Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2 May 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > The Democratic Party successfully harnessed the liberalization of
> > social mores to the political and ideological power of economic
> > neoliberalism during the Bill Clinton years.
>
> That's not harnessing, Yoshie. When you harness something, it pulls you
> in the same direction. Here, social mores go progressively more left,
> while the governing discourse and policy goes more right.
>
Clearly the metaphors (war, harnessing) are getting in the way of rather than contributing to analysis.
First, there is no "left" and "right" in what you are referring to here as the "cultural wars." The assumption that there is can only confuse political thought.
There is also no _general_ connection between liberal and left politics. (There may be in individual cases -- e.g., Justin's claim that he is a liberal -- but in general the identification only obfuscates.) And finally, and most disastrously, u.s. politics simply can't be understood as long as the observer assumes any connection whatever between the Democratic Party and left politics. It is much more than a clever joke to refer to the u.s. as a one-party state with two right wings.
So "we" (leftists, left liberals) have neither won nor lost the culture wars. That the culture has changed is potentially of aid to us -- e.g., our gay activists no longer haved to hide the fact that they are gay. That helps. We no longer have to interrupt meetings to ferry any female college students back to their dorms by 10:00 pm (an actual case from the '60s, where a woman who had worked with SNCC in Mississippi the summer the three activists were murdered) nevertheless had to get back to her dorm). That helps. And so forth. But those changes are just changes in the general culture, which we should be happy about, but they are not specifically _left_ victories.
If we want to understand the defeats of the left over the last 40 years (beginning, essentially, with the election of Carter, a serious defeat), we have to forget this metaphor of harnessing the culture wars. And the precondition for the left rising again is for current leftist to separate themselves, once and for all, from the DP.
Carrol
Carrol