Reading from Left to Right: A Symposium on American Dreamers and The Reactionary Mind
Reading from Left to Right: A Symposium on American Dreamers and The Reactionary Mind
“Is there such a thing as the left and right? What distinguishes them, not just in our time but across time?” Bruce Robbins and James Livingston argue with Corey Robin and Michael Kazin about their recent attempts to theorize the political spectrum.
The following is a discussion of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, featuring comments from Bruce Robbins and James Livingston and rejoinders by Robin and Kazin. It was originally conceived as a panel at the 2012 U.S. Intellectual History Conference, which was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Dissent is grateful to the panelists and panel chair Lora Burnett for the opportunity to publish slightly edited versions of the conference papers.
Bruce Robbins on Michael Kazin and Corey Robin
James Livingston on Michael Kazin and Corey Robin
Response by Corey Robin
Response by Michael Kazin
Bruce Robbins on Michael Kazin and Corey Robin
As a believer in a broad-church left that wanted both to see Obama reelected and to hope that once reelected he can be prevailed upon to do things differently this time around, I feel well represented by these two excellent books, each of which finds a compelling public voice for convictions very like my own. I have certainly not thought about what the left should be as seriously as both Corey Robin and Michael Kazin clearly have. If I suspected that this panel demanded a public display of factionalism, I wouldn’t have agreed to be on it. What I assumed is, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History being an organization devoted to intellectual history and intellectual history moving more slowly than the presidential election cycle, it would make sense, even in the pre- and post-election frenzy, to talk about longer-term issues and perhaps a view of the left that’s also a view of the academy, which Lord knows also runs on slower cycles.
First, however, a couple of observations on the two books we’ve been asked to discuss.
Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation announces that it’s arguing against the idea that the American left has been a “failure.” Much as I would like to agree and moved as I am by the exemplary lives gathered in its pages, it’s hard for me to feel that the book entirely avoids the conclusion it says it’s arguing against. This seems to me a story, as Kazin puts it, of “political marginality and cultural influence.” In other words, I think it’s saying that the left has been a success in the domain of culture but a failure in the domain of politics, the domain that has always been taken to define left and right.
Assuming that the book is trying to say that this combination of success and failure ought to be thought of as less of a failure and more of a success than many of us might have thought—Michael is here to pronounce one way or the other—it seems to me that it could use a sharper polemical engagement with those on the other side of the question who are still dumbfounded by the loss of the white male working-class majority and who think cultural progressives are crazy to imagine that any progress has been made as long as drones circle overhead and economic inequality continues to be as dramatic as it is. Here I’m also arguing in my head with Todd Gitlin, Michael Kazin’s colleague at Dissent, as I do on paper in my book Perpetual War, about whether the anti-Vietnam War movement and what Van Gosse calls the “foreign-policy left” simply opted out of “real” politics by refusing the default position of American patriotism.
The real question of the book seems to me the following: how should we name and how should we feel about this particular combination of failure and success? Assuming for the sake of argument that the one domain where the left has had a significant and measurable impact on American life is the domain of culture, does this deserve to be thought of as a political impact? What the book calls out for, it seems to me, is a different measuring stick, a metric or standard or common language that would justify the pleasant sense that cultural success has indeed spilled over into the domain that used to be held apart as political. With this metric laid out, we could argue with more confidence that some of the territory of what should be called political has been taken over, for once, by the good guys, and we could draw the corresponding conclusions for further action.
My own position, and perhaps also Michael Kazin’s, is that what looks “merely cultural” (I borrow the phrase from Judith Butler) is rarely really merely cultural—that steps in the direction of diversity always have material consequences, if we make the effort to do the extra arithmetic. Conceptually, “politics” and “culture” are gross categories that probably do more to confuse than to clarify. I think we need to generate some other terms that will take some weight off them. They are both ready to collapse.
