Why America Needs a Left E-Book

Eli Zaretsky

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse.

Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

Leseprobe

Why America Needs a Left

In memory of Allen Zaretsky

A sweet giving nature, easy laughter and emotional depth

Why America Needs a Left

A Historical Argument

Eli Zaretsky

polity

Copyright © Eli Zaretsky 2012

The right of Eli Zaretsky to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5656-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: America’s Three Great Crises and Three Lefts

1 Abolitionism and Racial Equality

2 The Popular Front and Social Equality

3 The New Left and Participatory Democracy

Conclusion: The American Left Today

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This project began with me puzzling over the problem of the left in general. I benefited from invitations from Hendrik Geyer of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study in South Africa, Christian Ingrao of L’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris, and Ross Harrison, Provost at King’s College, Cambridge, which allowed me to present preliminary ideas, and supplied me with research facilities. I also gratefully acknowledge The New School for Social Research and Lang College, which provided me with a sabbatical and other research support. After a while I realized that I needed to separate off the problem of the American left from the more general problem with which I began. Alice Kessler-Harris invited me to prepare a version of my ideas for the Organization of American Historians, which allowed me to do just that. John Thompson was convinced that I could make his book deadline for that version, and he helped me to do that. Two other friends, Leonard Helfgott and Jeremy Varon, gave me superb, last-minute readings. Michael Kazin sent me the proofs of his American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation long before I completed my book. Nancy Fraser, as always, was luminous and inspiring; whatever lucidity the book possesses comes from her. My obligations to so many great historians can be traced in my notes. Finally, I want to acknowledge an older debt to James Weinstein, who first introduced me to the problem of the left.

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

William Morris, “A Dream of John Ball,” 1886

Introduction

America’s Three Great Crises and Three Lefts

From the beginning of the republic, most of America’s thinkers and political leaders have argued that the country neither had nor needs a significant left. The so-called liberal consensus school, including Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter, has argued that the country has always enjoyed agreement on such matters as private property, individualism, popular sovereignty, and natural rights. Others claimed that it did not have the leftist working class or peasantry other nations had, a claim often termed American exceptionalism. Still others claimed that the country didn’t need a left because it already believed in, or had even achieved, such goals as democracy and equality, goals that other nations were still striving toward. This view has been associated with Cold War liberalism, and with neoconservatism.

This book argues that these are all false and misleading ways to understand America. The country has not only always needed, but has typically had, a powerful, independent radical left. While this left has been marginalized (as it is today) and scapegoated (especially during periods of emergency or “states of exception”), the country’s history cannot be understood without assigning a central place to the left. The indispensable role of the left has come during periods of long-term crisis, when the country’s identity is in question. In what follows I will argue that the country has gone through three such crises: the slavery crisis culminating in the Civil War; the crisis precipitated by the rise of large-scale corporate capitalism, culminating in the New Deal; and the present crisis, the crisis of “affluence” and global power, which began in the 1960s. Each crisis generated a left – first the abolitionists, then the socialists, and finally the New Left – and together, these lefts constitute a tradition.

At the core of each left stood a challenge to the liberal understanding of equality – the formal equality of all citizens before the law. In place of that understanding, each left sought to install a deeper, more substantive idea of equality as a continuing project. In the first case, the abolitionists, the issue was political equality, specifically the abolitionist belief that a republic had to be founded on racial equality. In the second case, the socialists and communists, the issue was social equality, specifically the insistence that democracy required a minimum level of security in regard to basic necessities. In the third case, the New Left, the issue was equal participation in civil society, the public sphere, the family and personal life. Central to our history, then, is a struggle between liberalism and the left over the meaning of equality. More even than the struggle between left and right, the struggle between liberalism and the left is at the core of US history. Without a left, liberalism becomes spineless and vapid; without liberalism, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and marginal. In great eras of reform, the struggle between them strengthens both. Only when the liberal/left dynamic is weak does a strong right emerge.

To make this argument I first need to clarify two concepts: the left, and crisis. What is the left? Derived from the spatial situation of the body in nature, the distinction between left and right was originally used to ground social power in nature. In every society, the right symbolizes dominance, authority, and God; the left symbolizes rebellion, danger, discontent, and the plebeian status.1 The words themselves often suggest this: recht and droit versus maladroit, gauche and sinistra. In this sense, the existence of a left is a universal characteristic of all societies. Nonetheless, there is a difference between earlier forms of rebellion, based on cyclical time, and the modern left, based on the idea of progress. In earlier societies rebellion took the form of “anger at the failure of authority to live up to its obligations, to keep its word and faith with the subjects.” Essentially, writes Barrington Moore, this type of protest “accepts the existence of hierarchy and authority while attempting to make it conform to an idealized pattern.” The modern left, by contrast, has questioned whether we need particular forms of hierarchy or authority, such as kings, capitalists, or “experts,” at all. It doesn’t seek to return to an idealized past, but rather to move toward a utopian but nonetheless ultimately realizable future.