The end of the cold war, which sparked a major re-thinking of old dogmas on the American right, had less emphatic consequences on the left, which had long ago replaced the old Marxist shibboleths with new ones: identity politics, the climate change religion, and, more recently, a firm belief in the divinity of Barack Hussein Obama. Yet for Cockburn, an old-fashioned leftist, the implosion of the system his father — a Communist party member — had so consistently defended had a profound effect on his thinking. While the rest of what used to be called the left in this country drifted into Democratic party politics and from there were recruited into the Obama cult, Alex Cockburn stood aloof: scathing in his indictment of Obama’s wars and the current regime, he deviated from contemporary leftist cant in important ways, such as his critique of Obamacare:

“The liberals are howling bout the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her “Death Panel” talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.

“But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.”

What is a conservative meant to think, indeed. If he had lived, I believe Cockburn would be having his paleoconservative moment: he was, after all, a paleo-radical who had survived long enough to be considered a reactionary. At the end of his long career as a luminary of the left, he found himself, like H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, denounced as an enabler of “right-wing extremism.” This was due not only to Cockburn’s defense of the militia movement, his caustic comments on the abortion issue, and his climate change “denialism,” but to his dalliance with — I would say outright sympathy for — libertarianism. He admired Ron Paul, and had been friendly to libertarians since at least the 1990s, when we invited him to speak at our first — and, sadly, only — national conference. We ran an exclusive column by him for a while, but his fees were higher than we could manage, unfortunately. I saw him at antiwar events in the Bay Area, and we also appeared at some libertarian-sponsored events together.

His appearance at our conference caused a mini-controversy on the left, where prim-and-proper commie types denounced him for “joining the Devil”: their big objection was that Pat Buchanan was the conference’s keynote speaker — oddly, the same objection the more politically correct libertarians expressed at the time. Left-sectarians hated Cockburn, and penned endless polemics against his “deviations.” Cockburn didn’t care: the caviling of his PC critics amused rather than deterred him.

For all his pedigree as the son of a celebrated “Stalinist” — a point the right-wing obit writers are underscoring — Cockburn was the exact opposite of a party-liner in every sense: I won’t insult his memory by referring to him as a “contrarian” — as if he was simply trying to draw attention to himself. He may have been born into one of Britain’s most distinguished literary families, but there was something quintessentially American about his brand of anarcho-left populism, more akin to the Wobbly tradition than the Leninist and social democratic currents that have dominated the modern American left.

Cockburn’s was almost a lone voice on the left raised against the centralizing, dehumanizing, “humanitarian” war-making trends of modern liberalism. It’s a telling indictment of that movement when I can say with certainty that we shall not see his like again.



"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."