Intellectuals in politics: Replies

...The Wall Street Journal regards me as a far-out irrationalist, one more postmodernist corrupter of the youth...

...That was a dumb definition...

...If we put that canard to one side, it may be that all that Ross and I really disagree about is the relative efficacy of one or another means to achieve the ends we share...

...This claim seems to me quite false...

...In particular, it has no ideas about the political problem posed by the desertion of the Democrats by their traditional working-class constituencies (the desertion discussed in books like the Edsalls' Chain Reaction) — a desertion that has, in the United States, immensely increased the ability of the strong to do what they like to the weak...

...I think that lots of people—especially factory workers in the North and farmers in the South who used to vote Democratic and now vote Republican—have great difficulty recognizing what is going on...

...But they did not think that the culture they shared with the FourthofJuly orators and with Martin Luther King, Jr., a culture that insists on patriotic celebration of America as a land of increasing freedom and equality, was simply an instrument by which "capitalism reproduces itself...

...I do not think leftists should teach their students that "phallogocentrism" or "humanism" has to go before things can get better...

...The further fact that the Old Left said little about the oppression of women, gays, and lesbians is enough to suggest to many younger academics that the Old Left was only a "left" in quotation marks...

...However, I think it important to note that, as David Bromwich says in a forthcoming book, in the triad of "race, class and gender" it is "class" that is currently losing out...

...We should, I imagine, vote for most of each other's bills if we both got elected to Congress, and against the Wall Street Journal's bills...

...I quite agree that in order to find out what much of the electorate has on its minds these days one must turn to "what Ice Cube is rapping about, or whatever new kind of cyborg Arnold Schwartzenegger is impersonating," rather than to "the complete works of John Stuart Mill or even John Dewey...

...Smith Goes to Washington, but I doubt that analysis of the work of the MTV artists or of Schwarzenegger by professors of English will help realize this possibility...

...Although most long-time readers of Dissent will probably agree with me on this point, most of my younger leftist colleagues in the academy will probably agree with Ross...

...SPRING • 1992 • 267...

...if either did not exist, he would have to be invented by the other...

...Ross's claim that "statistics, like poll-taking, are one of the lowest forms of political consciousness" seems to me just a way of claiming that the sort of thing philosophy professors and English professors are good at is more socially useful than the sort of thing sociology professors and political science professors are good at...

...The inutility of Ross's left is suggested by its disdainful refusal to think in terms of drafting and passing bills...

...I would like Democratic politicians, Newsweek, and leftist academics to din those statistics into the electorate's ears...

...This strategy is characteristic of what Ross calls "liberal pragmatism" and "the liberal imagination...

...The Plastic People, Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Stewart did not need this sort of assist to play the role they did, and it is not clear to me why contemporary figures should need it...

...The Old Leftists were quite aware that culture mattered...

...The distinction that Ross draws in No Respect between "the liberal imagination" of Trilling, SPRING • 1992 • 265 Howe, Macdonald, and others and the "liberatory imagination" of himself and his allies (like his parallel contrast between "liberal pragmatism" and "participatory democracy") is in part a distinction between those who favor what he calls "the language of clarity and plainspeak" —the language appropriate for argument over the details of legislation—and those who do not...

...For this implies that topics that only philosophically sophisticated intellectuals can grasp are politically more urgent than topics that the average voter can grasp...

...In contrast, Ross does seem to think that discussion of the cultural topics about which he writes will do quite a lot of relatively short-term political good...

...Thompson's remark that the Althusserians thought themselves "the first white Marxists" to arrive on British soil...

...But even someone prepared to argue (with support from the Vietnamese and the Salvadorans, though none from the Hungarians and the Czechs) that the cold war did more harm than good ought to acknowledge that some of the cold warriors, some of the anticommunist academic left, did a lot to help equalize the life chances of Americans...

...I cannot find any answer to such questions in Ross's writings...

...There is a fairly sharp generational difference here...

...Neither has much relevance to the possibility of social progress in this country...

...I imagine that Ross sees Hollinger's and Gitlin's remarks as more of "the dirty campaign of PC-bashing...

...There he suggests that those who refused to put "Western freedoms" in quotation marks during the cold war cannot count as "really" left at all...

...Ross says that that language "is all too often used as a means of excluding complex or radical insights, and of denying such insights entry into the public discourse of politics...

...So, I protest, is the United States...

...The utility of this left is illustrated by its role in drafting and passing Lyndon Johnson's Great Society bills...

...Despite the interest of the topics that Ross discusses in No Respect, I find it hard to see what audience he envisages for that book, or what political service he thinks it performs...

...I should have written "between the strong and the weak" so as to embrace issues of race and gender as well as of class within the scope of "real politics...

...Ross thinks that "no one in this country has much difficulty recognizing that the rich soak the poor," and that the absence of an "immediate and unstoppable clamor for the redistribution of wealth" is a matter of culture and ideology...

...But the question is: once one finds out that those are the sorts of things that it has on its mind, what does one do about it...

...There has been a busy and useful left in the North American academy for most of this century...

...As I see it, Senator Helms and Ice Cube take in each other's washing...

...They thought of it as a vehicle that had enabled American leftist intellectuals, decade after decade, to circulate increasingly radical ideas among the electorate...

...The Old Left was a much more useful left than the one of which Ross is a representative, and it is a better model for a future left...

...Yet I suspect that Ross and I have mostly the same "positions vis-à-vis issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and ecology" — the issues that, he says, make up cultural politics...

...I should also concede to Ross that the English department left has been a lot better at directing the public's attention to some things than the Old Left was...

