American politics [was Reps delaying

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Sep 17 16:12:07 PDT 1999



>From: sawicky at epinet.org (Max Sawicky)

Takes issue with my comment


>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.


>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 . . .

Well, after reading Alan Wald's New York Intellectuals I would say that there was something in that. Those Trotskyists whose criticisms of the Soviet Union seemed more important to them than there criticisms of the US state department did move pretty rapidly to the right and did indeed make a specific contribution to Cold War Liberalism. (Incidentally isn't that the meaning of George Orwell's accommodation to MI5.)


>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.

Of today, I would say that the semi-organised left of the seventies and eighties concentrated the experience of defeat in the most systematic form - that's why so many of them have found a hearing for their political expressions of lowered expectations, accommodations to the market and so on.

Maybe this is a more English thing than it is an American. The existence of the labour party does mean that there is a straight conveyor belt from the left to the establishment that has carried former leftists like Chancellor Gordon Brown (one-time Gramscian), Development Minister Clare Short (one time Irish solidarity activist) Peter Mandelson (one-time Communist Party youth organiser) Tony Banks ('break the poor not the law' - municipal socialist) Paul Boateng (ditto) into the British Cabinet today. On top of them you could add the Government political advisors drawn from the Communist Party: Geoff Mulgan, Charles Leadbeater, Charlie Whelan (now retired), and the two sons of the late Ralph (socialist register) Miliband, Ed and David who are advisors to Gordon Brown and PM Tony Blair respectively.

I would say that is quite a contribution from the left to the current government.


>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.

I suppose it depends where you cut demarcate 'the left', but surely one of the key experiences of the US left was agitation for humanitarian intervention *against* apartheid. When I attended a US peace conference in New York in 1993 a lot of opponents of intervention in Vietnam were in favour of intervention in Haiti and Bosnia. By chance the news came through of the bombing of Bosnian Serb positions during the lunch break and a cheer rang through the hall.


> 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.

Yes well, that's the point at which it is seen as acceptable to cross the line, where the UN provides a rationale for intervention - or a fig- leaf for the US, perhaps.


>Railing against the Reagan-Thatcher axis of the 1980s makes no sense
>today, when we are ruled by the Blair-Clinton axis.
>>>>>
>
>mbs: Half right, I'd say. We are ruled by B-C but according to policy
>that owes a lot to R-T.

Yes, I certainly agree with that. But its specific contribution is that it gives us R-T as refracted through the defeats and the adaptation of defeat of the (okay) soft left. That's what makes Blair good at what he does. He gives us pro-market policies in a pained expression, imperialism all dressed up as Oxfam.

-- Jim heartfield



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