The band, War said The world is a ghetto. http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0000032UW.01.TZZZZZZZ.jpg
The AmeriKKKan Left is a ghetto. http://www.portside.org/showpost.php?postid=2199 THE STATE OF OUR MOVEMENT
Van Gosse from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
>...The first lesson we can learn from the New Right is that
they have never allowed the immediate constraints of the
mainstream political world to define or limit them,
while at the same time they have remained intensely
focused on every possible gain and intervention in (and
manipulation of) that world. And bit by bit they have
taken it over, first within the Republican Party, and
then through the Republican Party.
Contrast this with the Left. On the one hand, we have many formations and organizations wholly defined by and limited by the constraints of institutional Democratic Party politics. On the other, we have whole swathes of activists who are deeply anti-electoral and even abstentionist, preferring to stand aside from the impure world of partisan activism. I know activists with decades of experience who have never met a Member of Congress, and know very little about how our government actually works, its gears and levers. And there are lots of people in-between, who participate in conventional politics while holding their noses, wading in only up to their knees (I would have to answer to this description, if I'm being honest). This is why the Right, and even many in the anemic Democratic center, mock us-and they are correct to do so.
The second lesson is that even though the Right is just as divided up into many different movements as we are, with their own decades of sectarian baggage, they have learned over time how to bring their movements together into a common front. It would behoove us to study how they did that-what kinds of compromises, and institutional adjustments were necessary. At the same time, we have to recognize that their common glue is largely unavailable to us. In fundamental ways, people on the right are linked by race, and by a racially and ethnically-based (and sexualized) fear and loathing of a whole set of 'others.' We may have common fears and antipathies on the Left, we may all detest oppression and militarism, but these are of a different order. So we have to find our own common vision, one based not in fear and the narrowest definitions of community and patriotism, but in hope and an expansive, internationalist love of the country we want to become, not the country we have been. That's a tall order but again, utterly necessary.
To really learn this second lesson, we're going to have do something to which we as Americans are almost congenitally averse. To build the powerful, united, broad Left the world demands of us we are going to have to embrace complexity-our own complexity as the historic Left in America. We aren't at all the same kinds of people, not just racially or sexually but in terms of our ideologies, even our spiritualities. Pluralism is here with a vengeance. Under no foreseeable circumstances are we all going to become socialists, or pacifists, or anarchists. We are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Buddhist, atheist and nationalist (of one sort or another), black, brown, yellow, red and white, working-class and middle-class. But if we can actually come together as a movement, we have a world to gain-or save.
Van Gosse teaches history at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. He serves on the Steering Committees of Historians Against the War and United for Peace and Justice. The views expressed in this essay are entirely personal.
-- Michael Pugliese
