Weinstein responds - Letters to the Editor - Letter to the Editor

Progressive, The, Jan, 2004 by Jim Weinstein

After a few perfunctory kind words about me, Matthew Rothschild proceeds to review The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left with breathtaking disregard for what I actually wrote ("An Unheroic Left," October issue).

In the book, I argue that a coherent left in the United States has not existed since about 1920, when the loosely decentralized Socialist Party provided the basis for shared universal principles that gave a common bond to a wide range of reform programs--movements for such things as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the eight-hour workday, civil rights, protected free speech, and even "free love" and birth control.

I assert that Socialist education and agitation succeeded in bringing these ideas and programs into the mainstream of American life during the Progressive Era, and thereby helped to humanize a brutally corrupt American capitalism as it emerged into the era of giant corporations that we know today. Success, I write, was possible because the Socialist Party's ideas were in tune with American capitalism's developmental path as it emerged from the fiercely competitive years of the late nineteenth century to one of corporate bureaucracy. But even as it entered the mainstream of American politics, the party's limitations became apparent. And after World War I, the Soviet experience disrupted the left, stood the public meaning of socialism on its head, and made the party unable to focus on the changes of this new era.

By the New Deal years of the 1930s, when the labor movement and other radical movements developed independently, both the Socialist and Communist parties were relegated to the sidelines. In other words, while traditional Socialist ideas had entered the mainstream of American political discourse by the '30s, the idea of socialism was increasingly identified with the Soviet Union's industrial development and its brutal political culture.

Rothschild ignores this central theme of the book. I wrote that "the Cold War seems more like an end--or rather a detour from history--a time when the left was disoriented and the political life of the nation became one-dimensional." But Rothschild does not discuss this assertion. Instead, he posits one of his own: that the Soviet experience and the Cold War comprised just one of several demurs. Other detours, he writes, included such things as Weathermen violence in the late '60s, identity politics after that, and, more recently, left love of third parties. My argument, however, is that all these things are aspects of the seventy years of disorientation, which made it impossible for the American left to pay appropriate attention to capitalism's changing reality and rendered it unable to develop a coherent political vision or program.

True, as Rothschild says, there have been many lefts in our country. But most of these have been movements of one or another sector of our society fighting for its particular rights. Some, like the civil rights and women's movements, were consistent ,with the universal principle of equality of opportunity, but in the absence of a coherent left, these, like all others, have tended instead to become lobbies for their own "special interests" within the established priorities of corporate America. And therein lies the long detour from a coherent left that espouses universal principles and includes us all.

Jim Weinstein

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