It is not a surprise that Bernard-Henri
Levy and I sound alike when we are talking about contemporary
America. Levy, affectionately known in France as BHL is one of the
three top intellectuals. (The other two are Pascal Bruckner and
Andre Glucksman.)
We are in agreement because we have the same foundational observation: the Left and Lefty ideology were completely defeated in the 20th Century. The same understanding is found in the other two leading French intellectuals.
Here are some quotes from...
Here are some quotes from Levy in the most recent France Today: “The (Thirteen) States freed themselves from an empire—and will never become one, contrary to what some idiots think, because imperialism is strictly a European burden—and in this struggle their allies were the French.”
The linkage between anti-Semitism and
anti-Americanism: “In French Ideology I demonstrated that
anti-Americanism was one of the key themes of the fascist tradition
in France, from Drieu la Rochelle to Maurras, a theme linked to
anti-Semitism and hatred of democracy and as such ensconced in a
hardly negligible sector of French culture.”
One of my favorite topics, the
fossilization of San Francisco: “FT:
In American Vertigo
you also talk a lot about the way the right has supplanted the left
in the realm of ideas.
BHL:
I came to San Francisco in the early 1970s; I come back 30
years later, and it’s like day and night! San Francisco was the
world capital of innovative ideas, of dissenting, counterculture
ideas, and today the San Francisco left often gives the sense of
being fossilized, crystallized in its past revolutions, the scribe of
its own exploits, administrator of yesterday’s successes and
today’s failures. I think this is
temporary, that ideological
history undergoes cycles, but today it’s clear that if you compare
the right’s intellectual vigor, its renewal of ideas, the breath of
intelligence that has infused the conservative center for twenty
years and is now embodied in the neoconservatives, with, on the other
hand, the petrification of ideas on the left, the situation we saw in
the ’60s has been
reversed. Personally, I wish it hadn’t, but I
have to acknowledge it. It’s even clearer in the United
States than
in Europe, because the American left, the left of the civil rights
struggle, the left of the counterculture, was unparalleled, far ahead
of what was happening in Europe, and now I find that its
fossilization is greater than European leftists’.
What more do I need to say? BHL even points out the nature of Lefty Fundamentalism, that Jimmy Carter was a religious zealot and has now become a more extreme a public Lefty.