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It often seems like American politics are a natural breeding ground for the best oxymorons:
Good government. Munificent statesman. Honorable lobbyist. Responsible right-winger. Honest leftist.
However, every once in a while, one has the pleasure of reading the work of a man who, with his fair share of intellectual integrity and world experience, manages to transcend the cynicism, lies, and extremist seductions of ideological heritage.
Journalist Marc Cooper, in the eyes of many friends and opponents, fits squarely into the category of “honest leftist.” His background is what you’d generally expect of an old-school, current affairs-addicted street fighting man: Vietnam War protests, civil rights, New Left camaraderie, noteworthy contributions to flagship periodicals such as The Nation and Harper’s, and, of course, a gig as a translator for Chilean President and socialist Salvador Allende prior to the horror show of Augusto Pinochet. In more recent years, he has been a force for liberal-linked common sense and a passionate critic of all those craftily reactionary forces in American culture.
Thrown into the mix are Cooper’s more surprising and less “left-orthodox” leanings. His acid critiques of left-associated apologists (including, but certainly not limited to, the contemptible likes of Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, Hugo Chavez, and Ward Churchill) are dead-on reminders of the necessity of constantly questioning those in and out of power. Much like Andrew Sullivan or the late William Safire, Cooper is at his best when he’s unapologetically charging his own side with the moral crimes of mob-mentality and hypocrisy. As Cooper once wrote on his blog, “Leaving the Left can be a bit like trying to quit the Mafia. You can’t get out without getting assassinated—literally or figuratively.”
For a two-part interview, Marc Cooper talked to The College Reporter about his personal history, heated disagreements with liberal thinkers, our drug war quagmire, “the last honest place in America,” and his sinful love of fuel-inefficient motor vehicles.
The College Reporter: From Chile during the coup to South Africa, what places or experiences have most shaped your worldview as a reporter and left-wing journalist?
Marc Cooper: There’s no question that my professional trajectory certainly falls under the rubric of being a left-wing reporter. I don’t shirk away from that. My first book has the words “radical reporter” in the subtitle. But it may not be accurate to call me a left-wing reporter now. I come out of the left and I’m sympathetic to the left, but my worldview is broader than that in this point in my life.
I started doing journalism when I was 16-years-old at an underground newspaper, and I then had the privilege and opportunity of traveling all over the world.
There are certainly a couple of things that shaped my worldview. My experience in Chile was a life-forming experience; it formed not only my professional view, but also my personal view because there was this extremely dramatic and momentous coup, for which I had a front row seat in the early 1970s. I’d also say my experience in Central America in the 1980s, primarily in El Salvador and Nicaragua, had a crucial amount of weight in allowing me to understand how the world works, and how it doesn’t.
And as a high school and college student, I was very much apart of what is known as the radical student movement of the 1960s. Coming out of that, it shaped my early life, and I was a proud participant and have no regrets.
But some of my fellow baby-boomers were recruited into dogmatic groups with a narrow point of view, exposing them to a very sectarian political left. I was fortunate to have been mentored by people who were much more skeptical of everything around them, including the left that we were part of.
And as history has progressed, we found that many models of the left had failed to deliver more democracy, more equality, and more freedom. At this point in history, it’s not that we need to transcend ideology, because ideology will always be with us. But the ideological schema of the left of the past century has pretty much been rendered obsolete, and we’re waiting for something new.
In time, you learn that your opponents don’t have a monopoly on political failure.
TCR: I’m a big fan of your fair-minded assessments and criticisms of liberals such as Naomi Klein and so-called anti-war bodies like International A.N.S.W.E.R. It seems like these decisions came rather naturally to you, but was there a time when you wrote a story that you knew would get you into trouble with your co-thinkers and intellectual comrades?
MC: Absolutely, almost every time. Now I do it with great pleasure. When I criticize people like Naomi Klein or Fidel Castro, it’s from a perspective that is grounded in principles on the left. But I expect a pushback from more dogmatic folks. I often intentionally set out of provoke those arguments as a public service. Some of my left-wing friends accuse me of being cynical because I’m washing all this dirty laundry in public. Actually, I say that they’re the cynics because they’re willing to compromise their integrity by apologizing for and defending people who violate principles that we claim to hold dear.
But I can only think of one story where I was initially surprised by the snap-back on the left, it wasn’t very radical at all. It was during the early part of 1998 when the scandal around Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky broke. My friends and I were mostly to the left of Clinton, and the Democrats I knew in ’98 were not particularly enamored by [Clinton’s] conservative policies. He was a pretty weaselly character who had gained the scorn of the left, and The Nation, where I was working at the time, was no friend of his. I wrote [in The Nation] about how I was absolutely delighted with how they caught the bastard. I wasn’t happy about how he engaged in sexual harassment with a confused teenager, but I was amused by the fact that his personal behavior reflected the same moral character he brought to office.
Then I immediately noticed how many of my colleagues suddenly moved into a position of defending this guy. They were so focused on beating back Republicans, which is always a nice idea, they forgot about how this was a prime opportunity to go after Bill Clinton.
Part II will run in the next issue of The College Reporter
