The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Bush's belligerent response fractured
the American left--partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures
that had appeared a decade earlier.
In a masterful survey of the post-9/11 landscape, renowned scholar
Michael Bérubé revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates
and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left
debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to
9/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of the
1990s to the question of what (if anything) is the matter with Kansas.
The Left at War brings the history of cultural studies to bear on the
present crisis--a history now trivialized to the point at which few left
intellectuals have any sense that merely "cultural" studies could have
something substantial to offer to the world of international relations,
debates over sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, matters of war
and peace. The surprising results of Bérubé's arguments reveal an
American left that is overly fond of a form of "countercultural"
politics in which popular success is understood as a sign of political
failure and political marginality is understood as a sign of moral
virtue. The Left at War insists that, in contrast to American
countercultural traditions, the geopolitical history of cultural studies
has much to teach us about internationalism--for "in order to think
globally, we need to think culturally, and in order to understand
cultural conflict, we need to think globally." At a time when America
finds itself at a critical crossroads, The Left at War is an
indispensable guide to the divisions that have created a left at war
with itself.
