"There are leftists, but there is no left"

[w4rma]

In These Times founder James Weinstein on the American left's "long detour" with communism, its current crisis, and the hope he sees in Howard Dean.
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By Joan Walsh

Oct. 30, 2003 | Nobody would mistake left-wing scholar and publisher James Weinstein for Roger Ailes. But long before there was a Fox News, Weinstein knew that the failure of the American left to become an enduring force in American politics was in part a failure to compete in the marketplace of ideas and in the world of media -- and that back when the left thrived, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it relied on a web of local, regional and national newspapers and magazines. So while most of his colleagues focused on their books and the world of academia, he played a leading role in founding journals like Studies on the Left and Socialist Review, starting San Francisco's Modern Times bookstore and, most notably, In These Times newspaper.

I worked at In These Times in the mid-1980s, back when it called itself "an independent socialist newspaper" (being more honest about his politics than Roger Ailes, Weinstein didn't choose the motto "fair and balanced"). I saw the label as one of Weinstein's charming eccentricities -- he was determined to revive socialism's respectability, take it back from those who had stolen it -- but the paper's left-wing politics were not eccentric; it was unexpectedly hardheaded. That was where I lost my romance with identity politics, with believing that some amalgam of women, blacks, gays and other pissed-off people would gradually rise and transform American politics. The paper covered all those movements, but critically. And it backed efforts to work within the Democratic Party, like Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, discouraging the vanity and nihilism of third-party politics -- the impulse that ultimately turned into Ralph Nader's disastrous Green Party run in 2000, which gave the presidency to George Bush.

Weinstein knows disastrous third-party efforts firsthand -- he was a Communist Party member for a short time in the 1940s, and became briefly infamous on the left in the late 1970s for helping to confirm historian Ron Radosh's revisionist account of the Rosenberg case: that despite the left's claims that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were falsely accused and wrongly executed for spying for the Soviet Union, Julius did in fact pass information to the Soviets. (He also favorably reviewed Radosh's "The Rosenberg File" for In These Times.) To many on the left Weinstein's admission was heresy, given the history of redbaiting and right-wing witch hunting the left had endured in the 1950s. But Weinstein has always reckoned clearly with the contradiction of that decade -- redbaiting was a disaster, but so was communism, and both had hurt the American left.
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http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/10/30/weinstein/index.html

[Skwmom]

1. Dean provides no hope. Dean = Disaster, Bush wins in a landslide.

The Democratic party will implode. Instead of reforming the party Dean will destroy it.

[w4rma]

2. more unsupported spam from Skwmom (n/t)