Toward a Politics of Democratic Ambivalence

...But the other extreme is now ascendent, insisting only on particularities, proclaiming tirelessly (and tiresomely) the fragmented nature of reality...

...To be on the left is not simply to declare one's preference for the current parties of the left, but also to take inspiration from a theoretical corpus that includes the writings of Marx, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci...

...To say that one is on the left is to say that one wishes to continue this legacy, and this is surely something worth saying...

...Where he calls for a "politics of democratic ambivalence," I uphold a "left politics," which, as I explained it, means favoring equalityfriendly democracy—a society in which it is inequalities that must be justified...

...In my view the principal value of Dissent is that it continues to keep such questioning alive, sustaining a fruitful tension between the "left" identity that is its historical legacy, and the openmindedness, come what may, that its very title proclaims...

...And more traditional forms of labor movement building and left activism retain their importance...

...Such a politics of ambivalence is a reasonable politics that might still incorporate much that Cohen seeks to defend...

...Take Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" thesis, cited by Isaac...

...Tyranny of the majority is a genuine issue, even if it has never been the general peril suggested by some...

...It's the sort of left represented by Dissent magazine when, in recent years, it offered Gitlin and Young and Walzer and Phillips and Cohen, among others, advancing some pretty diverse contentions about multiculturalism, all speaking from "the left...

...But I don't believe that these issues can have the same ethical, political, and, indeed, metaphysical centrality that they have had for the left since the time of the French Revolution...

...Robespierre, however, identified a republic with democracy in his famous "Terror and Virtue" speech of February 1794, thus helping democracy's foes to identify it with terror.* In the nineteenth century democracy increasingly took on more positive connotations, often in struggles to extend the franchise and secure diverse rights for all citizens...

...For or against...

...In some ways I feel as if my values are still on the left, but in other ways I'm not so sure...

...The Gulf War raised a number of issues that do not easily fit within the standard left/right framework...

...That such approaches have contributed to the fragmentation of the left, especially in the United States, goes without saying...

...As for the future of these parties, only time will tell...

...I'd need to supply that sort of platform in order to respond to Isaac's repeated questioning: Is there a "left" position on this and this and that...

...I still believe that the labor movement is a necessary precondition of social justice and democracy...

...For most delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, "democracy" meant a government and public life subject to unruly popular whims, with the persistent threat of mob rule...

...One is as the vitality of a "left" partisan identification...

...Is this not itself a "binary" reduction—"left" versus "ambivalence...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 89...

...However deep the political space, one has to begin somewhere in order to move in it, Where has America's political space actually moved in recent years—after twelve years of Reagan-Bush and now with Lott-GingrichClinton...

...Palmer, examined how "democracy" was deployed as an epithet in the 1790s, he found it comparable to "communism" at the time he was writing, the early 1950s...

...Yet in the twentieth century we were treated by Leninists/Stalinists to "democratic dictator*R.R...

...Well, I certainly don't believe the world has ever been "whole" (whatever that might mean), yet I am also not inclined to a politics of ontological tantrum...

...Yet things are more complicated than this...

...Obviously, this was wrong, sometimes with pretty serious consequences...

...Indeed, it is the business of pledging one's ideological allegiance that I mean to call into question...

...Cohen would not deny that the political universe has changed, but he feels comfortable reaffirming that he still "stands" for the same things, in the same place, "on the left...

...So nationalization of the means of production resolves all problems, especially those having nothing to do with production...

...Cohen has offered some very good reasons why he is still "left," and they all point to a single important fact—that the left is not dead and has not historically been superseded...

...It was then, generally, a word of opprobrium...

...I grew up in a trade union household...

...or with "republics" or—heavens!—with "people...

...But if the alternative to abstract universalism is "democratic ambivalence," then perhaps we'd best give up on politics altogether...

...Happy day...

...Happy "liberal democratic" day...

...One can be an egalitarian without proposing that a single mold be imposed on all circumstances...

...Had Cohen written an essay on "What I Think," then such issues would have received more attention...

...To be more precise, he is saying that there are a range of positions on a left/ right continuum, and that he wishes to stake out a specific position—a democratic left one—along this line...

...Isaac's argument turns "the left" into a historical straw figure— undifferentiated, always in the "same place," divorced from and resistant to any meaningful pluralism, and thus easily contrasted with open-minded, postmodern ambivalence...

...If Walzer is right, then it becomes difficult to give a single meaning to the claim that one is "for equality," because equality now becomes a complex project, in which questions of socioeconomic distribution lose their ethical priority, and in which other discourses—ethical, aesthetic, religious—necessarily come into play...

