My battle with Norman Podhoretz.

Norman Podhoretz has brought forth a new book called World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. The publication date, in case you might be inclined to miss the point, is September 11, the same date on which an adapted excerpt appeared on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. There, to illustrate his polemic against anti-Americans past, present, and future, Podhoretz deployed a phrase, "a negative faith in America the ugly," of which the last three words, wearing nothing but inverted commas, did double duty as a headline. Podhoretz employed this phrase to suggest that the American left tout court was a wicked place where "not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning." He went on to write that this bad impulse was something "that [Todd Gitlin] and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more."The phrase, you see, was my own. Here is the whole sentence to which it belonged when I wrote it for Mother Jones several years back: "But in the wake of September 11 there erupted something more primal and reflexive than criticism and hope--a kind of left-wing fundamentalism, a negative faith in America the ugly." And so, umbrage is what I took at Podhoretz's warped summary of my rejection of that negative faith. Now, certainly one way in which democracy is messy is that, in the course of opposing bad policies, some dissenters lose their tempers, even their wits, and curse from top to bottom the nation that embraced its leaders' policies. Certainly this happened in the 1960s, as I have written at length. But, if the nature of Podhoretz's trickiness needs to be spelled out, it is this: Left-wing fundamentalism was not, and is not, the whole of the opposition to either the Vietnam or Iraq wars. On the left, after September 11, 2001, there was loathing of Islamism, there was reasoned criticism of Bush, there was intense patriotism, and there was left-wing fundamentalism. Moreover, the myopic and wrong-headed impulse to blame America first is not an unvarying constant--"tenaciously held onto," in Podhoretz's phrase--many former indulgers having long since gotten over it. On reading "america the ugly," I went to the keyboard, wrote a version of the present response, and sent it the next day to the op-ed editor of the Journal, Robert Pollock, after agreeing that my opposition to Podhoretz's abuse of my phrase would take second place to an argument about the anti-democratic lineage of the hoary stab-in-the-back accusation--the charge that wars like Vietnam and Iraq would be won were it not for the left undermining the nation. Ill-accustomed as I am to writing for the Journal, I thought such a piece worth attempting not only as a matter of personal privilege but because the issue at stake is substantial: whether Podhoretz is right to warn that the United States is going to be betrayed out of winning World War IV. E-mail is marvelous. It took all of 14 minutes from the flick of my send button for Pollock to reply: "We're willing to print stuff that isn't on our line but this is way over the top. Much more vicious and uncharitable than the piece you're objecting to from Norman. And the stab in the back theme is a straw man. Sorry." Funny, but that straw man seems to be making his case on the Journal op-ed page on a regular basis. A bit of backstory: Over the decades, Podhoretz has been insistently replaying the 40-year-old saga of his courageous escape from the prison house of radicalism and subsequent career as commissioner manque of patriotic resolve. Revisiting the stations of his long march toward Damascus, he retraces in this op-ed his recovery from left-wing illusions. In a time-honored tradition, he assures us that, where once he was blind, now he can see--in fact, that his onetime blindness is the very certificate of his continuing 20-20 vision. Show me anyone of a certain age who has nothing to live down about the '60s, and I'll show you a stone for the ages. But the lucidity of Podhoretz's memory may be conveyed by the fact that he writes that he is "haunted by one memory in particular" where he came to understand the dreadfulness of antiAmerican radicals. In a "drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan," he addressed "a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. " His companion surveyed the "bedraggled-looking assemblage" and noted that "every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other." This meeting, he writes, took place in 1960--remarkable when you consider that John F. Kennedy was not yet installed in the White House and left-wing radicals, however farsighted they might have been, were not in the slightest interested in Vietnam, let alone any opposition to a yet unimaginable war there. This is the "one memory in particular" by which Podhoretz says he is "haunted." We have been here before and we shall be here again, for the trope of unregenerate losers betraying their homeland is a staple of ideologues. In the which-side-are-you-on melodrama that Podhoretz embraces, the America-haters of the "domestic insurgency" lurk everywhere and all that they need for victory is that good men stand around doing nothing. In this stick-figure world, men like Bush and Cheney are at once principled, unabashed about their ambition, and properly appreciative of America's benison. By severe contrast, the ungrateful America-haters disguise their own will to power. So it was too in the '60s, when Podhoretz came to understand that the abiding sin of his misguided circle was ingratitude for their great good luck in finding themselves living in the great field of ambition that constituted the heart of square America. Now, those squalid, dirty-minded, antinomians are back, this time disguised as tenured radicals, media heavies, and other latte- lapping moral relativists. Once more, they matter immensely. The nation's prospects in the current struggle, he writes in World War IV, "will depend at least as much on the war being waged on what in World War II was called the 'home front' as on the bloody battles being fought by our armed forces in the Middle East." The awful trouble is, Iraq is not bound for glory. Psychologically, this poses a problem for true believers like Podhoretz. What better solution than to point a withering finger at the barbarians at home? Unable even to define war aims, let alone articulate a strategy for attaining them, incoherent even in naming the enemy, let alone defeating its successive incarnations, ever self- immunized from doubt, the passionate dogmatists who were responsible for the catastrophe in the first place are prone to explain their failure at the front as the result of betrayal behind their backs. It is, as the Marxists used to say, no accident that the charge of stabs in the back has its origin in a defeated autocracy that badly overreached-- imperial Germany after World War I. During those bitter years, Jews and leftists were the scapegoats of choice. The Germans, anxious amid the rubble of their defunct ruling ideology, vulnerable to the dark arts of propaganda, were riled up against inconvenient dissenters. The United States has proved no exception to the same cycles of blame. For aren't Americans born to be winners? Can anything but internal demons explain why we don't always succeed? Thus did the Maoist takeover of China and the stalemate in Korea fan the flames of McCarthyism. Thus, too, did eventual American exit from Vietnam spawn the Rambo legend, recently recycled by President Bush, that the United States was winning the war until the military was betrayed by civilian meddlers, ignorant pointy-headed bureaucrats throwing their weight around from Washington, D.C. Today, it is the bogeyman of troopbetrayal that gets wheeled out to shield the administration and its supporters from the consequences of their own deception, corruption, incompetence, and delusions of progress. The last time I corresponded with a Wall Street Journal op-ed editor, it was September 20, 2001, the editor was Max Boot, and he sought me out because I had been quoted in USA Today saying that protesters "had a right to be skeptical" of U.S. foreign policy but also had "a responsibility to suggest realistic alternatives" to war, and that the nation had "a right of self-defense," albeit "restrained and focused," in the face of attack. Was I interested, Boot asked, in writing "about how you've gone from being an antiwar activist to being in favor of war in this circumstance?" I wrote back that, while I had "many criticisms of some current antiwar arguments ... to say that I'm 'in favor of war' is not accurate." I told him I wanted to write a piece "with due complexity." Boot wrote back: "This isn't quite as clear cut as I was hoping for so guess we'll pass."

By Todd Gitlin; Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.