Is the American Left Adrift?

Can we stop talking about demonstrations soon? They're only very rarely of any use no matter what the circumstance. They mostly exist only to give the heady illusion of "making a difference, man" to the people who participate in them.

i'm tempted to make a blanket statement that post-modernism and identity politics have terminally crippled the left. (gore's 49% doesn't count- he's not on the left that i'm on. he still would have had my vote, though). class politics, which are relatively easy to evangelize, is, i fear, being subsumed by identity politics, which due to ties to postmodernism is really difficult to evangelize.

it's something i need to flesh out, but i do believe it's a tension worth discussing.

This is maybe why the Canadian and American left can't relate super well; ideological dispute is a natural feature of candaian elections and political discourse; we can agree to disagree. Is the US, the main parties already agree on the big stuff, and just have the details to work out.

it's the postmodernism that jinxes, i feel, any attempt at broadening this discourse. everyone has their own identity, history is self-created, truth is subjective. how can you proselytize with those tenets as fundamentals?

one thing i will say is that if the left can be more or less agreed to be a bunch of people and organizations that work to improve the lives of the poor and dispossessed, and fight for social and economic justice, including a living wage and equality of opportunity regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, mods vs rockers, then it had better understand the way these peoples' experiences are shaped by the way they slot into the american system. and i'll tell you something: people are working out there. thousands and thousands of people are out there giving pro bono legal advice, running community environmental organizations, working with drug offenders, lobbying against regressive taxation. they just keep quietly doing what they're doing no matter if it's kerry or bush in the white house and they are not bothered by the existence of postmodern theory. i think if kerry can win the white house he can do something to make these people feel less alone, though.

xpost

yeah, i guess i define identity politics as opposed to class politics in the sense of basic political assosiation. instead of forming these alliances along economic lines, they're formed along gender lines,
also, that identity is political, not just cultural. your expression of 'who you are' and what you define yourself as is a political act. this is problematic for me when self-definition in opposition to the status quo is seen as political activism in and of itself. i know these terms may be vague, sorry.

heh, what identity politics means to you is diferent than what it means to me, and that's ok! multiple and equally valid interpretations, blah blah etc. university's ruined me, perhaps. i try not to let this stuff get in the way for myself: realpolitik has to trump theory everytime. it does affect the political work of a lot of people i know, however, which is why i pay it attention.

and oh, i know people are working hard; i've done it myself, and i know a lot of wonderful, dedicated people spending their time on this stuff. i'm not bemoaning the effort here, nor do i think things are as floundering as they could be; apologies if i've come across that way.

if i lived in the states right now, i expect i would be volunteering for kerry, and i'd def. be voting for him.

i'm not judging, i'm just saying, these are the arguments that i hear. i find it problematic because this is seen as valid political action in and of itself. i agree, activism would logically refer to organization against discrimination, etc., but not necessarily.

this may be retricted to my university and assoctated groups, in which case it's so few people that it really doesn't matter. i hope this is the case.

Tracer, "identity politics" doesn't seem that vague to me, though maybe it is and I just haven't thought about it. (I'm getting sleepy. I should be in bed. I just got finished writing my senator a letter about gay marriage, but I was primarily using it to sort out my own thoughts on the matter.) Anyhow, I think one perceived problem with "identity politics" is that groups divide themselves into smaller and smaller slivers of identity, ever more specific; rather than building connections that can lead to a large-scale movement.

I'm personally more specifically interested in American liberalism, which is a much bigger tent and represents a long and notable (sometimes even noble) tradition that needs to be better understood, appreciated and trumpeted. I have friends who have completely given up on the word "liberal" because it's been used successfully as an epithet for so long, but I think that's a mistake. Liberalism has a history that warrants defending. So, for that matter, does America, which is another mistake I think the American left has made. There's a tendency to spend so much time debunking the American mythos that the actual ideas and opportunities undergirding the society get completely ignored or written off as propaganda. I mean, of course America has never been America, like Langston Hughes said, but on the other hand this country's history is marked by one triumph after another of the expansion of rights and freedoms and opportunities (countered by valleys of regression and oppression, like the one we're in now). And I think liberals need to relaim those triumphs, in a way that doesn't whitewash anything but also doesn't shortchange the accomplishments. It's important to know that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, yes, but I think it's also important to understand what distinguished them and their ideas and how those ideas helped open up possibilities that later generations capitalized on.

