WAS IT JUST a little over a year ago that I expressed a longing in these virtual pages for a real Left in America (i.e., a serious political organizing movement, not just an exclusionary subculture of sanctimony)?
Now there is one, or at least enough of one to get syndicated columnists all a-flustered and annoyed.
Whether they’re getting annoyed for the right reasons is still debatable.
You see, the critical depiction of certain Dreaded Eugene Anarchists in a recent Harper’s, as described here last week, is indeed a reasonable enough interpretation of certain elements of today’s Way-New Left. Yes, some young radicals are hedonistic, self-righteous, and more concerned with proclaiming their personal moral superiority than with really changing anything. Many of their third-of-a-century-ago precursors were like that as well; though the boomer-centric U.S. news media will rarely admit it.
But can the Way-New Left learn from the old New Left’s mistakes?
A look at the broader movement (or movements) that converged at WTO last fall and at the IMF convention in Washington, D.C. last month offers a hopeful vision.
Beyond the loud and easy-to-stereotype bandana kids, there’s a whole gaggle of Greens, Net-connected “dot commies,” ideologues of assorted stripes, agitators, disciplined direct-action planners, limo-liberals, Utne Reader yups, bohemians, aestetics, labor advocates, minority advocates, queer advocates, hangers-on, and many, many others.
They’re not in agreement on everything.
That they don’t have to be is part of the whole point.
Part of what they’re arguing for is the right to disagree, to publicly express and sort out the messy cacophanies and contradictions of human social existence–as opposed to letting big business and its wholly-owned politicians decide everything via backroom deals and unelected tribunals.
It’s this diversity-in-practice part that makes the Way-New Left more than just the latest generation of “lifestyle radicals” and square-bashers. Instead of just another “identity politics” (i.e., the continuation of target marketing by other means), it cuts across a lot of the age, race, gender, class, and tribal categories into which the marketers would prefer we remained set apart.
And that’s what might really be causing the corporate conservatives and the corporate liberals to fear it.
The Way-New Left has become influential enough for pro-corporate commentators to try really hard to discredit it. It’ll take a little longer (perhaps longer than the current U.S. election season) to see if it can become influential enough to really change things.
Nothing less than the survival of democracy is at stake.
TOMORROW: Dreaming a city into existence.
ELSEWHERE:
