Intellectuals in America part 2

Part 2 is a response to Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of history and a member of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.

Kessler-Harris starts off by stating her disappointment with Obama's presidency, and immediately my hackles are up. Dionne's argument about the necessary difference between being in power and being a critic is still on my mind, and so Kessler-Harris's oblique criticism seems weak. How can we critique Obama when we (and by that I mean the extended Left) have been so pitifully absent? We can criticize all we want, but if we aren't organizing then we have no one to blame but ourselves, really. Criticism without action is empty.

But Kessler-Harris's essay is not about Obama, but rather about the failure of intellectuals to engage both politically and with mass culture (meshing questions 1 and 3). She makes some cogent, if unoriginal, points. For many years intellectuals have pointed out that there has been a failure on the Left to find language as effective as the Right. How did "liberal" become a dirty word? How did "right to life" or "family values" become embedded in the fabric of American culture? Why can't we do that? Much of it is that intellectuals cannot, by virtue of the fact that they are intellectuals, speak the language of mass culture. And perhaps they should not.

Kessler-Harris writes, "Fifty or sixty years ago, we might have argued that . . . magazines like Dissent . . . 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 . . . the influence of these outlets has been diluted." Of course, the reason that they have been diluted is because the people have lost faith in their government and turn to alternative sources of authority to tell them how to think and those alternative sources do not include Dissent or any of the other intellectual stomping grounds.

If the Left is going to reach out to the people, it is going to have to leave intellectuals behind. Who are the most effective voices on the Left? Kessler-Harris points to Michael Moore as one, and I agree. But I would hardly call Moore an intellectual who speaks the people's language. He is a populist. Her other icons of Left-wing populist speech are more questionable: Arthur Miller? There is a guy who intellectuals get all emotional over and think speaks to the people, but how many Americans have read Arthur Miller (and felt it speak to them) or even less likely - seen his work performed?

The Right has its intellectuals and populists, but the populists run the show - they're the ones out in front. The Left has many intellectuals, but the populists tend to be denigrated - truth, in all its messy glory, trumps emotion. And most of us like it this way - there's something heroic about holding on to Truth, even if it means losing election after election.

So, the answer for intellectuals: be intellectuals - trying to speak the people's language is just going to sound like grandpa trying to be hip. Intellectuals have their important role to play vis-a-vis mass culture, but trying to be part of it doesn't even make sense. Rather, the Left needs to foster its own populists, a la Michael Moore, and there needs to be a relationship between them. If I remember my Gramsci, that was his point about hegemony and the role of intellectuals in the revolution - they should play a role, in fact they should be leaders, but they can't be the whole movement. And they can't control culture, culture is controlled by the people - populists need to take the ideas of the intellectuals, cut out all the complicated stuff, and put the basics out there. Das Kapital was for intellectuals; the Communist Manifesto was for the populists; the populists took the Manifesto and synthesized it for the people into: screw the rich; equality for all; let's get ours.

Intellectuals in America part 1

No, fearless reader, I haven't given up on you, or this whole blog experience thing. No, I haven't been slacking (completely). Rather, I had an inspiration. The latest issue of Dissent included a symposium - a handful of intellectuals were asked to comment on one or all of four questions:

1) what relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture?

2) Does the academy further or retard the engagement of intellectuals with American society?

3) How should American intellectuals participate in American politics?

4) Do you consider yourself a patriot, a world citizen, or do you have some other allegiance that helps shape your political opinions?

My project is to post a critique of each of the responses that were submitted, which I will follow with my own response to the questions.

Today's post addresses E. J. Dionne Jr.'s response, which you can find here.

Dionne's focus is on the failure of the (intellectual) Left to succeed politically today and he sees the roots in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. He writes, "An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons [in the English departments of American universities] displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics." In short, the leftist putsch of the universities that overthrew the right-wing dictatorships that reigned in the 1960s came to completion. But too many on the Left mistook teaching radical theory to captive audiences in lecture halls for read world organizing and the development of a radical praxis that spoke to the needs of the American people. In the end, it became a group of bourgeois professors and students fighting for power within the academy.

I was a member of the Radical Student Union at college. We were involved in a few actions that I am proud of: supporting the Graduate Student Union that was fighting a contract battle, was one. But the biggest action on campus in my 4 years was the student takeover of the administration buildings by ALANA, which demanded that more people of color be hired as professors and administrators. RSU made a cameo in that action, but as no more than supporting cast, certainly.

And, maybe more importantly, who was organizing in support of the janitors, cooks, and other working class folks that catered to the students? Not ALANA, the more centrist organization that sought to open up bourgeois positions to people who were otherwise shut out, but was not really interested, organizationally, in the well-being of the oddly invisible, working-class African-, Latino-, Asian-, Native Americans all over campus. RSU made a few attempts at reaching out to the campus unions, but ultimately the excitement and energy were around the hip issues of the day: Chinese sweatshops, and bio-engineered food, neither of which the full-timers at the dining commons I worked at cared much about.

To return to Dionne, he goes on to critique the current state of the Left as largely being about analysis and short on action. We tend to make a great opposition party, but the problem with being a great opposition party is that often the opposition has no real idea how to run the government effectively. The Left has become thinkers, rather than actors. My sense is that the last great wave of Leftists were veterans of World War II. I suppose the obvious question is, what about the student revolts of the 1960s? But if you look at who was inspiring the Left in the 1960s, typically you see a whole slew of World War II vets in the background, pushing things forward.

Dionne also picks up on a series of fetishes of the Left - a Leftist litmus-test, if you will: a fetish for individualism - the ultimate American hegemon, which teaches us to be our own person, even at the expense of everybody else: a selfishness that better belongs on the Right and contradicts the supposed collectivist instincts the Left purports to support. The fetish for knee-jerk anti-imperialism, which all too often becomes an anti-Americanism that is political poison. The fetish for anti-statism, which meant a withdrawal from participation in the American body-politic and ultimate surrender.

Obama's campaign seems to represent a possible sea-change for Dionne. "The excitement so many experienced during the 2008 Obama campaign was nothing more or less than a rediscovery of the joy of democratic activism." And while I would agree, we seem to have believed that all we needed to do was elect a president and that was it. The Left has become politically lazy. Hope and Change are not something that are achieved, they are goals that we must never stop striving for. We've forgotten that democracy is a never-ending process; it's not about elections. "The politician focuses on the work that can get done and is called upon to have a realist's sense of the limits of the possible. The critic is dogged in pointing to the work that remains unfinished, the reforms that are not adequate, the crooked places that have not yet been made smooth."

The problem is that the Left left the building. We seem content to carp about Obama's short-comings, but where was the Left when the Tea Party took over the healthcare town hall meetings? We were content to shake our heads at the idiocy of the Right, while they dominated the media space. Where is the anger that the healthcare companies have completely derailed the public option (and at this point, any meaningful change, in my opinion)? If we can't participate meaningfully in the public debate and if we continue to pretend that elections are all that matter, we are going to continue to get the politicians and political process we deserve.