difference without apologies

It's a well-worn argument to suggest that the Left (whatever exactly that is) should spend more time learning from the Right (ditto), taking a few leaves out of the books of Reagan, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush, the Republican Party, Harper, what or whomever have you...

They must be doing something right, it is suggested. And the reason the Democrats remain in opposition, the US army is in Iraq, property relations have yet to be abolished... is that the Left, perhaps particularly some ultra-leftist fraction, is too busy with merely "symbolic" politics, too obsessed with political and personal purity, to face up to the real questions of power.

A latest version of such a rebuke, directed specifically our way (if also while digging up a history of the SDS and the 1960s more generally), comes courtesy of the Valve: More Groovy Street Theatre. But it's a tired, tired complaint. Moreover, it'd at least be something if it were a Lenin denouncing us as infantile.

Anyhow, where does one start a response? By pointing out that to discredit critiques of "the idea of power" is effectively to discredit critique tout court? By noting that a pragmatism extolling the "socially viable or politically efficacious" is a posture as ideological as any other? By observing that there may be a reason or two why the Right does certain things (populism, to take but one) rather better than does the Left? By contrasting a simplistic critique of the 1960s (simplistic in part because it's no more than a mirror image of the Reagan/Thatcherite blaming of all social ills on that period) with more sustained historical reflection? By pointing to the raft of counter-examples from "New Labour" to the sorry recent histories of (say) the US Democrats or the Canadian Liberals? By demonstrating that this "more politically efficacious than thou" stance shares too much with the fantasy of a "more politically pure than thou" position that it invents as its own sorry justification?

Further suggestions welcomed. In fact, apologies. Comments are now closed. Scott is welcome to have the last word.

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

But the disagreement, surely, has much to do with the way you assume desertion (whether from voting or certain 'united fronts') is apathetic.

Actually, I think the disagreement's with so many different people on so many different fronts that it's no wonder no one ever brings up such issues. However, in this case, I can clarify something:

I don't think apathy an appropos description at all, hence the oxymoronic phrase "concerted apathy." (I should note that I've been on an oxymoron kick, which may be partly responsible for the confusion.) What's responsible for the debate is my choice to illustrate instead of define "symbolic politics," I think, since that's led everyone to assume I meant "voting is political, everything else isn't."

[s0metim3s]

Are we, then, back to discussing the paradigmatic and the exemplar?

[McKenzie Wark]

Hmmm... is the New Left really to blame for the decline of mainstream Democratic politics, or did it succumb to its own internal tensions and contradictions?

Was the New Left really self-defeating, or did the extraordinary pressure brought to bear on it both by public sources of power and by covert and clandestine ones have something to do with it?

Mind you, one characteristic gesture of the New Left was to backett off the experiences of the old left as not worth paying much attention to or learning from. Would be a shame to make that mistake all over again...

[Matt]

Was the New Left really self-defeating, or did the extraordinary pressure brought to bear on it both by public sources of power and by covert and clandestine ones have something to do with it?

I must say, it continues to strike me as really odd that Scott seems not to have ears for this. There is now massive evidence for the previously undestimated breadth and depth of such a backlash (previously underestimated to the 5th degree, at least) - again, see Christian Parenti's book, Lockdown America, just for instance - a goldmine of research into the prison-industrial shitf primarily, and which opens with the famous quote from H.R. Halderman: "Nixon always emphasized that the real problem was just the blacks. The trick was to devise a system that recognized this without appearing to...")

Anyway, Scott's response appears to be:

"while I think we agree (how could we not?) that there’s been a backlash, we differ as to its origins. I locate them, pace this post, in part in the withdrawal of leftists from conventional politics."

Which, rather unsatisfactorily, seems to be something of a watering-down of his post's assertions without of course necessarily watering-down anything. In other words, neither here nor there.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt, I'm not deaf to that point, I'm just not wedded to the celebration of a politics which failed in almost every respect. I understand why people would think, "well, the circumstances weren't ripe for its success, but next time it'll succeed," but as I quick check the contemporary political scene, I don't sense that they'd be more likely to succeed now than they didn't then . . . and am frankly baffled as to why anyone would think otherwise. On the other hand, I do see a very successful coup of popular politics by a coalition of fringe interests and wonder whether revulsion to its politics has blinded people to the obvious success of its methods. I don't see why bouldering ahead employing the same ineffective tactics (or rehashing previously ineffective ones) seems like such an attractive solution to so many people. (I think I know some reasons why, but they have to do with the aestheticization of certain political positions and are neither immediately nor self-evidently germane, and since people have spent the past two days willfully or ignorantly mistaking an Old Left critique of the New Left for Reagan Era boosterism, I'm not up for making subtle arguments. Man, quasi-political blogging bites.)

[Charles]

Scott has been asking commenters to return to his post, while acknowledging that "absolutely everyone" has read it in ways that he claims are other than his intention.

Let me mimic his gesture and repeat the various points I made here, points that I indicated were far from exhaustive:

1) to discredit critiques of "the idea of power" is effectively to discredit critique tout court

2) a pragmatism extolling the "socially viable or politically efficacious" is a posture as ideological as any other

3) there may be a reason or two why the Right does certain things (populism, to take but one) rather better than does the Left

4) [We should contrast] a simplistic critique of the 1960s (simplistic in part because it's no more than a mirror image of the Reagan/Thatcherite blaming of all social ills on that period) with more sustained historical reflection

5) [We could point] to the raft of counter-examples from "New Labour" to the sorry recent histories of (say) the US Democrats or the Canadian Liberals

6) this "more politically efficacious than thou" stance shares too much with the fantasy of a "more politically pure than thou" position that it invents as its own sorry justification

And let me say that I hardly think they can be reduced to "willfully or ignorantly mistaking an Old Left critique of the New Left for Reagan Era boosterism." I'm sorry that they, and the numerous other responses both here and at the Valve, have been represented in that way.

