Is this or is this not remarkable: Noam Chomsky signing onto a political declaration co-authored by Bill Kristol.  Chomsky, radical left critic of capitalism and American foreign policy.  Kristol, neo-conservative warmonger.  In common cause.

The cause is American democracy, which is under unprecedented threat. Kristol has joined with sociologist Todd Gitlin and political scientist Jeffrey Isaac in an “Open letter in defense of democracy” signed by some 40 intellectuals ranging from left to right on the political spectrum.  (The center of gravity of this group does skew a bit left.) The signatories see the threat as coming from the authoritarian drive of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. It’s a short letter. It’s noteworthy not so much for what it says—all of which will be familiar to readers of this blog—but for the range of political perspectives it represents.

I don’t know how much effect this letter will have, but it’s good to see leftists and rightists coming together in face of the neo-fascist menace.  I do have to admit that I find it strange and a bit uncomfortable being on the same side as people like Kristol and Liz Cheney. Both played their parts in getting the US into invading Iraq.  Both have long records as ruthless partisan Republicans, a persona Kristol couldn’t manage to shed even during his problematic one-year stint as an op-ed columnist for the NY Times back In 2008-9. Cheney was even worse than Kristol for sheer nasty partisanship.  As recently as 2020, she denounced the Democrats as “the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism” and asserted that former Secretary of State John Kerry had “traveled around the world acting as the head of the Chamber of Commerce for the mullahs in Iran.” But still, you can’t help admiring her for almost surely sacrificing her political career in order to stand up to the Trumpists.

The stances of people like Kristol and Cheney are all the more admirable, and more than a bit surprising, because rightists of their ilk have often shown a predilection for authoritarian politics.  American conservatives have long manifested affinity if not gushing affection for right-wing dictators, going back as least as far as Italy’s Mussolini. Spain’s Franco and Chile’s Pinochet also had plenty of American admirers on the right, and Jimmy Carter was savaged by Congressional Republicans for being insufficiently supportive of Nicaragua’s vicious dictator, Somoza.  So, you’ll pardon me for suspecting that somewhere in the psyche of the typical self-described “conservative” American there lurks a yearning for authoritarian alternatives to actually existing democracy. That yearning has come to the surface in the GOP of Donald Trump.

So, how to explain the deviance of anti-Trump rightists like Kristol, Cheney, George Will and so many others?  Much as we may for the most part abhor many of these peopIe’s values, I think we have to acknowledge that they are genuinely sincere in their attachment to American democracy.  And why shouldn’t they be? Our constitutional order, created for a pre-industrial, mostly rural society over 200 years ago, by men fearful as much of the excesses of democracy as of the abuses of autocracy, places great obstacles in the way of progressive change.  Conservatives have good reason to be happy with American democracy. But today’s GOP is not a conservative party; it’s a radical right-wing personality cult.

But if conservatives have good reason to value American democracy, why should leftists be so concerned to preserve it? The answer isn’t hard: Western democracy, even in its stunted American variant, is worth defending. For all its limitations, our system does hold open possibilities for progressive change toward a more decent society. And, not least, our democracy is worth defending because the alternative that looms would be much worse.

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