Memories of 11 September, and the dark days that followed, are universal among geriatric American millennials. As a member of the generation that came of age in the Nineties and early 2000s, I can easily return to those early hours of fear and war, summoning the confluence of mixed emotions — despair, rage, confusion — that accompanied them. But beyond the smoke, and the flames, and the nightmarish pictures of people falling through the sky, my overriding memories of that time can be summarised in two words: Bruce Springsteen.
By the turn of the century, the New Jersey native had already established himself as a rock and roll legend. But his artistic reaction to 9/11 enhanced his importance. Less than a year after the attack, he recorded The Rising, his first album with the E Street Band since the Eighties. Despite the centrality of politics to those frantic days, the collection was strikingly unideological. Instead of protest, Springsteen opted to explore grief and mourning, and how to find hope in the immediate aftermath of a devastating loss.
Among its most effective and moving moments is “Into the Fire”, an overt tribute to the first responders who ascended the stairs of a burning, crumbling building in the desperate hope to save the lives of strangers. “Love and duty called you someplace higher,” Springsteen sings in a tender voice. “Somewhere up the stairs / Into the fire…” The chorus functions as a prayer to the heroic firefighters, police officers, and paramedics: “May your strength give us strength… May your love bring us love…”
In other words, then, Springsteen understood that the rescue workers represented and exercised the best of humanity. They were, and are, worthy of praise and remembrance that transcends narrow political strife. It’s a pride, a heartfelt patriotism, you can still spot today. At a recent rally in Georgia, in support of Kamala Harris, Springsteen emphasised the need for presidential candidates to understand the US, its history, and “what it means to be deeply American”.
Such gentle flag-waving is rare on the progressive Left, placing it at odds with the heavyweights of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the Republican Party adores a presidential nominee who recently referred to the United States as a “garbage can”.
This angry new world was arguably forged as far back as 2015. That year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a memoir, Between the World and Me. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Coates examined racism in the United States, focusing mainly on police brutality.
Like Springsteen, Coates offered a reaction to 9/11. But this time, the writer is shorn of all sympathy, all grace. “Looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold,” he confesses. Referring to the firefighters and cops, he writes, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
It is difficult to find a more contemptible passage in the past two decades of American letters. Yet despite such a chilling lack of empathy, Coates has won nearly every literary prize imaginable, including a National Book Award for Between the World and Me. From the American press, he receives the pious reverence typically reserved for the Pope at Sunday mass.
A rare heretic, Tony Dokoupil of CBS News, recently asked Coates a series of challenging questions about his indifference to Israeli history or suffering. In his latest book, The Message, which has a large section on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attacks Israel as an “apartheid” state, Coates never once mentions October 7. Two intifadas, or indeed any loss of Israeli life, are notable by their absence too. For exercising the mundane obligation of his profession, Dokoupil was reprimanded by the network. Many influential pundits on the progressive Left, notably Mehdi Hasan, screamed about the interview for days on social media. The digital herd stampeded toward Dokoupil’s characterisation of The Message as not out of place in the “backpack of an extremist”. The language is strong, but hardly unfair.
One wonders if to Coates, Israelis, like the firefighters rushing up the stairs of the World Trade Center, aren’t really human. Is that why they are unworthy of inclusion in his one-sided book? Certainly, the contrast with Bruce Springsteen is only heightened when you recall that, on 13 October, he performed a benefit concert for the USC Shoah Foundation, an organisation that preserves the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and raises awareness to the ongoing threat of antisemitism.
As unlikely as it might seem, then, Springsteen and Coates personify a crossroads for the American Left. Liberals and “progressives” can choose a humanistic, big-hearted liberalism, one that seeks common ground in the pursuit of personal freedom and social progress for minority groups. Or they can crawl into a sewer of a narrow delusion, one that pits “oppressors” versus “victims” and “colonisers” against “the colonised” — and where some people, no matter how much they’ve suffered or the grace that they’ve shown despite their suffering, are hardly human at all.
The deification of Coates, and the contempt for the lone journalist who challenged him, is an ill omen. And it’s far from alone.
While the American Right has morphed into an autocratic personality cult, assembled around an increasingly deranged Donald Trump, the Left is fighting its own internal battle. So far, the Democratic Party has managed to contain the Leftist revolt against reason to a small number of congressional representatives and city officials. Recently, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman lost their seats in Missouri and New York, during Democratic primaries, after mouthing antisemitic bromides against Israel, and articulating extreme positions against law enforcement and the free market.
