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.
No comments:
Post a Comment