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One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest.
Despite Robert Frost's stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism ("I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old"), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.
In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan's key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.
I became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s. I'd written a play about the far right (Destiny), but as the National Front crashed to ignominious defeat in 1979, it was clear that its thunder had been stolen by a resurgent conservatism that owed much of its passion and its principles to deserters from the left. As the death-agony of the 1974-79 Labour government unfolded, former socialists and communists contributed to proto-Thatcherite tirades with titles like "The Future that Doesn't Work" and "An Escape from George Orwell's 1984". In 1978, former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn.
In my play about defection (Maydays, produced by the RSC in 1983), I speculated about how the British class of '68 might move to the conservative right. Essentially transposing the experience of earlier generations into the 70s, I don't think my central character's trajectory was implausible. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy and other nouveaux philosophes had provided a vocabulary of retreat for the veterans of the Paris events of May 1968. Some American popular radicals had fled to business (Jerry Rubin) or to the religious right (Eldridge Cleaver), and former Ramparts editor and Black Panther supporter David Horovitz was to mount a 1987 conference, Second Thoughts, at which former 60s radicals such as Michael Medved and PJ O'Rourke confessed and renounced their errors. Nonetheless, most of the leading figures of the period - from Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin and Bernardine Dohrn in America via Danny Cohn-Bendit in Germany to Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn and Sheila Rowbotham here - have remained faithful to their previous ideals. And while Alan Milburn, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling and Stephen Byers have clearly moved a considerable distance since their days in or about the Trotskyite far left, they would doubtless claim to be pursuing a drastically revised version of the same, socially progressive agenda. Until very recently, almost everybody disillusioned with the far left felt there was still a viable near left they could call home.
Now, that appears to be changing. Bookshop shelves are not quite yet groaning with defection literature, but Nick Cohen (What's Left?), Andrew Anthony (The Fallout), Ed Husain (The Islamist) and Melanie Phillips (Londonistan) are all self-confessed deserters (Phillips wears the "apostate" label with pride). Although Martin Amis was never part of the revolutionary or communist left (and attacked both his father and his friend Christopher Hitchens for so being), The Second Plane is an assault on the kind of liberal, literary intellectuals among whom Amis has moved throughout his life. And although Cohen, Anthony, Phillips et al have poured particular vituperation on leftwing playwrights (David Hare and Harold Pinter in particular), they have now been joined by one - David Mamet, who last month wrote a piece for the Village Voice entitled "Why I am no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (he no longer believes that "people are basically good at heart"). Like previous generations, these defectors have been there, done that, and can now bear witness to their former misbeliefs. In so doing, they are joining a club with an extensive membership. Most of the radical and progressive achievements of the 20th century - including the Russian revolution - were brought about by an alliance between the oppressed and the intelligentsia, and a good proportion of them - particularly the Russian revolution - were followed by disappointment and desertion. For some, disillusion set in as early as 1921, when the Bolsheviks suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt, the port of St Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution. Subsequent "Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in eastern Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year.
As a result of these crises, ex-communist writers such as Arthur Koestler and Stephen Spender moved to the liberal centre. Others, like WH Auden, withdrew from political involvement altogether. For many, like the American poet and bohemian Max Eastman and the fellow-travelling novelist John Dos Passos, the cold war provided a changing room from which they emerged - with new stars in their eyes - as full-blown, traditionalist conservatives.
The events of 1956 changed the rules of membership of the ex-communist club in two ways. The creation of a self-consciously non-Stalinist New Left gave people disillusioned with communism somewhere else to go. On the other hand, the subsequent activities of the New Left became a recruiting agency for the right among older radicals, socialists and even liberals. For ex-communist Kingsley Amis, opposition to the expansion of higher education ("more will mean worse") was the first of many Conservative causes which transformed the author of Lucky Jim into a Thatcherite cheerleader. Similarly, what became the Reagan coalition was given considerable intellectual ballast by a group of New York intellectuals surrounding ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, for whom the hippy counter-culture, Black Power and later the women's and environmental movement demonstrated the infantilism and nihilism of the New Left. Self-defined as "liberals mugged by reality", Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were genuinely neoconservatives, having previously been revolutionaries (Kristol), radicals (Podhoretz, Glazer) or at the very least democratic progressives.
