NYT: Whatever happened to the American left?

[Scuba]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/whatever-happened-to-the-american-left.html?_r=1


..snip..

And yet, except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.

Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter — although last week the president did sound a bit Rooseveltian when he proposed that millionaires should “pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.”

How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

..end..

[DrunkenBoat]

1. Persistent union-busting, red-baiting & infiltration from Truman on? Just a thought.

[coalition_unwilling]

10. Dem and Repukes collaborated in the 50s to crush the Left. HUAC

would never have survived without the active connivance of Dems. And stalwart "liberal" JFK and his brother RFK both cozied up to the likes of Joseph McCarthy.

[Starry Messenger]

17. (Bingo)

[Admiral Loinpresser]

29. Bobby even joined McCarthy's staff.

But progressivism is about redemption. For my money Bobby redeemed himself when he found his voice in the '60s.

[coalition_unwilling]

31. ;I think Bobby more than redeemed himself and agree with you

that proessivism is about redemption, among other values. There is this incredible story about RFK during (I think) his 1964 campaign for Senator from New York where he was visiting one of the housing projects that had sprung up in New York City. RFK indicated that he wished to enter one of the buildings but his campaign staff, perhaps fearing for his safety amidst the crushing poverty and violence of the projects, kept trying to keep him away. RFK over-ruled his staff and entered the building anyway. That particular vignette has endeared RFK to me in a way that JFK will never be.

I've often wondered what the history of this country would have been had RFK and MLK, Jr. survived. One thing is for sure. Had RFK won in 1968, some 20,000 Americans would be alive rather than dead (approx. number of casualties in Vietnam from 1969-74).

[ChillbertKChesterton]

26. Both parties waged a war on Labor in order to appear "tough on communism"

Noone in the political realm wanted to look like a pinko so the hard, critical of capitalism, backbone of leftism eroded.

The "left wing" of American politics became less about working class populism, labor, and emancipatory politics, and more about political correctness, multi-culturalism, and 'inclusion'.

The Right wing has marched further and further to the extreme right while the left wing attempts to placate them by being more "moderate". The right wing draws lines in the sand while the left wing tries to appear 'moderate', 'centrist' and 'sensible to the political reality'.

The left wing shies away from words like "socialism" "class warfare" and critiques of capitalism.

The left wing argues that we should end the wars in the middle east for practical reasons: they are expensive, because they don't work, and because they make the world hate us; however they never argue for the moral reasons, that it's wrong to invade countries and kill/injure/displace millions of people.

The left wing has no real moral foundation: the civil rights movement was largely based in, and supported by, religious leaders who used christian morality as a basis for opposing the war in vietnam, the twisted social/economic structure in the USA, and the racist social policies across the country. The left wing today cannot articulate moral foundations to stand on.


The left wing is too afraid of looking weird, looking crazy, looking out of the mainstream, so they never ask the big questions, they never critique capitalism, they never argue on behalf of the people we are killing in the middle east. Anyone who does is branded as "radical" and shunned by most liberals.

On the right, the far right Ayn Rand worshipping Tea Partiers are driving their movement, and they shun anyone who appears to moderate for their tastes. On the left, anyone who appears controversial is shunned for being "too radical".

This is the problem.

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. Wow, they published this in the New York Times? I'm impressed.

[ChillbertKChesterton]

23. *deleted*

[COLGATE4]

3. It died a death of a thousand cuts with the advent of RW talk radio

and the simlutaneous corporatization of TV with the 24-hour news cycle. There was no longer any interest in providing unbiased news at 6:00PM and 11:00PM. Instead, the populace had to be fed a steady diet of "news flashes" 24/7. Combine that with the concentration of the two largest parts of the communications industry in the hands of RWingers and the 'American Left' just slowly faded out of view and out of mind.

