You might be interested in reading Aziz Rana's book on America's complicated relationship with republican notions of freedom and the various coalitions that have emerged to fight reaction and try and 'renovate' the project at various points in the country's history. I think many of the points about the odd character of American politics has faded in the last half-century. Associational life has genuinely withered and the biggest sources of divergent political outcomes here are path-dependent. Our arid political culture is more or less the arid political culture of Europe and Japan. Our class dealignment is theirs. Our economy is joined with theirs. On the flip side of things, trade liberalization and corporate consolidation, along with special arrangements like liquidity swap lines between central banks, seems to have brought the most powerful sections of the various 'national capitals' closer and closer together. I think these are all good reasons to try and develop more universal strategies, rather than lean into the better parts of Americana. But maybe you're right and we have to attend to the little differences in what is left of national culture. I'm all in favor of talking about freedom more and equality a bit less.
Man, this is good as hell, especially the third part. I’m an old unionist, but my dad and some other older guys I knew were big into the New Left and the SDS. This series has been a great examination of the critiques of that generation, and your own critiques of those critiques. I guess my own (unoriginal) criticism of the new left is that they were too suspicious of the old materialist tradition, without which tradition there’s no way forward for the Left. Thanks for writing this.
Erik Olin Wright devotes a big section to his book on "real utopias" to trying to push past the kind of thinking Rorty and other latter-day left pragmatists were doing about organizing to thinking about the actual scenarios that might push the left into some form of political power. Some of them require organizing, some are conjunctural accidents, some are ye olde classic "the contradictions heightened" kinds of things where a left just sort of slides into power because the system just shat itself so badly. I read Wright in some ways as trying to carry on with this sort of "old New Left" project and its attempts to be concrete in a way that the left of Occupy and afterwards has (sensibly, understandably) wanted to avoid.
I also remember the fashion at one point among some people on the left for calling Rorty et al "left conservatism", which I don't think Rorty warranted. I think there were some bien-pensant leftists/former leftists who did deserve the label--the sort who got so incensed about "identity politics" that that became their only target of note, the kind of people who kept shoving Walter Benn Michaels at people (without having read him, often) and they were often people who'd been very enamored of Rorty.
What role, if any, do you see for academic lefties? I get the point about parochial Scholaticism and the rarefied air of theory. Write more for general audiences (like Rorty's book)? Focus instead on teaching, cultivating the republican and civic humanism you point back to?
Thanks again for your reading of Rorty. As a 70 year old philosophy graduate student and political activist, I am glad someone else finds Rorty crucial. I worry about the anarchosyndicalist tradition, though, because of its tilt against electoral politics. This problem is endemic in the new DSA.
This was a really great piece--enthusiastically sign off on the back half. Feels great to have these views expressed in a concise and shareable form. To me, as, like a regular reader of the New Left Review, the main question about the left and its internal debates is "who"--who is the public for these debates? Where are there existing social bonds that can be activated to fight for socialism? My view is kind of that there aren't any, since workplaces are more atomized than ever, and that, despite a few high profile wins, actually the density of organized labor has gotten worse. In that respect, things are actually worse than they were in the 90s. And yet, what you say here about a national movement is also true. I'd be genuinely curious to hear yours, or anyone's, accounting for that contradiction.
Although it's buried in here, and more alluded to than stated, I think this is extremely solid summary of why (and how) the right has been successful in grabbing political power while the left has not.
I wrote my master's thesis last year on the possibilities of imagining a different future for our world. The three chapters deal with, respectively: Marcuse's diagnosis of the problems facing advanced industrial society; Arendt's concepts of action and natality, in combination with Marcuse's thought; and a fun, experimental combination of Marcuse, Ricoeur's work on metaphor and metaphoricity, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and Rorty's work in Achieving Our Country (including the Movements vs Campaigns appendix).
I think you might get a kick out of reading it, so let me know if you're interested, and I'll get you a copy of it.
Thanks for all the great writing you're putting out.
