In the last two weeks I have listened to two revealing podcasts that shed some light on the state of youthful opinion. The first, by Glenn Loury, was mainly an interview with Sabrina Salvati, a Millennial (I think) black podcaster from the left. (Glenn's wife LaJuan Loury also took part in the interview.) The second was a remarkable two-hour conversation between Briahna Joy Gray, a lawyer and commentator who was press secretary on one of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns, and Norman Finkelstein, a dissident Boomer academic and the author, most recently, of I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It, a massive polemic against wokeness in general featuring a long chapter on Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, whose stewardship of a new center for antiracism at Boston University is now under attack and under investigation. Finkelstein is one of the most intellectually controversial people in the United States. Born in 1953, the child of two Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, he made his name as a critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and of some American Jewish supporters of Israel. He accused Alan Dershowitz of plagiarizing parts of his book The Case for Israel from another secondary source--this controversy is discussed calmly and at great length in Finkelstein's Wikipedia entry--and Dershowitz retaliated by waging a long an successful public campaign to get DePaul University, where Finkelstein was teaching, to deny him tenure in the 2000s. Finkelstein now teaches part time, I believe, at community colleges--that is the impression I got from some of his remarks in the interview.
I suspect that Salvati and Gray represent a substantial strain of Millennial left wing opinion, although I cannot be sure. Salvati has only 900 subscribers on Substack, while Gray has almost 82,000 subscribers on her youtube channel. One striking view that they share is opposition to support for Ukraine. Both of them, particularly Salvati, seem to view the war as just another example of American imperialism and endorse the idea that we are fighting a "proxy war" against Ukraine, and that American foreign policy is controlled by "warmongers." Salvati insisted that the decision to give cluster munitions to the Ukrainians will in the long run do more harm than good for the Ukrainian people--ignoring that President Zelensky very much wanted those munitions, and that the Ukrainian people obviously overwhelmingly support his leadership in the war. That was not all. Salvati accused both Donald Trump and Joe Biden of being Fascists, and Gray ended her interview with Finkelstein--whom she has had on her podcast before, and obviously likes personally--by saying that she would vote for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic Primary and Cornel West in the general election. Gray also suggested the Biden appeared on the UAW picket line as part of a strategy devised by mysterious corporate powers that be to hide plans for hurting the UAW in an eventual agreement.
I have no sympathy whatever for those views about the Ukraine war, a genuine struggle for independence and territorial integrity against a lawless, imperialist Russia. Indeed I still regret, as I said about a year and a half ago, that NATO didn't think seriously about intervening militarily in the war as soon as it became clear that Ukraine could and would defend itself. I was skeptical about our original intervention in Afghanistan in 2001--and said so in print--and I was totally opposed to invading Iraq, but this is a completely different kind of war. What struck me about Salvati's and Gray's views in general, however, was their similarity to the views of so many of my contemporaries in the 1968-70 period. They had decided not simply that the Vietnam war was a mistake, but that it was simply one element in a completely imperialistic and wicked US foreign policy. They had also decided that there was no difference between the two parties and had taken no part in the 1968 election, except to disrupt the Democratic convention and some of Hubert Humphrey's rallies. They had contributed to some extent to Richard Nixon's victory, which as it turned out meant four more years of war in Vietnam, as well as the Watergate scandal, which we could not then foresee.
Just as Franklin Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and many other members of the post-Civil War Missionary generation bequeathed certain values to the GI generation that fought the war, Strauss and Howe in the 1990s expected Boomers to leave a new set of values to Millennials. I'm beginning to think that that happened, but in a far more fragmented way. Newt Gingrich and now, Donald Trump, have inspired some Millennial right wingers, and Boomer left wingers seem to have passed their views down two generations as well. Gray in the Finkelstein interview mentions that her grandfather was a Black Panther, as was the father of Gen Xer Ta Ne-hisi Coates. And, of course, many Boomer and Xer academics have passed the world view of the late 1960s on to many younger students in colleges and universities.
