9.11 sure didn’t unite us, did it?

Norman Podhoretz of Commentary is upset about the left. It seems so much like the left we grew to dislike in the ‘60s. Podhoretz quotes Todd Gitlin, a leading '60s New Left figure and now a professor at Columbia, who currently questions the "negative faith in America the ugly" that his comrades tenaciously held onto for so long.

Podhoretz’s points:

 in the ‘60s, the ideas and attitudes of the left would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. By 1972, only 11 years after President John F. Kennedy had promised that we would "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty," Democrat George McGovern was campaigning for president on the antiwar slogan, "Come home, America."

 as the Vietnam War ground on, the institutions that shape our culture converted to "faith in America the ugly." By 2007, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.

 bureaucrats and administrators tend to be the slaves of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists. These "practical men" read the New York Times, switch on their television sets, go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their nervous systems.

 the new antiwar movement already is where it took years for its Vietnam era ancestors to reach. Like the McGovernites with Vietnam, the Democrats want America out of Iraq, and the sooner and the better. Sept. 11 did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way, even though we still face the long struggle against Islamofascism in Iraq and elsewhere into which we were blasted six years ago.