On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, SA wrote:
>> the opposite of conservative is liberal. And if the Nation asked the
>> question Is Obama A Real Liberal? they'd not only have to answer it
>> emphatically Yes, so would you and Doug.
>>
>> The Right has a huge advantage here. Their wing and their center both
>> agree, whether they like it or not, that they share a common identity:
>> they are all conservatives. The only difference is how fierce or how
>> true a conservative they are. Which gives the wing enormous moral
>> leverage over the rest. The center always has to admit they are the
>> less true, less fierce representatives of a common creed. That means
>> they are always implicitly apologizing for their compromises.
>>
>> But on the left that isn't true. For us, liberals -- the wing we want
>> to influence -- are as much a defining other as they are for the right.
>> And we are for them. We're divided against ourselves internally, in
>> our fundamental categories of thought.
>
> This is astute. For the left, liberals are the Other, but the same
> dynamic doesn't hold on the right. And this relationship needs to
> change. That's basically what I was trying to get at here:
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090914/012915.html
>
> But for that relationship to change, a lot of other things have to
> change. It seems to me the model for the right relationship is obvious -
> the popular front.
This is a classic argument that of course makes perfect sense to me: that left influence will be a function of left power, and left power will be a function of a left movement. (And then the problem, as you immediately pose it, is that without commies or labor, what kind of left movement could ever have comparable power? And if nothing, what then?)
But I think this is somewhat askew my point point about how the logic of collective and personal identity differs from right to left.
A Popular Front coalition, as you so ably describe it, still takes as a fundamental premise that left and liberal are mutually opposed and defining identities even while they are partners in strategy.
Where as I said, on the right, this isn't true. They all agree they are conservatives. They all agree liberals are bad. The only question is how conservative is the right amount.
And it's this, I think, which is what makes it so easy and natural for right intellectuals to denounce their own side. It's because they can denounce it for not being conservative enough. It's that formula at the end: we denounce you for not living up to our common ideals -- that makes it easy and natural. And that's missing on the left because they define the liberals as having fundamentally different ideals -- as betraying our ideals simply by living up to theirs.
Which makes the logic of identifying into a big confusing mess that right intellectuals don't have have.
Which I think is the answer to the original question of why the terms of identification in the NR are so different from the Nation.
I'll go farther and say don't think it's actually got that much to do with difference in terms of criticalness of "their" administration. The Nation is full of criticism of its administration for not going far enough; that's their shtick. Almost every article is the present government is about how it's falling short and could do better. But in the end they support it against all attacks from the other side and take as a starting point that even at its worse its better than the opposite. And the NR is exactly the same. At the end of that editorial they talk about supporting a more conservative guy for Senate. They sound like the Nation supporting an anti-war guy against Lieberman. They both painted it like it was crossing the Rubicon but in both cases it was very small beer: one super-junior senator. And in both cases in the end it worked out badly. BFD.
When the rubber meets the road, these journals aren't that different. NR evinced a maniacal party loyalty when they kicked out Buckley's son because he crossed McCain who couldn't be less their model of a conservative. And Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn are two of the Nation's most popular columnists and they denounce Democrats as well as anyone on this list.
I think in the end what you and Doug were highlighting was essentially a difference in the terms of identification. And I think that difference has to do with the underlying collective identities themselves.
Michael