue Stater sees the highest model of humanity, and the rural Red Stater sees a misery of traffic and crime and rudeness, this America sees glimmering lights and theatre, 'the nice place to visit where you wouldn't want to live.' Where they want to live is the same sort of place I would choose: a quiet place, by a lake or mountain, with a few good neighbors and the fruit of their own vines.

I have come to know this America better in recent years, but probably only because Mr. Keillor awoke me to it, and inspired me to look for it. Though I think it is mistaken on several points, and though I regret the odd hostility with which its members seem to view me and mine, it is an America I both like and respect, even love, as one loves a distant sister.

Out of that love grows a genuine tolerance, one that I wish Mr. Keillor felt for us: a desire to see the old style of Federalism renewed, so that the way of life he advocates may be protected, and flourish in its enclaves. I don't want them to be unhappy in an America that is theirs, too. I think a lot of the discontent they feel arises because the Federal government has too far exceeded its Constitutional bounds, so that capturing and controlling it takes on an outsized importance. We cannot be happy with good laws from our local governments, because we must always worry what our political opposites from outside our state will try to enforce on us from above. Everything that is Federal has to be decided one way for all of us, with the result that the government is either affirming what we feel about Right & Wrong, or it is thrusting aside our deeply held beliefs and forcing us to accept something we find immoral.

On some questions, there is a proper Federal role, as enshrined in the Constitution. Yet most matters were designed to be handled by the states and even the localities, so that we might each enjoy some peace. The nation was founded on principles designed to admit the Puritans of the NorthEast, and the libertines of "Rogue's Island," as Rhode Island was called by the wags of those days. We make a mistake when we try to force Rogue's Island's values on Boston, or vice versa. It was possible then, and is possible now, for us to be happy with each other.

As for M. Levy, I note that he has an insightful critique about the state of the Left:

The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.

And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old "young" Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the "enemy," staring in disbelief when I say I've spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: "If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know"; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: "to raise more money"; and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals--I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called "American Empire" (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).

What is odd is that, having so diagnosed things, all M. Levy himself has to offer is more of the same -- that they should be louder and more passionate in arguing the same points he has just suggested are a wasteland. Having warned against the tired formulas of the Kennedy clan, he then recounts them: Levy, like Teddy, waxes poetic about Abu Ghraib, Americans as torturers, the need to ban the death penalty. Having warned against treating Bush as if he were a new McCarthy, he calls for a renewed movement to impeach the President.

It is unworthy to lecture people for agreeing with you. Indeed, one can't be quite sure where Levy feels the American Left should be. Either the Left is too passionate, or insufficiently so; either confrontation is the wrong policy, or the right one. Either the ideas of the 1960s Left are tired and worn out, or they are ready to sweep the nation.

On this last point, at least, there is clarity to be had. We can find it where we began, with Taranto's formula. "The French-looking Democrat" is an effective jibe in national elections not because of the shape of Kerry's nose, but because of the shape of his ideas and character. We have had our referrendum on the topic, and it proves that those ideas are not ready to sweep the nation. They do enjoy strong currency in certain enclaves. They ought to be allowed to flourish there: but this is not the road that will lead you in victory to Washington.

If we can all accept the truth of that, we can start working on the real problem: how we can build an America in which we can all be happy. When we're ready to stop trying to force our views down each other's necks, and to fight out each election and Supreme Court Nomination as if it were Armageddon, we can start rediscovering the tools of peace and brotherhood that were built into the system. As the nation that produced Frank Lloyd Wright ought to know, a house divided against itself can stand -- as long as the architect has planned for proper counterbalances, and distribution of the load.