...As a San Franciscan friend remarked to me, the audacious and liberated culture of Berkeley —a culture that has been in place for twenty years, and within which Ross is read with relish and admiration—seems to have done no good at all for the people living across the border in Oakland...

...My definition could be read as suggesting that, for example, the HillThomas confrontation was not "real" politics...

...Let me concede that Ross is quite right to criticize me for defining "real politics" as politics "likely to redeem the balance of power between the rich and the poor...

...Britain, Thompson protested, "is an old socialist country...

...It is also the case that these attitudes trickled down pretty steadily from college faculties to college graduates to noncollege graduates during the decades prior to the moment when, according to Ross, the left began to enjoy its "first real foothold in the North American academy...

...My cultural conservatism amounts to no more than my opinion that the best way to get these positions adopted by the electorate is to argue for them in the old "plainspeak" ways, through statistics and anecdotes about selfishness and greed, praise for tolerance and equality, and reminders of the ways in which America has overcome inequality in the past...

...The new generation does not count the presence of such people as John R. Commons, Lionel Trilling, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Sidney Hook, and Daniel Bell in the North American academy as a leftist presence...

...he thinks of himself as likely to "make a little history...

...It is tempting to think, in Hegelian fashion, that later is usually better and that youth must be served...

...There seems every reason to expect that liberated English departments will remain picturesque enclaves...

...People like Dewey and Trilling used it to enrich American public discourse with complex and radical insights...

...That would, indeed, be a silly suggestion...

...Perhaps the English department left believes that an appreciation of the audacity of popular culture, once inculcated among college students who take English courses, will eventually trickle down to, and diffuse itself within, the consciousness of the general public...

...They would sympathize with the tone of Ross's discussion of what he calls "the Old Left," in the last chapter of his No Respect...

...Ross, on the other hand, says that I am a "cultural conservative...

...I see them as plausible estimates of probable utility...

...They are not...

...How does one use this knowledge of popular culture to change government and laws...

...I think that Ross and his colleagues are right when they point out the audacity and potential liberating effect of much of popular culture, though wrong in passing over the viciousness of other parts of that culture (for example, the scene in Conan the Barbarian in which Schwartzenegger snaps the homosexual's spine, or Ice Cube's rap about burning down Korean-owned shops...

...The English department left is acting as if it has a lot better things to do—a lot higher forms of political consciousness to have—than thinking about that problem...

...It can be so used, but the Old Left did not use it that way...

...I think they were successfully duped by Reagan...

...But I have no idea how they propose to redirect this audacity to purposes of social change...

...Perhaps one day we may look back on MTV as Havel now looks back on the Plastic People of the Universe, and on Schwarzenegger as we now look back on Jimmy Stewart in Mr...

...Our skill in practicing the hermeneutics of suspicion and our flair for detecting ambiguity and latent contradiction are talents with relatively limited application...

...The English department left has lots of thoughts about race and gender, but almost no ideas about class...

...Whatever may be true about the appreciation of popular culture, it is at least the case that feminist attitudes, antiracist attitudes, and antihomophobic attitudes will so trickle...

...How can one employ this knowledge in agitating for refunding Head Start or in generating popular support for a reversal of Bowers v. Hardwick...

...I do not expect "all political work to translate instantly into benefits for the poor," but I do expect leftists to keep in touch with the part of popular culture that is made up of debates about which candidate to vote for, which side to come down on in referenda, which organizations and popular initiatives to join...

...I agree with David Hollinger's remark that one of the contributions of the newer left has been to enable professors, whose mild guilt about the comfort and security of their own lives once led them into extra-academic political activity, to say, "Sorry, I gave at the office...

...But I would not claim that discussion of the latter, merely philosophical, topics will do much political good (except in very long-term, indirect, trickle-down ways...

...But it is one thing to say that what college students learn in humanities courses matters in long-term ways and another thing to say that the attention of Senator Helms, the Wall Street Journal, and so on to the English department left shows that this is a pretty effective and important left...

...The whole idea of a universal adult franchise is based on the assumption that they are not...

...I cannot see why he thinks this...

...Todd Gitlin seems to have a good point when he says that, although the Republicans seem likely to control the White House forever, our cleverest and most vocal leftists continue to be concerned about who controls the English department...

...This is like saying that the Filthy Speech Movement at Berkeley mattered a lot more than the Free Speech 266 • DISSENT Movement because it got a lot more attention from the media and from right-wing politicians...

...But until that problem is solved, the strong and the selfish will, in this country, steadily increase their power...

...In particular, without the power base that feminism has constructed within the academy, especially within English departments, the fury over the Senate's treatment of Hill would have been much less intense...

...We humanities types are not useless, but we are not nearly as useful as Ross thinks...

...Nor, to be sure, does discussion of the topics of my own books...

...Ross has said that "the liberal imagination . . . exercises and defends autonomous rights and privileges already achieved and possessed," as if prior to the development of the "liberatory" imagination no American leftists ever worked to change anything...

...There is something to that belief...

...Discussion of such topics does little to keep us intellectuals in touch with the possibilities open for social change...

...I think that statistics about income distribution, per-pupil expenditure in school districts, and so on are indispensable ways of getting them to change their minds...

...It is true that the Old Left ignored a lot of injustices and inequalities, but it is also true that it struggled, with good effect, against a lot of other injustices and inequalities...

...Ross and I will never agree, I imagine, about whether the cold war was, on balance, a good war...

...So I suspect that Ross and his friends, who believe themselves to be conducting cultural politics, may find that they have been engaged only in academic politics...

...I think this temptation should be resisted...