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PARTISAN REVIEW
left ideology- which remains a diverse melange pragmatically
focused by certain issues-but the new perception of the Soviet
military threat, coupled to the emergence of a new right that
exploits that threat in part to promote its selfish and simplistic
social policies. The result appears to be a situation in which there
is little room for rational renovation of critique from the liberal
left. Phillips's argument, for example, seems to result in a version
of the right's traditional "my country, right or wrong." Thus we
are told that the left favors leftist forces in Latin America and
Africa "regardless of their Soviet ties or their anti-American pol–
icies" ; that "disarmament agitation" in the United States
strengthens the hand of the other superpower; and that opposition
to some of Menachem Begin's policies and concern for the Pales–
tinians show that the left "is actually against Israel." Are these
and other statements in Phillips's article to be read as an argument
that the renewed cold war has somehow cut away the basis for any
criticism of the policies of America and its allies? Is pro-American–
ism and anticommunism once again the only test to be applied to
Third World governments, and to citizens' loyalty?
Phillips states further: "In the past, radicals were able to
think of politics as an internal affair, and were ready to challenge
their own governments even at the cost of helping foreign ones.
Now the presence of the Soviet Union rules out purely internal
questions, making all questions truly international." Are we to
take Phillips's " now" as disallowing any challenges to the status
quo? In any event, he falsifies the history and the context of chal–
lenges offered by the left.
It
could in fact be plausibly argued that
one of the relatively strong points of the left over the past twenty
years has been its insistence upon linking domestic issues to
international ones, seeing connections between the attitudes that
promoted war in Vietnam and racism at home, between geo–
political actions and their socio-economic consequences, between
policies in Chile and El Salvador and the fate of American cities,
to take only a couple of obvious
e~amples.
Phillips asks: "How are
we to understand the readiness of the left to proclaim its indigna–
tion against Salvador, while muting its objections to Afghanistan?"
While I am not aware that the responsible left did "mute" its reac–
tions to Afghanistan (the debate on Afghanistan largely concerned
what American countermeasures might prove effective), the an–
swer to Phillips's rhetorical question is so elementary he seems to
