Nothing Left of Liberals 

Reading Legimation Crisis in Tehran. By Danny Postel

Reviewed by Robert Harless

Speaking as a fellow undergraduate of Danny Postel’s, I can testify that his knowledge of academic minutiae was staggering even at twenty. His boundless knowledge reminded me of the ‘buff’ of whatever fetish - like the baseball fanatic who memorizes every player’s stats. Danny developed an interest in academia in boarding school, and watching him quiz elder members of the philosophy department on obscure journals I was reminded of the Bible story where Mary takes the twelve year old Jesus to the temple where he wows the scribes. Danny combines a commanding knowledge of intellectual history and incisive intelligence with a passionate zeal to do the right thing and defend and protect his intellectual heroes. 

The book expresses several inarguable lessons for ‘the left’ – really for anyone in politics but the narrowness of his arcane, ‘inside baseball’ focus turns conventional wisdom upside down. Danny assumes the reader is as familiar as he is with obscure radical journals so the issue of the book’s audience looms over its first half. Its rhetorical heart is Postel’s contention that the left in the US doesn’t pay attention to human rights abuses in Iran because of its anti-imperialism bias. Postel repeatedly characterizes this ‘bias’ as “tunnel vision” that prevents radicals from registering human rights abuses on their “radar screens.”

Yet in America, as in Iran, it’s the right wing that is most dismissive of civil liberties and human rights – something Danny alludes to, although he says some complaints about the Patriot Act can be “recklessly hyperbolic.” Still, the notion that the left ignores civil rights is a mighty big pill to swallow. Remember Bush’s criticism of Dukakis in 1988 for his membership in the ACLU? Remember Ashcroft? You must constantly remind yourself Danny is peering through a microscope at radical amoebae, and not gazing through a telescope at conservative stars.

The first half of the book has the unmistakable tone of a grown-up disabusing a child of his foolish notions, but we never learn the identity of the child. Danny doesn’t help his case by naming left wing luminaries who agree with him. He lauds Noam Chomsky for meeting with Akbar Ganji, an Iranian dissident. Chomsky writes almost exclusively about US imperialism, but he’s all for Iranian civil rights.  Postel notes that Chomsky was “admonished by numerous radicals” to avoid Ganji because he wasn’t critical enough of the US. But the anonymity of the “numerous radicals” and their failure to influence the one radical with a shred of notoriety leaves the reader unconvinced. The left-wing Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Radio, interviewed Ganji, and offered enough sympathy to please Postel despite her vision being blurred through “the prism of American Imperialism.” Richard Rorty supports the Iranian cause and he’s the most famous living philosopher in the US. Who exactly are the people Danny is scolding? Are they ‘radicals’ so obscure that they have no influence? Considering the negligible power of radicals in the US, Postel’s indignant lecturing often comes off as shooting (little) fish in a barrel. Perhaps the radical miscreants will know who they are and appreciate Postel’s merciful refusal to scold them by name.

He rails against the left with, to my count, one specific example of an un-named “anti war activist” who discouraged Iranian intellectual Shirin Ebaldi from discussing Iran’s tyrannical government at an anti war rally in London. She ignored him and said what she wanted to say anyway - yet another powerless radical. Z Magazine and New Left Review are some of the very few named names, but their sin was decrying the NATO actions in Kosovo in the 1990s. Postel says the Marxist Monthly Review did a “smear job” on Ganji for his not being Marxist enough, but then you turn the page over and find out that Ganji and Iranian intellectuals in general, don’t really like Marx. Postel lists the core values of Iranian liberalism, and none of them concern economics. If Postel can criticize the left in America even as he, to his infinite credit, wholeheartedly agrees with the left about the necessity of preventing war with Iran, then why can’t Marxists criticize Ganji even if they might agree that jailing intellectuals is dirty pool?   

Postel’s excoriation of the ‘the left’ includes sins of omission. “Precious few leftists today have more than a vague clue who Ganji even is. Go to the websites of The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, and The New Left Review and search for his name – see how many times his name is even mentioned, let alone how many profiles of him or essays on him appear.” In other words, leftists are in the wrong for not being as well informed about Iran as Postel, who has spent the last few years focusing on Iran. One might counter that Bush has kept the left pretty busy over the past six years, and it’s telling that Postel all but ignores the 800lb gorilla of the Iraq war. It’s probably best for him to ignore Iraq because he holds up Kosovo as a triumph of “liberal internationalism” even though some of the same rationales used to invade Iraq (fascist in charge) were employed for NATO’s actions in the Balkans. Liberal internationalist Peter Beinert and the pro-globalization liberal Tom Friedman of the New York Times argued thus.

