At Least This Guy's Honest
In the current issue of The Nation, that ancient American magazine that has grown more adolescent with age, Ronald Aronson, author of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, puts a very interesting proposition to the American left. It's neatly captured by his essay's headline: The Left Needs More Socialism.Here's why I think he's honest. He admits, even though mostly in an indirect fashion, that the American left is "stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics," that it has lost its soul, that it has "no vision," and that this has caused it to be "doomed," because it has been utterly incapable of articulating a vision sufficiently compelling to cultivate the affections of the American people.
But then, he blames the "right" for this. He singles out the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Francis Fukiyama, and Thomas Friedman. One might have thought Aronson would have been just the tinest bit harder on the American left itself, which, he correctly observes, has categorically dismissed socialism in favour of identity politics, specifically "feminist, antiwar, progay, antiracist, multicultural, ecological and community-oriented identities."
And then he turns for inspiration to Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and proposes that American lefties should regard the World Social Forum as the contemporary version of the 19th century International Workingmen's Association.
Not to give advice to the American left or anything, but do look before you leap, lest you end up looking like complete idiots.
posted by Terry Glavin at 11:58 AM
8 Comments:
Terry, I hope that you don't think the photo of the guy with the "Equal Rights for Suicide Bombers" is a leftist, although your text seems to indicate that you do.
Reminds me of an old joke circa 1966.
"Hey man, can you Sarte?"
"No I Kant. Camus?"
As for d-p-u: I think we can be fairly certain that the eejit in the picture imagines himself as some kind of leftist, ...
Nope, he's a right-winger, a member of the "Protest Warriors", a group that attends anti-war demonstrations with bogus signs.
From an article on them from last year:
The Leftists behind us had no idea our signs were parodying them saying things like, “Equal Rights for Suicide Bombers.” In fact, for awhile, they believed we were fellow anti-war protestors, just like them.
And there's a photo of the very same sign accompanying the article.
That's hilarious: He was deliberately masquerading as a pseud nutjob - and nobody noticed?
Ah, you skipped reading the article. No, they weren't noticed because they joined the front of the march with their signs pointing away from the body of the demonstration, but toward the news cameras.
The URL scrolled off the page, and was difficult to retrieve. Here's the embedded link.
I understand your point that there are a number of loons in the left, but surely there are a similar number on the right as well, although less visible as they don't tend to put themselves on public display at demonstrations in the same manner of the lefty loons. With the notable exception of some right-wing bloggers, that is.
But if your intention to imply that these are representative of the socialist movement, and that, should the American left take Aronson's advice and inject more socialism into their political movement, then they will undergo a personal transformatiuon into aging hippies with poor poster-making skills, then you're painting with a overly wide brush.
On the other hand, if your point was to simply show that there are a number of batty people on the left, then identifying a right winger with a silly sign as a representative example is missing the mark by a wide margin.
Well, accidents happen, and the Protest Warriors have caused this type of confusion before. They had to be rescued by police at one particular demonstration after another group of right wingers mistook them for left-wing demonstrators and physically attacked them. In cases like this, I think it's less of an issue of right wing parady meshing with left wing goofery, and more an issue of right wing illusions about the thought processes of socialists seemingly confirmed.
...specifically the so-called "anti-war" left.
Being that I consider myself part of the anti-war left (when it comes to Iraq, at least, I'm all for the Afghanistan intervention), I'd appreciate some extra info on the fuzzy thinking part, as many of the dire predictions about Iraq have turned out optimistic, in hindsight.
"Troops out" may well be what the American "left" wants, but what matters more to me is what the people of Iraq want. And it's not necessarily the same thing.
Summarizing the American left's position as "troops out" is a gross simplification. Many prominent left-wing bloggers have taken the opposite view, and are now simply pleading for some kind of a plan, any plan that has more meat than just "stay the course."
Myself, I'd think that regardless of what the Iraqi people think at this point, the US has lost that particular war, and should be settling on plan B. In other words, what can be salvaged, and how.
Myself, I dunno what should be done there. I think the cause of humanitarian intervention has been set back by decades, and international diplomacy is a shambles. I don't know what can be salvaged, and I certainly don't know what can be done to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqis, which I'm damned sure is going to get a lot worse in the near future.
But you're right, the battle to stop the invasion ended a couple of years ago, and no one seems to have put a set of realistic alternative plans on the table since.
Other than the Iraqi blogger Riverbend in 2004:
I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.
But it is what the main anti-war groups are saying, I'm afraid. Troops out, pure and simple.
Well, some political groups thrive through the appearance of publicly opposing established government policy and I suspect there is some of that at work. I haven't kept up on what some anti-war groups are up to, although I'd be surprised if political cults like the CPC/ML were not active in the area. Certainly some of the sloganeering rings of that groupthink prevelant in that collective mind. But I'd also be surprised if there were much public support for their views (or puported views expressed through Stalinesque slogans). Most lefties I know support the Afghanistan efforts, but oppose the Iraq adventure, for a variety of reasons.
...it was the unilaterial nature of the invasion, and the paralysis of the Security council over Iraq, that added up to the last straw that led to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which remains untested.
I had thought that the R to P was more a reaction to Rwanda and Kosovo than Iraq, and that if in place it would have likely prevented the invasion, unless time travel to the late eighties or early nineties became possible. Still, either way, it's a welcome reform.
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