As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority. But there is something quite particular about spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before. Most people who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their contempt for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end justifies the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to take anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement as cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as "bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the first place. As Spender wrote in The God that Failed (1949), "the communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the reasons which made him one".
But, often, something else is going on. Frequently, there is a sense among defecting intellectuals that it's not just the party that has let them down. Most people move left either because they are outraged by the victimhood of the oppressed (Spender's distress at men and women "sealed into leaden slums") or because they are inspired by the left's revolutionary ardour (as many of my generation were by the Black Panthers and the Vietcong). The discovery that the poor do not necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining resignation is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they don't always behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.
Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame.
One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his quip about John Dos Passos: "On account of Soviet knavery / He favours restoring slavery". Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a death wish and feminism a plague.
Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation".
Like Eldridge Cleaver, the neocons argued that the welfare state had turned the poor into parasites; James Q Wilson asserts that, in the black community, welfare became for black women what heroin was for black men. For Podhoretz, far from being "persecuted and oppressed", the blacks he knew were doing the persecuting and oppressing.
The directness and lack of apology in neoconservative polemic is a result of the fact that its authors had discharged the same ordnance in the opposite direction, and knew the likely weight and calibre of the returning fire. Most political defectors leave the left because its authoritarian practices stand in such stark contrast to its emancipatory ideals. For many, however, there is a double paradox: on opening their suitcase at the end of the journey, they find not just that the libertarian ideals they left the left to preserve have gone missing, but that the only thing remaining is the very cynicism and ruthlessness which they left the left to escape.
So, as on the far left, there is a tendency to see the world in stark, binary terms. Kingsley Amis once admitted that "it's all pretty black and white to me now. If you decide, as I have, that there are only two sides to the argument, then it's all quite simple." Kristol insists that environmentalists aren't really interested in clean air or clean water; what they're really after is authoritarian political power. And a condemnation of the practice of radicals and revolutionaries justifies the abandonment of the groups they seek to defend. For neocon Nathan Glazer, 60s radicalism was "so beset with error and confusion" that even its mildest manifestations - such as affirmative action for African Americans - had to be swept away.
Is this pattern reflected among those defectors for whom the "Kronstadt moment" was 9/11? Certainly, Husain's The Islamist describes a progression towards and then away from the non-jihadist but pro-Caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will be familiar to any reader of defection literature; he is now working with the Conservative thinktank Civitas. Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.
The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't want a theocratic empire after all'".
No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied. And those of us who dismissed the oppression of women and gay people as "secondary contradictions" in the early 70s are correctly wary of putting those issues on the back-burner now. Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation - on these understandable grounds - to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.
For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object - the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but his "thought experiment" about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) "until it hurts the whole community" makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque.
Cohen is careful to point out that "Islamism has Islamic roots", and, clearly, the group that he dubs the "far right" goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami. It's also a group that - defined in the old-fashioned way as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - remains at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. As Trevor Phillips pointed out in his "sleepwalking into segregation" speech, made after 7/7, a Pakistani man with identical qualifications to a white man is still going to earn £300,000 less in his lifetime.
It is also a group that suffered, particularly during Cohen, Aaronovitch and Anthony's formative years. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Paki-bashing created an image of Britain's south Asian communities as a traditionally submissive group, victimised by unwarranted aggression. For some, this image was complemented by admiration for groups such as the Bradford 12, who sought to defend their communities against fascist attack, and won the right to do so in court. When, in 1989, Bradford's Pakistanis found a sense of self-confidence and identity through burning books rather than banks, it's no surprise that liberal progressives who had supported, maybe even pitied, that community felt a sense of betrayal. In their books, Cohen and Anthony frequently point out how people on the left grow bitter when the poor fail to live up to the romance of unbridled heroism or untainted victimhood. They don't fully take into account the effect of that delusion on themselves.
Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking. Despite his defence of women's and gay rights against Qur'anic scholars, a distinct strain of hostility to the sexual gains of the 60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and sexual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual support", dips more than a toe into the Daily Mail's critique of the welfare state (breaking up families, privileging immigrants), and blames the Respect party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi unemployment.
Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to theocracy" ("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.
Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New Statesman's Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses brought Muslims together and "helped develop a British Muslim identity".
