Re: Gary Trudeau, Iraq and Nader

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox wrote:

> ...the bulk of those who can be reached by the left (in fact
> the bulk of those who can also participate in reaching more) call
> themselves liberals. Of perhaps 40 or so core people in left activity in
> Bloomington/Normal, probably all but four or five would call themselves
> liberals. And of the few hundred who at this time we could get out for a
> demo almost all would also call themselves liberals.
>
> In other words, even from a communist perpsective, most of our comrades
> are not marxists or even radicals; they all call themselves liberals.
>
(snip)

> How would one define "liberal" as I have used it in this post?
----------------------------
Carrol has raised an interesting point.

Ironically, the great majority of people who are less politically informed
than the contributors to this list don't seem to have much difficulty
defining who is a liberal and who isn't. A fierce debate is currently raging
between self-styled liberals and conservatives on a whole range of issues--
not only in the US, but throughout Western society, and perhaps much of the
rest of the world, as well. These include such matters as the role of
religion in public life, sexual freedom, pornography, abortion, civil
liberties, trade unions, social welfare, public education, racial
discrimination, immigration, homosexuality, government regulation,
progressive taxation, global warming, US foreign policy, and others which
I've undoubtedly missed in my haste to assemble a list.

If you summarize the respective and often sharply counterposed views of the
contending sides on each of these issues the differing programmes and
defining characteristics of both liberalism and conservatism at the dawn of
the 21st century become apparent pretty quickly.

There is one issue which used to be front and centre which is no longer
widely debated: public ownership of the means of production, distribution,
and exchange. From the latter part of the 19th century to the latter part of
the 20th, this was THE central political debate, and it is what divided
socialists from liberals, who had meanwhile moved away from laissez faire
and accepted state intervention in defence of capitalism. The conservatives
were the marginalized ones. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
progressive abandonment of social ownership by China and other developing
nations, the decline of the Western industrial proletariat, and the
associated taming of the mass social democratic and Marxist parties, shifted
the centre of global political gravity to the right and took that debate out
of the public arena in astonishingly short order.

This may explain why the left-wing generation represented on this list, the
first one to lack any access to the masses in more than a century, has felt
so isolated and adrift over the past decade or more -- a mood Carrol has
captured very well in his post. In the absence of any serious socialist
alternative, the socialist intelligensia, such as remains, is of necessity
forced to support one or another liberal, pro-capitalist party if it wishes
to remain politically engaged on a mass level. In the US, in the current
election, this has led most left intellectuals to the Democratic party; a
minority, represented most prominently on this list by Yoshie and Louis,
support the left-liberal Greens, at least the faction of it which is the
most implacably hostile to the Democrats.

Though each side  claims to be acting on behalf of socialist ideals they
still espouse, in practice they nonetheless are campaigning for one or the
other of the two liberal parties contesting the election against the
conservative Republicans around the range of issues described above. The
Greens, it is true, are the more assertive of the two in advancing the
liberal agenda -- especially concerning Iraq, where Nader has called for the
phased withdrawal of US troops -- but this only reflects their relative
distance from power. It's perhaps worth recalling, in this connection, that
Joshka Fisher was once the German  Peter Camejo, and this is not meant as a
criticism of either.

In any case, like it or not, whatever our conception of an ideal society may
be and however we may like to describe ourselves to ourselves and others, in
practice you might say we are all liberals now. Less by choice, it would
seem, than that history has not moved in our direction. No longer do we
campaign for public ownership and state planning, but have joined the
liberals, inside and outside the electoral arena, against the conservatives
on the remaining issues we have in common. Some of us recognize the new
clothes we are wearing, others do not or cannot. But perhaps they should
cast a sideways glance in the mirror when their temperatures begin to rise
and they pump up that old Phil Ochs 45 to full volume in their war against
the liberals.

Marv Gandall