America's "Most Dangerous" Professors?
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Perhaps more damning is that I "blame Israel and the US for provoking Islamic terrorism." That's true, but only in part, since I also blame Muslims, which he neglects to mention, and which is the whole point of trying to offer a more holistic and accurate description of the causes of the war on terror. Horowitz also criticizes me for arguing that capitalism and globalization have caused "war and misery," but I don't see him arguing that they don't; that's because he's too smart to enter an argument he can't win. The point, I guess, is not that they don't do these things, but rather that by highlighting them I'm putting the capitalist project, or at least American power, in danger).
Even worse, I have the temerity to remind people that war and occupation are wonderful opportunity for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits. For Horowitz such claims are just "Marxist clichés unanchored in any observable reality." And here we have arrived at the basic dynamic behind The Professors. It is clear that Horowitz and his kind, on the one hand, and myself and most of the other honorees from his list, do not exist in the same reality. Horowitz, like his hero George W. Bush, "creates" his own "reality" (as one senior White House official famously bragged of the current administration), and if they have to destroy other countries, say, Iraq, to do so--in what neocon philosopher and Bush confidant Michael Ledeen gleefully describes as "creative destruction" (the term was originally coined by the sociologist Rudolph Schumpeter to describe the impact of modernity on societies where it appeared)--well, that's the price of progress.
But it's pretty dangerous when someone with Horowitz's supposed clout thinks that war profiteering, which has been amply documented by our own government auditors, is "unanchored in observable reality." I guess, like Einsteinian physics, it depends on the point of view of the observer. From inside the beltway, and especially the White House and conservative think tanks and K-street lobbyist suites, they hope that no one is observing the rape of the American treasury that has become the Great War on Terror. For the rest of us, I don't think it's so easy to ignore.
In the end, what Horowitz clearly wants is that we either support his radical neoliberal-neoconservative agenda or just sit down, shut up, and act like the mobs watching the spectacles at the Colosseum, satisfied with a ticket to the big show and the chance to glimpse Ceasar at one of his well-scripted appearances before his gladiators.
Am I a utopian, as Horowitz charges? Well, I have two young children and would like to see them grow up in a country, and a world at large, that lives up to the high ideals upon which the United States was founded. As I write this at a friend's apartment in Beirut (a rock musician, I'm afraid to say), more and more of my acquaintances are lamenting precisely the loss of utopian spirit that only a year ago drove Syria out of Lebanon, a feat most of them would have bet their lives wouldn't occur in the lifetimes only a few months before it happened. What's clear to them is that as soon as the utopian urge gave way to "realism" and "pragmatism," politics as usual came back with a vengeance, leaving Lebanon as weak and vulnerable today as it was during the Syrian occupation.
Ultimately, I think that my utopian inclinations are the main threat to Horowitz and his generation of disgruntled ex-leftists, for whom the status quo of increasing corruption, lies, violence and trampled rights can only continue to the extent people don't believe that another world, or at least another political culture, is possible. I--and I'm willing to bet, most of the professors in Horowitz's book--still believe that it’s possible for America to live up to its founding promises, to be a force for good in the world rather than just naked self-interest, greed, and the benefit of corporations with ties to red-state Republicans.
Does that make me dangerous? I wish it did, but I fear Mr. Horowitz is giving me and the American people more credit than is our due. As far as I can tell, the American empire is safe and secure, despite my best efforts to topple it. Let's hope we're both wrong.
Mark Levine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil.