...But in an essay about "Why I'm Still 'Left' " they have no place...

...At the end of history we have the dictatorship of global bond markets...

...This often materialized in the conviction that one idea takes care of everything...

...The vitality of the left can be understood in a number of ways...

...Consider Cohen's narrative of what it means to be "left," and what concerns are left out of this narrative: • nationality, immigration, and human rights • race and ethnicity • gender and sexuality • religion and questions of "ultimate meaning" • the difficulties of sustaining democratic participation given the forces of commercialization and trivialization that pervade the culture of advanced industrial societies...

...This is a complex tradition, but there can be no doubt that it has made important contributions to democratic politics and social justice, and that these contributions should be honored rather than repudiated (the failures of this tradition should equally be remembered, and repudiated rather than honored...

...Not because such problems don't concern him, but because many of them lie outside of the "left" political project, and indeed the standard left/right continuum...

...Gitlin has argued that the left has lost its moorings and its faith in a "universal" project, and he attributes this in large part to the intellectual and cultural excesses of the sixties, excesses that include multiculturalism and postmodernism...

...This said, I do think that Isaac raises a real problem in the history of the left: the tendency to abstract universalism...

...I tried to point this out in "Why I'm Still `Left.' " If liberal democracy means that citizens should, through politics, have a real say over the basic conditions of their lives, then it is threatened by the "economic correctness" of our times—that is, by neoliberal economics, with its market mysticism and its sanctification of the pursuit of profit regardless of any social and political (that is, human) consequences...

...If we're not going to give up, then we need to speak a language of democratic imagination and social possibilities...

...JEFFREY C. ISAAC is a generous and provocative critic, yet I fear our disagreement may perplex some readers...

...Everyone else must "adjust...

...To BE "left," for me, is, among other things, to try to save the idea of democracy from this type of thinking...

...Sure, concepts like "left" are always neater than the messiness of the world...

...My father permanently lost his job as a Linotype operator when I was thirteen, and I experienced firsthand the injustices of capitalism...

...This is not a question that can be answered with an ideological label...

...My sort of left is not Isaac's reified left, it is pluralistic...

...One can be antiStalinist and anti-McCarthyist at the same time...

...Still, it does seem fair to say that the country's political space, or most of it, has moved far to the right...

...I care deeply about socioeconomic inequality...

...So what am I? Where do I stand...

...To be "left," I argued, is to have an expansive sense of democracy, to call for its extension into social and economic life...

...Among these values equality seems to hold pride of place for Cohen, and his essay centers around those forces, mainly associated with globalization, that are intensifying economic inequality...

...I'm not a disciple of the times...

...and from a political tradition that includes the trade union and syndicalist movements, the Paris Commune, the various socialist, communist, and labor parties, and the forms of social deDISSENT / Winter 1998 83 mocracy that became prominent in the twentieth century...

...Yet he does want to assert that the political conflicts of our time can be reduced to an ideological opposition between "left" and "right...

...Certainly I could present arguments as to what I think would be an appropriate "left position" on many of these issues, although others on the left might have different ideas...

...These discourses do suffer from their own forms of arrogance and intellectual narrowness...

...Across the Atlantic, Edmund Burke protested that "perfect democracy" is "the most shameless thing in the world...

...In the past, as today, some on the left approached change and complexity with analytic and moral sophistication and some with dogma and banality...

...Is there a distinctively "left" perspective on the rights of national minorities, for example, or the plight of refugees, or the right of gay people to marry...

...Instead, let's look a little more closely at where the end of history delivers us...

...Yet there is also too much of importance left out of "the left" for it to define a distinctive political identity appropriate for the political world of today...

...What it means, I think, is that "the left" can only succeed as a participant in a broader and deeper democratic political space that is pluralistic, fractious, and improvisational, a space that is open to questions that lie beyond the standard framework of the left...

...I have treated this primarily as a question of personal commitment, but it is equally a question of political organization...

...If "postmodern" idioms represent one way of acknowledging this, the burgeoning of interest in civil society, also noted in many Dissent essays, especially those by Michael Walzer, speaks to these developments in other ways...

...And yet there are still many who advance spurious arguments to justify extraordinary inequalities, whether these arguments draw on sociobiology or laissez-faire economics...

...Recent social democratic electoral victories in France and Great Britain demonstrate this...

...As he points out, what is at stake is more than terms like "liberal," "socialist," or "left...

