Todd Archer wrote:
>
> Anthony said:
>
>
> That's a fine enough observation, but it doesn't reply to what Carrol was
> talking about. He was criticizing Thomas' assertion that there is any such
> animal as an "anti-sex" Left (I presume Carrol means an organization and not
> disparate individuals). Do you think Carrol's right or not?
>
Todd is substantially correct, but "organization" here may be misleading. What we have today is "disparate individuals" rather than an even roughly coherent left. I don't, however, demand that there be organizational unity as a precondition of speaking of "The Left." For a short time in the 1960s one could speak, without making an asshole of oneself, of "the left," as long as one exercised reasonable discretion in not generalizing from too few examples. That is, one _could_ formulate generalized descriptions that applied more or less equally to two such disparate organizations as the Southern Christian Leadership Council (King's organization) and the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (forerunner of the RCP).
My argument is that not only is that not possible today, but generalized descriptions of "The Left" _usually_ represent bad faith on the part of the person offering the description.
If I were to operate in describing the mid-sixties as Doug and Lisa operate in describing "the left" as it now exists, I would describe the Civil Rights Movement as a bunch of seat-belt haters. That is, around 1966 several members of SCLC were in town fund-raising. I drove them around town in my 1964 Plymouth, which had that newfangled device, seatbelts. They all laughed as I buckled up.
Carrol