Dissent Magazine has an article by Andrei S. Markovits (
Dissent Magazine ) about the history of the left from 1945 to now. It looks at the gains and the defeats that the left has encountered and the change in both structure and ideology that has occured in that time.
His basic thesis is that the left, while formerly, motivated by a concern for workers has fragmented itself into mostly issue based activism without a coherent center.
His article is mostly on European leftism but I think that it can be applied to us here.
More below the flip
He writes,
With the collapse of Soviet communism and the green and purple challenge to Western social democracy, the European left has lost the overall coherence of modernist universalism that defined it for more than a hundred years. On the one hand, one should rejoice in this development, because Truth and Progress (with capital letters) were too arrogantly defended by much of the left throughout the twentieth century. We will most likely be spared any repetition of the horrors of the GULAG or the genocidal mania of the Khmer Rouge-whose protagonists claimed to be acting in the name of justice, equality, and progress. But there exists a more fundamental problem. Although one can still identify many worthy causes that qualify as progressive, one would be hard-put to identify a subject of history that-like the working class of yore-could form the social basis of a unified left. Instead, we witness the proliferation of groups focused on particular forms of injustice, slighting, and victimization-in other words, on purely negative experiences. These experiences may all be real, but the groups that develop around them will remain largely powerless without the positive institutions of community that were so essential in the creation of a politically effective working class. And as a consequence of their powerlessness, they will turn inward, extolling their own particularism, which will only further fragment an already fragmented left. It is in this context that the old siren songs of nationalism and neonationalism seem especially appealing to the lefts of all industrial societies
The issues with which we as liberals are concerned with are important but we must have a coherent goal, not just message. It was most fundamentally lost after 1968. Even Johnson, as rat bastard as he was about the Vietnam War still produced a whole slew of programs guided by a central idea of helping the working class.
But how did we get here.
[Between 1945 and 1968] the political landscape of Western Europe, as delineated by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, still pertained. Two fault lines-both of which had been "frozen" by 1920-defined the identity of "the left." The first was the external line that separated it from the rest of the political world, notably liberals, conservatives, fascists, clericalists, and the representatives of "cleavages" other than the "owner-worker" cleavage that defined the essence of the left as a whole.* And second was the internal line that separated social democrats from communists. The earlier relationship between these two was by and large resumed during the postwar period. Where social democracy was the stronger of the two before the war, it emerged so again afterward-and vice versa. The character of left-wing politics, the culture of socialists and communists, was barely changed by the war. The working-class-dominated milieus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained by and large what they had been. Associations, colors, insignia, songs, tastes, and leisure activities that had been institutionalized in the decades before the Second World War- in many instances even before the Great War-continued in a completely different world.
[After that] [t]he authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the orthodox period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy. On the intellectual level, the New Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the hegemonic parties. On the institutional level, there emerged small, but intellectually influential parties to the left of the traditional social democratic and communist parties in terms of their programs as well as their strategic approaches. Though small in actual numbers, these parties represented the legacy of the "68-ers" in the left's "party space"-a standing challenge to the orthodox left. The Parti Socialiste Unifié in France might perhaps be the best example of this genre: small in number of voters, members, and officeholders, but important in intellectual influence
But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left politics outside of any established institutions, parties, or unions. It was in this milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the United States was forged. It was at this critical juncture-the decade between 1968 and 1978-that tendencies developed whose influence persists to this day, in Germany especially, but also in Europe generally.
He describes four strands of leftism that emmerged at this time. The first were the Westerners. Those were the ones who placed there concerns not on third world revolution or the working class but instead on due process and Rule of Law and Human Rights.
The second he calls third worlders who spent themselves in support of third world causes. They hated the United States, constituionalism, parlimanary practice and whatever else seemed to reek of western institutions.
The third where your standard marxists who said that all capitialism was bad and that it must be changed.
The fourth is particularly interesting.
I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists." The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming bourgeois society. . . By the mid-1990s, in fact, a substantial number of '68ers had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the West. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well throughout Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization. The two most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl. Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler-now the far right National Democratic Party's official legal counsel-recently declared that the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism, neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of values." Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation."
Shades of any one working to pass a certain law about Professors and Students we know of?
Finally with the fall of the Soviet Union the left completely fragmented. We come together in some sense on some common ground but in general it seems that much of what is driving a lot of us, and I am no exception, is an absolute loathing of the policies of the Republicans. And that is ok, for now. But we need to either resurrect the old understanding of liberals as being for the working class or come up with something as universally applicable as that.
Environmentalism, though I am concerned about it and will work to support anything that looks like it will help us not slide into some disutopian novel like future, it will never be something that I can place the whole center of my political understanding. I'm sorry, saving the spotted boo boo just doesn't do it for me. And for most American's that's really what it comes down to.
Labor. This is more of issue that ties into concern for the working class rather than something that an ideology centers on.
Terry Shiavo. Uh. . . Uh God. . . Rest. . . Uh. . . Her soul? Abortion and such that tends be put under the name "Life" I think is a variable issue. To some its really really important to others its just kind of important. And placing it under the rubric of Women's rights doesn't help either because, well, I'm not a woman and though I think its important that women are treated equally and have the same opportunities as men shoving any particular in front of rights once again fragments us, because some are going to be more concerned with it than others.
And that’s really been our problem. Any presidential candidate has to go and woo this group and that group and sort of shove a coalition behind him rather than having a ready made one.
Our language tends to be particular because our ideology is composed of particulars that are only vaguely tied together. Personally I think that we should once again try and resurrect the idea of the working class. And not the working class as opposed to the middle class but both.
What is the political genius of Social Security. It applies to everyone. Medicare was thought to be the third rail because of the voting power of the old. But Social Security impacts every class. So any change to it has to pass the smell test. Most political issues don't. Look at tax cuts, most people support them because all they hear is that they get money and the smell of money kills the smell test on most any issue.
So How do we rebuild, not just the party but the ideology? We've got issues, good issues. Most American's agree with us. But we keep losing elections and its because there is no clearly definable, turn on the TV and know, basis for liberalism anymore.