...Cohen rejects such a complacent reading of history...

...This sort of question hit home for me during the Gulf War, when it became difficult for me to discern what an authentic "left" position would be, and where the standard left positions in play—anticolonial rhetoric, moralistic denunciation of nationalism, military noninterventionism, along, of course, with a healthy dose of antiZionism—rang hollow...

...Orwell, Silone, Camus, Buber, and Weil...

...What is at stake are important values that have been associated with "the left," especially the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity...

...If I were forced to give a label, I think I would describe myself as a democrat, someone who believes that in our world of plural identities and plural injustices, the most important thing is for citizens to be free to contest and negotiate the terms of their own association...

...Well, I'm also a democrat and, as with "left," I say that without resignation...

...The question before us, he holds, is how, in the face of the inadequacies of liberalism, "do we discipline the processes of globalization on behalf of democratic precepts and (nonmarket) human needs and values...

...Yet a discussion of such concerns is not included in Cohen's powerful account of why he remains "left...

...This imagery is essentially binary...

...Although I believe that this imagery has served liberatory purposes, I don't believe it still can...

...But for me the democratic is more than a qualifier: it is the most important of political values, the value that makes it possible to adjudicate the other values cited above...

...Indeed, such problems are frequently addressed by Dissent...

...Moreover, if we apply Isaac's argument about "left identity" to the history of "democratic identity," we'd be compelled to forswear it too...

...Isaac is right to say that my "narrative" of left concerns leaves out religion and "questions of ultimate meaning," although I find this an odd point for him to make after advocating a politics of ambivalence...

...Hardly a soul among conservatives says so, and I suppose it is because they recognize their advantage...

...He protests that things are more complicated than any single category allows...

...That's why the Founders offered themselves as republicans, with a Roman rather than an Athenian echo...

...I think we must just get on with the impossible though inescapable business of being universals and particulars at once...

...His objections are not to "left values," only to claiming for them a political "space" and then centering one's politics there...

...It also makes sense to me when someone identifies as a specifically "liberal" democrat in order to complicate things...

...His book Democracy in Dark Times was just published by Cornell University Press...

...I note, for example, the Summer 1996 special issue on "Embattled Minorities Around the Globe," in particular Cohen's introduction to that issue...

...None of these complications are registered in Cohen's account of why he is still "left...

...I know that the deepening of political space has complicated my values, freed me up to acknowledge the range of my concerns—as a Jew, as a parent, as a member of the human species, as a congenital nonconformist—and DISSENT / Winter 1998 85 also ethically challenged me in new and disturbing ways...

...it is certainly not only a 88 DISSENT / Winter 1998 matter of economics...

...so I'm "still left...

...Cohen addresses the widespread sense that "left" politics has become outmoded, a sense given powerful expression by Francis Fukuyama's essay on "the end of history," which declared that with the downfall of communism, liberal democracy had proven to be the most progressive form of politics, the final stage in the political evolution of humankind...

...Such a democratic and humane regulation of economic forces constitutes the historical project of the left, and so Cohen argues that, as a supporter of this project, he is "still left...

...Debs, Tawney, and Harrington...

...But I think that it is less these discourses themselves than the political developments they have sought to register that have contributed to the weakening of the left...

...It doesn't at all follow, as Isaac implies, that I think democracy or equality must have homogenous meanings in all domains...

...Modern usages of "democracy" date from about the same time as "left," roughly the late eighteenth century...

...The German Social Democrats, alas, have not yet been "Blair-ized...

...Just when was it comfortable to be "left" in America...

...And those darned French who just ousted a right-wing government—how silly to "still believe in the possibilities of politics—i.e., that sovereign publics can vote for leaders who want to reorder social and political priorities regardless of what global bond markets say...

...It is a point that has frequently been acknowledged in these pages, notably by Todd Gitlin...

...Why is this...

...Sustainable development advocacy, new global labor networks, struggles against environmental racism, and union drives to organize women of color all represent important efforts to join traditionally left concerns to new social movements and concerns...

...Not as a "pledge of ideological allegiance," but because I'm for equal citizenship in a free society, because I identify with people who fought for such goals during the last two centuries...

...He is right when he says that I still identify myself as "left" because of values—most simply, liberty, equality, solidarity...

...Left parties and left critiques still have much to offer to those interested in freedom and justice...

...To be "on the left" is to identify with a robust egalitarianism, to believe that most kinds of inequality are unjustifiable...

