I've said as much in print. But for my purposes here these issues don't matter. The main point is that the effoert has delegitiamted any attempt to build socialism and we have no ideas and no organization. The other side is delegitimated, but still has money and organization.
[WS:] I am pretty much with you on this subject, but I would like to add my 2 cents.
First, the concept of "socialism" is awfully vague - it ecompasses anything from an eschatological project (to use Kolakowski's term) aiming to achive salvation on Earth to to specific institutional forms of organizing economy and society. The left obvioously "failed" to build the former, but so did any other religion to bring its people to the "promised land" - since heaven, end of history, promosed land etc. are figments of liteary imagination. They do not exist, so nobody can "fail" to deliver them. The concpet of failure meaningfully applies only to situations when delivery had been possible but was botched.
As to the the latter, I think the left has a tremendous success, albeit that success varied from country to country. Nordic countries and EU implemented a great deal of social protection, labor friendly legislation, democratization and general improvment of living conditions of the working class - which were the central objectives of any labor movement. We tend to take these achivements for granted today and discount them, but they are achievement of counless socialists and communists across many countires who fought (and many died) for them. US is lagging behind many of these accomplishments, but US is only one country, cunsummed by gutter populism, Anglo-Saxon individualism, and lacking left movement of any significance. So the more accurate assessment is that the puny US left failed to implement many socialist instituions that their more powerful European brethern succeeded to implement in Europe. An last time I checked, these
reforms are a permanent fixture of EU societies, despite vicious attacks by rabid dogs of right wing reaction. Again it is not "socialist utopia" as many pie-in-the-sky types dream, but very specific institutions with real effects on countless working people.
Another point. It is not accurate that the left run out of ideas. Certain ideas, such as social protection or decent working conditions that used to be the hallmark of the left, now have become th emain stream ideas - shared by most political camps, excpet perhaps the rabid right wing nuts. Other ideas, such as certain brands of populism, have indeed become discredited or taken over by the right. But in their plasce, the left proposed some newer ideas, more appropriate for our current material conditions - such as the concept of ecologically sustainable economy. It was the "new left" that pioneered it and now it is again moving fast into the mainstream. So I would say that the left is coming up with new ideas that move to the mainstream to the point of not being "owned" by the left anymore, whereas right is rehashing old discredited ideas or, as they say it in the vernacular, keep putting lipstick on a pig.
I think your (and mine) beef with the left is limited to the "old guard" that get stuck in the rut of old left tropes from around the turn of the century, such as populism, anti-intstitutionalism (rooted in Anglo-Saxon individualism and anti-intellectualism), "workerism" or "third worldism" - or "utopian socialism" more generally - while being oblivious to new ideas advanced by the "new left." Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------