Ah, hell. I've wandered far afield from the question, and I could go on in this vein for pages. I just think the American left, or American liberalism anyway (and if liberalism isn't far enough "left" for you, sorry, it's all I got) needs to reconnect the country's past, present and future, not just to dispel the moronic creation myths of modern conservativism (in which the United States was ruled by Jesus Christ and John D. Rockefeller until the smelly hippies started trying to turn everyone into queers in the 1960s), but to articulate aspirations for the future: Where are we, how did we get here, and where should we be headed? A little more vision, a little louder voices, and a hell of a lot less apologizing for being liberal. Conservatives wear "conservative" like a merit badge; in Republican primaries, they fall all over themselves to prove their dedication to conservative principles. It would be nice to see the same on the other side.

when did 'liberal' start meaning 'champagne socialist'? it's a pr coup for the right, but it's really disingenuous, because they're defending the world's greatest bastion of liberalism ever: the US constitution + declaration of independence.

My weasel words were: I think one perceived problem with "identity politics" is that groups divide themselves into smaller and smaller slivers of identity, ever more specific; rather than building connections that can lead to a large-scale movement. I phrased it that way precisely because, at the very least, I don't fully agree with those criticisms.

I have also see people write that most of the major successes of the progressive to left side of the political spectrum have been movements that can be labeled as "identity politics" (civil rights, women's rights, gay rights--not complete successes, but a lot has changed partly as a result), and I agree with that.

But I also think that identity politics sometimes drifts into increasing fragmentation. So I guess I am subject to your criticisms.

one thing i might say here is that the world is drifitng into increasing fragmentation, and that's just the way it is. we don't live in the steam age anymore, we don't work the land, we've got globally mobile capital and TVs everywhere. it would be surmountingly strange if our politics were monolithic in such an atmosphere.

I'll have think about it. It's not something I have sorted out.

The point about us living in an incresingly fragmented world is of course true.

(FWIW, I am not quite willing to call myself a leftist. I'm more of a left-leaning liberal than a true leftist. But a lot of what the left says makes more sense to me that what I see from any other area of the political spectrum. Not that I am asking to be let off the hook on this issue because of that, but I'm just saying, for the purposes of this thread, I don't think I speak as an American leftist.)

This is true, historically. But seen in retrospect, they both fit in with that broad American liberal tradition I was talking about up above. Which I think is also part of the answer to this identity politics vs. ideological politics problem -- even if the specific interests of, say, reproductive rights activists, queer activists, labor organizers, environmental activists, etc. don't overlap or are even sometimes seemingly at odds, they are all still part of the general movement of democratic liberalism over the past few centuries. But somehow democratic liberalism ends up as everyone's bogeyman -- it didn't do enough, it hasn't done enough, George Washington owned slaves. I think the democratic liberal tradition -- not just political but also intellectual and artistic -- needs some serious defending right now, and it's not getting it. In the United States, at least, a profound ignorance about our own history is allowing conservatives and Christian fundamentalists to more or less rewrite the Constitution after the fact, even without amendments (since who actually reads the Constitution anyway?).

I'm not saying that whatever New Left or Neo-neo-liberalism emerges has to be some kind of back-to-Rousseau movement, but the Renaissance and Enlightenment -- for all their flaws, compromises and betrayed revolutions -- laid some important foundations that are going to start cracking if they're not tended to. I think the left made a mistake in throwing out the Dead White Males. They need to be reclaimed, alongside Ghandi and King and all the other dead men and women of all colors who collectively liberated more people over the past 300 years than any army ever. Or so it seems to me.

so the question is do you want to play that game? it gets very dirty very fast. strangely enough i know of a couple who's marriage is in trouble because of one them working for moveon and is getting scarier and scarier the more entrenched in politics she gets. i like to think of tracer's scenario of people just out there doing it on a personal/community level - no matter who's in power (though of course their work gets easier or harder depending on who is). maybe i'm just more focused on being a good person and doing what you can well instead of doing ugly things that might be for the 'greater good'.

you just can't call defeat because your man doesn't make office. there are a million other things that make up your day.

This is one of the central conundrums of effective left/liberal politics in America right now. If the underlying principles of left/liberalism include humanism and broad distribution of power, then betraying those principles in order to get into office to support those principles is a morally dubious proposition. I've got this recurring metaphor of a football game, where one team wants to win but within the framework of the game -- with rules, referees, etc. -- and the other team comes out with machine guns and shoots everyone on the field and pays off the refs. If part of the argument we're having is about whether we need the rules and referees, then you can only make the case for it by playing by those rules. But how do you do that when you're playing Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, who think rules are for pussies and chumps?

I don't know. I don't think the Democrats have figured it out yet either.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/07/on-the-politics-of-identity.html

http://jezebel.com/resilience-is-futile-how-well-meaning-nonprofits-perpe-1716461384?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

https://facingrealitycollective.wordpress.com/towards-a-revolutionary-left/

On November 30, 1999, activists shut down the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. The protests were a thrilling moment during bleak times for the socialist left. Now, years of resistance are finally paying off. https://t.co/38i77jMzf4 @DougHenwood

— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) November 30, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/judith-butler-wants-us-to-reshape-our-rage