What Michael Kazin has done is assemble in one common story people who did very different sorts of things and in many and perhaps most cases might not have recognized each other (or themselves) as belonging to a common effort, a common project, a common “left.” It’s of course inspiring to think of them after the fact as having been united despite their diversity. But in a time when diversity or disunity or fragmentation is one of the most common diagnoses of what went wrong with the left, or even stopped a true left from coming into being, I’m not sure how much it helps to declare victory by definitional fiat and take the unity as given. Shouldn’t this be posed as a question? What sorts of fragments do in fact go together, and why? Note that this is a question that the political theory bible of the New Social Movements, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, refuses to ask, on the principle, it seems, that this common ground is unknowable or untheorizable, or must be left unknown and untheorizable lest we slip back into the determination by the economy in the final instance. Today a lot of us are edging back toward determination by the economy in the final instance and nothing seems to me more important than trying to theorize real and potential common enemies and common platforms. Does anti-fracking go with Palestinian rights? How do you mesh student debt with mortgage debt, mortgage debt with sovereign debt, and all kinds of debt with climate change? Should the left think of the state as its sworn enemy or a potential ally?
Which brings me to Corey Robin’s book and the question of left-and-right.
In The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin treats the ideas of the right as not just reactive, but relational. In the beginning is the left, which very properly seeks a power that it doesn’t have. The ideas of the Right emerge as on-the-fly reactions to the left’s threats to existing power. To me this has the taste of a creation myth, that is, very energizing to the would-be activist but a bit simplifying as an account of how things actually happen.
“Conservatism is the theoretical voice,” Corey writes, of an “animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.” I’m not entirely convinced of this. Does everything begin with the agency of the subordinate classes? Really? Suppose some degree of economic redistribution were to be proposed from on high, whether for reasons of justice (unlikely but possible) or as a pragmatic, long-term way of assuring social stability (say, Bismarck’s welfare state). Surely this top-down project of redistribution would be fiercely resisted by many on the Right—for example, those who were going to be asked to pay—even without it arising from any assertion of subordinate agency. Subordinate agency is a piety. It can be there, and it can not be there. It should never be assumed to be there, let alone to have started everything is the first place. For both historical and for political reasons, the hypothesis that decisive action comes from below needs to be tested out in any particular instance.
One of the most influential books for literary critics of my generation—I started college in 1967—was Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1957). Culture and Society got so much attention, and properly so, because, I think, it fashioned a usable tradition for the left that began with figures of the Right. It began, specifically (like Corey Robin), with Edmund Burke. And it showed how the conservatism of Burke and others was essential to the critical force of the concept of culture, the concept on which and by which Williams’s own left-wing tradition was constituted.
The culture-and-society tradition has had its critics, and one can see why. Still, Williams’s move continues to make sense, and even some of the most eloquent critics on the left, like Francis Mulhern, are ready to agree. After all, Burke applied against the French Revolution ideas he had already developed earlier in his life with regard to the British exploitation of India and, if Conor Cruise O’Brien is to be believed, that also referred implicitly to his sense as an Irishman that the revolutionaries were violating French society in much the same way that the English had violated Ireland. Uday Mehta argues accordingly in his book Liberalism and Empire that from a global anti-imperial perspective it’s Burke who represents the true left, whereas the supposed progressives of his day, like J.S. Mill, were imperialists and therefore rightists. One need not entirely agree with Mehta—I don’t—in order to take his point that our technology for distinguishing left and right needs to be sophisticated and situational. Instant identifications are likely to lead to costly and embarrassing errors.
I’m not thinking of any particular aspect of current thinking on the right that I’d like to see the left take more seriously or respectfully. But others will (community? responsibility?). And I think the long-term fortunes of the left may depend on its ability to politicize issues and concepts that, like “culture” for Williams, can be claimed by both sides. Like taxes, say.
How do we position ourselves vis-a-vis politics in the form in which it was presented to us in the November elections: where do we stand on the state? It seems to me that the state is the most central and dangerous issue where lines of left and right cannot be clearly contrasted today, where the descendants of Raymond Williams’ culture-and-society tradition in effect make common cause with the Tea Party. If anti-statism is good politics, it can only be in the very long term. But I have my doubts.