The Finkelstein interview was interesting from another angle. Finkelstein devoted a long chapter in I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It to Ibram X. Kendi's book, Stamped from the Beginning, which purported to be a history of racism in the United States and western culture generally. He points out, in great detail, the factual and logical weaknesses in Kendi's arguments, especially the argument that giants of the abolitionist and civil rights movements such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois were actually racists because, in his view, they looked down on black culture or wanted black people to join in white western civilization. Finkelstein is an interesting person. He described himself to Glenn Loury as a communist with a small c, and he is intentionally abrasive, but his conversation with Gray makes clear that he is an idealist when it comes to historical scholarship, and is therefore incensed that someone with incredibly oversimplified views of Kendi could have zoomed right to the top of the academic ladder. (Oddly, I, who like Finkelstein had a checkered career in academia, am not surprised by this: it happens all the time. He has not perhaps grasped the simple truth that the true scholars among us--who include members of all races and genders--are too few to define the ethos of our profession. The big winners in academia combine a sense of what people will like at any given moment with a talent for networking, and those appear to be Kendi's talents as well.) Finkelstein also mentions that while he has always regarded the New York Times as a conservative, establishment paper, he felt for several decades that he could trust it to provide true information. He no longer does, and I understand that, too.
The Ukraine issue is interesting from another perspective. Both the extreme left and the extreme right now oppose aid to Ukraine--and the extreme right in the House of Representatives has managed to delay aid to that beleaguered nation. This is a parallel to the early years of the Cold War, when both left-wing liberals--some of them with actual Communist associations--and extreme conservatives opposed it--the former because they were on the other side of it, the latter because they saw it as an excuse to expand federal power. By the mid-1950s both extremes had essentially been eliminated from Congress. The denouement of the budget crisis--which, it must be said, has only solved it for six weeks--suggests that the country might now be ruled by some kind of centrist majority. And while I am not as far from Briahna Joy Gray as you might think with respect to the current direction of the Democratic establishment, I still think that such a centrist majority would probably be the best thing for the country at this point. It is the only alternative either to endless division or an actual breakup of the country. I only wish that we had a Harry Truman or a Dwight Eisenhower to lead it, but Gen X has not produced a leader like that yet.
2 comments:
If you would study the war's origins, you would see that people like Freeland and Neuland, both whose grandparents are ex- Ukrainers are driving forces. Ex Nazis and extremists from Ukraine, Germany were given refuge in Amerrica. Such Ukrainian extremists have been prepared for such a moment. The British empire was peacefully folded into the American. Studying the history of the various orange revolutions in the Ukraine show it to be a Western plot to oppose Eastern Ukraine Russian influence and foment war fever. This war is self defense. The alternative of blithely sitting it out until nuclear missiles were stationed on Ukraine's eastern border would be nuclear annhilation. Beyond these observations, since the Monroe doctrine and the Louisiana Purchase, Mexican War, Spanish American War, Americans have just been hell bent on expansion with few checks. Empires in the past were similar. Rome started as a small town, much like Plymouth Rock. Trajectories are always quite similar. Only speed is different. Putin and Xi's policies are simply a reiteration of the UN charter or JFKs Peace speech, which apparently got him killed. The so-called Rules Based Orfder is the same way America dealt with the Indians. Make a contract with the intention of breaking it while laughing at the naiveté of the other side. The Eurasians understand that full well and call America "The Empire of Lies". Russia has fully broken with it while China is building a competitive system and gaining allies globally. Lenin or someone said that capitalists would sell the rope to hang them with. Obviously the rest of the world has taken note and are biding their time.
You are a rare person, someone who actually reads and evaluates opposing viewpoints. I disagree with your conclusions, believing that the Ukraine War is a continuation of US foreign policy that led to our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, but you get at the heart of our problem, that there is no honest, public debate about our foreign policy. One side are "Nazis" and the other "Putin Lovers". Time to end the polemics.
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