Obama's Not-War On ISIS

"What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it."

—GWF Hegel

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GettyImages (edited by me)

I've already addressed the Obama Administration's Totally-Not-War-Or-Anything-Like-That against ISIS a couple times before, but it's particularly pertinent to do so now, once again. President Obama has requested from Congress another Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), or what we might refer to as a declaration of we're-still-not-calling-it-war. Obama conducted an entire offensive in Libya without congressional approval, and our "counterterrorism" against ISIS has now been ongoing for six months without any such approval—so why is that the president now feels it's appropriate to ask for a new AUMF?

The answer is not exactly a comforting one. It's clear that Obama isn't admitting wrongdoing, as he's continued to maintain his current not-war is authorized by the 2001 AUMF. He could just be offering Congress the chance to have its voice heard just to be polite, but that seems a tad dubious. So what possibility is left? In a word, escalation.

As we know well by this point, Obama has given us his guarantee that there will be no "boots on the ground." This hasn't proven to be very meaningful so far (unless the over-2,500 security personnel and military advisers in Iraq are wearing sneakers, maybe), and the proposed AUMF doesn't do much to strengthen it. We have a vague promise that there will be no "enduring offensive ground combat operations," which is essentially meaningless when one takes into account that (by pure coincidence, of course) the president is the one with the authority to decide what "enduring" and "offensive" mean (and presumably what "ground" means, too, given that the boots worn by US military personnel in Iraq are apparently not on it).

Of course, as I've previously noted, even if Obama does maintain his "no combat troops" pledge, that doesn't mean the next president will—and, conveniently enough, the sunset provision on the AUMF would be in 2018, well after Obama's successor is in office; whether that's a Republican or Hillary Clinton, we have some reason to be worried.

As Noam Chomsky, among others, has noted, it's US involvement in the Middle East that's helped to create the scourge that is ISIS—the idea of a war (erm, I mean "counterterrorism offensive") to rectify that problem is, of course, completely nonsensical. As if to remind us the dangers of US involvement in the Middle East, the government of Yemen was recently overtaken by a coup. The culprits are the Shia Houthi, who have been alienated by the policies of Yemen's US-backed government (both before and after the 2011 revolution). The Sunni community within the country, feeling threatened by the Shia insurgency, has increasingly turned to al-Qaeda (you know, that group that we thought was the worst thing ever, before ISIS came into being).

Even if we were to devote the resources (i.e. lives and money) necessary to defeat ISIS, there's no reason to think that that wouldn't have the effect of creating some other horrible terror group, just as our war to get rid of Saddam Hussein ended up creating this nightmare. There's no pretty solution for the ISIS problem, but greater US involvement is no solution at all. If you live in the US, now would be a good time to call your representative and urge them to vote "no" on the AUMF that's been proposed. Before you write this off as pointless, keep in mind that it succeeded back in 2013, when Congress was scared away from approving Obama's plan for airstrikes on Syria.

The new war (whether we call it that or not) is not going to be to the benefit of the general populace of the US, Europe, Iraq, or Syria. It's hard to imagine ISIS can be defeated in any way but through war, but it's not our war to fight and we are not helping anyone by getting involved in it. Even if the fearmongering about ISIS were anything but blatant lies, this would be exactly the wrong thing to do in the course of addressing the problem. If Congress approves the AUMF as it's been proposed, it perpetuates the same policies that have created the current situation.

How Political Incorrectness Was Stolen

I've always detested political correctness. Even before I was old enough to actually understand politics, it always came off to me as a stupid set of rules written by people who thought that no one should ever have to be offended, and that even innocuous speech and behaviors should be deemed "offensive." My impression of it over the years has hardly improved; it’s always seemed like—and still seems like—an excuse to get outraged over stupid things, act victimized, and prevent any sort of enlightened discussion on serious issues from actually taking place, often while promoting shallow, empty catchphrases that are more problematic than helpful.

