Looking Left

The internal contradiction.

Martin Morse Wooster from the February 1991 issue

It was the summer of 1990, and America’s liberals and leftists clamored for a place in the sun. The Republican Party was led by a man elected to be a second Ronald Reagan but whose persona was that of a kinder, gentler Richard Nixon. The economy was swan-diving into a recession, as developers, investment bankers, and savings-and-loan executives spent their days alternating between bankruptcy courts and grand jury proceedings.

The conservative movement appeared to be splitting up. The sniping between traditionalist conservatives and their neoconservative rivals had escalated into a cold war, and fiends had burst in on Pat Buchanan and fired a round of verbal bullets at point-blank range.

In the 1990 elections, voters, when they wanted to change their leaders, preferred politicians with principles over those who believed in nothing at all. While many of these principled politicians were Republicans and some were even conservative, in a few states voters preferred liberals or leftists to a Republican nonentity. Given some victories- a governor in Oregon, a senator In Minnesota, and the first avowedly socialist congressman since the days of‘ Harry Truman-some liberals proclaimed that their cause was resurgent.

When Robert Kuttner viewed the future in the October 29 New Republic, he was as enthusiastic as a child in a candy store who got to stuff his pockets with chocolate bars, Tootsie Rolls, and jelly Faced with a dark and forbidding future (“winter is coming, the larder is empty, and the supply of firewood has already been burned”), Kutmer’s cure was to stimulate spending by increasing axes. If people stopped spending money in what they wanted to and were forced to give more money to the state, said Kuttner, all would be well. After all, he said, World War II government spending ended the Great Depression!

The one admirable fact about Kuttner is that he never changes. In good times or bad, Kuttner’s cure for the economy is always the same: massive government spending and punitive income tax rates. Such constancy is to be admired in our fickle world.

Most of Kuttner’s peers on the left aren’t as stalwart in their opinions. Indeed, it’s difficult to determine what the American left wants these days.

That is because the American left, like the American right, has its authoritarian and anarchistic tendencies; both Emma Goldman and Herbert Croly have their descendants among today’s leftists. Since the first World War, the debate on the left has been about what tendency will predominate. Until the 1960s, most prominent leftists, as the writers and editors of the New Republic, tended to be authoritarian command-and-control social democrats. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s restored the anarchistic faction of the left to some degree of power. Today, neither side dominates. Indeed, in many cases, a leftist typically uses authoritarian and anarchistic language at the same time.

Consider the question of free speech. On the one hand, most leftists believe that recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts grants have an absolute right to say and do whatever they want. On the other hand, many of these same leftists – particularly feminists, gay-rights activists, and blacks – then argue that politically incorrect speech on campus should be severely restricted or banned.

But David Rieff, in the November Esquire, notes that censors on the right and censors on the left have an eerily similar agenda, as both demand “linguistic martial law.” Far from being the cutting edge or the avant-garde, Rieff argues, the puritans of the left advocate the timeless American view that the country will be purified if all purportedly harmful substances or thoughts are outlawed. Rieff correctly notes that the arguments for banning “hate speech,” pornography, and alcohol advertising rest on the same false assumption-that Americans “are so gullible and childish that they will follow the lead of everything they see or hear.”

In a hard-hitting essay, Rieff observes that calling for restrictions on the First Amendment, rather than advancing bold and daring views, will result in “imposing one more layer of conformity and blandness in a country where conformity and blandness in politics and thought are more and more the rule. Americans need to take stock, to argue, ridicule and defame without worrying about hurting one another’s feelings.”

Rieff is correct. Banning offensive speech would reduce the debate about the future of our country to the opinions offered on the op-ed page of a onenewspaper town. The best way to advance one’s cause isn’t to ban your opponents’ arguments, but to offer better arguments.

But the arguments offered by liberals add leftists these days lack vigor. Consider a Symposium conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies and presented in the November Progressive.

Inspired by a similar forum published in Policy Review last spring, the IPS asked 19 prominent American leftists to determine what were “the crucial foreign and domestic priorities for the progressive movement in the 1990s.”

What is curious about the symposium is who the editors selected. There are no novelists, no artists, and no one from the Hollywood Left: Saul Landau is the only filmmaker represented. There is one union leader and only two politicians, Jim Hightower of Texas and Jesse Jackson. Most of the writers earn comfortable livings as professors, think tankers, and legal-services lawyers. Secure in their endowed chairs or government jobs, few of the participants have to endure the rigors of the marketplace.

Most avoid specific reforms in favor of vaguely advancing the politics of niceness. The left, says Leslie Cagan, an adviser to New York Mayor David Dinkins, should “develop organizing vehicles to challenge power in the different arenas of our lives.” “Facilitate the integration of work and family,” add think tankers Heidi Hartmann and Roberta Spalter-Roth. “Encourage people to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement,” urges author Frances Moore Lappe.