Anti-American Studies

Abstract

That Todd Gitlin, one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, should have about-faced with regard to early millennial U.S. imperial ventures is one of the defining acts of our intellectual moment. In aNew York Timesop-ed piece in September of 2002, Gitlin wrote,The American left … had its version of unilateralism. Responsibility for the [September 11] attacks had, somehow, to lie with American imperialism, because all responsibility has to lie with American imperialism — a perfect echo of the right's idea that all good powers are and should be somehow American. Intellectuals and activists on the far left could not be troubled much with compassion or defense…. Knowing little about Al Qaeda, they filed it under Anti-Imperialism, and American attacks on the Taliban under Vietnam Quagmire. For them, not flying the flag became an urgent cause…. Post-Vietnam liberals have an opening now, freed of our 60s flag anxiety and our reflexive negativity, to embrace a liberal patriotism that is unapologetic and uncowed.Here, any sense of hesitancy about a war on “terror” is ascribed to a loony left; U.S. imperialism, if it isn't seen as some left fabrication, seems peculiarly untroubling to Gitlin. Indeed, the publication in which his op-ed appeared had published a couple of months earlier (in theNew York Times Magazine) an essay by Harvard's Professor of Human Rights Policy [sic] Michael Ignatieff proclaiming imperialism a necessary national exercise: “Imperialism used to be the white man's burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn't stop being necessary because it is politically incorrect.” This, together with Gitlin's call for a “liberal patriotism,” is pitched against what Gitlin elsewhere, in redolent terminology, names the “reflexive anti-Americanism” to be found “on campuses and in coastal cities, in circles where reality checks are scarce.”