From: sawicky at epinet.org (Max Sawicky) Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 10:17:54 -0400
We can't let this puppy pass w/o comment. It resembles commentary from the right, admittedly springing from different motives, that reflects a jaundiced, distorted view of the now aging U.S. New Left.
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Jim heartfield (jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk)
The way I see it, the contemporary political and administrative
establishment is quite decisively a product of the left, but in the
sense of being a product of the left's defeat.
In personnel terms, in Britain, certainly, and I suspect also in America
and Europe, many of today's most influential figures are recruited from
the left. (I've just read British Chancellor Gordon Brown's biography,
to learn that in the seventies he was the author of a Gramscian-marxist
collection of essays on Scotland called the Red Papers)
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mbs: By this reasoning, we could say the modern U.S. right was based on American communism/trotskyism, since half the editorial board of National Review was ex-communist of one type or another . . . More reasonable to say that the left attracted some talented people, and when some of them took their leave, for one reason or another, they were likely to play an important role in the guise of new political identities. Especially those that were planted as agents in the first place, as Clinton himself may have been.
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. . .
On top of that the left contributed the two central planks of
contemporary bourgeois politics multi-culturalism and humanitarian
imperialism. In the name of the former they are reforming all the major
social institutions, and with the latter, the world order.
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mbs: Au contraire, the modern U.S. left cut its teeth on opposing humanitarian imperialism, in the form of opposition to Vietnam (originally a soc-dem/JFK affair). It has been pretty consistent since then, opposing U.S. intervention in Grenada, Central America, Panama, and the Persian Gulf. The salient difference of the Balkans affair is that it was "peace-keeping" (obviously flawed in large ways, as many have properly noted) by other means. A lot of criticism of the intervention hinged on the fact that it was the U.S. acting outside the UN. To JH and some others, this may not be an important distinction. To me it can be. I've noticed that many stalwarts here and elsewhere (i.e., Z-net) who opposed U.S. intervention in the Balkans are all for UN intervention in East Timor.
As for multi-culti, I would agree it's big in the cultural context, but in the U.S. it's more of a lightning rod in politics. Clinton dined out on attacking the pseudo-left version of multi-culti, namely identity politics.
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Railing against the Reagan-Thatcher axis of the 1980s makes no sense
today, when we are ruled by the Blair-Clinton axis.
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mbs: Half right, I'd say. We are ruled by B-C but according to policy that owes a lot to R-T.
I haven't tracked this down much, but it seems possible that one of the under-emphasized stories of the Reagan era was the Thatcher influence, including the importation of some Brits who play an important role in the U.S. right, such as Stuart Butler.
mbs