THE LEFT ON THE RUN: Stanley Kurtz of the "National Review" takes on prominent black novelist John Edgar Wideman today. Wideman wrote a paranoid screed for "Harper's" recently in which he pretends the war or terrorism is actually a proxy war against people of color in America:

Wideman isn't just deflecting criticism by establishing his victim credentials. His point is that Bush has cooked up a fraudulent war abroad "to upstage and camouflage the real war at home" (i.e. the "war" of a racist white American society against blacks). Wideman has next to nothing to say about Islamic terrorism. He's preoccupied instead with the cultural and political effects on America of a war with "alarmingly open-ended goals." Bush's "phony war," says Wideman is being waged not "to defend America from an external foe but to homogenize and coerce its citizens under a flag of rabid nationalism."

Here's more:

That is the point. And however false and malicious it might be as an account of the president's motives for prosecuting this war, Wideman's calumny is built upon a genuine fear. The president is in fact defending us from an external foe, but that urgently necessary defense really does have the effect of cutting off the cultural and political oxygen of the Left. Wideman is desperate to disallow the reality of the terrorist threat. He can't do it through an analysis of Islamic society, the technology of mass destruction, or homeland defense, so instead he tries to conjure away the terrorist threat with standard-issue techniques of deconstruction. We use the word "terrorist," Wideman says, to deny the possibility of "reasoned exchange" with our foes, to project the evil in ourselves onto a despised "Other." Funny, I thought it was the terrorists themselves who'd traded in reasoned exchange for murderous scapegoating.

And then Kurtz nails the crux of the problem:

The cultural politics of the Left is essentially an attempt to "one up" democracy by being "more egalitarian than thou." The sense of superiority; the demand for control; anger against a hated foe — all of these forms of human irrationality are abundantly present in leftist politics. Yet a right-thinking, well-brought-up, hyper-egalitarian fellow can only enjoy these guilty pleasures if they're buried inside of an attack against America itself for some imagined sin against democracy. To feel angry at, or superior to, some benighted foreign foe is just too obvious — too embarrassing — a way for a sophisticated modern leftist to gratify all of those nasty but ineradicable human longings for supremacy. So how to run a leftist political crusade when America really is under threat from a foreign and undemocratic foe? It cannot be done.