Re: The Horowitz Affair, or Culture Wars Part II

["schulte-baeuminghaus" <cresscourt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alan,

Yours is a valuable reminder of what has happened in many countries
that nominally boast a powerful "left."
If the abandonment of the constituency of the left - and the
willingness, indeed, of that constituency to have itself abandoned -
has been nearly total in Britain, it has also been very nearly total
in, for example, Australia.
It is always difficult to assess how far claims to affection for
left-wing movements are genuine or are rooted in personal ambition
offering career opportunities and a route to political power.
The former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU),
Bob Hawke, who became Labor Prime Minister in 1983, walked, talked and
looked like a leftie but his policies stamped him in the slapstick,
meretricious mould of a Thatcher and Reagan.
The man who, as Treasurer, largely ruled the Hawke menagerie and
ultimately pushed Hawke out to become Prime Minister himself, was an
even better example contradicting the belief that, if it walks like a
duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
Paul Keating had solid leftist credentials. He came from an authentic
working-class area of Sydney. He was said to have knelt at the feet of
the famous - or infamous - Jack Lang who, as Premier of New South
Wales in the 1930s, repudiated on payment of "colonial" debts to
Britain. He was sacked by the Governor - a Brit, called Sir Philip
Game, probably a stalwart of the British Colonial Office.
Lang was too left for the Labor Party - even the Labor Party of Curtin
and Chifley during and after the War - but he won a seat in the
Federal Parliament as a representative of "Lang Labor."
While it was possible to disagree with his policies, Jack Lang could
be respected for the firmness of his leftist beliefs and, if Keating
had indeed accepted him as a leftist guru, a certain radicalism might
have been expected from the acolyte when he became PM.
It didn't happen. Banking reform meant giving the banks the freedom
they dreamed about. Managing the economy meant levels of unemployment
that hadn't been endured since the 1930s. Australian industry was
transferred overseas - as one Australian recently put it, "Australian
industry was gutted." Australian jobs went with it. Even our
agriculture - potentially one of the most efficient in thw world - was
brought ot its knees. When there was one of the most severe droughts
in our history, Keating suggested that that was one of the
vicissistudes to be expected against which the farmers should
safeguard. Given his Irish ancestry, Keating might have recalled the
reliance of the British Government on the theories of Mlthus when the
potato blight hit Ireland.
But the market was king. Globalisation ruled. Keep you eye on the
bottom line.
Keating was swept from office in a landslide in 1996. Some might have
expected that would return the Australian Labor Party to its
working-class roots, its working-class constituency, its working-class
policies. Admittedly, the working class is very different from what it
was in the more radical days of left-wing political movements; but the
lower-income, more vulnerable sectors - employed and unemployed, male
and female - the battlers - are still there and they need vigorous
representation.
Since 1996, there's been no change, except possibly in the direction
of inanition. The leader of the Labor Party and Opposition is a decent
West Australian, the son of the man who took John Curtin's seat when,
as Prime Minister, Curtin died in the last days of the War. Curtin was
a leftie who saw "The Light on the Hill" and urged his Party towards
it. Beazley the Elder was of similar though more modest persuasion.
There's no sign that Beazley the Younger genuinely sees any "Light on
the Hill" or, if he does, that he has the courage to lead his people
towards it.
There are of course some genuine lefties hidden away somewhere in the
Australian political spectrum but they're not getting much oxygen in
the polluted atmosphere of an ageing Thatcherism, Reaganism,
globalisation, "Washington consensus," neo-liberalism, market economy,
free trade, and all the other buzz-words that dominate political,
social and economic "thinking."
One result has been the emergence of One Nation, a party with an
unlikely leader which is very nearly the only refuge for the
disaffected. (Some suggest the Greens are also a refuge but they don't
even pretend to address what are the main concerns of what used to be
the constitutency of the left.)
Where we are headed for, in the light of all this, whether in Britain,
Australia or elsewhere, is a mystery. Obviously, there are rugged,
challenging, probably highly unstable times ahead for the American
economy  and others all around the world. The Bush menagerie and their
equivalents elsewhere show no promise that they can come even close to
meeting the challenge.
Will something of the old left emerge from its paralysis to rescue us?
Or will we have to rely on some shambolic party like One Nation to
show us the way out of the wood - or lead us into a deeper darkness
from which there'll be no rescue except through catastrophe?


James Cumes




----------
>From: Alan Thomas Harrison <Alan.Thomas.Harrison@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: Ted Goertzel <goertzel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: The Horowitz Affair, or Culture Wars Part II
>Date: Fri, Mar 30, 2001, 7:46 pm
>

>
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:24:53 -0500 Ted Goertzel
> <goertzel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I know David Horowitz slightly, and I have read a couple of his books.
> There is
>> some truth to his criticism of the 60s movements and of PC movements on
> campus
>> today, although it is exaggerated and one-sided.  Everything you say
> about his
>> motivations is probably true.  However, calling him a "former so-called
>> 'left-winger'" shows the benefit of hindsight - at the time no one on the
> left
>> questioned that he was a left-winger.
>
> I'm sure that there's a whole thread on PSN - and maybe one or more
> doctoral theses! - on the phenomenon of the "ex-leftie".
>
> Ted Goertzel is dead right about hindsight. Certainly many people who have
> been accepted as unequivocally left-wing have subsequently moved
> rightwards. At present, the Guardian (itself a journal of vapidly liberal
> stripe) is running a feature in its Diary column purporting to be a
> competition to find the Turncoat of the Year - the prize being a coat with
> thirty appliqueed pieces of silver, and the competitors various ex-lefties
> who have become Blairites, seeking to embarrass them with their erstwhile
> leftist views counterposed with their current rightwing positions.
>
> More seriously, in the British context at least, a person with a leftist
> reputation acquired many years ago can be used as a cover for the actions
> of the right. For example, the former shop steward and now deputy prime
> minister, John Prescott, played a role as Blair's useful idiot in getting
> rid of Labour's commitment to the common ownership of the means of
> production, distribution and exchange. I resigned from the Labour Party of
> my own volition in protest at the expulsion of Dave Nellist, engineered by
> the ex-leftie Neil Kinnock, but some of my friends in my home town,
> Walsall, were kicked out in a process which used Clare Short as "left
> cover".
>
> What is particularly interesting, and worrying, is the presence among the
> Blairite ex-lefties of a number of women who gained their leftist
> reputation in large measure on the basis of their perceived feminism, such
> as Clare Short, Dawn Primarolo (the former Bennite who sits for what is
> effectively his old seat) and Harriet Harman. At least two of those - Short
> and Harman - represent seats where the working-class votes with its bum -
> keeping it on the settee on voting day, and voting rates barely exceed 50%.
> Another interesting case is Joan Ruddock, whose official CV completely
> omits the office which gained her her left reputation and original adoption
> as a Labour candidate - her presidency of the Campaign for Nuclear
> Disarmament.
>
> Alan Harrison
> Brunel University, UK
> cbstath@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>