replies to his critics
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
Two brief anecdotes: (1) For two months I eagerly awaited the Fall Dissent, pleased as could be about the excellent symposium that my essay spurred. When it arrived I immediately phoned my...
...This way of thinking about politics cannot help but be disconcerting to those schooled in more traditionally "left" ways of thinking about "making history...
...Dionne, Jr., but I don't think that Jay Rosen's "civic journalism project" or James Fallows's book do anything more than register this problem as one of journalistic ethics...
...Perhaps it is, if one wants to use vulgar and disparaging language to describe what is in fact simply a different perspective on what politics can accomplish...
...Wade Rathke and Joel Rogers's essay in Dissent ("A Strategy for Labor," Fall 1996) makes clear how ambitious a program the revival of the labor movement would require...
...Is there a way to do this democratically...
...I agree...
...The best part of Gitlin's argument is his appeal for common ground and for an ethic of self-restraint...
...I also don't think that my respondents take the full measure of the new forms of media that dominate our culture...
...From the vantage point of American society at large it is a sectarian debate...
...How many have heard of Dissent...
...I don't believe in the feasibility of the kind of grand strategizing that Rogers practices...
...In his "Editor's Page," Michael Walzer seconds my sense of grimness about current realities but notes, correctly, that "what follows from that is less clear," and that my own "prescriptions hardly seem adequate to the situation" I describe...
...There are good reasons to be skeptical, indeed pessimistic, on this score, even if the results of the November elections had been more favorable for the Democrats...
...In some ways a great deal does not turn on this issue, either for gays or for the broader heterosexual population unconcerned about sexual identity politics...
...they know that it helped to weaken Clinton and to sidetrack his progressive economic agenda...
...I expect at least a few of them to know of the magazine, since one of the students is a very liberal Democratic activist and another is a leftist who participated in Union Summer...
...The premise of neoprogressive arguments is that American society is undergoing profound and disturbing change, that existing welfare state arrangements are under serious stress, and that an ambitious program of interlocking reforms—like those put forth by Michael Lind and Joel Rogers—is necessary...
...This observation was in many ways the launching point for my original essay, and it will also be the launching point for my reflections here...
...But that is my point...
...the presumption is that some form of class-based left is both possible and desirable...
...Many of my interlocutors rightly insist that national politics is important, that the 1996 presidential and congressional elections were important, that federal legislative reforms are important, that the AFL-CIO is important, and that efforts to create a national left electoral politics are important...
...Nor do I share his idea of the intellectual as someone who is to be judged according to his or her "usefulness" in offering "new techniques" of political organizing and public policy formation...
...Yet in this narrative it is usually the non-class groups—gays, women, blacks—who are told to cool down...
...My prescriptions— if you want to call them that, for they are less prescriptions than models of a certain kind of practice—are not adequate to the situation...
...What I questioned was the overall prospect of a progressive revival, of a broad-based movement for fundamental socioeconomic reform...
...Mark Levinson offered a clever parody of my argument, but the fact is that the kind of radical worker dialogue he invokes against me takes place all too rarely in the real world, however 112 • DISSENT Arguments frequently it occurs in his imagination...
...When it arrived I immediately phoned my uncle, a staunch, lifelong trade unionist and a genuine New York liberal...
...Our debate is an important one, with serious implications, but it is not a debate about which most Americans care...
...I know...
...Is this "attitude adjustment...
...Yet I really do believe that the current period is qualitatively different from previous eras, and that large-scale agendas of mass mobilization and coherent social reform are deeply problematic...
...Rogers asks what I've got "to offer," and he sneeringly points out that the answer is very little...
...are right to say that these so-called identity issues often become hyper-inflated...
...For me this does not mean the end of politics, but it does mean the end of certain ways of thinking about and doing politics...
...The logic of their argument seems to be something like this: the left/liberals/Democrats need to organize around other, more authentic and majoritarian issues, like class, because focusing on gay rights only alienates workers and strengthens conservatives...
...I urged him...
...Now, Gitlin et al...
...A recent issue of Dollars and Sense reported that for the union movement to be restored to its postwar height (of one-third of workers represented), it would have to organize one million new workers a year for the next twenty years—a daunting task, made even more daunting by the fact that such a movement would also have to address serious new problems associated with the mobility of capital and the declining demand for labor...
...he replied...
...Because of my pessimism I suggest that the most promising responses to the challenges of economic dislocation and cultural fragmentation are partial ones...
...But this is a debate that should not be prematurely foreclosed, and I thank my critics for helping to open it up in the pages of Dissent...
...Perhaps...
...If he ever comes to Bloomington I might even consider joining...
