Anti-Climacus

LINK: I enjoy church particularly when the preacher is fired up on his topic, especially if he's not always fired up, as that makes it easier to tell when it happens.

Norm Geras is fired up today. I suggest y'all go read. I like this especially:

"What you say and don't say - not on some particular day, but over a period, in the balance of the emphases, the silences and the sounds - is the vehicle of what you think, where you stand. The animus against politicians like Bush and Blair, the sheer unrelenting hostility and, in Bush's case, derision, combined this with a voice about the evils today threatening us which is variously muted, strangled or just rampantly apologetic, tells a bleak story about the cultural moment we are in. What price will in the end be paid for the combination remains to be seen. It is unlikely to prove costless."

Which makes me wonder why it is that certain left-of-center types (Norm, the Harry's Place crowd, even Socialism in an Age of Waiting), myself included, have ended up in this position. The answer, it seems to me, is that we'd all subscribe to something like the following statement: principle has to trump politics, every time. Trotsky must ally with the social democrats against Hitler because he understands that, even as much as his opposition is totally wrong, there's a greater priority at the moment.

You might think of it as the difference between the belief that politics is all about power versus the belief that it's about power, but also justice. If you're inclined to see principle as epiphenomenon to justify use of power by people who have it, then your political position has to be pure oppositionism. You support the war because you hate fascism, dictators and gross violations of the sanctity of human life. You oppose it because America is hegemon, and so any use of power, even for a putatively good reason, begets more of the environment one doesn't desire in the first place. It's unclear to me that a leftist anti-war position (other than that of the pacifist, which is another, easier set of problems to deal with) will not eventually reduce to this postmodern mush. So it's not really 'their morals and ours;' it's our morals and their rejection of them.