Euston

After another screed at the left, or at least what he perceives of as the left, the sputtering remnants of Hitchens notices the Euston Manifesto:

This hectic collapse in the face of brutish irrationality and the most cynical realpolitik has taken far too long to produce antibodies on the left. However, a few old hands and some sharp and promising new ones have got together and produced a statement that is named after the especially unappealing (to me) area of London in which it was discussed and written.

The “Euston Manifesto” keeps it simple. It prefers democratic pluralism, at any price, to theocracy. It raises an eyebrow at the enslavement of the female half of the population and the burial alive of homosexuals. It has its reservations about the United States, but knows that if anything is ever done about (say) Darfur, it will be Washington that receives the UN mandate to do the heavy lifting.

It prefers those who vote in Iraq and Afghanistan to those who put bombs in mosques and schools and hospitals. It does not conceive of arguments that make excuses for suicide murderers. It affirms the right of democratic nations and open societies to defend themselves, both from theocratic states abroad and from theocratic gangsters at home.

I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.

One of the sharper criticisms of the blogger responses to the war, both pro and con, came from George Packer in The Assassins' Gate, and is that the war quickly became more about winning an argument than anything else. A lot of egos are then on the line over the outcome. And here is Hitchens, snarling at those he feels betrayed his side of the argument, and swearing to become a conservative out of spite, which should give some idea of the depths of his ideological roots.

It bears repeating that many on the left didn't oppose the war because we disagreed with humanitarian intervention, we disagreed with the motives of this invasion, we felt that its chances for success were slim, we thought the consequences of failure would be catastrophic, and we thought that abandoning the rest of the world was folly. Hitchens may rail at the more batty inhabitants of the left, and Berman may dramatically pound the table in self-righteous argument with his dopey leftist everyman companion, but what it comes down to is that they were wrong, dead wrong.

So they're doing a very public regrouping in the form of the Euston Manifesto and, gathering their threadbare tatters of ideology around them, trying to regain a semblance of their pride by saying "Well, that didn't work out too well, but look how good our motives were.". And this is one of the things that offends me personally about the Manifesto. Guys, our motives are all the same. We want democracies all over the globe. We want peace, we want honour, we want shared wealth, we want personal liberty, we want the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, and we want an end to tyranny, oppression, and suffering. The motives were never the issue, it was the choice of a harebrained way to obtain those goals without thought as to what would be lost that was the problem. Putting down those motives into a signable "manifesto" simply adds more hubris to the pile by implictly proposing that those not in the Euston Club have differing motives. That is deeply offensive because it's the same card that has been played over and over again in response to opposition to the war, any opposition, no matter the reason.

I think that the next-to-last word should go to Jim Henley:

One of the least appealing things about the self-consciously “Decent Left” is its narcissism. You get the feeling that the emphasis is less, “What’s the decent thing?” than “How shall we demonstrate our decency?” It’s self-conscious and gestural and obsessed with striking the right profile. Ironically, this mirrors the standard conservative complaint about leftism generally. You don’t have to read many issues of the New Criterion or Commentary to find complaints that leftists are more concerned with being seen to be capital-G Good than with the practical work of building a decent society.

Vanity, vanity, thy name is Decent Left.