The Silence Of The Doves

By James Carden, American Committee for US-Russia Accord

This week, US Senator Bernie Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser published a widely discussed essay in The New Republic in which he in effect declared that American liberals and progressives need to prioritize expressions of “solidarity” with Ukraine over policies that might put an end to the bloodshed. 

In this Duss, a reliable weathervane of liberal opinion, is hardly alone among  liberal commentators and policy practitioners, after all, Democrats on the Hill unanimously voted for President Biden’s $40 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine.

What accounts for the enthusiasm for war in Eastern Europe among American liberals? 

A seminal essay by the late scholar of France and Central Europe, Tony Judt, titled “Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America” (2006) may put the current mania in perspective. Because of their insatiable need for approval, liberals like Duss are prone to drift in the direction the winds are blowing, and never is that more true when the opportunity to cheer on American intervention in “a good war” presents itself.

Judt, writing in the aftermath of the decision by George W. Bush to wage an unnecessary and illegal war of choice in Iraq, noted with dismay that in the run up to the March 2003 invasion, many of the country’s leading liberal voices eagerly went along for the ride. “A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media,” wrote Judt. “And America’s liberal  intellectuals found at last a new cause.”