...So-called "postmodern" writers, among others, have called attention to this issue, and some of my interlocutors would do well to take their writings more seriously...
...I take no comfort in this fact, but my own efforts to make sense of things have led me to conclude that there is a profound disjuncture between the problems that are thrown up by our society—problems of "our own making"—and the resources at our disposal for their solution...
...Not one...
...But what if these groups are acting out of a deep history of marginalization and anger...
...That is exactly the tragic bind in which I think we find ourselves...
...This is a sociological reality, and it has more to do with the forms than the substance of mass communication, which is why, contrary to Sean Wilentz, it is perfectly consistent with conservatives hating the media for its "liberal elitism...
...Why begin my response to critics on such a weighty subject as the future of the left in America with such trivial anecdotes...
...This is a serious problem for neoprogressives...
...He really imagines himself to be an organic intellectual of the left...
...What's that...
...he offers intricate and theoretically sophisticated— if unrealistic—analyses of structural conditions and political possibilities, and writes with great confidence about what is to be done...
...I ask the class if any of them has ever heard of Dissent...
...I don't imagine that history turns on what I write, and I think those of us who write for magazines like Dissent ought to have a more sober and realistic sense of the scope of our audience and the potential of our ideas to effect change in this recalcitrant world of ours...
...What I am pointing to goes much deeper, to the mass-mediated form of our culture at large...
...Finally, I think that some of my respondents fail to take the full measure of the current fragmentation of "left" constituencies...
...It is true, as Wilentz and Dionne protest, that some neoprogressives recognize this issue—but their treatment of it often seems crudely functionalist, as if this fragmentation could be reversed in some simple way...
...These things do matter...
...I could be wrong, and there is nothing in my argument to suggest that other voices need to be silenced...
...I have placed the symposium on "The Poverty of Progressivism" on reserve...
...It is simply unfair and reductive to accuse me of seeing ordinary Americans as morons...
...Wishing that it isn't so won't change things, nor will declaring a politics of a unified left bring one about...
...114 • DISSENT...
...For these reasons and others I am skeptical about a progressive revival, and I believe that our politics will be characterized by stasis rather than by "progress...
...Because it is important to retain a certain perspective...
...The Kennedy-Kassebaum health care legislation made a difference, as did the increase in the minimum wage...
...My essay offered a number of reasons why...
...I agree with neoprogressives about the challenges, but I don't believe that there is reason to think that the necessary response will be forthcoming...
...If Joel Rogers wants to organize the New Party, then all power to him...
...I'm one of them, and / am disconcerted...
...Pick up a copy of Dissent...
...But how do you enforce the idea that gays should silence their concerns in the name of left unity...
...What if their identity issues are as real to them as class issues are to Gitlin, Dionne, Rogers, and Levinson...
...Take a simple issue—gays in the military...
...The point is that the kind of rational discourse that the left requires is anathema to the mass media and has been marginalized in our society, a point made not simply by Baudrillard but by Jiirgen Habermas and many other social theorists as well...
...I voted for the Clinton/ Gore ticket, and for Jonathan Weinzapfel in his unsuccessful race to defeat the ultraconservative Gingrichite John Hostettler...
...But I don't believe there is any reason to invest such an effort with the profound significance that many on the left imagine it might have...
...2) I am currently teaching a senior undergraduate seminar at Indiana University on the decline of liberalism in America...
...Nothing in my essay is inconsistent with support for such efforts...
...He surveys the scene as if it were a chess board...
...I could not agree more...
...Another way of putting this is to say that gays should shut up, at least until after "progressive" or "left" unity has been achieved...
...What's missing from the Dissent symposium is any voicing of those issues...
...When I ask how many have heard of the New Republic or the American Prospect, the Public Interest or Policy Review, the answer is still none...
...What you have then is a fractured and acrimonious public sphere, in which the appeal to "progressive common ground" is likely to ring hollow...
...To be fair, my original essay itself speaks only to the question of its possibility...
...Those gays who believe that their struggle is the true emancipatory struggle, and that other struggles are secondary, are as narrowminded as those leftists who say this about class...
...But the "new social movements" that have emerged in the past three decades raise equally important questions about the ethical appeal of a classbased social democratic revival, and in many WINTER • 1997 • 113 Arguments ways call it into question...
...A reinvigorated AFL-CIO under the leadership of John J. Sweeney will play an important role in national politics...
...I greatly admire E.J...
...Dionne, Lind, Todd Gitlin, and others see that an issue like this can take on enormous symbolic importance...
...One is the crisis of the labor movement...
...I don't share Rogers's confidence about political agency...
...What if the cultural revolution of the sixties was like a Pandora's box, and the new perspectives released by opening it cannot be contained...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
