Left & Right: Prospects for Peace (Give this a try. Fascinating.)

Left & Right: Prospects for Peace

A year into the Obama administration, American foreign policy has yet to experience the change for which many progressives—and some conservatives—hoped. Even as U.S. forces remain mired in Iraq, the president has committed more troops to Afghanistan and escalated incursions into Pakistan. He prosecutes the war on terror at home and abroad in much the same manner as his predecessor, and militarism continues to find support on both sides of the partisan divide.

Must effective opposition to war and empire also cross ideological lines? It often has. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1898, brought progressives such as Jane Addams together with conservatives and classical liberals such as William Dean Howells and Oswald Garrison Villard. In the 1960s, libertarians Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio attempted a similarly ecumenical effort with their journal Left and Right, though opposition to the Vietnam War remained almost wholly left-wing.

Today, men of the Right such as Andrew Bacevich and Bill Kauffman publish volumes in the American Empire Project edited by progressives Tom Englehardt and Steve Fraser, while antiwar left-wingers such as Norman Mailer and Ralph Nader appear in the pages of TAC. A new Left-Right coalition called Come Home, America recently met in Washington, D.C. With memories of Bush’s militarism fresh in the minds of the Left and the reality of Obama’s warmongering spurring on the noninterventionist Right, is this the moment for all enemies of empire to come together?

We invited thinkers from across the spectrum to address that question and related ones such as: What obstacles stand in the way of cooperation between progressives and conservatives? Why have earlier antiwar attempts failed? And is it enough to oppose war and imperialism, or must a successful alliance have a positive vision as well? ... http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/may/01/00012/

I realize they have their caricature of the Left, but the difference is that our caricature of them is correct and spot-on. Only by maintaining the strict us against them paradigm will we be able to function.

Remember: the Right is always wrong and evil, the Left is always true and good.