> This article basically says nothing and is out of touch.
> Excusable, perhaps, since the author is not American. There
> has been no dearth of American public intellectuals
> denouncing Bush. That is not the problem.
Yeah, I agree. The problem is not that the US Left is silent, in fact it is not. The problem is that it does not have much to say anymore. It keeps repeating the old tropes like a broken record.
Speaking of Camus, the US Left reminds me of a character from one of his novels, "The Stranger" I believe, who made a considerable effort to memorize the timetable of trains departing from Paris, and when he finally managed to accomplish this task, they changed the schedules.
Another observation re. Levy's piece - I do not think that European Left owes its relative strength (vis a vis the US) to intellectuals speaking out. It owes it to organized labor and its wisdom to transform itself from wage cartels to a universalist political movement entering national politics and fighting for public good rather than interests of its members. The US unions have never made that leap, as Fitch argues. Hence the difference.
Yet another thought - I think that a historical window of opportunity to build Left institutions in the US has been lost. Europe took advantage of that opportunity in the first half of the 20th century, the US did not. I tend to agree with Fitch that the misguided organized labor, pursuing the "American dream," is partly to blame for that failure. Therefore, the US and Europe are fighting very different battles today. The European Left is basically waging a defensive war to protect its core institutions against neo-liberal challengers. The US left has nothing to defend since it never held any institutional titles here. It is like an evicted tenant - it merely signed a lease agreement during the New Deal era, but the institutional premises changed and the new owners simply terminated the lease. Unlike the European left, the US Left is practically homeless and it first needs to get back into the house to have anything to say. That requires a very different strategy. Mr. Levy apparently missed that point.
Wojtek