Writing in The National Review, Stanley Kurtz tries to explain why the anti-War Left must be:

The problem for the Left is that Sept. 11 really may have changed everything — that a near-constant state of mobilization against terror may permanently cripple the politics of multiculturalism at home and anti-globalization abroad.

We can only hope. Identity politicians have indeed had a rough time of it lately, but they’re a tenacious bunch (how old is Jesse Jackson, anyway? 125? And howsabout that Gloria Steinem gal? Hell, Mad Magazine was lampooning her in the early 60s, weren’t they! She’s, like, 90 if she’s a day!), and their emotional appeals carry a lot of weight in a culture built on soundbites and maintained by a sympathetic media. On the anti-global front, Bush’s plan to impose tariffs on steel imports, coupled with Tony Blair’s (among others’) appropriately vocal outrage, may have set that cause back a bit. Some questionable ideologies have been bruised since 9/11, no doubt about it; but crippled? Not by a longshot.

[…]The cultural politics of the Left is essentially an attempt to ‘one up’ democracy by being ‘more egalitarian than thou.’ The sense of superiority; the demand for control; anger against a hated foe — all of these forms of human irrationality are abundantly present in leftist politics. Yet a right-thinking, well-brought-up, hyper-egalitarian fellow can only enjoy these guilty pleasures if they’re buried inside of an attack against America itself for some imagined sin against democracy. To feel angry at, or superior to, some benighted foreign foe is just too obvious — too embarrassing — a way for a sophisticated modern leftist to gratify all of those nasty but ineradicable human longings for supremacy.

[…]That’s why left-leaning intellectuals have retreated into a stance of tortured isolation and superiority, while still suggesting to anyone who will listen that the threat of terrorism and the war itself are nothing but mass delusions.

Personally, I pray the intelligensia keeps braying and howling and making asses of themselves. Because the more we as a society hear of the radical egalitarian agenda, the more likely we are to notice just how bad — and by that I mean “undemocratic” and ideologically relativistic — it all sounds…

—–