In fact, Bunglawala's attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian article last June, he reiterated the importance of the anti-Rushdie campaign in building self-confidence among a small, isolated, beleaguered and frequently victimised community, but went on to "readily acknowledge we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned". Now, he confesses, "I can better appreciate the concerns and fear generated by the images of book-burning in Bradford and calls for the author to be killed". Not least because, as he wrote in response to a critical blog, the same laws that allowed Rushdie to write The Satanic Verses protects the rights of Muslims to say what they think, too.
Support for human rights legislation that protects the rights of religious as well as sexual minorities is controversial within the Muslim community, as are other examples of supposedly diehard Islamists responding to liberal criticism. For example, the MCB came under fire when it decided - not before time - to participate in Holocaust Day ceremonies. Azzam Tamimi is a leading member of the main Muslim organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim Initiative, a group much reviled for its close ties with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian equivalent, Hamas. Tamimi's book on Hamas (published in America as Hamas: A History from Within) contains a sustained critique of Hamas's constitution, its treatment of the Jews, and its quotation of the tsarist antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another leading member of the BMI, Anas Altikriti, points out that the Qur'an says nothing about homosexuality beyond relaying the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (and, for that matter, does not call for the execution of apostates). Altikriti negotiated for hostage Norman Kember's release in Iraq, campaigned against escalating protests over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark (while sympathising with Muslim anger against them) and argues that, unlike the British government, he has been fighting separatist Muslim extremism since long before 1997.
Despite the drumbeat of demonisation by media and politicians, these and other Muslim leaders are increasingly open to the argument that their shared interest in universal human rights trumps what we rightly regard as illiberal beliefs. They are, in other words, going in precisely the opposite direction from that which their detractors describe and predict. Are they really (to use Hitchens's formulation) to be anathematised as "fascists with an Islamic face"?
All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The civil rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the south. The difficulties of that relationship were demonstrated when - after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-black leadership of one of the main civil rights groups. Later, feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for the sexism of both their political practice and personal behaviour. Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance which successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?
Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between left and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For atheists, it is between secularism and religious belief. For some American and European feminists, it is between women's rights and a multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.
What all these fault-lines have in common is that they pit progressives against the group that is under the most sustained political attack, here and abroad, and that those who draw them include people who have the authority of the convert, having seen the error of their ways. It behoves those of us who have also been there and done that, not to defend the indefensible, but to protect the vocabulary of alliance that has done so much good in the past and is so necessary now.
David Edgar is a British playwright.
© 2008 The Guardian
27 Comments so far
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Not only are neocons better organized (a skill many of their older members learned from the communist party) but they are also much better bankrolled.
It follows that they also have organized a much better communication/media infrastructure that more efficiently (and widely distributes)catchy, one-liner explanations for current events and operate effective "smear and fear" campaigns against prominent mildly progressive individuals and movements.
(For neocons and their religious Right allies, progressive means any ideology or movement that is to the left of the neocon position. Because one can't go any further to the right of the neocons, it means most humans outside the corporate media/political beltway are potential targets for their slimefests.)
>>> Most people who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left organisations
And how does one know this? Self-report?
The common thread in these so-called defections is that these people made their livings with words before their belated "conversions," which should be coupled to the fact that the pay is better on the right.
Perhaps they are merely whores...
>>> As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority.
In what manner? It seems to me that someone who starts out a sentence with the equivalent of "I was a deluded idiot in my youth" might find it difficult to credibly follow this modest claim with another, "but now, I am wise."
As far as I can tell, once an idiot, well..., let's be charitable.
The mistake, I think, is to see all leftists and radicals as inherently better than the run of the mill. The fact is that many on the left are idiots, just as many on the right are.
Tony Christini: Maybe you misunderstood me when I said, "I wonder why?" I know why, and you just explained the reasons very well. I did see In the Valley of Elah, parts of Rendition, and that's about it, except for indymedia documentaries about Iraq.
I now remember your novel, 'Homefront' reviewed in Counterpunch a few years back. You have inspired me with the second post and I want to purchase and read the book. Thanks, Tony.
Speaking of movies or novels about Vietnam, I went to a special screening of 'Platoon' at UCLA before it was released and Oliver Stone participated in questions and answers afterwards. I pointed out two flaws (my opinion) and told him in no uncertain terms it was a masterpiece and he'd probably be in the Oscar ceremonies the following year. He blushed, asked me if I was a Vietnam vet, we exchanged a few more words and he really felt honored for the compliment.
My favorite anti-war novel is the Dalton Trumbo story, 'Johnny Got His Gun.'