George Carlin (Image from Reuters)

Ever since I discovered them, I’ve been a fan of George Carlin’s numerous takedowns of the hypocrisy and frivolity of the PC movement; it’s in that vein of anti-PC thought that I’ve always fallen. Historically, I consider myself to have pretty good company: Carlin, Marilyn Manson, who’s always been just as ready to offend PC liberals as he has the Christian right, and Hunter S. Thompson, who always represented the spirit of political incorrectness in his very existence. The stated goals of political correctness—moving toward a society where we tolerate our differences with one another and no one is unfairly discriminated against or made to feel inferior—were always ones I supported, but the victim mentality of the PC movement, their constant and usually unjustified outrage, their readiness to glorify people who say and do things that have reason to be offensive, just not to their side—those were always enough to turn me off.

But it’s because of my disgust for that sort of shallowness and hypocrisy that a disheartening truth has become clear to me, after a barrage of events to back it up—the uncritical deification of the dead Charlie Hebdo journalists, Salman Rushdie’s vindictive attacks against those who criticize “our fallen comrades,” Bill Maher’s claim that liberals are “bullying” him, and then, of course, Jonathan Chait’s empty-headed bad joke of an article; there is a new breed of political correctness: Political Incorrectness. People like Maher, who I once thought of as almost an heir to Carlin’s anti-PC individualist legacy, have revealed themselves to be no more eager to have a rational discussion, no less willing to play the victim, and just as ready to exploit good ideas as an excuse for loathsome garbage, than the PC crusaders they so despise.

Political correctness, to this new movement, is a convenient accusation to lob at anyone who challenges their mendacity—take when, back in May of 2013, Maher had Glenn Greenwald on his show, and after Greenwald threw a mountain of facts at him rebutting his claims about Islam, Maher eschewed rational argumentation in favor of accusing him of holding “a silly, liberal view that all religions are alike, because it makes [Greenwald] feel good [to think so].” Similarly, when, last year, Brandeis University decided not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because of her statements on Islam (such as that the West should fight a war against it using military force and that it’s a “nihilistic cult of death” that it “legitimates murder”), Sam Harris immediately responded by deeming the university’s act a capitulation to “PC-bullying.”

Harris also wrote off criticism of his support for ethnic profiling as being largely motivated by political correctness, and lacking substantive critique; Rushdie, too, has claimed that because of the “intimidation” of political correctness, we are unable to address the major problems associated with the War on Terror (presumably, he’s not referring to the very true, but largely unmentioned, fact that the United States, being the world’s leading terrorist nation, has no business waging a “War on Terror”). Like Jonathan Chait in his recent article, Harris, Rushdie, Maher, and the rest of the “Political Incorrectness” movement readily write off whatever arguments or actions contradict their “Politically Incorrect” views as being motivated by PC standards, regardless of who’s behind them and the rationale that’s offered for them.

As can be seen from these quotes, though, it’s not enough for the champions of “Political Incorrectness” to just dismiss criticism of their views as PC bullshit; rather, it’s crucial that political correctness of almost any incarnation is now a type of “bullying” or “intimidation” (or fascism, depending on who you’re talking to). One of the most annoying traits of the PC movement (particularly among self-proclaimed feminists on sites like Tumblr), for me, has always been the victim mentality underlying it, so it’s particularly disappointing to see these proponents of “Political Incorrectness” succumbing to the same self-indulgent nonsense. The downright whininess of the “Politically Incorrect” is, at times, farcical, such as when Sam Harris complained to Cenk Uygur about (perish the thought!) being called a “douchebag” in an article on Salon (we can only hope poor Sam has gotten the help he needed in recovering from that degree of PC bullying). The “Politically Incorrect” crew throws around accusations of bullying, authoritarianism, and censorship almost as readily as online “Social Justice Warriors” throw out accusations of racism and misogyny. What makes this particularly ironic, of course, is the standard line from the “Politically Incorrect” that what they really want is an open discussion and that their opponents should “just stop being so sensitive!”

