February 05, 2002

Matt Welch on the "Axis

Matt Welch on the "Axis of Evil":

Without commenting on the propriety of Bush’s usage of “axis,” I find it interesting how many on the Left have a knee-jerk hostility to the word “evil,” and are still hung up about Ronald Reagan's usage of it. If there were two things the Left could never stop taunting Reagan for, it was his Evil Empire quote, and his exhortation to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” It seems to me rather obvious that, in these two cases, Reagan was right, and his hecklers (which included me at the time) were wrong. Facing this honestly should have been the first priority of every “progressive” since November 1989.

Well said. I really believe that much of the current Left's reality-gap has to do with nostalgia for the glory days of "anti-Reagan and stuff, man, yeah." I was (to a degree) one of those hecklers, as well. At that time, "evil" seemed a distant and unreal abstraction. It was not at all a part of the vocabulary of the self-regarding hipster sophisticate (unless the topic of discussion was heavy metal music, or perhaps an ex-girlfriend or two-- like I said, we were sophisticated...) If 9/11 taught us nothing else, at minimum it brought the word "evil" back into legitimate usage. How else can you describe the WTC attacks, or for the quest to acquire the means to continue the jihad against America through nuclear and biological terror? Partly because of the inability of the "progressive" establishment to come to terms with this reality, there are a lot fewer Leftists than there were on 9/10.

There's certainly reason to question the literal accuracy of the word "axis," let alone its propriety, to describe the malfeasance of the three countries in question. But to shrink from the word "evil" in this situation is perverse. It's yet another example of the contemporary Left's nostalgia-driven inability, thus far, to "update" itself and engage with today's world. Until they manage to do that, today's Leftists doom themselves to impotence and irrelevance, even when they do happen to be on the right side of this or that dispute.

Posted by Dr. Frank at February 5, 2002 04:53 PM | TrackBack