Keep writing, Mr. C.
"A movie reviewer recently mentioned the fact about Iraq war movies haven't done well at the box office. I wonder why?"
Compared to the relative lack of, say, Hurricane Katrina movies, or, say, the ongoing national slaughter of the impoverished by the impoverishers movies, the growing number of Iraq war movies, by their very existence alone, are doing extremely well. Far more such movies have been made now than were remotely ever made about the Vietnam war at a comparative time. And far more people see most any of these movies than see most any such documentary. But it's no cause for celebration, far from it, because nearly all of these movies are very careful not to be too "antiwar," too revealing of the basic illegality and immorality of the US conquest of Iraq. Of course all wars are brutalizing in their everyday and peripheral realities (true of even justifiable wars), which is about as far as any of the movies go, which typically isn't even as far into the fundamentals as Michael Moore's relatively circumscribed documentaries go with the various issues he examines. The central reality of the US conquest of Iraq and beyond is distorted or falsified, or goes rather studiously ignored, let alone undetailed, the fact that the US has committed the supreme crime of aggression, "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the whole," in the words of the judgment of Nuremberg. None of the dozens of Iraq war movies, shows, and novels I'm aware of renders this reality explicit and central. I've seen quite a few of the movies, and read in quite a few of the novels, along with taking in reviews or articles on each. Very few of these various works of fiction even begin to approach that central framing context, and consequently they either greatly falsify or evade the crucial central reality. On those grounds, those grounds that are central to the whole calamity, the movies and novels don't deserve a large audience, even if they do on other grounds. Until this "major and crucial point overlooked" is made clear in relation to the US role in the aggression against Iraq, as Noam Chomsky notes, "until at least this is recognized, all other discussion is merely footnotes, and shameful ones." And that's the shame of the Iraq war movies and novels too; they are essentially about the "footnotes," however monstrous, rather than the "major and crucial point overlooked."
My novel Homefront - also the novella Glory, and the long story Washburn that complete what is essentially a three book novel - addresses the overlooked central reality. You can't see it in the theaters. Hundreds of publishing houses and journals wouldn't touch any part of it. If not for affordable print on demand publishing technology I doubt it would be available.
In sum, seen as a Hollywood meal ticket (make that, yacht ticket) the Iraq war movies are a commercial disappointment, while otherwise an extreme and growing success compared to their (virtually nonexistent) Vietnam war counterparts. But to call these movies a cultural success is an extreme overstatement, except as footnote.
That said, most of the films I've seen have some limited worthwhile qualities, even though I not only directly see that I'm watching relative footnotes, I get the antagonizing and sometimes intolerable sense that goes along with it. Be that as it may, currently in my view three of the most worthwhile are In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, and probably the most worthwhile of all, the relatively low budget G.I. Jesus, for what it attempts at least. Even slimmer pickings exist among the novels, seems to me.
balakirev,
Excellent comment (11 a.m.).
I would add (related to the point made by peaceman 10:49 a.m.) that the conservative-elite group is more easily organized into hierarchies that can be much more effective than the loosely organized and independent-minded intellectuals and workers of the left. How can those promoting equality ever make much progress when those supporting inequality always have the advantage of better organization?
My sympathies in this discussion lie mostly with the writer of the original post, although I can appreciate the validity of many of the comments. Yes, there is a vagueness which is inherent in abstract theorizing; but how are you to explore a causal explanation for any phenomenon without a degree of abstraction? No abstraction -- total specificity -- gives no categories of explanation, so no relationship among observations.
Similarly, the writer of the original post does not deal extensively with each of the unsettling realities of Muslim demands of liberal societies in his call to maintain an alliance with the oppressed despite their imperfection. And so?
I observe that some even deny the rightward shift of elite discourse. Okay, perhaps all of your friends are still committed radicals from the 60s: nonetheless, the United State now tortures prisoners. The President admits that his Cabinet was deeply involved in it, and defends the practice. The country yawns and moves on. The United States tortures prisoners and has been torturing prisoners for about a decade as part of its official practice.
Please wake up. Are you not chilled? Is not the moral community in which you live hardly recognizable? Even at its most powerful, the Ku Klux Klan was opposed by the official organs of the governement of the United States; now it is the government.
It is in those truly horrific circumstances that I join the writer of this post in urging all of us, whatever our reservations about specific issues, to press for human rights for all, for humane treatment for all, and for classic liberal values in our public policies.
