"Can There Be a Decent Left?" by Michael Walzer, in Dissent (Spring 2002), 310 Riverside Dr., No. 1201, New York, N.Y. 10025.

Was 9/11 "blowback" for American misdeeds abroad? Obviously, shouted Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and many likeminded others. The U.S. war in Afghanistan? An imperialist adventure, most declared. Such responses have led Walzer, coeditor of the socialist journal Dissent and an éminence grise of the American Left, to an anguished inquiry into the current "indecency" on that side of the spectrum.

"Maybe the guilt produced by living in [the sole superpower] and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics," he writes. "Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the Left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the... barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved." Although many leftists subsequently "recovered their moral balance," Walzer says, "many more" did not.

The Left long ago "lost its bearings," Walzer says. Its critique of U.S. foreign policy—"most clearly, I think, from the Vietnam years forward (from the time of ‘Amerika,’ Viet Cong flags, and breathless trips to North Vietnam)—has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate."

As a result, leftists made a fetish of alienation, "refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That’s why many leftists had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed"—and why they backed ineffective proposals such as turning the problem over to the United Nations.

Clinging to a "ragtag Marxism," many of Walzer’s ideological confreres are blind to the immense power of religion. "Whenever writers on the left say that the ‘root cause’ of terror is global inequality or human poverty, the assertion is in fact a denial that religious motives really count." Minimizing the importance of Islamic radicalism, many have simply assumed that "any group that attacks the imperial power must be a representative of the oppressed, and its agenda must be the agenda of the Left."

Opting for the "moral purism of blaming America first," many leftists cannot bring themselves to criticize the "oppressed" elsewhere. Yet even the oppressed are morally obliged "not to murder innocent people, not to make terrorism their politics." What the American Left must do now, Walzer says, is to "begin again" by putting "decency first."