— The Chomskian Left is fast making itself irrelevant by irrationally opposing the war, which will make the project of hard-core religious conservatives like John Ashcroft so much easier in the future. Sharp self-criticism by Michael Berube, Nation and Narration, in Context.
So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable as bin Laden, much of the left checked the man’s policy positions on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly backed out of the room. They didn’t move right, as so many Chomskian leftists have charged; they simply decided that the September 11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable point of contact with anything identifiable as a left project save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against Iraq. As Marx himself observed, there are a number of social systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are good cases in point.
Those leftists who support the war are just a little too gleefully going after their rivals, it seems.