...It is captured by Isaac's contrast between his "ambivalence" and what he calls my "binary" left imagery...

...Its meanings have been plural...

...Not with illusions about the current political environment or with utopian delusions...

...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political theory at Indiana University...

...Cohen seeks to defend no party line or official position...

...Or were they "People's Democratic Republics...

...I find it troubling that almost all the voices insisting that "left" and "right" are passé hail from the left...

...The political universe, he warns, has changed...

...I defined left by an ethos that is democratic and humanist, equalityfriendly and inclusive...

...A sense of ambivalence, the recognition of ambiguities, and perception of nuance are vital intellectual qualities...

...Readers may wonder: OK, but Isaac and Cohen are actually on the same side of many matters— they're not quarreling about the respective merits of, say, vibrant trade unionism or gender equality or racial justice—so what's the real substance of their disagreement...

...There is an even deeper sense in which the left remains alive—as a tradition of inquiry and social criticism...

...Democracy" has been expropriated and abused...

...Palmer, "Notes on the Use of the Word 'Democracy,' 1789-1799," Political Science Quarterly, June 1953, p. 208...

...Socialist or liberal or conservative...

...Since Fukuyama draws on Hegel to make his argument —a bit of a joke if you've actually studied Hegel—let me be "still left" by paraphrasing Schiller: one should be a child of one's time, not its disciple...

...What I want to suggest is not that Cohen's "left" position is to be rejected, but that a more ambivalent attitude toward this positioning is more appropriate...

...Left or right...

...That's "democracy" for most contemporary Americans...

...I still bridle at these injustices...

...It is not simply a question of political style or postmodern skepticism about "common ground...

...Those citoyens must learn that "left" and "right" are meaningless...

...One doesn't have to declare oneself a partisan of "multiculturalism" or "postmodernism" to note that these phenomena represent some of the most pressing political problems of our time, and that they mobilize a great deal of moral and political energy, often more energy than the economic problems that concern Cohen, myself, and the typical Dissent reader...

...it doesn't follow that taking a position means that one simplifies everything that is complex...

...I am gripped, instead, by a sense of tragedy in the human condition—a sense sorely lacking on the left, I should note—but no less by the need 86 DISSENT / Winter 1998 to take sides...

...One can, unambivalently, support an alliance with Moscow against Hitler without diluting one's view of Stalinism...

...Although I did not fully agree with what Cohen had to say (Dissent, Winter 1991), I think both he and Michael Walzer raised important issues not typically discussed on the 84 DISSENT / Winter 1998 left...

...There are too many important concerns— communal, parental, associational, religious, aesthetic, ecological, human—that are undreamed of in the "left" philosophy...

...Didn't Cohen argue in "Why I'm Still 'Left' " for a pluralistic left that combines "discrimination and openness in its intellectual conversation," unwed to canons...

...I think there is, first of all, a "metadisagreement" between us, to use a current way of characterizing these things...

...ships" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere...

...I don't agree with Cohen, but neither do I disagree with him...

...Don't get me wrong...

...An ethos—not a party line with identical prescriptions to be applied, one after another, in every situation and place...

...this association is, as I said in my original article, an affront to the memory of millions who identified themselves as "left" yet opposed and were persecuted by Leninist and Stalinist regimes...

...Fukuyama, in his contribution, wrote that we "live in an age when conservative ideas have become dominant" and noted that "if a big idea has been broadly accepted, then the contestation will be over smaller ideas or over personalities...

...But the claim that they have no future is plainly fatuous...

...Yet it is hard for me to see how their arguments were distinctively left at all...

...In any case, who would want to be identified with "democrats" after them...

...While the question of more or less socioeconomic equality surely continues to be pressing, it can no longer serve—if it ever could—to plausibly define the universe of important political concerns...

...This is not a sign of the narrowness of his thinking, but a sign of the narrowness of "left" imagery...

...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent...

...If I'm "still left" today, this is because of where my political values fit—if you can call it fit— in a conservative universe...

...I must acknowledge some bewilderment at Isaac's insistence that my "left identity" can't provide answers to all questions, since he recognizes that my article was on "Why I'm Still 'Left,' " not "My Correct Views about Everything...

...Yet to be on "the left," it seems, requires that this should be the defining political question...

...For myself, I am not sure where I stand...

...It is not because being "left" allows me to remain in a comfortable political space...

...I think dramatic disparities in socioeconomic power and privilege subvert political democracy and weave basic unfairness into the fabric of social life...

