PAUL
HOLLANDER
115
Peace Delegations, "Folks are finding themselves moving to other coun–
tries where there is a lot of conflict, like the Middle East and South
Africa." If so, the impulse to help Nicaragua and its people had more to
do with the mystique of participating in the (presumed) redemptive rev–
olutionary transformation of a society and the excitement generated by
it, than with helping flesh and blood human beings in their prosaic day–
to-day existence.
I think that one effect of the events here discussed on the American
(and Western) left and especially the radical left will be a further
intensification of social criticism aimed at the United States, as if to
confirm the claim that just because putative socialist systems failed, the
United States or capitalism does not have a moral edge over them, or
over the unfulfilled ideals of socialism. I believe that this trend has been
with us since the early 1980s, stimulated in part by the anger and frustra–
tion the Reagan presidency had created in these circles.
Support for the African National Congress will remain on the
agenda (and the corresponding demands for divestment) ; sympathy and
support for the communist guerillas in El Salvador (and the associated
criticism of United States foreign policy) will also persist; the overex–
tended and disfigured concept of "racism" will continue to be used as
perhaps the single most devastating (and intimidating) critique of Ameri–
can society (and of particular individuals); other critiques in part modeled
after attributions of racism (and perhaps also stimulated by the institu–
tionalized rewards provided to its real or putative victims) will continue
to be voiced by other certified victims groups - feminists, homosexuals,
AIDs victims, and their more privileged supporters and advocates, and
others.
American society will continue to inspire and nurture a vast array of
discontents and frustrations which will be blamed either on capitalism or
on the more unique deformities of American culture. In doing so, the
critics will persist in confusing the sources of their discontent which are
stimulated by capitalism (or American social institutions) with those
which are rooted in the far more general afflictions of modernity,
including freedom, individualism, and affluence, all of which are at once
intensely desired and bitterly denounced.
