CAMBRIA CA - Fifty years ago a few of the leading intellectuals on the left, such as Lionel Trilling and Dwight MacDonald, began to perceive growing weaknesses in the dominant liberal ideology of the time, and began to look hopefully for the emergence of a reasonable, responsible conservatism. Today, the shoe is on the other foot, as conservatives wonder whether a reasonable, responsible left is possible.

As David Brooks has pointed out, being on the left in recent years has meant being for freeing Mumia and cheering infantile leftists when they throw bricks through windows to protest globalization. September 11 made the position of the radical left even more acute, and brought out the worst instincts in many.

It has also provided a clear dividing line between two kinds of leftists: those who genuinely love America but who are confused, and those who resolutely hate America; between those who now fly the flag, some for the first time in their lives, and those who still want only to burn it. A number of prominent leftists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, have responded splendidly in the aftermath of September 11, while many of the usual suspects--Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Mailer--have reacted according to script.

Which brings us to Michael Walzer’s immensely important article in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, entitled “Can There Be a Decent Left? ” Walzer, a professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, is the author of numerous books, including Just and Unjust Wars and Spheres of Justice, and thus is a serious man of the left. His chief complaint about his fellow leftists is that they are not serious. The leftist critique of American power, Walzer says, “has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate.” Not all uses of American power are evil, Walzer points out. The left conducts itself on this point with “willful irresponsibility” that Walzer thinks is “pathological.” David Horowitz would be hard pressed to exceed this critical vocabulary.

“The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question,” Walzer writes; “Can there be a decent left in a superpower?” Walzer thinks there can, but only if the left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances and emotional extravagances. Patriotism is not politically incorrect, as an earlier generation of leftists (George Orwell and Mary McCarthy, for example) understood. More fundamentally, Walzer calls on the left to find “something better than the rag-tag Marxism with which so much of the left operates today--whose chief effect is to turn world politics into a cheap melodrama.”

This may turn out to be the most difficult step for the left. Consider that the hottest book on the left today is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s _Empire_, which argues, among other risible ideas, that terrorism is merely “a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality.” So long as Empire is a guiding light for the intellectual left, Walzer’s noble project has little chance of success.

Responses to Walzer’s article will appear in a future issue of Dissent. Their tone and substance will reveal whether the left is participating in the post-September 11 sobriety.