...CONTEMPLATE the complexity of these issues, it becomes impossible for me to say just what exactly a "left" view of them is...

...In short, the word "democrat" has a modern story comparable to the word "left...

...And democracy does pose some problems in principle...

...the right knows how successful it has been at resetting the parameters of public discussion...

...Put into practice, such thinking renders political democracy powerless...

...As I see it, the argument between Isaac and myself is not about the value of skepticism, doubt, questioning, or, indeed, of ambivalence, but about ideologies of ambivalence...

...As Cohen notes, the imagery of "the left" derives from the ideological divisions that emerged during the French Revolution, pitting those who supported "progress" against those who supported "reaction...

...And I believe that the current distribution of wealth and power ought to be challenged in the name of egalitarian justice...

...Besides believing in tolerance, I think religion and "ultimate meaning" are best kept far from politics...

...And here is a historical wrinkle about the use of terminology...

...Such discourses as "multiculturalism," "postcolonialism," and "postmodernism" in part represent efforts to understand these phenomena...

...they can also be turned into an ideology (even a sectarian one—look at the "deconstructionists...

...There can be no doubt, as Norberto Bobbio argues in his Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, that the parties of the left are still players to be reckoned with in the liberal democratic game, especially in Europe...

...Remember, as some of them surely did, that Socrates was done in by a lynch mob in the guise of a jury in the first democracy...

...political space, for him, has now become too deep for a term like "left...

...In fact, this ethos stakes out an orientation and a sensibility toward many of the matters that, according to Isaac, are absent from my narrative, say, racial or gender discrimination...

...The label "democratic left" is not inappropriate, insofar as it suggests that many traditionally "left" concerns about socioeconomic equality must be central to democratic politics, that class conflict is a central form of contestation in a capitalist society, and that class privilege ought to be subjected to vigorous challenge...

...Adjectives, when they are modifiers and not appendages, can mean a lot...

...Isaac says that if, finally, he must accept a political tag, this is it...

...the importance of intermediate associations in a democratic society...

...And it has always been complex...

...Rightists, centrists, and ideologists of the "end of ideology" aren't much different...

...The same is true, I would argue, of more recent events in Bosnia...

...it means that I think unmerited power, privilege, or suffering cannot be justified in any of them...

...When one historian, R.R...

...that is, to accentuate the importance of traditional liberal concerns like secure civil liberties...

...At the same time I'm not simply a democrat—I'm a social democrat because my view of democracy is complex...

...On the other hand, it is true that my left position has broader implications...

...It is that these developments either are outside of the horizon of the historic left or cross-cut the left/right continuum in complex ways...

...However, I am not gripped by ambivalence when I think of many primary features of our miserable twentieth century: fascism, genocide, Stalinism, imperialism, for starters...

...Fukuyama proposed that debate between left and right, indeed, contention about all matters of consequence, is safely behind us since the fall of communism revealed liberal democracy, as he perceives it, to be humanity's highest political incarnation, I leave aside the implicit identification of "left" with communist dictatorships (yet again...

...Tony Blair, he commented, evidently with satisfaction, has "openly defended the core of the Thatcherite Revolution...

...I grant the weaknesses of any single descriptive term...

...Nobody used "democracy" to defend the idea of universal suffrage when it was debated in revolutionary France...

...As a descriptive term, it has never been fully adequate to any reality (virtually all contemporary democracies have elites, a reasonable number of them undeserving, in virtually every sphere of life...

...Well, yes, the political universe has changed, but then it always does...

...rOR ALL this, "democrat" is still an honorable word to my mind, a word with which I readily identify...

...Finally, as Cohen points out, the left is alive as an egalitarian ethos that has become ever more precious...

...Several months ago, the Weekly Standard published a symposium in which respondents were charged with explaining the "peculiar" contemporary situation in which conservative ideas "seem to be in the ascendent" while their political representatives—Dole, Major, Juppe—lose elections...

...Few today would deny that "all men are created equal...

...Dissent writers published a number of interesting pieces during this period and, as the magazine itself acknowledged, Dissent was deeply divided about the war...

...But, yes, with social-democratic humanism...

...When people inch away from the word "left" nowadays, they often emDISSENT / Winter 1998 87 brace "democrat" as an alternative...

...This literature underscores the practical and ethical vulnerabilities of welfare-state bureaucratism...

...The world has changed in too many ways for that...

...and the centrality of complex rather than simple equality, that is to say, the irreducibility of questions of justice to a simple scheme of "more" versus "less" equality...