This is a superb article that exposes the intellectual banality of the British right, or at least those sections of the right that try to whip up anti minority ( read anti Muslim passions ) on the basis of ideas that are dishonest at the least, slanderous at worst.
I think it is inspiring to think there are people like the author who are as unafraid to speak truth to prejudice as they are to speak truth to power.
Unfortunately, humans need some sort of paradigm to organize and give meaning to the raw data that they register and experience.
The primary language and culture that we imbibe as baby's milk already forces us to focus on some aspects of perceived reality while ignoring others.
While we imbibe our language and culture, the society's core ideology is added into the mix.
And usually this ideology rationalizes that society's practices and institutionalized injustices as maintaining that society's functional viability and, as such, it is inevitable and "the best of all possible worlds."
If a member of society attempts to "progressively" diminish its unequal distribution of power and wealth, he/she will need an alternative paradigm to both understand and to attempt to change it.
As a result, a person and a progressive movement have to possess an alternative paradigm in order to register and focus on what is meaningful.
Without a paradigm used to organize data into meaningful information, the social actor can't direct his/her actions toward a target, nor test why these actions did or did not work as predicted.
So a political and social actor understands a movement needs its "ism". The wealthy and power certainly understand this reality. In politics, the isms are three: 1. to maintain the present distribution of wealth and power 2. to change the present distribution of wealth and power in favor of the already wealthy and powerful 3. to change the present distribution of wealth and power in favor of the less powerful and wealthy.
Because the majority of nations and individuals are nonelite, the ism that most likely registers and makes meaningful the social reality of the majority of peoples is number 3.
Ideologies 1. and 2. must rationalize the unequal power and wealth system to those whom it benefits least. Thus those ideologies don't focus on the core reason causing this inequality -the system itself. In other words, they work by not registering and understanding the majority of raw data the average citizen experiences. Instead, the average nonelite citizen's focus must be turned into other directions that less and less aproximate reality. To the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
Unfortunately, the elite's ideological project also necessitates the intellectual, emotional and cultural underdevelopment of the nonelite. And this intrinsic underdevelopment acts hand-in-hand with economic and political underdevelopment.
Thus, the major source of today's social problems stems from "those who have the most needs have the least power, and those with the least needs have the most power."
There is no fuzzy snapshot here.
Interesting article by Mr. Edgar, and thoughtful insight by all of you above.
POET: I think you may have nailed it on your post. "They crave dogmatic assurance of a settled model for existence and any model will do as long as it is sufficiently fixed in its certainty." Too many of us want a defined, regimented, micro-managed system where we think current and future events are predictable and can be controlled.
Tony Christini: Very good points! I've never heard of Liberation Lit before but found the site interesting and dab in writing myself and may contact you in the future about a project I'm working on.
A movie reviewer recently mentioned the fact about Iraq war movies haven't done well at the box office. I wonder why?
Balakirev: Good comments. Unfortunately, the rest of the planet takes some of the worse products and culture from us. We set the trend and they follow suit.
Betsy: Sad to say, some of my relatives are Republicans and Bush supporters, but are finally beginning to see the light and now have "second thought?" about W. and the Republicans.
A problem with the left liberal/progressive movement is not a lack of unity, but too often ideological differences in a paradigm which is workable. Possibly too much personal ego involved. A classic example was 'The Spanish Civil War' during the 1930's. While the various leftists groups quarrled with each other about a plan of action to counter the fascist regime, the right wing was well prepared and united in squashing the progressive community.
One thing is certain about reactionaries, as the great George Seldes used to call them. They have two goals: money and power. Whatever personal feelings they have within their group, the hatchet is buried and unity takes precedence in achieving their goals. Therein lies the formula for success. We progressives need to unite rather than go our own way. This is an all to common trait of liberals. I'm guilty myself, and trying to be less dogmatic, as POET said, and more in tune with my brothers and sisters in the progressive community. Time is running out.
I AM MYSELF says, "There is nothing more dangerous than a recovering liberal alcoholic who's gotten religion. Nothing. Stark black and white in a world of grays." So true... and POET substantiated that comment with great wisdom by stating, "they crave dogmatic assurance of a settled model for existence and any model will do as long as it is sufficiently fixed in its certainty."