You might be interested in reading Aziz Rana's book on America's complicated relationship with republican notions of freedom and the various coalitions that have emerged to fight reaction and try and 'renovate' the project at various points in the country's history. I think many of the points about the odd character of American politics has faded in the last half-century. Associational life has genuinely withered and the biggest sources of divergent political outcomes here are path-dependent. Our arid political culture is more or less the arid political culture of Europe and Japan. Our class dealignment is theirs. Our economy is joined with theirs. On the flip side of things, trade liberalization and corporate consolidation, along with special arrangements like liquidity swap lines between central banks, seems to have brought the most powerful sections of the various 'national capitals' closer and closer together. I think these are all good reasons to try and develop more universal strategies, rather than lean into the better parts of Americana. But maybe you're right and we have to attend to the little differences in what is left of national culture. I'm all in favor of talking about freedom more and equality a bit less.
Man, this is good as hell, especially the third part. I’m an old unionist, but my dad and some other older guys I knew were big into the New Left and the SDS. This series has been a great examination of the critiques of that generation, and your own critiques of those critiques. I guess my own (unoriginal) criticism of the new left is that they were too suspicious of the old materialist tradition, without which tradition there’s no way forward for the Left. Thanks for writing this.
Erik Olin Wright devotes a big section to his book on "real utopias" to trying to push past the kind of thinking Rorty and other latter-day left pragmatists were doing about organizing to thinking about the actual scenarios that might push the left into some form of political power. Some of them require organizing, some are conjunctural accidents, some are ye olde classic "the contradictions heightened" kinds of things where a left just sort of slides into power because the system just shat itself so badly. I read Wright in some ways as trying to carry on with this sort of "old New Left" project and its attempts to be concrete in a way that the left of Occupy and afterwards has (sensibly, understandably) wanted to avoid.
I also remember the fashion at one point among some people on the left for calling Rorty et al "left conservatism", which I don't think Rorty warranted. I think there were some bien-pensant leftists/former leftists who did deserve the label--the sort who got so incensed about "identity politics" that that became their only target of note, the kind of people who kept shoving Walter Benn Michaels at people (without having read him, often) and they were often people who'd been very enamored of Rorty.
What role, if any, do you see for academic lefties? I get the point about parochial Scholaticism and the rarefied air of theory. Write more for general audiences (like Rorty's book)? Focus instead on teaching, cultivating the republican and civic humanism you point back to?
Thanks again for your reading of Rorty. As a 70 year old philosophy graduate student and political activist, I am glad someone else finds Rorty crucial. I worry about the anarchosyndicalist tradition, though, because of its tilt against electoral politics. This problem is endemic in the new DSA.
This was a really great piece--enthusiastically sign off on the back half. Feels great to have these views expressed in a concise and shareable form. To me, as, like a regular reader of the New Left Review, the main question about the left and its internal debates is "who"--who is the public for these debates? Where are there existing social bonds that can be activated to fight for socialism? My view is kind of that there aren't any, since workplaces are more atomized than ever, and that, despite a few high profile wins, actually the density of organized labor has gotten worse. In that respect, things are actually worse than they were in the 90s. And yet, what you say here about a national movement is also true. I'd be genuinely curious to hear yours, or anyone's, accounting for that contradiction.
Although it's buried in here, and more alluded to than stated, I think this is extremely solid summary of why (and how) the right has been successful in grabbing political power while the left has not.
John,
I wrote my master's thesis last year on the possibilities of imagining a different future for our world. The three chapters deal with, respectively: Marcuse's diagnosis of the problems facing advanced industrial society; Arendt's concepts of action and natality, in combination with Marcuse's thought; and a fun, experimental combination of Marcuse, Ricoeur's work on metaphor and metaphoricity, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and Rorty's work in Achieving Our Country (including the Movements vs Campaigns appendix).
I think you might get a kick out of reading it, so let me know if you're interested, and I'll get you a copy of it.
Thanks for all the great writing you're putting out.