Even worse, though, is that the “Politically Incorrect” crowd is really not that great when it comes to “politically correct” issues like the LGBT cause, religious tolerance, women’s equality, and so forth. Not long ago, Bill Maher cited how “Facebook has now decided we have to choose, in our profile, from 56 different genders” (which, if he’d checked, he would know are largely just slightly different terms for the same things, and are really just various prompts you’ll get if you select the “custom” option and begin typing, rather than some long list you have to scroll through) as an example of liberals being “obnoxious;” in a stand-up routine, he went on to mockingly list options like intersex, bigender, and genderfluid (apparently Bill Maher is unaware of the various societies throughout history—all, no doubt, ruled by PC fascists—that have recognized more than two genders). And, even taking into account that he’s a comedian, it’s a bit hard not to detect misogyny in some of his routines, as he talks about the "feminization" of society, where sensitivity matters more than facts.

Harris is worse; his ideas about “conversational intolerance” are completely incompatible with the view of a society where no one is made to feel unwelcome based on personal creed (as long as that creed tolerates others and harms no one). His advocacy for “benign dictatorship” being imposed on Muslim countries by the West as a means of transitioning to democracy shows an undeniable belief in an almost inherent superiority of Westerners, to the extent that even a Western-imposed dictator is better than a Middle Eastern Muslim democracy (until, of course, we can properly civilize the Muslims).

Then, of course, we have the late Christopher Hitchens—not a just a saint for the New Atheists, but for many of the “Politically Incorrect” as well (no surprise, given the overlap). With him we run into a gold mine of awful views, from his support of the Iraq War to his view that Native Americans really should get over the whole “genocide” deal because it was one of those unfortunate things that happens in the process of advancing as a species. Hitchens said and did the sort of things that even some of today’s conservatives would back away from.

With Manson, Carlin, or Thompson, while you might not exactly get that “let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya” feeling, there's always the sense of a sort of “you don’t screw with me and mine, I won’t screw with you” attitude—that as long as someone else isn’t hurting anyone, there’s no reason to bother them. The Manson-Carlin-Thompson dream society is an essentially libertarian one—not libertarian in the Ron Paul free market sense of the word, but rather a society where people are free to be who they are, and aren’t under the thumb of big business, big government, religious institutions, or the thought police. In the end, they're on the side of the “little guy,” whoever it is, in the present or the past, that's getting unfairly kicked around (or worse) based on race, class, or personal creed. The same, I’m afraid, just can’t be said for the Mahers, Harrises, and Hitchenses of the world.

In the end, though, there really is a defining feature of “Political Incorrectness” that makes it vastly worse than the PC values and attitudes it’s supposed to save us from: it consistently, with few exceptions, ends up defending the worst aspects of Western foreign policy. This stands in stark contrast to the old-school political incorrectness I’ve mentioned. Between Carlin’s scathing quips about how the US likes to bomb brown people, Thompson’s unequivocal condemnation of George W. Bush for “killing brown skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people,” and Manson’s comparison of America’s role in the Iraq War to a large-scale version of the Columbine shooting, it’s very clear where each of them falls on the foreign policy debate: with those who hold the Noam Chomsky-esque view that American foreign policy is largely murder on a massive scale. And why not? Isn’t the idea that when the government disintegrates innocents halfway across the world, it’s somehow more noble than any other instance of murder, just an example of a particularly awful sort of political correctness? Isn’t calling out the crimes of the government we live under challenging the standard on what it’s “acceptable” to say in perhaps the most important way possible?

But, unsurprisingly, the “Politically Incorrect” see it differently; this is obvious enough with Harris or Hitchens, given their readiness to use whatever force necessary to eliminate the Islamic extremism they claim is the real threat to civilization; given his unfettered praise of Obama, one can’t expect anything too impressive from Chait on the foreign policy front, either. Steven Pinker, another “Politically Incorrect” “intellectual,” asserts that democracies like the US “tend to stay out of disputes across the board,” disregarding all examples to the contrary and asserting there has been a “Long Peace” since World War II. Maher is probably the best in this respect, given his opposition to the Iraq War and that he even went as far as to compare the drone war to terrorism—but, as illustrated in his scuffle with Glenn Greenwald, that doesn’t keep from ultimately defending the idea that we Westerners are far more civilized than Those People (i.e. Muslims).