Writing in the summer of 2011 in Bookforum, Mark Mazower wrote as follows:
a younger generation now passing through the universities sees politics as a matter of single-issue mobilization and views the entire political process with suspicion. This generation is universalist while also antistatist and anti-institutional, and therefore antipolitical too, although it does not think of itself as such. The result is constant critique but little by way of mobilization. If we think of the victims of the slump of 2008, we can see that theirs is a story of political failure, because they have failed to challenge the ideological hegemony of market values. Even now, hedge-fund profits and bank bonuses are up, and gold is soaring, as state spending across the United States faces unprecedented cuts.
People talk about a return to Marx following the financial collapse, but the reality, Mazower says, has been a turn to anarchism: “the attractiveness of Marx’s thought is fatally compromised in the eyes of many natural critics of capitalism today by his commitment to organization and to rigid party discipline. Anarchism’s combination of individual commitment, ethical universalism, and deep suspicion of the state as a political actor mark it out as the ideology for our times. We are all anarchists now.” To me Mazower does not seem very happy with this state of affairs, and I’m not either.
James Livingston on Michael Kazin and Corey Robin
In teaching my American intellectual history classes, I typically lead off with two of Emerson’s essays from the 1840s, “Man the Reformer” and “The Conservative.” My purpose is to give students a feeling for how the man characterizes what seem to be mutually exclusive sensibilities, at a moment when the difference between them was becoming an either/or choice because the conspiracy of silence on slavery—the vital center—couldn’t hold. Emerson uses “radical” and “reform” as synonyms in these essays, as did many of his contemporaries, who often correlated both with “progress.”
Emerson dismantles these distinctions, of course—that signature move is his original and lasting contribution to the American intellectual tradition. By the end of “Man the Reformer,” for example, private property is no longer a constraint on progress and the merchant has become the model of intellectual innovation. Still, the difference between radicalism and conservatism he posits is something we historians tend to unconsciously recapitulate in our thinking and writing, as a way of distinguishing between usable and disposable pasts—which is also a way of identifying with certain people from the past, bringing them to life, if you will, and, with the same strokes, sweeping their opponents into the dustbin of history.
The difference, if I may venture a translation from the Emersonian original, goes like this. The conservative reveres the past; he sadly perceives in every small movement away from this glorious past a violation, and thus a betrayal, of a tradition, “time out of mind,” that limits political innovation in the present (a.k.a. custom, culture, the Constitution). The radical/reformer reviles the past; he gladly perceives in every organized movement away from this moribund past a departure, but also, somehow, a redemption of a tradition, “time out of mind,” that allows no limit on political innovation in the present (a.k.a. jubilee, carnival, the commonwealth, the Gospel).
These attitudes toward history would seem to be antithetical. And yet the conservative and the radical perceive the relation between ethical imperative (“ought”) and historical circumstance (“is”) in exactly the same manner—as a gap that can’t be closed, a wound that will never heal. Both sides unconsciously affirm Kant’s terse formulation of the either/or in the Critique of Pure Reason: “For whereas, so far as nature is concerned, experience supplies the rule and is the source of truth, in respect to the moral law it is, alas, the mother of illusion! Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done, or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed.”
In short: What ought to be done in the future has nothing to do with what is being done in the present, which is inconsistent, however you look at it, with a deeper past, a tradition “time out of mind.” On this the conservative and the radical seem always to agree: the usable past is an ineffable, mostly elusive moment, something that follows from the invocation of a higher law, whether the law of narrative, of reason, or of dreams. Without trying, Kazin and Robin demonstrate an uncanny symmetry of social movements from the left and the right—both are animated by a deep and abiding sense of loss.
Take, for example, the standard historiographical rendition of the difference between radicals and conservatives in the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. The abolitionists and their fellow travelers were radical because they repudiated any politically mandated compromise with slavery—they chose the ethical imperative residing in the Declaration over the historical necessity enshrined in the Constitution (ought over is, the people over the nation-state). Republican Party leaders, particularly Lincoln, were “conservative” because they refused to repudiate the politically mandated compromise with slavery which the Constitution permitted and enforced (is over ought, the nation-state over the people).