Yet on some crucial principles Postel’s positions are simply inarguable. The first and most important is that thinking liberals should not fall into the trap of opposing whatever their enemies say. Just because George W. Bush says it or Andrew Sullivan sincerely believes it doesn’t necessarily make it untrue, nor should it dictate knee-jerk opposition from the left. Such an un-wise practice would literally be ‘reactionary’ and it allows Bush to dictate the priorities of the left. Related to this notion is the sub-title of Chapter One “We Know What We’re Against, But What Are We For?” It seems to be an object lesson for the US Democratic Party, which has spent thirty years, at best, moderating policies that already started far right wing, or, at worst, just lamenting the right’s unconscionable tactics.   

Of Postel, US war protestors might ask, how do you avoid playing into the hands of US war mongers looking for invasion excuses? Conversely, how do you avoid being labeled as a “US lackey” or “outside agitator” by Iranian clerics if you sincerely agree with the White House that the Iranian government is tyrannical? On the other hand, how do you avoid being called a ‘traitor’ if you oppose US military action? Postel cleverly makes a rhetorical end-around run on these questions. He quotes both Akbar Ganji and Shirin Ebaldi maintaining that to beat the conundrum of national loyalty; liberals should avoid lobbying their governments in such cases. Instead they should offer each other “moral support” in Ganji’s words. They can work through N.G.O.s and civil society and, even better, simply make contact with like minded intellectuals across national boundaries to avoid the labels of lackey, traitor or spy.

Danny spends much of Chapter Two, to my mind, wrestling with his own conflicted, thirty-something soul about what a Proper Liberalism should be. He’s careful to separate the wheat (anarchists and independent socialist forces) from the chafe (Stalinists) when offering a noble example of radical internationalists who weren’t imperialist: the anti-fascist brigades of the 1930’s Spanish Civil War. He claims the modern American left’s logic would negate the idea of the brigades, but the obvious response is that ‘the left’ didn’t convince FDR to make a world war out of a civil war. Isn’t sending the Marines completely different than sending Hemingway? That’s a crucial distinction that Danny ignores. It’s not to say Postel is a broad brush-stroke artist. One of Postel’s sterling qualities is his refusal to over-simplify or speak in bumper stickers. That can lead to confusion for the uninitiated, but it’s impossible for anyone to brand Postel as a cliché monger. He takes great pains to make the finest distinctions.

There are different shades of liberalism, and Postel advocates a specific one for the left. Obviously we don’t want “neoliberalism” because that’s the Republican, NeoCon, Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank variety. In opposition Postel proposes a new “Third Worldism” brand of “radical liberalism” that would rival the washed up, dumbed-down anti-globalization movement. Given that the project of the globalization is literally trade “liberalization” that would seem to amount to replacing the ferocious wolf of the anti-globalization movement with a lap dog that heels on command. Postel is not blind to these contradictions. He admits that on civil rights liberalism is on its “home court” while the radical anti-globalization team has home court advantage on third world economics. Postel says activists do all the global economic leg work while liberals do virtually nothing – undoubtedly true. What’s inexplicable is Postel’s conviction that, despite liberalism’s inherent weakness in matters of global economic justice, his vision of a center left liberalism could rival the foolish anti-globalization movement. Not only do center-left liberals apparently not care much about globalization, centrist liberals in the mold of Tom Friedman are actually the anti globalization movement’s sworn enemies.

Postel devotes a few paragraphs to outlining a center-left vision of economic justice with wince inducing phrases like “piecemeal, reformist organizing” and “tinkering with the (global economic) institutional architecture.” He even advocates “insinuating ourselves pragmatically into these institutions” - institutions like The World Bank - headed by Paul Wolfowitz. This prescription smacks of joining the Nazi Party to spare Jews. Danny doesn’t mince words about these literal contradictions in terms when he asks, “What exactly is our critique of neoliberalism and US imperialism? And how do we make sense of liberalism’s complex historical entanglement with (European) imperialism? I don’t propose any one set of answers to these questions.” Darn. It’s like reading a tract by Da Vinci that says “You know what we need to do? Square the circle. Unfortunately I don’t have the space to do that here.” Postel seemingly can’t accept that liberalism might be a Phillips head screwdriver that just doesn’t work in the flat-head screw of global economic justice.