For all the stupidity of political correctness, it is at least on the right side of this issue; while the PC warriors may be obnoxious, one rarely finds them defending Western foreign policy or trying to stick up for the human rights record of the US or UK. The PC left is not only annoying, but certainly also hypocritical at times. But issues like these are trifles compared to the monstrous crimes that have occurred as part of US foreign policy, and which the “Politically Incorrect” would often like to gloss over or even defend. By giving cover to that sort of barbarism, “Political Incorrectness” earns itself the scorn and disgust of anyone concerned with human rights. It’s this issue, ultimately, that’s prompted me to focus so much on figures like Maher and Harris recently.

Anti-PC individualism, as espoused by Carlin, Thompson, Manson, and numerous others, has been buried by people claiming to represent it but using it as a façade to promote a completely different set of ideas. We need someone who condemns the stupidities of the PC movement on the one hand—a movement that really has gained a disquieting amount of influence—but who stands just as strongly against the violence of Western foreign policy and the lies than enable it from people like Harris and Hitchens. I don’t know who might fill that role, but whoever it is, now would be a great time for them to step into the spotlight.

[Later note: Originally, I cited California's affirmative consent law as an example of political correctness leading to a bad policy. However, I have since reevaluated my position and consider my former views on the law to have been based on a poor understanding of it, and I have concluded that, while there may be some concerns in how it's enforced, the law is fundamentally sound.]

Not a Very Accurate Thing to Say: A Response to Jonathan Chait

There's an article by the journalist Jonathan Chait that's gaining a decent bit of attention lately, entitled "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say." It's already gotten a fair bit of criticism (not all of which I agree with), but I thought I'd throw in my two cents on it anyway. To be honest, upon first seeing it, I thought it might be something I'd end up agreeing with—I'm no fan of political correctness, and I think it's one of the most annoying tendencies within the modern left. However, it became clear after not too long that this article was not some well-thought-out critique of political correctness so much as an attack on viewpoints Chait doesn't like by strawman and by associating them with legitimate stupidity which isn't directly related to them in any meaningful fashion. Per the usual, I'll pick the article apart here.

The article starts out decently enough, talking about a recent incident where a student journalist was harassed and fired because of a piece he published satirizing PC culture, and an incident in 1992 when a group of angry radical feminists stole a videotape from another feminist who had an exhibition documenting the lives of sex workers who viewed their profession as empowering. Correctly, Chait views both of these incidents as PC stupidity run amok. However, it's shortly after this that Chait begins to reveal how this article is ultimately his own stupidity run amok, as he claims that the "theory animating both attacks turns out to be a durable one, with deep roots in the political left."

Next, Chait complains about the criticism of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons:

On Twitter, “Je Suis Charlie,” a slogan heralding free speech, was briefly one of the most popular news hashtags in history. But soon came the reactions (“Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie”) from those on the left accusing the newspaper of racism and those on the right identifying the cartoons as hate speech. Many media companies, including the New York Times, have declined to publish the cartoons the terrorists deemed offensive, a stance that has attracted strident criticism from some readers. These sudden, dramatic expressions of anguish against insensitivity and oversensitivity come at a moment when large segments of American culture have convulsed into censoriousness.

This is something I'm happy Chait gave the opportunity to address—while I've already attacked the New Atheist response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I haven't very much discussed the actual cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo. The truth is, not only do you not have to be a supporter of political correctness to condemn them; if you honestly see nothing wrong with some of the cartoons, I wonder if there's not something wrong with you. How about this one, making light of peaceful protestors killed by the Egyptian government (the text reads, "The Qur'an is shit—it doesn't stop bullets")? Yeah, hilarious. There's an entire letter that's now surfaced, written (before the shooting) by Olivier Cyran, who once worked at Charlie Hebdo, attacking their increasing obsession with mocking and degrading Muslims. The magazine quotes Bernard Maris (a journalist that was killed in the attack) as writing:

Show your breasts, Amina [a member of FEMEN who posed topless], show your genitals to all those bearded retards who hang around on porno sites, to all the desert pigs who preach morality at home and pay for escorts in foreign palaces, and dream of seeing you stoned to death after raping you... Your nude body is of an absolute purity, compared to their jellabas and repugnant niqabs.