Except that by being both profoundly conservative and insistently radical, Lincoln became a great revolutionary. This diligent student of American history discovered an empirical continuity between the ethical imperative of the Declaration and the historical circumstance of the Constitution, making the either/is choice between them moot. He introduced the argument in the Peoria speech of October 16th, 1854. He concluded it on February 27th, 1860, at what was then called the Cooper Institute. The usable past he recounted—or concocted—was neither ineffable nor elusive, because there was no higher law involved. The Constitution and the Declaration were equally indispensable moments on the continuum of nation-building, he demonstrated. In this view, historical circumstance and ethical imperative were compatible, even indissoluble, rather than antithetical.
But it’s a difficult position to occupy or defend, because in taking it up you have relinquished any claim on moral purity or religious piety—you’re not speaking truth to power anymore, because you’ve acknowledged that right makes might. You want power, and so you assume that no God is on your side. It is true, Lincoln placed the expansion of slavery beyond the scope of any political compromise as early as 1854 by citing the Declaration: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man making a slave of another.” Still, he wasn’t an abolitionist; he openly courted the votes of white supremacists (who were the vast majority of voters as such); and as late as 1862, having drafted a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he announced that his paramount purpose was preserving the Union, not ending slavery.
Almost a century later Richard Hofstadter, of all people, was confounded by this political alchemy, and debunked the Great Emancipator accordingly in The American Political Tradition. But seven years after, he wrote a new introduction to Social Darwinism in American Thought, his 1944 debut as an intellectual historian. In a puzzled, almost resentful tone of voice—remember, those were the salad days of what Daniel Bell called the radical right—he noted that “in America the roles of the liberal and the conservative have been so often intermingled, and in some ways reversed, that clear traditions have never taken form.”
The books we’re here to discuss are, I think, brilliant attempts to give crisp narrative form and precise intellectual content to these traditions—to mark the boundary between left and right, or radicalism and conservatism, at a moment when the confusion of these spheres has reached the surreal point where the insurgent candidate demanding radical, pitiless change is called the conservative, and the incumbent seeking to preserve the modest gains of the recent past (the last sixty years, say) is called the liberal, sometimes even the socialist. The books we’re here to discuss are, in these terms, both symptoms and attempted cures of a generalized intellectual hysteria that often borders on delusion. The authors mean to rouse you from this waking dream and show you that it need not weigh like a nightmare on the rest of your life, or on the remainder of American history.
To do so, they have to demonstrate that the left and the right are, in fact, in history, “clear traditions,” as Hofstadter put it. The great achievement of both books is that they have found—in the relevant sources rather than in some higher law—the emotional and intellectual clarity Hofstadter coveted. But is that achievement also a signal failure, or rather a signal of our more general intellectual failure, in the sense that the authors confirm and codify what most Americans already believe, that the post-modern age of incommensurability has arrived—that there is no common ground between the radicalism of the right and the conservatism of the left, or vice versa, that there is no shared standard of intellectual attainment or comportment to which anyone can be held? Lacking that ground or standard, argument becomes pointless. Power of the kind that issues from the barrel of a gun becomes normal, even necessary. At any rate violent or apocalyptic fantasies can become commonplace from left to right.
So, the question Corey Robin and Michael Kazin raise is this: what is the intellectual price, the opportunity cost, of their careful, convincing, and again brilliant clarifications of the differences between left and right?
Notice that both Left and Right are reduced to their extreme essentials, to the either/or of Emerson’s starting point in “Man the Reformer” and “The Conservative.” In Corey Robin’s book, conservatism becomes synonymous with the radical right—the reactionary mind in action against political movements convened by the left. In Michael Kazin’s book, the left becomes coterminous with those same political movements of radicals, mystics, and seers, outsiders all, who had the intellectual or economic wherewithal to favor social equality and altruistic justice over individual liberty—who could ignore the mundane demands of the world as it is (historical circumstance) in the name of an ethical imperative.
What the left and right might have in common is thus obscured if not obliterated. For example, the sublime sense of loss that animates their urgent search for a usable past, on the one hand, and for a strenuous, producerist alternative to the enervating pleasures of consumer culture, on the other. Or the identification of the large corporation, finance capital, and “big business” as the proximate causes of what ails us—a diagnosis that demands a restoration of competitive market forces made flaccid by bureaucracy and corruption (to hell with “too big to fail,” break up the banks!), and the recognition of the small holder (the self-made man) as the source of economic innovation and dynamism.