[WhiteTara]

4. The Left has been muzzled by the media. n/t

[Selatius]

5. The Taft-Hartley Act and a far more effective corporate propaganda machine.

The left is there. They just don't report it like they didn't really report on anti-war demonstrations. Labor unions lost the most out of outsourcing of jobs, and right-to-work laws, born out of the Taft-Hartley Act, in right-dominated states has effectively confined many labor unions to more liberal enclaves.

[moondust]

6. Kent State, fear and intimidation, DLC complicity.

Wanna have a life? Better get your hair cut, get a job, and learn to jump through the man's hoops.

[pretzel4gore]

7. 'nothing fails like success when you're working for the devil'

the rightwing wins by losing, loses by winning- and it's been winning since they sorta got their arses kicked in WW2....the reactionaries have always depended upon the libleft to fix the mess, but why? Why should we? Why not let the fascists win, again, just like they have been winning the world over for decades? Afterall, for example, on a slave ship, 1/3rd of slaves in chains vote for fascism/low taxes for slavers! Same as in them deathcamps- 1/3rd of the inmates always vote for hitler (even when that means their kids are murdered!) and finally, mr hitler's solution to problems! The human capacity for stupidity has been ruining everything for thousands of years, for everybody. Jesus died in vain. And the bushwhelp etc needs to be applauded for killing the economy and destroying hope, wasting time while planet dies! I admit this defies common sense, but the pigmedia are the voice of common sense, ya gotta admit, and they define the arguments (ergo, no left!)and always will. So, carry on, rightwing stooges...

[rocktivity]

8. The same thing that happened to the New York Times.

Coming from them, that question is a fucking joke.

x(
rocktivity

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[struggle4progress]

11. we're all spending too much time online and too little time talking to the public mebbe?

[Hardrada]

12. The real American Left, the Marxists and anarchists were

imprisoned, exiled, murdered and with these and other means were made powerless by 1920. WWI was used as a pretext. Had this starin continued in our politics the Democrats would not have been puloled to the center and weakened as has happened.

[mulsh]

13. The NY Times would know the answer because....?

I don't recall reading all that much useful or even very accurate info about the American Left in the NYT...um ever. Breezy puff pieces sure, no problem especially on Sunday.

[Admiral Loinpresser]

14. American left: Whatever happened to the New York Times?

I remember the Pentagon papers and great investigative journalism. In the last couple of decades we have had journalistic malpractice in the form of Whitewater, 2000 presidential coverage, cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq, etc. What indeed happened to the NYT? Perhaps the two phenomena are not unrelated.

Having said that, the opinion piece is informative and well timed. Perhaps consciously, Mr. Kazin provides part of the rationale for #OccupyWallStreet. The closer we get to 1929, the more we can strive for 1933. Thanks for posting it.

[truthwillout777]

16. the media is clearly to blame for our country going down the crapper

none of this would have been possible without them, the stolen election for Bush, the lies about 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the stupid ass huge waste of money and violation of the constitution the 'patriot act'...I could go on....if the press were doing it's job, we could just relax right now...but instead we have to fight the stupid memes put out by Limbaugh and the like because we have no one to defend the truth and right now the beyond corrupt own all the airwaves are are brainwashing people with teh stupid.

IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT NEW YORK TIMES!! Try reporting the truth, perhaps some real news every once and a while. The press use to investigate things, hold people's feet to the fire...any of this sound familiar??

[deutsey]

15. Well, to begin with, a large chunk of our leadership was assassinated

Not just the alphabet soup of assassination (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcom X), but others were targeted as well (Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, for example).

As the CIA Contra manual pointed out in the '80s, a great way to de-stabilize/break a movement is to assassinate its leaders.

There was also the whole COINTELPRO thing.

The left also fucked up in the '60s by believing that "The Revolution" was going to be sudden and sweeping and, therefore, there was no need to establish and maintain a network of media/thinktanks to advance the left's agenda.