I had a lot of trouble reading this article because it made so many categorical assumptions, as if the delineations the author espoused are clear, concise and settled designations. In other words, his own prejudices fully color his arguments; and what common intellectual grounds he forges are writ in the FRAMING of a publishing nexus that ASSUMES conservative values as the NORM. I rally often in this forum for those ideas, values and perceptions that TRANSCEND the ism-divisions, however astutely they are dressed up. This playwright is a snob who's limited by his own world view. All of us see life through the prism of our own level of understanding, but I find his OFFENSIVE. Yes. There have been some who have defected. Horowitz, giving Bush the line of "compassionate conservative" gets my goat most. Bottom line, either we care about people and recognize life as a shared garment of destiny; or we just focus on our own private gains and those institutions that justify a modern basis for Darwin's "survival of the economic fittest."
Lots of good comments here today.
The problem with extremkists of either end of the political spectrum is the same problem experienced by ideologues: sooner or later their perfect model of reality breaks down. When that happens, they have three choices:
1. Ignore reality in which case they join they become either disciples of magic or ignorance.
2. Go from one extreme to another because, whatever the differences may be, they crave dogmatic assurance of a settled model for existence and any model will do as long as it is sufficiently fixed in its certainty.
3. Once and for all realize that it is impossible for any extremist or ideologue to be able to explain any more than a small part of reality for a limitied amount of time.
When we realize that the best we can do is take a fuzzy snapshot of a very tiny part and brief instant of reality that happened in the past (even if that past was just a minute ago)then we are open to abandoning the ideologue-extremist model.
In its place is the wonderful opportunity to become a part of the flow of existence instead of trying to dominate it with our inadaquate thoughts. This is the road less traveled and few there be who find it and fewer still who are willing to stay on it once found.
Yes, it is all a bit abstruse and abstract. As he should know, the terms "right" and "left," "conservative" and "liberal" are a bit fluid. Fidel Castro has policies that many "Neoconservatives" would like to adopt, and the militant communists of the former Soviet Union had and have many policies and practices that are anathema (rightly so) to intelligent environmentalists. The free-market capitalists of the West are eagerly buying goods from a country which they still call "communist China." The writer joins the defectors in assuming that "environmentalism" is left-wing; it may or may not be such. And where in the writings of Marx,Engles,Lenin, or Mao, is protection of the environment given salience?
And recent writers of the left have asserted with reasoned clarity that "multi-culturalism" can be a great handmaiden of capitalism. Protection for the poor? Well, that goes back to a time before even before Christ.
Want a classic example of a liberal turned conservative? Glenn Beck.
There is nothing more dangerous than a recovering liberal alcoholic who's gotten religion. Nothing. Stark black and white in a world of grays.
"Back in 1865 or in 1965 we in the North didn't believe in multiculturalism; we forced the South to give up slavery and de jure racial segregation."
Different scenario.
Your examples of practices we in the west find abhorant occur in other sovereign countries with other cultures. Do they invade us because we maim so many people with Big Macs and The Simpsons?
Slavery was occurring in this country - it was OUR back yard (though, slavery was not the reason for the Civil War).
60, 70's wow where's the munchies, man
Unfortunately, the problem is worse than David Edgar attempts to show. Liberal intellectuals and writers migrating (further) away from the left? Which one of them has written, say, an explicit anti Iraq war novel laying bare the central illegal and immoral nature of the conquest? Not exactly a marginal reality. Moreover, how many explicit progressive partisan Vietnam War novels exist? How many university presses, or any press, has published one?
Among left organizations in the US, the novel sort of died, or rather was killed, a long time ago, if nowhere else. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was not only first published in serial form in a left periodical, his research for the novel was funded by it - by the socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. I'm aware of no left news periodicals (let alone liberal ones) that are regularly running partisan liberatory fiction. Given that corporate-state power destroyed most socialist and labor newspapers and periodicals in the US decades ago, it's understandable that left organizations can't afford to fund the writing of one, but it's astounding that virtually none has published one under its imprint, especially given modern publishing technology (let alone the online publishing resource of the internet). Such novels won't be found pouring out of university presses either. Commercial and other presses? Take a look at this list of novels, also films, and consider how many are how clearly left progressive and how many are not - and who is creating them - would make for good research projects too for some number of grad students and scholars: http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/iraq-war-fiction-3/
When relatively prominent "good liberals" or, call them, good professionals of US literature have so little, if anything, to say for progressive partisan fiction - see here: http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/benjamin-percy-refresh-refresh-and-iraq-war-fiction/ - one can see that the problem in literature extends far beyond the racist lunacies of Martin Amis and his ilk that Terry Eagleton and others have done well to point out.
