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August 04, 2003

Ann Coulter’s Views are Getting Traction

When I first heard, months before it was published, the thesis of Ann Coulter’s book TREASON, I was taken aback. It was so far out there that I wondered how it would go over.

However, her views are gaining a lot of acceptance. Here are two current examples.

From Norman Geras, in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

On Sept. 11, 2001, there was, in the U.S., a massacre of innocents. There’s no other acceptable way of putting this: some 3,000 people (and, as anyone can figure, it could have been many more) struck down by an act of mass murder without any possible justification, an act of gross moral criminality. What was the left’s response? In fact, this goes well beyond the left if what is meant by that is people and organizations of socialist persuasion. It included a wide sector of liberal opinion as well. Still, I shall just speak here, for short, of the left. The response on the part of much of it was excuse and apologia.

At best you might get some lip service paid to the events of September 11 having been, well, you know, unfortunate—the preliminary “yes” before the soon-to-follow “but” (or, as Christopher Hitchens has called it, “throat clearing”). And then you’d get all the stuff about root causes, deep grievances, the role of U.S. foreign policy in creating these; and a subtext, or indeed text, whose meaning was America’s comeuppance. This was not a discourse worthy of a democratically committed or principled left, and the would-be defense of it by its proponents, that they were merely trying to explain and not to excuse what happened, was itself a pathetic excuse. If any of the root-cause and grievance themes truly had been able to account for what happened on September 11, you’d have a hard time understanding why, say, the Chileans after that earlier September 11 (I mean of 1973), or other movements fighting against oppression and injustice, have not resorted to the random mass murder of civilians.

Why this miserable response? In a nutshell, it was a displacement of the left’s most fundamental values by a misguided strategic choice, namely, opposition to the U.S., come what may. This dictated the apologetic mumbling about the mass murder of U.S. citizens, and it dictated that the U.S. must be opposed in what it was about to do in hitting back at al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

Geras describes the Left as being opposed to the United States. Before Coulter’s book, this was unheard-of.

And from Neo-Liberal Norah Vincent, in an article strongly critical of Coulter’s book:

So, for the record, let it be said that, as Coulter asserts, there are indeed some on the American far left who despise this country, hope to see it fail and have said as much in public. Remember the infamous University of New Mexico professor, Richard Berthold, who said on 9/11: “Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote”?

Coulter’s point is being heard.