I wish that I were in Pittsburgh today with the folks at Netroots Nation, but work and financial obligations (there's nothing like trying to bring in a grandchild from overseas to make you forswear luxuries) make that inadvisable. But Pittsburgh is one of my favorite former hometowns, and if I can't be there at least I can tell you a bit about the Pittsburgh Left.
By "the Pittsburgh Left," I don't mean the Leftists of Pittsburgh, although they are there (I used to be one of them) and, like smaller-big city and academic leftists everywhere, they do their part to fight for what's right and to keep the flame alive. I mean this Pittsburgh Left, the one you don't see as commonly practiced anywhere else, but the one that can help guide our understanding of what it means to be progressive.
The Pittsburgh Left is, of all things, a procedure for making a left-hand turn. It's glorious.
The Pittsburgh Left involves two cars facing one another waiting at a traffic light or other stop signal: one turning left and one going straight. The left-turning car will execute its turn through the intersection before the car going straight passes through the intersection, where normally it would yield. Permission to do so is either given by the car going straight, or sometimes taken by the left-turning car by starting through the left turn early enough so as not to obstruct the straight-going driver. This practice is seen as courteous, because a very small delay for the oncoming vehicle can eliminate a long delay for the left turning vehicle and those blocked behind it.
In practice, Pittsburgh drivers often make the Pittsburgh Left by anticipating the green signal after cross-traffic has stopped or cleared, but before the actual signal change. This practice is so common that straight-going drivers in the area are accustomed to pausing a moment before proceeding on green, for their own safety. [Emphasis added.]
When I first came to Pittsburgh in 1992, I was still, despite eight years of supposed mellowing in the Midwest, a Southern California driver, trained to take and hold my asphalt territory at any cost. The notion that some opposing driver wishing to make a left hand turn before me, infringing on my right of way (!), drove me mad, affronted my dignity. The first time someone tried it on me, I blared my horn, popped out my eyes at them, and moved about a yard into the intersection before stopping short, the better to illustrate to them the gravity of what they had done.
I was not yet a Pittsburgher. I was, in local parlance, a "jagoff."
The second time this happened, I was with my wife, who had started teaching at Pitt and whom I was visiting for the weekend, and I unloaded a rant, for her benefit, against this miscreant driver. "Dude..." was not yet a common admonition, but she gave me the equivalent of one. She explained that that was how they do things here. (My apologies to the driver who had previously received my gimlet eye.)
I started to honor the Pittsburgh Left, and then to admire it, and then to love it, and then to be in awe of it, and then to see it as a metaphor for the Left generally, for how we approach our politics as well as our driving.
The problem that the Pittsburgh Left seeks to solve is this: if a car wants to make a left-hand turn against a long line of opposing traffic in the absence of a left-turn arrow, that car (and those behind it also seeking to turn left) will be substantially inconvenienced, especially in heavy traffic, by the fact that only a few of them can turn left (after creeping into the intersection) after oncoming traffic clears once the light turns red. In the Los Angeles Metro area, where I live, it can take many, many minutes to clear a line of cars wanting to turn left if there doesn't happen to be a left-turn arrow there.
By allowing one or two or (given a long line of aspiring left-turners) even three cars to make their left turn first, they (and those behind them) gain a substantial benefit at a very small cost to those who are slightly delayed in going straight. The aggregate cost roughly adds up to the aggregate benefit, but it's a cost that a driver can bear cheerfully if one even notices it.
The Pittsburgh Left is a practice (and a praxis) of minor and considerate deference to those in need. That's it. It's a refusal to press one's right -- the right of a driver going straight to occupy the intersection as quickly as one might -- for the greater common good, based on empathy for the person who is in a disadvantaged position.
What's amazing about it is not that people defer at all -- no more than that people help the blind across the street or pick up others trash or volunteer to coach Little League -- but that it works as a cultural system.
Think about it: the Pittsburgh Left -- which is, after all, an illegal practice unless the car going straight actively yields the right of way -- could not exist if even a sizable minority of the population were as big a bunch of jagoffs as I was on my first visit to the city. There would be car accidents in intersections all of the time, the people who had tried the Pittsburgh Left would be sued and lose their driving privileges, and people would become loathe to try it. And it's a voluntary and informal system. The city doesn't train drivers in how to do this or force them to do it; people just see it, learn it, and do it. It's a precious thing, a sociological miracle.
Now, some people will abuse the Pittsburgh Left. My rule was that I would always defer to the first car, usually defer to the second car if it followed closely upon the first -- but if the third car turning left tried it I would get pissed off. (I don't remember a fourth car ever daring to try it.) One could write an entirely separate essay on how the bounds of the cultural practice are enforced. But the point is that people, working informally, can enforce it.
The Pittsburgh Left is an attitude and cultural practice of cheerful deference to those most in need. (I repeat: cheerful. I and others would take pride, while letting that first car cut in front of us, at how the practice was kind and maximized aggregate happiness. There is pleasure to be had in feeling civilized.) It applies widely as a metaphor. When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote of taxes being the price one pays for a civilized society, he was invoking the ethos of the Pittsburgh Left: we each endure (ideally cheerfully) a small infringement on what would otherwise be our rights so that those who would otherwise suffer may thrive. When a property owner lets kids take a shortcut across their yard without objection, the Pittsburgh Left is invoked.
The point -- amazingly, perhaps, to conservatives -- is that the Pittsburgh Left is a practice of deference to the weak rather than to the strong. Most of our social rules presume and promote deference to the strong, to people with rights inhering in property (or, in this case, in the statutes regulating driving.) Anyone has the right to block the Pittsburgh Left from working properly. And yet, few will, because they don't want to be considered a jagoff.
What is equally amazing is that it continues to exist. You can't just import the Pittsburgh Left into another city, although supposedly at least isolated examples of it exist. The police have to be willing to tolerate it; the drivers have to be willing to honor it. If I ever tried it here in Orange County, I would probably be run over accidentally and then backed over intentionally when the other driver realized the political implications of the cultural practice: that it makes people who don't defer to those in need feel bad.
The power of social opprobrium -- which is what Fox "News" and the money porn shows do their best to dilute -- is powerful. Those who won't give up some minor property rights for the greater benefit of others should feel like jagoffs. ("Let the flippin' driver go ahead of you, jerk, what's it to you?") The Left -- sometimes unkindly, but in the service of greater kindness -- will make those who violate the ethos of the Pittsburgh Left feel bad about themselves. They can do it, but they suffer relative shunning and derision. That's a good thing, when it serves the purpose of empowering, rather than oppressing, the relatively disempowered.
So to those of you who may be driving or being driven around Pittsburgh this week, keep an eye out for the Pittsburgh Left. You may choose to try it yourself, if you dare. (Flashing one's lights as an acknowledgement that you're going to try to claim the right of way is a good practice, and receiving a flash of lights in response is like receiving a warm handshake of good fellowship.) And my hope for you is that you bring the ethos of the Pittsburgh Left back to your homes when the gathering is done.