Dennis Perrin, From Cooper's piece:
>Must the narrative of the left
> remain rooted in victimization? Can race politics be transcended without
> abandoning a critique of racism? Can the left, in short, get past the
dusty
> cant of the last 30 years and conjure a proactive vision with popular
> appeal?"
-Which "the left" is he talking about? The Left I'm aware of -is extremely variegated and can hardly be said to have a -uniform opinion on race, or much of anything else.
There is variation but within each enclave of the left, there is often intense dogmatism on their particular orthodozy, leading to the old joke about leftists forming firing squads in a circle.
And look at this list-- I am explicitly for socialist governance of the economy, national health care, abortion on demand, massive global redistriction of income, Palestinian statehood on every inch of pre-1967 territory, and about every other sign of leftwing goals, but because I disagree on tactics around the Democratic Party and some foreign policy campaigns like Kosovo, I regularly get labelled as a DLC-clone, a "social democrat" (with all the scorn of the far left for the term), and so on.
I generally take it as the rhetorical game of this list, but it does reflect a broader problem of much of the Left in reaching for the excommunication stamp pad at the slightest provocation.
-- Nathan Newman