One still must wonder how long sanity will prevail. To put it differently, it’s possible that American culture no longer has the infrastructure necessary to maintain political movements of humanistic liberalism. Algorithmic social media is an easy scapegoat here, but it is undoubtedly true that fewer Americans obtain their news and commentary from reading, instead opting for TikTok videos and Twitter soundbites that reduce complicated issues to slogans, and simultaneously squash complicated people into cartoonish enemies. To that point, Ta-Nehisi Coates has declared that the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most intractable problems of modern times — a collision of politics, religion, and territorial claims — is “simple”.
Likewise, criminal justice is “simple” if you believe that diverse police forces in modern cities, like New York and Chicago, are nothing more than heirs to slavery patrols. During the 2020 primary, meanwhile, Joe Biden displayed bold honesty when he told a voter demanding a prohibition of fossil fuels in the first term of a Biden presidency to “vote for someone else”. Then again, climate change and environmental science are simple if it’s feasible to “ban” oil and gas over just four years, or anyway to do without causing immeasurable human suffering along the way. Springsteen himself seems to understand the need for pragmatism. When he took the stage in Atlanta, after all, he didn’t talk about those things that divided Americans. Rather, he underscored the importance of civil rights, and looked forward to a middle-class economy that served “all our citizens” equally.
I think it’s clear, then, that there’s a linear relationship between rejection of nuance and negation of human beings. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, anti-Israel protestors ripped posters and flyers showing the faces of Jewish hostages off walls and telephone poles in London, New York, and other cities. Students and faculty at prestigious universities in the United States, including Columbia and Georgetown, praised the Hamas “resistance” and defaced campus property with red triangles, the Nazi symbol for political enemies. In May, a spreadsheet went viral identifying popular authors, some of whose work is apolitical, as “Zionists”. The point, anyway, was to encourage the blackballing of authors from book festivals and other events.
Literary agents, many speaking anonymously, have claimed that it has become difficult to earn publishing contracts for authors who support Israel or write about overtly Jewish topics. Matisyahu, a Jewish American singer/songwriter who favours Israel and addresses antisemitism in song, had three performances cancelled after several venues were spooked by the risk of protest.
At the American university where I teach, the only acknowledgement of the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre came from a student group denouncing Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza. There was not a single reference to Jews murdered, raped or abducted by Hamas. That’s unsurprising. Israel, according to prevailing wisdom on the far-Left, is something of a headquarters of evil — a colonialist project and an apartheid state. Its citizens, in turn, alongside anyone who expresses solidarity with them, are readymade villains. “Zionist” now functions as little more than an antisemitic slur.
A popular theory of psychology posits that the way a person reacts to one thing is the way that they’ll react to everything. The ignorant and antisemitic reaction to October 7 portends that American Leftists may well react with similar revulsion toward knowledge, nuance, and compassion to future crises, both foreign and domestic. With the Republican Party already tolerant of death threats against everyone from librarians to hurricane relief workers, American politics could yet transform into a high volume, kinetic duel in which conversation is impossible, and the threat of violence always poisons the air.
Recent philosophers of liberalism now read like letters from an ancient age. In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty argued that the Left should return to “piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy” as opposed to obsessing over “systems” and “power”. The measured use of government to improve people’s lives — echoing the great liberal achievements of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare — would not only create a fairer and freer society. It would also allow liberals to tie their aspirations to hope, rather than the bitterness of the perpetually morose cultural Left.
During Covid, for instance, extending the child tax credit succeeded in reducing child poverty, even as its expiry provoked little protest. In the same vein, Leftist activists on social media love to demand “Medicare for All” — yet never seize the opportunity to advocate for a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act, or push to lower the entry age to Medicare, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden suggested during their respective presidential campaigns. They may not offer the same online thrill, in short, but aiming for realistic achievements could significantly improve the welfare of millions.
Robert Putnam, author of the sociological classic Bowling Alone, believed that the practical method to achieve Rorty’s ambition was to reverse the decline of community, and cultivate a nation of joiners. As Putnam argued, the more people associate, in civic clubs, religious institutions, and indeed bowling clubs, the likelier they are to build empathy and solidarity, engineering healthy democratic politics in the process.
With both Left and Right so embittered and self-righteous, it’s difficult to imagine anyone replicating the legislative successes of previous decades. Civic virtues themselves — from civility and humility to logic and empathy — now feel like the relics of a bygone era.
The image of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center, and Bruce Springsteen’s soulful artistic response, also feel like long lost history. The singer/songwriter connected the liberal values of pluralism, individual rights, and communal improvement to the heroism of the first responders. Coates, conversely, wrote that the first responders were not human. In political culture, the latter view is winning.
Given that the principles of liberalism were essential to the construction of a free and prosperous society, one with the capacity to correct injustice, an increasingly cynical and angry America may want to borrow Springsteen’s optimism. “Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart,” he belted out in Atlanta over the weekend. “And I believe in a promised land.”
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/