Liberation Lit is one of the few journals of any type that regularly runs much explicit progressive partisan fiction in the US, and that consciously seeks it out: http://liblit.org/
balakirev said: "Because my dad had a long career with US Air Force Intelligence, our family travelled the world...If you grow up observing the poverty in places like the Philippines or Honduras, and you don't buy the racist or 'free'-market rationales for the what you experience, you can't help but eventually discover Leftist concepts are best suited to understanding your experience"
Right on. I was no leftist as a youth or a young adult. Only lately, as I approach late middle age, have I begun to see the world in left-right 'shades', and I choose left. Chief among my influences was exposure to poverty in SE Asia and Central America in the 1970s. Its difficult for U.S. citizens to encompass the profound injustice of people living in the lap of extreme luxury just a stones throw from people freezing to death in cardboad boxes in a high-altitude capital like San Salvador (sometimes they checked this distance by actually throwing stones). But, when 3% of the population owns 70% of the wealth, what other outcome is possible? I'm no communist, but enforcing progressive taxation to keep the richest 10% of a country from owning more than 55% of a nations wealth is far from a bad thing to me. Its what the U.S. did between 1930-1978 and, last I checked, those weren't exactly hard times. We built dams, roads, bridges, electrical infrastructure (before there WAS any of these). We defeated global fascism, global communism, segregation. We fought a major war in SE asia and, the very same decade, flew to the moon!! We OWNED the international economic community.
Now, 30 years after supply-side economics got its start, we try to defer payment on our OWN WARS!!! We're $10 trillion in public debt, ANOTHER $10 trillion in private debt, just as our baby boomers approach social security. Our Civil Engineers estimate our civil infrastructure needs $1.6 TRILLION dollars in immediate spending just to come up to the CODE it met in 1970. And, lately, the facade on our economy has fallen, revealling that we're broke and owe everyone on the planet money. We have no functional middle class anymore.
Thanks to the Bush tax cuts, our richest 10% now own more than 73% of all the nations wealth. WE are becoming the horrid Central America I saw all those years ago, and I seem unable to prevent it. Get yer cardboard boxes NOW, and don't plant them within a stones throw of the gated communities!!!
A good example of the kind of wordy, highly abstract analysis that floats airily from notion to notion, so abstruse as to have no visible connection with real life and actual politics. The average voter has no idea who these people are that the writer talks about, nor why he does so.
This article doesn't describe anything of my experience.
Every 1960s hippie radical I know (which is most of my friends) is supporting Obama, except for a few who can't stand the Democrats at all and are voting Green, Nader, or Bernie Sanders. I don't know ANY who have become right-wingers. The same is true for the Old Lefties I know, including our parents.
The only issue on which I sense a slight rightward creep is abortion, which looks a bit more nuanced to some of us once we've given birth than it did at age 20 -- but even there, I don't hear anyone advocating for making it illegal again. We value our daughters too much for that.
The media in this country promotes the idea that the driving force in the Arab insurgency is Islamic fundamentalism. We should keep in mind before buying into this view that the same media portrayed the Irish insurgency as driven by religious differences between Protestants and Catholics, something which we now know was a lie.
"Multiculturalism is at best an evasion of uncomfortable issues and at worst a rhetorical device for neutralizing opposition to the spread of Islamic law."
**this is true.
case in point, Bridget Bardot going on trial because she is pissed off about the barbaric feast rituals of Eid being brought into France. Not that kosher slaughterhouses are pleasant but its BS to say that you have a right to bring a violent or oppressive belief into your adopted culture(whether its female circumcision, cockfighting, honor killing, animal sacrifice or Mohammad worship) and not face criticism from those who dont support it. It doesnt make you an intolerant racist to be against oppression.
A mass migration of humans from one place to another is not something that should be celebrated.
It should be greeted with concern.
Moral relativism is a myth. Everyone has a word for sun, and everyone has a moral belief system. There is a common language to all moral systems if people look at them carefully.
You can use that common belief in forming a general fairness doctrine with respects to religion and culture.