It is of course true that American politics has become more polarized over the last twenty years, and that the sense of loss on the Right has only deepened. But to explain these facts, we would need to follow Irving Kristol’s example in acknowledging that, in the late twentieth century, the difference between liberals and social democrats practically disappeared, and that, since the 1960s, social democracy has made enormous strides. In other words, we’d have to explain how the left has won, not lost, in the absence of concerted political movements dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and the installation of socialism. But then we’d have to explain why the left’s sense of loss is even deeper than the right’s—we’d have to ask what both sides know they have lost, which is to ask why each side believes so fervently in the gains of the other.
Neither Kazin nor Robin are interested in these questions, but there is no reason they should be in view of their purpose, which is to differentiate left from right. They admit that the left seems still to be winning the culture wars, but they agree that sustained political power is the far more important measure of success, and that the left has lost, hands down, on this front. Like the president, they assume that they inhabit a center-right country, and approach it accordingly, as if their dreams of (and for) America don’t intersect with the majority’s.
It’s not a strictly empirical question, though, is it? If we define the left as political movements demanding radical social-economic change—the abolition of slavery, the end of wage labor, the execution of the artificial person known as the corporation, the overthrow of capitalism—we will probably not accredit the incremental yet significant changes in social relations (of production and elsewhere) that have happened without them. We will probably not see how the sporadic campaigns of cultural politics, and the increasing scope of the “cultural apparatus,” have superseded state-centered, policy-oriented politics, making organized movements less important than the twenty-four-hour news cycle. We will probably think that the left has no purchase on any important issue because it doesn’t speak programmatically in any one intelligible voice.
What happens if we drop, or at least modify, this definition of the left? What, if anything, changes, including our definitions of the right? Can there be progress without movements, socialism without socialists? As academics or intellectuals, we’re loath to answer yes, because we know how socialism was created in the past, and because we like to think our ideas matter to people off campus, out there in the real world of class struggle. But these, finally, are the questions Corey Robin and Michael Kazin force us to ask.
Jim Livingston and Bruce Robbins raise excellent questions and register important reservations about The Reactionary Mind. In doing so, they give me the chance to address some common misconceptions about the right (and left), misconceptions I should have confronted more directly in my book.
Jim and Bruce pose two objections to my argument. The first is that they don’t think I’ve correctly identified the points of cleavage between left and right. Bruce asks whether it’s really the case that conservatives are opposed to “the agency of the subordinate classes,” as I claim. Are there not other issues that galvanize the right? Mightn’t conservatives be opposed to economic redistribution that is not initiated by subordinates but is promoted from on high (a la Bismarck)? Jim, for his part, situates my argument in a long tradition that pits the left as the party of the future against the right as the party of the past—and suggests that such distinctions are not in fact all that useful, as both parties partake of the past and future, tradition and innovation.
That leads to their second objection: Rather than identify points of cleavage between left and right, Jim and Bruce ask, shouldn’t we (Mike Kazin and I) emphasize points of commonality? Or, more simply, have we overstated the difference between left and right? Bruce rightly points out, for example, how much Raymond Williams—and his intellectual progeny on the left—owes to Burke’s conception of culture. Bruce proceeds from there to wonder whether there might not be other usable pasts that both traditions could borrow from each other. Jim makes a similar, and especially effective, point on the shared conception of history and loss in each tradition. It’s not clear to me why Bruce and Jim think it’s so important to emphasize commonality at the expense of cleavage—in Bruce’s case, the reason seems political (i.e., it might help the left to better organize and reach out to citizens if it didn’t dwell so much on its differences with the right); Jim suggests that doing otherwise partakes “of a generalized intellectual hysteria that often borders on delusion”—but it’s a fair question.