Nothing Islamophobic about that. (Oh, I forgot, I'm not supposed to criticize him because he was killed. Whoops.)

Chait's next examples of political correctness gone awry are not much better; he cites the petition to revoke the invitation to Bill Maher to give UC Berkeley's commencement speech (an issue I've already addressed), glibly noting that Bill Maher has criticized Islam "along with nearly all the other major world religions." The fact that Bill Maher has explicitly singled out Islam and that his criticisms of it are particularly problematic is conveniently overlooked (though, as I said before, I don't support the petition).

Similarly, "protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for 'imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.'" So the protestors didn't want the commencement speech given by the managing director of an organization that routinely exploits and harms third-world countries, who herself champions the disastrous European austerity measures? Can't imagine why, seems like a great pick to me.

In the same vein,

Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested ­former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.

What's shocking is not that these figures were "blocked" by protestors but that the universities would even consider them as commencement speakers: Rice avidly backed the US invasion of Iraq, a major war crime; Hirsi Ali said that the West needs to fight a war against Islam, using military force if necessary; Birgeneau sided with police who brutalized nonviolent protestors on his campus. Are we honestly supposed to feel bad that they were scared off?

Chait then goes on to cite a number of other examples of what he views as PC craziness, which I mostly agree are genuinely stupid. In fact, I agreed so substantially that I wasn't sure that the article would actually be worth responding to—that is, until, it got to the latter bit of it. There, the things he says begin to become so absurd that it's quite a task to demonstrate how wrong they are—the best way is to simply look at them bit by bit.

The right wing in the United States is unusually strong compared with other industrialized democracies, and it has spent two generations turning liberal into a feared buzzword with radical connotations. This long propaganda campaign has implanted the misperception — not only among conservatives but even many liberals — that liberals and “the left” stand for the same things.

This part is actually true, and I find it quite annoying for reasons very unlike Chait's. I find it very annoying that my ideology is constantly grouped in with those whose views I strongly dislike (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc.)  as "leftism." Likewise, I find it incredibly annoying that the right wing actually believes liberal hacks like these are "left-wing" in any sense; and I find it equally irritating that it's popular among some mainstream Democrats to fancy themselves as somehow being far-left just because they hate Republicans.

It is true that liberals and leftists both want to make society more economically and socially egalitarian. But liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace. (So, for that matter, do most conservatives.)

Uh-huh. Let's look at the three claims this paragraph makes, in effect: Claim A: "liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights..." If by liberals you mean mainstream liberals like Chait, this could hardly be less true. Chait is yet another Obama apologist, willing to overlook or endorse minor issues pertaining to individual rights under the president such as his expanded drone strikes (so much for the right to a fair trial), expanded NSA spying (so much for the fourth amendment), and role in keeping a Yemeni journalist in prison on bogus charges (and there goes freedom of the press). This sort of thing is all too typical of mainstream liberals, who often continue to hail the greatness of Obama in spite of his blatantly problematic (to put it politely) legacy.

Claim B: "most conservatives" also "hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition." Even more absurd, considering that Obama's worst policies have often been too mild for many conservatives. American conservatism is largely American liberalism minus the few shreds of humanity that that ideology has. To say it defends individual rights or holds to Enlightenment values is laughable.

There's also an implicit third claim: leftists don't "hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace." I guess someone should tell that to Noam Chomsky, one of the most renowned leftists on Earth, who has consistently defended individual rights, freedom of expression, and a "free political marketplace" (whatever that means) from attacks on them by liberals and conservatives, and who cites Enlightenment principles as the core of his anarchist philosophy.

