Leaving the Left behind

[pegkerr]

From Arts and Letters Daily:

A continuously renewing society needs to foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women. For Keith Thompson that means leaving the Left behind...more...

Well? What do you think of his critique?

Comments

[splagxna.livejournal.com]

heh. when i first skimmed your post, i thought it was regarding the 'left behind' novels... was very confused when i started reading.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

Likewise. Please promise us never to post about those books, Peg, or my entire world-view will be crushed.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I can pretty much assure you that I never will. I have no desire whatsoever to read them. My church adult forum screened the movie that was made from the first one, out of curiosity. It was dreadful.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

*laughs* That's right, they made that miserable film with the oldest brother from "Growing Pains"! I'm sorry you had it inflicted upon you.

[qwerty88.livejournal.com]

"A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites."

Being morally capable does not mean that they have the power, or the knowledge to make the decisions. Especially when they are lied to. cf Texas' power in determining what gets into textbooks or the president's lies about reasons for going to war in Iraq, or the 'town hall' meetings where everyone is screened and coached on their questions so that a veneer is kept up with no substance.

"The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter."" I work with people who tell their 1yr olds that "they better grow up straight", and then laugh as if they're really funny. Because things that aren't allowed to be said in polite company can be said in humour. Sometimes this works for forces of progress, sometimes against.

And fighting for gay marriage, should this be viewed as the Left's inability to view "individuals as morally capable"?

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

I think he's lying through his teeth.

Let's look at the rhetorical tricks. Sneer quotes around peace. Framing the opposing sides as for and against self-determination as opposed to for and against war. Hell, defining what's happening in Iraq as "self-determination" at all. Defining freedom as what George Bush wants.

But most of all, assigning bad motives and views to anonymous sources. "Leading voices in the peace movement". Who would that be? (Probably ANSWER, the standard bugbear in these situations.)

Yes, Virginia, this is a straw-man argument.

[pameladean]

Sorry, I couldn't get through it. Too much smarmy anecdote.

P.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The sneer quotes and unattributed victim blaming were dense enough to set off my allergies.

[amandageist.livejournal.com]

I thought he was brilliant and agreed with just about everything he said. He articulated what I have not been able to, about my problems with "the left." My difficulty is that I believe in so many of the things the left supposedly believes in--but in almost none of the *ways* they go about achieving them. This man seems to share my problem, and seems to be doing what I do: look at things case-by-case and cease identifying oneself with any Label. The terms "left" and "right" and "conservative" and "liberal" are only useful, in these days of a million shades of gray, in the broadest terms; and the broadest terms are not where I live or how I think and feel.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

I felt the same way. It is difficult for me at this point to reconcile both my conservative and my liberal opinions with the behavior of both parties. To quote a friend on the topic "All must chill."

Excellent icon, by the way.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think it's facile. He takes a lot of easy and obvious shots in a very sarcastic tone of voice. The impact would have been much greater, I think, had he sounded more disappointed instead of disdainful, confused rather than condescending.

Also, he clearly doesn't understand what the people he criticizes are actually talking about. For example, Bill Cosby is right--but so is Jesse Jackson. It's all well and good to expect people to talk correctly, and they should, but to focus your energy on language when there are no jobs is the definition of short-sighted.

It's apparent to me that as soon as the movement went beyond easy legalities with clear good guys and bad guys to looking at the core of the problems that come with capitalism (and always how to fix them within the system of capitalism) he lost his beloved black and white. Something tells me that he would not have thought as much of Dr. King's later speeches about Vietnam and economic conditions as he did the "I have a dream" speech.

Let's face it, the movement got him off the hook for a long time. He was a "good" white person who didn't want to discriminate against anyone. But he also wants anyone who is successful to pretty much look just like him, have his background, his cultural understanding. What's really sad is that people who agree with his cheap shots--and some of them are dead on, no doubt about it--will think that they need to follow in his wake or risk being fools.

But he's the fool.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

I've read some good critiques of "the Left" in my day. This is not one of them. Let me count the ways ...

1) He's beating up a straw leftist. This is very common. He presents some caricatured attitudes which he insists are held by all sorts of "people at dinner parties", and props them up with a few very selective quotes, in some cases (as with Sontag) so selective and misleading as to amount to slander. I don't know anyone who slots into his caricature, myself. Maybe he does. I don't think they're exactly filling the world.

2) A kind of refinement on (1) -- there is no such thing as "the Left" in the monolithic sense he seems to believe. There are pacifists and anarchists and Quakers and liberation theologians; there are hardline Communists, there are many types of socialists, there are social democrats; there are people who have no special political attachments but are to a greater or lesser extent dismayed by events in Iraq, which are by the way going quite a bit more badly than he seems to think, and I don't say this because I want it to be true -- a functioning Iraqi democracy would be a fine thing. There are people who believe the US is doing the right thing in Iraq but who are very upset about sexual harrassment on the job. You just can't lump all these people into one category and call them all simpering leftists.

3) And by the way, the repeated use of the word "simpering" does not suggest that the author is actually making a difficult but considered decision to leave behind a once-prized political allegiance. Nor does his account of his past history, such as it is, sound like that. It sounds like he's always enjoyed finding "leftists" that he disagreed with and then pretending that he's a lone voice crying in the wilderness against them.

4) There are jerks everywhere in the world. Of course you can go out and find people on the left who just hold obviously silly opinions, or who do seem to be taking delight in every casualty in Iraq. You can find people everywhere on the political spectrum who hold silly opinions and indulge in inappropriate schadenfreude. The fact that this writer appears to me to be a jerk does not invalidate all criticism of "the Left" any more than the existence of some leftist jerks invalidates all progressive thinking.

Okay. Rant done.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

To further point (2):

> Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise?

Well, no. Because in the sixties I wasn't allowed to cross the street alone.

The Left is a big ol' tent, and you don't get to defame the entire set of us based on your distaste for Woodstock, the Black Panthers, and the late Andrea Dworkin.

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

I don't know anyone who slots into his caricature, myself. Maybe he does. I don't think they're exactly filling the world.

Hopefully you are correct, but I can tell you first hand that they are filling Orange County, CA. Possibly you need to be the rebellious child of privileged conservatives to turn out as poorly as outlined in Thompson's article, but I can certainly vouch for their existence in numbers. Personally, I am currently attempting to find a place where the liberals have more grey matter (like so many of my friends on LJ) in an attempt to escape the crowd that gets its talking points from Green Day lyrics.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's muddled and cheap, but there are shreds of good points within. But he's wrong, and it's kind of sad to read.

B

[aerden.livejournal.com]

A lot of what Thompson says is also a lot of why I decided in the 90's that I no longer wanted to consider myself liberal, even though I still hold many ostensibly liberal beliefs. The behavior and attitudes I've observed out of so many prominent liberals in the news and in my personal life are just not anything I respect, anymore, and I am turned off by the fact that many of them seem to hate so very much.

Even in this comment section, there are people who simply cannot admit the possibility that maybe Thompson was writing his honest feelings on the matter. Because he's 'gone conservative,' everything he says is suspect, it must all be rhetorical manipulation and outright lies; he can't possibly be speaking about a situation as he sses it.

I'll admit, I might be more positively disposed to Thompson's article because so much of what he wrote mirrors my own feelings and struck a chord with me. Maybe his tone really is sarcastic, and I'm just missing it. But as far as I'm concerned, he's just expressing the same sad frustration that I feel.

Chantal