[Admiral Loinpresser]

19. Two hundred "unsolved" murders at Pine Ridge, 1973-75.

Many of them were AIM members murdered by the goon squad of Lakota tribal chairman Dickie Wilson. Then one FBI agent on the rez took a bullet and Leonard Peltier got a taste of the Troy Davis treatment.

[white_wolf]

18. The various Red Scares and Cold War propaganda destroyed the real left in this county.

Without the various socialists, Marxist or otherwise, to organize the working class and pressure the establishment, the democratic party was able to drift further and further to the Right. Reforms are only granted to stave off revolution, without that threat of revolution you get no reform. The Social-Democracies of Europe weren't built by reformers,but by socialists. Hell, social-democracy originally came out of the Second International. Lenin and Trotsky were social-democrats in their day, though no one would call them that now.

[TBF]

25. This is the right answer - the far left was attacked and/or deported during the

Palmer Raids (while a democrat - Wilson - was president) and McCarthy years. Without the treat of serious resistance the right-wing has had a field day.

[begin_within]

20. The silence is because of active repression of left-wing ideals by the commercial media.

[Warpy]

21. I didn't get that paper today, but was there any coverage at all

of Occupy Wall Street? That's their answer. The American left is out there, but it's been choked off from any media access for decades.

Corporate media aren't doing the job of a free press. They're doing the job of an advertising press.

Their article on the demise of the left is premature.

[loyalsister]

22. Apparently there is no clear cut "American Left"

I keep seeing the "real left" which has no meaning to me.
I grew up with fiscal conservatives who may or may not be socially liberal, liberal on both issues, RW nuts, Libertarians, etc... With that, it was often a toss up whether they were republicans or Democrats. When I was in college, if a person wanted to be a cool rising professional they identified as a republican and may have tossed some beliefs aside. Bottom line, when it comes to gen x the republicans were the cool club for ambitious students. Some survived with sense, then there's the Paul Ryans and others mentored by Michelle Bachman types.

It took true commitment to wind up liberal after growing up in the 80s. Even that includes forgiving some conservative opinions somewhere along the line.
In some ways, my idea of some kind of relatable "left" of center may be someone else's just not extreme right.
I have been a part of the disability rights movement which has been carefully structured and includes some conservative dealing. Any time our advocates want to get something done, they show up with proposals that save money.

We are products of our times and people who surround us.

[ChillbertKChesterton]

24. Let's not forget that liberals play into the right-wing ideology of "elitism"

by and large, left-wingers view working class republicans as "stupid redneck country bumkins", which fits perfectly into the right wing ideology that left-wingers are "latte drinking elitists who think they know better than real, honest, hardworking americans".

every successful social movement in the history of the united states (and arguably in the world, in recent centuries), has occured from the bottom up, by working class people.

As long as the left-wing views the working class, blue-collar, rural people as being the stupid sheeple enemy, nothing will ever change.

by being condescending elitist jerks, you only reinforce the conservative ideology.

[DrunkenBoat]

27. I agree with that. There's also the often unquestioning support for 'experts'.

problem with that is, experts can often be found pushing the solutions of the rulers. The pyramid is structured that way -- to keep your status as 'expert,' you will do it.

[ldf]

28. if i remember correctly the new york times was too busy

fanning the flames of w's war, using their own embedded "reporter", to bother reporting in any depth about the leftwing filling the streets of manhattan protesting the rush to war.

remember, if they don't report it, it didn't happen. and that is exactly how they want it. they can make or break politicians. they can instigate wars, or cause the people to turn against wars.

it's like the wall street protests. the only way there will be any real coverage, other than a multi-second "mention", is if it gets violent. THEN they will be all over it like shit on george w bush, pouring tons of ink on coverage of the violence loving anarchists.

give me a fucking break.

they used to be "the (oldJ) grey lady". now they are "the toothless old whore".

:grr:

[Nay]

30. First, we have no leaders. Second, we have no mass media. Third,

US citizens have adopted assholiness as their reason for being.