> Will __someone__ please tell the rest of us what this alterman guy
> said, so we can judge it for ourselves on its (de)merits.
Perhaps the following will help.
>From *Nation* May 25, p. 10, Eric Alterman, "Making One and One Equal Two"
We live in paradoxical times. America has no left, but it also has two lefts. The reformist/social democratic left is almost exclusively economic in emphasis. It views itself as part of a tradition that stretches back to Eugene Debs and John Dewey. Its idea of a secular saint is the late Irving Howe; its poet laureate is Walt Whitman.
The radical/academic left concerns itself primarily with race, gender, and sexual preference. It lives primarily on college campuses but also within small solidarity organizations. Its American heroes are W.E.B. Dubois and Angela Davis. Its secular saint is Mumia Abu-Jamal; its poet laureate, Michel Foucault. Together, these two lefts cancel each other out.
The border between the two lefts is demarcated by each one's perceptions of American liberalism. The first left views liberals as well-meaning though unreliable allies. Most of the differences between "liberals" and these leftists have disappeared; even most democratic socialists have a hard time explaining what they are.
To the Foucaultian left, however, liberals are the enemy. "Liberalism," writes Blanche Wiesen Cook in the current *Radical History Review*, "turned its back on imagination, creativity, idealism, sided with the right, created a new right, helped raise an entirely new righteous wrathful fundamentalist right with new evils for their Bible stomping. The wicked today are people of color and struggle, feminists and queers." (And she's just getting started: "Like the Balkans we are at war," Cook continues, "a step away from ethnic cleansing.")
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There are the opening paragraphs. If it isn't clear what Alterman is trying to do, I suggest that it's not really worth trying to find out. As someone on either Marxism or lbo mentioned lately of Michael Lerner, in Alterman we have a simply "loathsome" individual, who simply delights in creating as confused and muddy an atmosphere as possible. In an earlier signed editorial Alterman offered the following program for what, I suppose, is "the [true] left" in his imagination: "It would behoove Democratic candidates and progressive activists to examine Clinton's agenda to figure out why it is so damn popular -- and how it might be refined to create a stable progressive majority for the future." And he concludes: "Clinton is redefining himself. The right is finally on the run. We can retain our moral purity and continue to complain about what a bastard he is, or we can hunker down and build on HIS [my emphasis] foundation." ["The Clinton Foundation," *Nation*, March 2, p. 6.You have your marching orders, boys and girls of the left. If you disagree with Alterman you are either a dupe of of George Will or a member of the Sparticist League." And this is apparently the reason for cutting Cockburn's columns from 2 pages to 1: to make room for this oily spreader of fog.
Carrol