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Leaving the Left behind
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
> 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.
no subject
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.