The Left has certainly undergone an evolution since the 1960’s. There was a time when it stood for the poor or the working classes, on the side of society's losers. In the United States there were also civil rights issues, but these fit in neatly with the idea of socio-economic justice.

I think that the evolution began with the protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960’s, along with the rise of the Baby Boom generation, which made a big splash with its tastes in music, fashion, sexual behavior, drugs, etc. Out of that came a shift away from traditional labor politics. In the U.S., civil rights became “black power,” and there was a smorgasboard of other causes, like Third-World liberation, radical feminism, gay rights, and abortion rights. You could pass for leftwing just by holding liberal views on lifestyle issues, like the legalization of marijuana.

That’s how we got into the mess we’re in today. In the US and in Britain, the Left ignores traditional socio-economic issues, gravitating instead to the fashionable politics of identity, gender, sexual preference, and Israel/Palestine. It’s as if the Left now feasts only on side dishes and dessert, leaving the meat-and-potato main course alone. And I think that this trend has led to a shallowness--and a lack of intellectual rigor--that allows for some strange mental acrobatics. The prime example of this is, of course, the Left-Islamist alliance.

I think that Cohen made a very astute observation when he spoke about how rich people can indulge in a kind of progressivism on the cheap: They can win points for being enlightened by focusing on issues that don’t call their own privileges into question. That reminds me of an article I recently saw about a well-heeled couple in Atlanta: The husband is a corporate lawyer and the wife is Ted Turner’s daughter. They’re both into environmentalism in a big way, and acted on their beliefs by building a new home. Now a “green” showplace, their house and its furnishings are all made of environmentally sound and carbon-neutral materials. All 5,000 square feet of it!!

Just a few more points, and I’ll be as brief as possible:

 

1. I forgot to mention in my comment above that those Baby Boomer protesters were themselves from a generation more coddled, better educated, and certainly more affluent than their predecessors. So they didn’t have to worry about wages and working conditions. They had the luxury of studying Marx, Mao, Marcuse and Fanon. That skewed their perspective, their sense of proportion.

2. I forgot that Nick Cohen had mentioned that the “end” of socialism in 1989 was a main cause of the unmooring of the left. I think that this is an excellent point. Workaday labor activism and moderate welfare state policies are hardly exciting substitutes. But, as I mention above, I think that this unmooring started as early as the 1960’s.

3. He’s right on target about Chomsky!

4. When Nick Cohen mentioned about how the left didn’t always oppose the Nazis or fascists before the war, he might have mentioned the effect of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. As long as Stalin and Hitler ostensibly saw eye-to-eye, all Communist parties fell silent with regard to fascism. Not all left-wingers were Communists, of course, but much of the discourse of the Left may have been influenced by the Communists.

5. I hope that this is NOT the last time that you’ll have someone from the left side of the aisle on this program. I understand that you’re all center-right, but your offerings can only be enriched by exposing your listeners to other points of view (e.g., like mine). I’m not talking about hard left, but people like Nick Cohen who share your liberal values and can sympathize with your concerns. Paul Berman and Michael Walzer would be good examples in the US, and there’s just about anyone from the Euston Manifesto Left in Britain.

6. I read Cohen’s book and liked it. One page that I dog-eared had some figures that I found very interesting.  I frequently hear that the rise of Saddam Hussein was the “fault” of the U.S. because we’d supported him earlier on. I would argue that other countries also supported Saddam Hussein. They all supported what they thought was the lesser of evils, either to maintain a balance of power (vis-à-vis Iran) or to win arms contracts. I heard that one reason why the French opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was that he owed them $4 billion for arms purchases.

In his book, Cohen cites some figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which examined the records of deliveries of major conventional weapons to Iraq from 1973 to 2002. Guess what? The major supplier of Iraq wasn’t the U.S., but the Soviet Union, which provided 57% of Saddam’s weapons. France was a distant second with 13%, then China with 12%. The U.S. supplied one-half of one percent and Britain supplied one-fifth of one percent. Moreover, Cohen points out that West German companies gave Saddam one of the largest chemical weapons manufacturing industries in the world, that the East Germans taught the Iraqis how to run it, and that France built Iraq’s Tammuz nuclear reactor.

Cohen points out that the U.S. wasn’t totally innocent. When Iran appeared to be winning its war with Iraq, with the possibility of threatening the oil fields in Iraq and eventually Saudi Arabia, the U.S. helped the Iraqis by giving them intelligence from AWAC spy planes that were monitoring Iranian troop movements.

OK, so the reality wasn’t so simple. When is it ever? But this is a far cry from saying that the U.S. created the monster that was Saddam Hussein. When criticism takes things out of context, putting one actor in the spotlight and leaving others in the dark, either the critic is ignorant or not arguing in good faith.

That’s it. I was succinct…at least most of the time.

I should clarify something. When I said that your listeners should be exposed to other points of view, like mine...I didn't mean MINE exactly. I meant views such as those that I hold. I'm left of center, but I won't go into that social democratic vs. socialist vs. Socialist thing again because I promised not to.

Joanne, thanks for your comments.  We appreciate any reasoned and thoughtful our listeners may have, and I do hope others come by here and read yours.

Thanks. That's sweet of you to say.   :-)