It gets better next:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

This overlooks the minor fact that Marx wrote an entire work defending freedom of the press and attacking censorship and that prominent Marxists throughout history, such as Rosa Luxemburg, have defended "freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly...the free battle of opinions." It's a bit telling that Chait neither quotes nor cites anything to back up his claim. Why complicate an idiotically contrived narrative with actual facts, though?

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

The idea that strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of blacks is, in fact, nonsensical. Of course, if you genuinely believe in free speech, you have to support it for even abhorrent groups like the Klan; but it's odd that Chait should choose this view from MacKinnon to illustrate the "problems" with the far left. Furthermore, what right does MacKinnon have to represent the far left? By no means is every radical leftist a radical feminist, like MacKinnon--in fact, while many of the radical feminists I know of hold far-left viewpoints, not that many of the radical leftists I know of are radical feminists.

Skipping ahead a bit, we get this paragraph:

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

I have a longstanding distaste for political correctness, but the idea that the "p.c. left" is more "philosophically threatening" than conservatism (or the psychotic ideology that we refer to today in the United States when we use that word) is unfathomably stupid. Let's have a brief refresher of the "accomplishments" of Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of American conservatism:

• support for the South African apartheid regime, whose military aggression killed 1.5 million people in neighboring countries
• support for IMF "structural adjustment programs" which led to the deaths of an estimated 6 million children under five per year
• funding of South American terrorists who reportedly raped, murdered, and tortured civilians
• weakening of unions and the middle class at home in the United States 
• policies that helped pave the way for the surveillance state we have today

And the movement that venerates this man as some kind of American hero is supposedly embracing a less damaging philosophy than the "p.c. left" because the latter tend be whiny and oversensitive. A bit of a stretch.
 
Chait then launches into a discussion of a professor of feminist studies who encountered young pro-life activists and, after they refused to take down their sign, "snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the [protestors] on the way." Supposedly this event and the fact that there were people who defended it is some damning indication of the evils of the far left and the danger of political correctness. While the incident and the defense of it are deplorable, somehow the fact that there are people in the US government who still defend the illegal invasion and occupation of a country that posed no threat to us seems a tad more pressing.

Chait goes on to discuss how the PC movement of the 1990's was vanquished because, thankfully, Bill Clinton came along to rescue us from it and return us to the world of genuine, good liberalism instead of politically correct leftism. Yes, thank God that Bill Clinton could save us from political correctness. True, he did end up bombing a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and killing maybe tens of thousands for no decent reason, but isn't that a minor issue compared to the menace of political correctness?

After a couple paragraphs vacillating between whether political correctness will or won't be vanquished again in the near future, Chait wraps up with this:

That the new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence is a triumph, but one of limited use. Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

Yes, nevermind the small fact that social freedoms for blacks, Jews, gays, and women were advocated for by far-leftists well before American liberalism did anything to address their situation. In Chait's mind, apparently, you have to abide by what he considers American liberalism (singing the praises of Clinton and Obama, essentially) or you must be a member of the "p.c. left." So Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and Gore Vidal are apparently either nonexistent, members of the "p.c. left" (despite holding ideas not even vaguely resembling the ones Chait describes), or actually mainstream liberals (despite detesting the ideology Chait espouses).

Ultimately, this is either Chait's attempt to smear leftism in order to deflect its criticism of mainstream liberalism, or Chait is really just too ignorant to know the complete stupidity of his claims about leftism. Neither says anything good about him as a journalist. But, in spite of his mendacious claims about their ideology, major far-left figures both today and throughout history would eagerly defend his right to publish this article. That fact, of course, defeats his arguments far more effectively than any kind of censorship ever could.

Note: The claim that the structural adjustment programs led to the deaths of six million children under five per year was slightly reworded for greater accuracy and the hyperlink was directed to a more reliable source. I also qualified the claim about Clinton's bombing killing tens of thousands as the number is unknown.