Danny sees his youthful involvement with left wing movements concerned with 1980’s Central American conflict as an example of ‘good’ radicalism. These youthful activities also represent his radical bona fides. Yet it seems we now have a “latter Postel” who rejects everything about radicalism except his role in it. I see his radical liberalism program as an attempt to push the fools to his left off the side of the earth so that he will stay, at least relatively, ‘radical.’

The crux of the Second Chapter is that ‘boring’ Western texts become exciting in Iran because people voraciously consume them as forbidden fruit. By extension, it’s true that in Iran liberalism is indeed relatively radical, and not the boring mainstream it is in Western nations. This situation fits Postel’s conflicted mentality perfectly. Because his outrage is real, he can use a radical’s word like “solidarity,” which is antithetical to a liberalism founded on liberty and individual rights, and be perfectly sincere about it.

Adults like Danny, not to mention Iranians, are no longer swayed by simplistic radical slogans and are wary of the hazards of revolutions. How did intellectuals fare under Ayatollah Khomeini, let alone today where they’re lucky to be beaten instead of killed? It’s no wonder Liberalism appeals to grown ups. It subdues the Tomfoolery from both extremes. Then again, liberalism is an ideology. It isn’t wisdom, it isn’t experience and it isn’t prudence – just ask the liberals who supported the Iraq war. It’s honest and honorable to ‘call them as you see them’ which is largely the advice Postel offers, but no ideology, even one as pragmatic as liberalism, guarantees that you’ll be honest with yourself.

Even within its ideological borders, liberalism is littered with contradictions and absurdities. Liberalism promotes ‘pluralism,’ but for whom? Pluralism is an inherently paradoxical notion – or outrageously hypocritical depending on which direction the missiles are pointing. Iraq war advocate Peter Beinert enthusiastically lobbies for a new “cold war” on Islamic nations because, in some sense, they refuse to adopt the tenets of liberalism – that is a circle in great need of being squared.

The second half of the book sweeps in as a breath of fresh air because Postel returns to his self-created niche of academic journalist. He has earned his keep for some years doing this sort of thing, so he’s bound to be better at it than conceiving new ideologies. All the tension – both of his reproach of ‘the left’ and in the crippling contradictions of his “radical liberalism” - evaporates. Postel seems to actually be having fun in Chapters Three and Four, rather than valiantly defending endangered Iranians, which was his sacred charge in the first two chapters.

Chapter Three is an edifying take on the 2005 book Foucalt and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson. Postel writes in first person so the book still sounds like a speech, but it’s a good speech and it relates all the important information about a hifalutin subject of some controversy. As in the first two chapters, he says things like “My friend Max Cafard poignantly captures the psychodynamics…” which gives the feeling Postel is taking you into his confidence.  Postel manages to not only swiftly and deftly summarize Foucalt’s ideas, but bring out the controversial contention of Afray and Anderson’s book. Their theory is that Foucalt may have repudiated some of his ideas right before his death - possibly  after seeing how badly the 1979 Iranian Revolution (which Foucalt more or less endorsed) turned out. The theory also happens to coincide with Postel’s own intellectual pilgrimage. Danny confesses that he swooned for Foucalt on first reading his radical critique of Western liberal institutions, but perhaps like Foucalt, he seems to have had second thoughts. 

The last and longest chapter is an e-mail interview between Postel and Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian liberal academic. The exchange is densely packed with name dropping intellectual gymnastics – brush up on your Marcuse, Arendt and Popper for this one. However, this exchange gets Danny out of the hot water into which he jumped in the second Chapter. Jahanbegloo attempts to square the circle of the inherent contradictions in a pluralist exchange between the West and Iran. Jahanbegloo suggests a way to establish a dialogue with liberal crusaders like Peter Beinert that would maintain the cultural integrity of both parties. In my mind it boils down to mutual respect – not really an ideology - but he offers a beginning point for rapprochement that sidesteps thorny obstacles. The long exchange shows us the rich and variegated political and intellectual life of Iran. By letting an Iranian paint the picture himself, Danny is relieved of his White Knight role. His probing questions allow Jahanbegloo to strut his intellectual stuff and display the intelligence that motivated Postel to defend him in the first place.

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran succeeds as intellectual reportage. It fleshes out the “contours” as Postel calls them, of liberal Iranian thought. It’s also illuminating on the intersection of Western texts with Persian minds, factions and history. Postel’s attack on anonymous, powerless, radicals amounts to tilting at windmills, and his radical liberalism program is a concept at war with itself. But even amongst the rhetoric there are principled words of political wisdom from a mature “latter Postel.” Anyone interested in Iran – particularly current thinking of its intellectuals should buy the book at Prickly Paradigm Press.