To try and stop this by claiming moral relativism and multi culturalism just prolongs a problem that must be addressed eventually.
The main point I took away from that long piece could be succinctly stated as: "It makes sense for progressives to continue to make common cause with Islamists as long as they face the same powerful enemy -- the international corporatocracy."
"The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking."
Oh really? Should men have a right to marry more than one woman at a time? Should mothers have a right to have their daughters' clitorises and labia removed? Should employers have to give some employees time off for prayer several times each work day? Should a family be allowed to execute a wayward daughter for damaging its honor? Should we have prayer rooms in our tax-funded airports and ritual footbaths in our tax-funded public restrooms for the benefit of one particular religion? Should members of one particular religion receive control of a public pool for a few hours each week so it can exclude one gender or the other? Should the government suppress writings and films that blaspheme a religion?
These are the real issues that Muslims (and in the case of FGM pagan Africans) confront Western societies with, right now. Multiculturalism is at best an evasion of uncomfortable issues and at worst a rhetorical device for neutralizing opposition to the spread of Islamic law. Back in 1865 or in 1965 we in the North didn't believe in multiculturalism; we forced the South to give up slavery and de jure racial segregation.
Because my dad had a long career with US Air Force Intelligence, our family travelled the world. Eventually, my dad ended up doing the empire's dirty work in Southeast Asia.
If you grow up observing the poverty in places like the Philippines or Honduras, and you don't buy the racist or "free"-market rationales for the what you experience, you can't help but eventually discover Leftist concepts are best suited to understanding your experience
Combine the above experiences with the fact you are passionately curious about the culture and music of the humanity's varied peoples...and you see it being wiped out everyone. For example, in El Salvador, the new rich have a habit of cleaning out the temples, palaces of their Mayan ancestors in order to build an imitative McMansion.
Of course, US commercial music dominates. In Honduras, my upper-class Honduran students had no knowledge of their folk music or traditional music (or of Hondurans like Guillermo Anderson who connect it to more "modern" influences), folktales, but they knew about the newest US hip-hop and rap "artists".
And the Leftist cultural websites in the US eagerly attempt to find crumbs of resistance in punk, heavy metal, goth, hip hop, rap, or even regatoon.
For me, the problem of progressive intellectuals forming alliances with poor people's movements is that these intellectuals tend to come from privileged backgrounds.
They didn't (and don't) have to endure the neglect, lack of education, indignity, anxiety, constant food and shelter insecurity, hard fisted oppression, and the quiet destruction of their culture and way of life, that the poor experience.
In other words, most progressive intellectuals don't receive the same constant negative feedback as do most members of the lower-classes or biologically-defined oppressed peoples.
Furthermore, many members of the progressive intelligentsia are both talented and trained to be interesting writers plus they usually have connections within the publishing, academic and think tank communities.
Isn't it so much easier to live the good life by acting as the Master's mouthpiece? Good food, great wine, young babes, great reviews for your books/movies/declarations, constant media focus on you and other ego enhancing forms of feedback come your way.
It's better and more pleasurable to ignore the smashed and downtrodden...the wretched of the earth and, instead, turn on groups, leaders, etc. who attempt to generate progressive social changes. Its not to be done in polite society. For one thing, it may disrupt one's digestion, shopping strategies or adventures travelling abroad.
I'm still a leftist in my views partially because, though I'm highly educated, I still life on the brink. In other words, I still share the life of millions of US citizens near the bottom. However, I don't live like the billions of the "wretched of the earth."
But because I saw them live day-to-day I can't use racist or corporate sponsered ideologies to explain their plight -or mine.
When a "bitter" lower-class guy or gal (whom is usually clinging to their guns or religion) complains about foodstamp "abuse", or welfare cheats, I always bring up Bear and Sternes. That's welfare cheating!
Mayday Mayday Mayday
Fuzzy thought potions escape us except when we're going down
though the scare is a rush
scarcity won't even blush
and knows it's descent is not heaven bent
as forever moments of shrieked hush cry
surely silence shares my pie my pie my pie
This is not consistant with my experience. I was fully there during the early 70s. My friends who had integrity still have the same values, and most of them act on their values in serious ways.
This includes most of my friends who are quite prosperous and a few who are now Microsoft millionaires.
Of course there were always creeps around and some of them had long hair. But they were creeps first and foremost then and their core emptiness will not have changed much.
Bo Richardson