"Hippie" foreign policy

Yes, Virginia, the 1960s did exist. They didn't look much at all like the psychedelic fantasies that haunt the minds of the Christian Right "culture warriors" and the OxyContin dreams of Rush Limbaugh and his dittoheads. But they existed.

And among civil rights and antiwar activists, there actually were some serious attempts at genuinely left-radical criticisms of US foreign policy. I won't try to trace what the path one might take to get from today's Bush Republican definition of "the Left" as including Osama bin Laden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Hagel to something resembling reality. It's probably one of those "you can't get there from here" situations.

Let's just say that circa 1968, the liberals knew they were liberals and the "left" knew they shared many social goals with liberals but also took a different viewpoint on some things, including some basic Cold War assumptions. Left critics of the Cold War during those days produced some serious, well-informed, thoughtful critiques of US foreign policy. Liberals, some of them anyway, actually engaged in what could be called a meaningful and occasionally productive dialogue with them. Followers of Spiro Agnew and George Wallace, the political ancestors of today's entire Republican Party, just dismissed the left and the liberals as dirty anti-American hippies. Some traditions remain intact.

Some of the better-known names of left historians of US foreign policy then would be William Appleman Williams, Noam Chomsky, Carl Oglesby, Gabriel Kolko, Gal Alperowitz, Walter Lafeber and David Horowitz. Yes, that David Horowitz, who went on to spend decades building a career out of being a repentent leftist who became a stark, raving rightwinger.

A liberal historian, Robert Tucker, wrote one of those "dialogue" books, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (1971), that dealt in particular with Cold War "revisionist" historians. Daniel Ellsberg in his 1972 Papers on the War called Tucker's book "a useful critique" of the left-revisionist approach, though Ellberg made it clear that the "revisionist" approach was closer to his view. Writing about the moral judgments on American conduct that their more sleazy opponents seized on to accuse them of being "anti-American", Tucker argued on the contrary that this aspect was the most appealing aspect of the left-revisionist take on the Cold War:

More than the explanatory power of radical criticism, it is the moral fervor and idealism of this criticism that must account for its influence. A provisional realism masks an idealism that runs deep in the American grain. The moral absolutism with which, explicitly or implicitly, the radical judges America's relations with the world is distinctive only with respect to the object of judgment - and condemnation [i.e., the US]. With respect to the standards of judgment employed, radical criticism is characteristically - if exaggeratedly - American. It is not surprising, then, that it is also characteristically American in its expectations of the role a new America is destined to play in the world. The radical does not foreswear the belief in America's providential mission. Instead, he changes the content of that mission and sees its fulfillment in the future. A condemnation of the past and present is accordingly joined to a promise of a future in which a sinful nation may yet redeem itself and, by so doing, serve as an example to the world. Indeed, given America's wealth, it may yet save the world. In the vision - or illusion - of how a Socialist America [!!!] would behave, the radical entertains expectations of the nation's destiny Americans have always entertained.

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