A question, in fact, I tried to answer in The Reactionary Mind. I don’t deny there that left and right share many of the commonalities Bruce and Jim wish to highlight. Indeed, my argument is that the right is always caught up in—consumed and recast by—its encounter with the left. (Tocqueville, in his memoir of 1848, gives an especially vivid, almost claustrophobic, sense of that encounter, as he describes a conversation/confrontation en route to the Chamber of Deputies with a horde of street demonstrators.) Far from residing in splendid and pristine remove, the right learns from, and is influenced by, the left. It imitates, borrows from, and models itself on the left. And ultimately, whether it likes it or not, it is transformed by the left. Partially for strategic reasons but also because it is simply impossible for the right not to be shaped, in ways it often is not aware of, by that encounter with the left. So it would be a great surprise if we didn’t find points of commonality between the two parties.
One of the reasons I emphasize the question of subordinate agency as a sticking point between right and left—a point I’ll come back to in a minute—is precisely that I think so many of the other cleavages historians and theorists have focused on (tradition versus innovation, state versus market, imperialism versus anti-imperialism) are not inherent to the split between right and left at all. Rather, as Jim and Bruce show in their different ways, they can often be points of contact.
This is especially the case when it comes to the attitudes of the left and the right to history. As Jim says, both parties borrow from and look to the past (and invent traditions), and both constantly imagine and look to a transformed future. Again, this is one of the points I make throughout the book. Burke—alleged tribune of the staid and slow wisdom of the past, siren of evolutionary reform as opposed to radical change—was, when brought face to face with the full enormity of the French Revolution, a Jacobin of the right ready to take a great leap forward. Precisely because he sought to preserve the old regime. That adage from The Leopard—“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”—has never been as true as it is of the right, including the Burkean right.
So misled have we been by the distinction between the Party of Order and the Party of Movement (or the Party of the Past versus the Party of the Future) that whenever we come up against the obvious fact that both parties have complicated and ever-changing relationships to the past and future (and equally complicated and ever-changing relationship to states and markets) we throw up our hands, in triumph or despair, and say, look, there really is no difference between the two. And yet, somehow, despite all the periodic declarations of the death of the distinction—and concomitant discovery of a Third Way (one day I’m determined to find the first use of that phrase in the treatise of some forgotten French Doctrinaire)—it persists. The question is why.
And here we come back to Bruce’s (and Jim’s) challenge to me: Do I over-emphasize the role of subordinate agency as the dividing line between left and right? “Can there be progress without movements?” Jim asks. Bruce writes: “Does everything begin with the agency of the subordinate classes? Really?” And goes onto say:
Suppose some degree of economic redistribution were to be proposed from on high, whether for reasons of justice (unlikely but possible) or as a pragmatic, long-term way of assuring social stability (say, Bismarck’s welfare state). Surely this top-down project of redistribution would be fiercely resisted by many on the Right—for example, those who were going to be asked to pay—even without it arising from any assertion of subordinate agency.
I agree with Bruce that the thesis of reacting against subordinate agency is ultimately an empirical question that “needs to be tested out in any particular instance.” And while I’m no empirical social scientist, the thesis seems to hold up against empirical reality pretty well. All the great waves of conservatism that I can think of have been responses to movements of subordinate agency. And, responding more directly to Bruce’s challenge, it’s hard for me to think of many, or even a few, instances of redistribution that were not in some way prompted or initiated by assertions—actual, feared, or imagined—of subordinate agency. The Bismarck case, of course, is the paradigm example of that (one of the reasons, in fact, that Nietzsche broke with Bismarck: too many concessions to the lower orders). In these instances, even when it is a Bismarck who is dispensing the favors, what is being opposed by the right is not the simple fact of redistribution but the movement that provoked it. And the not unwarranted fear that rather than dampening the movement the concessions will only embolden it.
It’s hard, I’ll confess, for me to abandon my thesis that conservatism is a reaction against the agency of the subordinate classes less than two weeks after the Roberts Court strikes down a key section of the Voting Rights Act (the culmination of an ancient obsession on the right), and on the very day that the Los Angeles Times reports yet a new effort by employers, empowered by recent Supreme Court rulings, to curb basic assertions of worker rights. The latter, of course, is merely the latest of a long-standing conservative-led effort, over the last forty years, to stifle labor’s agency, inside and outside of the workplace. As I’ve said to Jim many times, I’m a huge fan of his claim, reiterated in his piece, that socialism is already here. But I’ve yet to figure out how to reconcile that claim with the reality of increasing domination in the workplace and increasing control over worker agency.
Assuming there is such a thing as the right and the left, what does distinguish the two sides, not just in our time but across time? The conventional answer—each side has its own distinctive view of the relationship between the individual and society and of the role of history—obviously won’t work. The alternative answer—nothing at all—also won’t work, for reasons I lay out in my book.
So until I hear a better answer, I’m sticking with mine.
I’m grateful for these provocative, insightful comments—some of which I agree with, some I think miss the point of what I wrote and make statements that don’t fit my understanding of current politics.
First, I’ll say a little about why I decided to write American Dreamers, then I’ll address the culture/politics question, then I’ll conclude with some thoughts about that ever-fascinating if ever-elusive question of what right and left might have in common. I hope you’ll see connections between these subjects. For what’s it’s worth, Jim, Bruce, and I are from the same generation, and we all got mixed up in the New Left—the exhilarations, the lunacy, and the second/third/nineteenth thoughts about what we did right and how we screwed up.
I decided to write American Dreamers because I wanted to get a historical fix on two contradictory thoughts about that movement: on the one hand, it utterly failed to present a historical alternative to modern liberalism and conservatism and yet, over time, it left a larger and more durable imprint on American society—and on the world—than we imagined when the movement seemed to collapse as any kind of coherent force sometime after the 1972 election. Our successes came despite our best efforts to alienate a majority of our fellow citizens by talking about the police as “pigs” and spelling the name of our country with three Ks.
We saw ourselves as the best and brightest of our generation, seeking to overthrow rule by the not-so-best or brightest of the previous one. But, despite claiming to be hard-headed Marxists, our analysis of American society was more emotional than rational. And, in our contempt for the liberal state, we came off as anti-statist as any Goldwaterite—although the content of our indictment of the managerial, hypocritical, corporatist, imperialist state was hardly the same as theirs.
To reiterate a point which E.J. Dionne made twenty years ago in Why Americans Hate Politics and which, in his own way, Daniel Rodgers echoes in Age of Fracture, the true victor in the civil war of the 1960s was libertarianism: the right of every individual—regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual preference to do pretty much whatever they want to do with their money, their property, their bodies, and their speech—as long as it doesn’t involve grand theft, rape, or homicide. There were some cross-currents of communal responsibility—environmentalism, in particular. But they were not able to summon up the same kind or degree of passion or to inspire the kind of mass mobilizations or mass organizations that both the New Left and the New Right put together. And this remains true today. Compare the puny size and influence of the opposition to climate change with the largest insurgencies on the left—for the rights of immigrants and the right of anyone to marry any they choose—and among conservatives—the Tea Party’s raging opposition to taxes and spending (on any program which doesn’t benefit older, middle-class white people).
So I wanted to look back at the history of the American left to understand how earlier radicals negotiated the relationship between expanding rights for individuals and proposing and fighting for social changes based on a notion of collective rights and outcomes—whether based on ascriptions of class, ethnicity and race, or gender. Except for one period—from the 1870s to the First World War—the Left was more successful at advocating for individual freedoms than collective uplift.
Second, on culture and politics: Bruce is right. These are “gross categories” which confuse more than they clarify. Was Betty Friedan making a “cultural critique” in The Feminine Mystique or a political one? Most readers saw it as the former, although they wouldn’t have used those terms. After all, Friedan wrote far more about the advertising industry, sexual malaise, and housework than about demanding equal pay for equal work or wanting to liberalize abortion laws. But then Friedan, no stranger to organizing, quickly used her fame to launch the National Organization for Women. And NOW’s first big campaign tried to get the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce the prohibition in the 1964 Civil Rights Law against sex discrimination. From the immediate abolitionists who endorsed interracial marriage to marriage equality activists today, the personal has always been political.
Still, attention should be paid to how contemporary Americans separate culture and politics. Once when most people wanted the state to do a lot more rather than less, who gets what and how—the basic subject of politics—was a subject that could engross people across social lines. But now “politics” has increasingly become the passion of relatively small, well-educated groups—except a month or two before a presidential election. As the title of Dionne’s book makes clear, most Americans have little faith in politics and see voting more as a civic obligation than as a democratic opportunity. But everyone lives in one or more cultural niches and is drenched by conversations on all manner of “platforms” about same-sex marriage, veganism and obesity, sports and music and fashion—and the Internet itself. As a result, they have far more information about those topics and care more about what their peers think about them than they do about the causes of the federal deficit, the income gap, or the costs and provision of healthcare. We no longer live in a nation in which millions of Americans care deeply about whether or not to inflate the money supply or whether the government should protect the right of workers to organize a union. I’m not necessarily nostalgic for that past; I didn’t live in it anyway. But the comparative lack of interest in such matters does have its cost, as well as its benefits. We could use a real argument about economic inequality, for example, something which Occupy started but never figured out how to continue.
Third, on the differences and/or convergence between left and right: Last fall, I taught two undergraduate courses at Georgetown: one was a lecture course on American radicalism, the other a seminar on American conservatism. Several of my students thought it was surprising—even rather bizarre—that I could teach both of them in what I hoped was a balanced, empathetic way. When it comes to U.S. history, they seem to expect that a professor’s political opinions will drive his or her analysis.
Now, I do think that the traditional definitions of these two forces—as ideologies, at least—remain cogent. Conservatives are occasionally fond of quoting Tom Paine about beginning the world over again, but that is just a nod to the fetishism of the new. They really want, in Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s words, to “restore” America, not to reform it. Samuel Huntington’s positional conservatism continues to be the default stance of the American Right—as the dream of a more egalitarian society continues to drive the American Left.
But as historians, we should be a lot more careful about seeing these two groups as eternally battling oppositions. Long ago, we thankfully got beyond the Beardian and Parringtonian dichotomy between the “interests” and “the people”—between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians and their alleged progeny. We shouldn’t reinstall it under other names, as Howard Zinn did in his hugely popular, analytically wretched People’s History .
Finally, a couple of brief disagreements: Jim asserts that, since the 1960s, “social democracy has made enormous strides,” despite the absence of a social-democratic movement. He doesn’t develop this idiosyncratic idea in this exchange, but he did so last year in Jacobin and, like everything he writes, it’s enormously provocative and fun to read. Yet, I would need more cogent examples than such features of early twenty-first century life as the all-volunteer Army and a modest increase in the number of Americans receiving entitlement payments to convince me that we have come a long way towards becoming a more collectivist, not to say egalitarian, society. Was the United States becoming more “socialist” in 1900 when one-fifth of all white men 55 and older were receiving Civil War pensions and the expenses of the program consumed almost a third of the federal budget? Welfare for certain groups with strong, well-financed lobbies is not the same thing as a society based on an ethic of solidarity.
I think Bruce also commits, in my view, a different kind of over-simplification of American politics when he claims that the contemporary left and right are united in their hatred of the state. Most conservatives, as Theda Skocpol and others have pointed out, detest only those aspects of the state which don’t benefit the people and institutions they favor: the military, agribusiness, and drug companies in particular. And the creeping progress of anti-abortion laws is resulting in bans on reproductive freedom in more than half the country.
Meanwhile, except for those principled anarchists whose prominence in Occupy belied their tiny numbers, most leftists— whether they are social democrats or would-be revolutionaries—now have, if anything, too much faith in the state’s ability to remedy social ills, if only the evil right would just get out of its way. This is a major change since the 1960s and early 70s—a feature of what Jim rightly calls a mingling of liberal and socialist affinities. So most leftists say no to NSA surveillance but yes to single-payer health care, no to military interventions overseas but yes to laws that would make it easier for unions to organize and prosecutors to put inside traders in prison. I don’t see either ideological wing changing their opinions on any of this anytime soon.
Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence.
James Livingston is a professor of history at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul.
Corey Robin is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and the editor of Dissent.
