OH, PLEASE, NOT THIS AGAIN:

“Something has gone terribly wrong in America,” said Jacqueline Rose, a feminist scholar in Britain. “America established a certain tradition of public dissent, with the civil rights and feminist and anti-Vietnam movements. But post-Sept. 11 there is a feeling that the American left has largely gone silent.”

I haven’t noticed that, though I’ve noticed that they have less and less to say beyond “Bush is Hitler,” and “it’s all about ooiiiill!” But maybe part of the difference between Europe and America is explained by this passage from the same article:

Some of the antiwar sentiment goes hand in hand with an outright hatred of all things American, a view that many believe belongs in the category of “stupid anti-Americanism,” as the author Peter Schneider, a German, put it in an interview. But stupid or not, such an attitude is on the rise.

What’s surprising to many European intellectuals, I think, is that this time Americans, even American intellectuals, are not following their lead.

And the commitment to “dissent” in America on the part of these European intellectuals is — not to put too fine a point on it — a huge lie. If twenty million Americans had marched to oppose Bill Clinton’s proposed national health insurance, these same intellectuals wouldn’t have been cheering them on as “dissenters” — they’d have been denouncing them as “cowboy individualists.” It’s only admirable “dissent,” you see, when it’s in conformity with the views of European intellectuals.

I suspect, for example, that this doesn’t count as dissent. But this presumably does. Yet, in fact, the latter is far more typical than the former.