[Alain]

I thought that folks engaged in this discussion might be interested in a piece in the NYTimes today about judge Scalito. It talks about this being the culmination of an effort that was 25 years in the making:

"Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement.

Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court.

"It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true," said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. "It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/politicsspecial1/30alito.html?th&emc=th

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Alain, that article almost makes it sound like the far Right infiltrated the Republican party and changed it from within . . . and that that had been their intention all along. Shame on me for suggesting that the left lost an opportunity to accomplish something similar, or for arguing that it can still be done today.

Charles,

1) to discredit critiques of "the idea of power" is effectively to discredit critique tout court

How so? And where do I call for the abolition of critiques of the idea of power? I seem to recall discussing the ineffectiveness of the particular public relations war waged by the New Left against any and all institutions, against "the idea of power" as instantiated in abstractions like "The System," but I fail to see how criticizing the efficacy of those specific rhetorical gestures undermines critique tout court.

2) a pragmatism extolling the "socially viable or politically efficacious" is a posture as ideological as any other

Everything's ideological. What's your point?

3) there may be a reason or two why the Right does certain things (populism, to take but one) rather better than does the Left

For all your blustering about how criminally ahistorical my original post was, you don't seem to realize that the Left monopolized populist discourse for the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Are you saying it's impossible for them to do so again? Why?

4) [We should contrast] a simplistic critique of the 1960s (simplistic in part because it's no more than a mirror image of the Reagan/Thatcherite blaming of all social ills on that period) with more sustained historical reflection

You demonstrated the simplicity of my critique where? In the first reply, Matt trotted out the old saw about the peace movement ending the Vietnam War. No offense intended, Matt, but that's a far more simplistic understanding of the era than anything I said, yet I heard no complaints. Or are you only interested in "oversimplifications" which fail to flatter your own position.

Or I could respond strictly with logic and say: Just because Reagan and Thatcher said something doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. If Reagan had woken up, saw that it was raining and said "it's raining," you'd be in a pickle.

Or I could say that your statement about the Reagan-era blaming of all social ills on the '60s has absolutely no bearing on my statement that the withdrawal of the New Left from the political scene is partly responsible for the current lurch to the far Right. Unless, of course, you're aiming for pure rhetoric and emptying what Reagan would've considered "social ills" and what I consider "far right conservatism" of all meaning. I suppose, then, you could say that the structure of our laments are similar despite the fact that I'm lamenting the establishment of the very social order Reagan wanted to establish. But what would be the point in that?

6) this "more politically efficacious than thou" stance shares too much with the fantasy of a "more politically pure than thou" position that it invents as its own sorry justification

The fantasy that "more politically pure than thou" position is a fantasy boggles my mind almost as much as your contention that it's impossible to determine the political efficacy of particular strategies. It isn't. We can look at the New Left's stated goals. We can examine their political tactics. We can see that they didn't accomplish their stated goals. We can say that means something's wrong with their tactics. Furthermore, we can say, as I did, that it's preferable not to employ strategies which failed to achieve their objectives in the past.

[Matt]

Good grief Scott, that was a "small pedantic note" raised as a naive question, one designed to help the conversariat along. I think Charles' points and those of others rather clearly stand, but given your responses (here as well as over there) perhaps it would be better just to drop it (though without necessarily "flying the coop," perhaps). After all one lesson to be learned from the New Left's failures is knowing when to quit.

I will refer readers back to Ray Davis' most recent comment, however, and this will most likely be my last contribution to this thread. Suffice to say we're not about to definitively resolve the legacies of the "counter-culture," SDS, or the New Left today. Ray writes:

"Here’s the “WTF” factor: It may or may not be 1968 in Canadian politics. But it is surely not 1968 in the arts. Who are the new sticking-it-to-the-man novelists? China Mieville? Which major movie directors are forming revolutionary collectives? Where are the rifle-waving poets? Ron Silliman doesn’t count, does he? Jackson Mac Low and Carl Rakosi died recently, and I don’t know of any successors—and those are the kind of “political poets” we could use more of anyway.

Nor does it seem that publishers are getting into radical chic, or that book reviewers are attacking writers for their bourgeois timidity, or that ballet houses are hosting tributes to the Chairman.

You posted your lament on “a literary organ”, but I don’t see the baleful influence of the New Left on literature.

My guess would be that you’re more concerned about the baleful influence of the New Left on English departments—but if I’m correct then that does, yes, seem to land us into “Theory” territory again, and the whole odd problem of determining the political utility of English departments under any circumstances."

I will also say that today's s lot is excellent.

[Blip]

You don't need a weatherman to know which way, and so on.

You also don't need a new holier-than-thou historicism, spin off the tongue and shelter deeper myths as it may.

(Both of those being links, perhaps worth clicking through.)

[Charles]

Scott:

I write: "to discredit critiques." You write: "the abolition of critiques."

I write: "more sustained historical reflection." You write: "blustering about how criminally ahistorical."

And so on and so forth.

You're not serious about this discussion, are you? I'd be tempted to say that it's simply a performance, simply symbolic, on your part.

Anyhow, I'm with Matt. It was, in retrospect, a mistake to respond to Scott's sideswipe in the first place, even by trying to raise broader issues. I apologize to all and sundry.