How To Write About Michael Walzer

My old boss is the peer at least of Rawls and Nozick. Garry Wills has a great NYRB review of his latest book. Money grafs:

Walzer argued in his 1977 book that much of the American intelligentsia abdicated its responsibility to challenge the assurances of the government during the Vietnam War. That charge applied to experts in and outside government. Robert McNamara should have told us he had doubts when that would have affected events—not thirty years later. I suppose we can expect a similar performance from Colin Powell—the loyal enabler turning at last into the ex post facto penitent. Democrats have been so chary of challenging the President that they have allowed the Bush administration to extend secrecy on an unparalleled scale. When the Democrats still had a majority in the Senate, they would not issue subpoenas to find out who was advising Vice President Cheney on energy policy. Health care statistics were kept secret.

Anything that might be embarrassing to a president is now treated as a national security issue—weakening him, it is said, will hamper his dealings with foreign powers. Unless we treat him as infallible, foes will see him as powerless. Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma.