Symposium: Alice Kessler-Harris

Symposium: Alice Kessler-Harris

I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing of Guantánamo; and a denunciation of torture, rendition, and the endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terrorism. On Election Day last year, I anticipated a more generous health care bill and a restoration of modest regulations on banks and financial investment firms. Obama led us to expect these things of him when, in his mellifluous and powerful voice, he advocated “change you can believe in.” I understood candidate Obama’s call to be not simply one of political style—not simply a cry to throw the scoundrels out. I wanted to believe that it was also a call to recalibrate our moral compass. As an academic, an intellectual, a student of twentieth-century American history, I resonated to the call.

I now think that we, we intellectuals on the Left, have failed our president and our country, that we share some of the responsibility for the political mire in which we are embedded. Candidate Obama raised some big issues. He called for a return to such constitutional principles as habeas corpus and for a redefinition of justice. He advocated a restoration of the rule of law in such arenas as civil rights and occupational health and safety. Above all, he promoted a spirit of fairness that would usher in a “post-racial” moment and redefine our commitment to a more egalitarian society. During the campaign, Obama, very tentatively, challenged the prevailing antigovernment perspective, suggesting that government could be a positive instrument—that it could enhance the safety of communities, promote equal opportunity, foster the greater good. But despite the fact that these images captured the imaginations of the voting population, the promise has been left dangling.

Since the campaign, these calls for a new direction have disappeared, obscured by the daily political battles in Washington as well as the failure of the Obama administration to adequately articulate principled and ethical aspirations. It is in this last area where I believe that left intellectuals could play a vital role. Over the past forty years, conservatives (intellectuals among them) shifted the popular spirit from a liberal commitment to social good (exemplified by the New Deal) to a massive mistrust of government. Using the language of freedom and individualism, and denigrating anything social, conservatives redefined perceptions of government from positive to negative. “Public” became a four-letter word connoting unnecessary taxes, poor service, regulatory constraints, and inefficiency. “Liberalism” became a political death sentence. “Democracy” lost its cachet, as conservatives convinced the electorate that getting more people to vote was merely a plot to expand the influence of the poor. Phrases like “right to life” and “family values” found their way into the popular media, embedded with meanings intended by a new Right and paving the way to new policies with astonishing speed. Without public protest Americans now allow private companies to run their jails, employ mercenary armies to win wars, create almost insurmountable obstacles to the organization of workers, and reject funding for most forms of public welfare except for poorly paid work. They also define as tax increases any effort to modify a tax system that ensures huge income gaps between rich and poor.

Perhaps our loss of control over words and language explains why, offered a politician courageous enough to open up questions about the nature of our moral center, we have not pursued the opportunity. It isn’t just that we, on the Left, lack agreement about alternative goals and the policies that would achieve them. We agree on many things, including a restoration of balance between the public and private good, trust in government, the value of civil liberties and civil rights, and basic assumptions about fairness and justice. But we lack a language capable of capturing public attention. Because we offer no way of speaking to a larger audience, we have little access to the media and almost no capacity to shape public opinion.

I do not agree that, as Irving Howe once argued, the retreat of intellectuals behind university walls that harbor and feed them, has subdued our voices. As intellectuals, we have not shirked our responsibilities to raise important questions about what is “American.” In the last generation, historians (to name just one group of articulate social critics) have refocused scholarly debates to suggest the positive as well as the negative value of government for daily life. We have turned our accounts of movements like progressivism or the New Deal to reveal how effective government programs could and did enhance individual liberty rather than constrain it. We have produced a literature that explores the relationship of race and gender to legislation enhancing civil liberties and civil rights. We have fostered a wide-ranging debate about the economic and social circumstances that have led to military commitments over the centuries. And we have spearheaded discussions about immigration, homelessness, and the century-long efforts to achieve health care and other social policies. Together these add up to a new portrait of an America that reveals the changing and expanding nature of the American Dream.

Our work (as well as our thought) has found its way into limited venues as the subjects of research rather than as inspirations to action. Fifty or sixty years ago, we might have argued that these outlets—magazines like Dissent, Partisan Review, Politics, and Commentary—could reach out beyond the intellectual community to serve as conduits to the desks of presidents and politicians. But today, in the light of powerful Internet media, and a newly personal pop culture, the influence of these outlets has been diluted. Our work participates in a process effectively captured by the pundit who described the New York Review of Books as “The New York Review of Each Other” Even outlets with higher circulation like the Nation and the New Republic don’t come close to reaching the millions who participate in blogs and Twitter, who read the mass circulation media, and who watch nightly television. This is not to denigrate their function, only to suggest that, in the modern world, to influence popular culture, to transform a mindset requires access to new cultural outlets. We won’t get there until we can play that game.

Look at how a multi-layered conservative movement made use of the mass media to alter public culture and construct a new public ethos around the meaning of public good. Case in point, and frequently cited, is Ronald Reagan’s brilliant use of the slogan “It’s morning in America” to capture the presidency. Milton Friedman’s “free to choose” comes a close second in the contest to engage the American imagination. And we are not just talking about slogans. We are talking about how words like family, tradition, and opportunity came to have a loaded content; others, like liberty, have new and unrecognizable meanings; equality has all but disappeared from the lexicon of politics. The most powerful example, however, is the notion of a ”War on Terror”—on idea that one political group is invested with such vicious content that it has the force that communism once had to stir a population to action.

If the power to shape words and language is essential to capturing the media, it also poses something of a paradox. The ability of left intellectuals to speak a common language requires both nuance and subtlety, but nuance makes simple and meaningful language difficult to achieve. The solution then might be to do as conservatives have done: to overlook small differences in the interest of articulating our moral center. If we can’t do this, we will have abandoned the popular media, essentially withdrawn from the game, and allowed President Obama’s agenda to rest on political manipulation rather than a shifting public opinion about what our society stands for. For my part, I am convinced that if we can reshape the language, we can reverse the moral course.

We can do this by constructing a language of shared goals rather than one of difference. Recent experience suggests the media will respond to such a language, even if it seems subversive. We could find ways of introducing this language, perhaps by developing a television program on the model of William Buckley’s Firing Line that would promote debate about serious issues. Or we might involve programs like Law and Order and the old West Wing—both of which have attracted huge audiences—on the issues we care about. We can be confident that advertising money will follow success. It has done so in the case of Rachel Maddow, whose gutsy approaches to the news we all admired but have insufficiently supported. We might follow the model of Michael Moore, who has been unafraid to debunk words like capitalism even as he utilizes capitalist methods to make his point. Can we take advantage of his initiatives (there are others, like Air America that have less expansive audiences) to develop the missing narratives by writing reviews in local newspapers, organizing responsive support groups, or in other ways becoming more active participants? And what about music and theater? Where are the grants and the institutes that support the Arthur Millers and Bob Dylans of the twenty-first century—both of them masters at coining a phrase? Bruce Springsteen comes to mind—and yet we haven’t yet elevated him to the ranks of those whose music inspires social change. We cannot separate ourselves from those worlds nor ignore our obligation to generate funds for a popular culture that speaks to the best in human nature. But neither can intellectuals ignore a world in which new forms of communication require us to speak a language that can be heard.

Alice Kessler-Harris is a member of the Department of History and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. She is the author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.