Left For Dead. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1996 by David Brooks

Recently, I took part in a series of auditions for a television talk show. I'm a conservative white male so I was put on a panel with a black male liberal and a white Jewish feminist. On the next panel, there was a blond feminist, a white male centrist, and a liberal Catholic priest. Another panel had a conservative thrown in with a gay male and a black woman cartoonist. Filing in for subsequent auditions, I saw a rabbi and a Hispanic man, and, if you had hung around for the whole series, no doubt you would have seen a pro-life Eskimo, a Perot-minded Asian American, and probably a lesbian with an interest in financial-services reform.

The experience was just another reminder of how influential the diversity movement has become, how much a part of our daily lives. Corporations, presidential administrations, even conservative think tanks, now assume that a dominant feature of a person's identity is to be found in race, gender, and sexual orientation. Most people, fierce right wingers included, feel that there is something wrong if an office is comprised mostly of white males. Biology is destiny.

Even without policy manifestations such as affirmative action, the Left has scored a dramatic victory on this point. For it was the left-wing identity movements that instigated this incredible emphasis on race, gender, and sexual orientation. And now in the full flower of this success comes a series of books and articles saying that it has all been a dreadful mistake. These liberal and left-wing writers argue that identity politics is a cul-de-sac, which has ghettoized left-wing ideas and allowed the white middle class to drift to the right. It's time to reduce the importance of identity politics, they say, and go back to the class war.

Now they tell us.

This critique comes from two directions. First from those on the Marxist left, who don't like the way class is now added as an afterthought in the gender, race, and class troika. Then there are the Democratic politicos who don't think it's possible to build a majority solely on the backs of aggrieved out-groups.

This is an argument the class-not-race crowd is going to lose. It's not going to be possible to go back to an economics-based leftism. In the intellectual sphere, the race and gender postmodernists have simply smashed the rationalist assumptions that are the building blocks of intellectual liberalism at mid century. Once you've given up on the idea of fixed meanings and normal categories (like male and female), you can't suddenly turn back and embrace Thomas Paine. In the political sphere, those pining for the old days of class warfare are longing for a set of working, class-based political alliances that can never be re-created. The class-not-race crew hasn't even managed to propose radical solutions or to demonstrate that they can generate mass support. It could be that they are the new neoliberals - able to write superb op-eds, able to imagine winning coalitions, but unable to energize a mass movement or a governing majority. It's likely, in sum, that for all its flaws, identity politics is the only liberal and left-wing option.

One can now find class-not-race arguments in Mother Jones, the Progressive, the Washington Post, and even Ms., but the most intelligent and sustained version of this thesis can be found in Michael Tomasky's new book, Left For Dead.(*) Tomasky nearly matches David Frum's book Dead Right for sustained intelligence, critical thinking, and clear argumentation.

Tomasky's first point is that the Left has to rediscover a language that will allow it to talk to Americans collectively, as a common people. He reports that there is open contempt among his fellow leftists for words that might transcend ethnic boundaries, words like citizen, American, even worker. "To use the word citizens is to exclude illegal aliens, and is thus xenophobic and probably racist," he reports. To use the word American is simply to adopt a code word in leftist circles for straight white men. And the Left even shies away from the hoary old word, workers, Tomasky writes, because that is to discriminate against people on welfare.

He traces the rise of identity politics back to the anti-colonialism movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, the universalistic ethos that had previously dominated left-wing thinking became associated with imperialism and oppression. While Europeans claimed universal human rights by discarding vestiges of national culture and history (the ancien regime), the anti-colonialist forces believed they could only throw off Western imperialism by reasserting their particular national culture and tradition. Frantz Fanon in Algeria championed his own form of nationalism, and so there was less emphasis on the common brotherhood of man.

Tomasky describes the leaders of the American New Left not as precursors to the broader left-wing movements of the late 1960s and 1970s but as, at best, a transition movement - a bridge between the universalistic Old Left and the new identity politics. The New Leftists were white men who preached universal values. By 1968, Tomasky says, the counterculture was in fact several tangentially related countercultures - black, gay, feminist, etc. - their differences being temporarily masked by their common opposition to the Vietnam war.