Two Views

...The working-class communities once nourished by jobs in nearby factories and mills are unraveling, weakened from within by the influence of television, and from without by suburbanization and dispersal...

...so the final tally is not yet in...

...Inconveniences notwithstanding, the strikers had the sympathy of a majority of the city's public...

...The immigrant community may be momentarily wary, but it is unreasonable to think that, having felt their own muscle, immigrants will now retreat...

...Together with the allies they have cultivated on the populist right, especially among groups antagonized by the 1960s advances made by African Americans and women, they have taken over the Republican Party, which now controls all branches of the national government...

...Reflecting this, movement commentators talk of networks more than solidarities, of spokes and hubs rather than organizations...

...I DON'T THINK the left is vanishing, and neither do most of the people with whom I talk and work...

...On May 1, 2006, the message was brought home by the "day without immigrants" in which, for instance, 90 percent of the drivers in the Los Angeles—Long Beach harbor, America's busiest container port, stayed home...

...They have succeeded in rolling back many of the gains won during the New Deal and Great Society eras, including protections for organized labor and the social welfare measures that provided a measure of security for larger swaths of the population...

...The variegated contemporary left has not yet settled on a comparably electrifying idea...

...And it was deeply flawed in practice by the fact that the Democratic Party coalition that emerged in the 1930s, although it had come to include much of the working class, nevertheless was tethered to and dependent on the one-party white South, the bastion of racial apartheid and conservative policies...

...It is not only the antiwar movement and its different parts to which we should look for the contemporary American left...

...Still, the awesome possibilities are there in the complex and fragile organization of a global political economy that depends on the widespread cooperation of ordinary people everywhere...

...Moreover, immigrants have also been the leading group in important unionization and strike efforts, in transportation, construction, and health care...

...Todd Gitlin, who also spoke, drew upon his article in the Fall 2006 issue of Dissent, 'Democratic Dilemmas: The Party and the Movements," to which we refer the reader...

...It is the first surges of the movement that are over...

...She is the author, with the late Richard Cloward, of Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, and Why Americans Don't Vote...

...It was flawed in principle by a tacit assumption that white men were the main subjects of democratic politics, with the consequence that the aspirations of women, blacks, and other minorities tended to be slighted or ignored...

...My guess is that what is meant is not really "the left" in all of its variegated, diffuse, and often vigorous manifestations, but rather a particular constellation of the left—the organizations, ideas, and policy prescriptions that emerged in the United States during the New Deal years and lasted until the late 1960s...

...Even now the military is reeling because demands for troops increase while recruitment becomes more difficult, a dilemma that movement counter-recruitment activities could turn into a crisis...

...This meant that elections were determined by whether the economic circumstances of the voters had improved under the incumbent, or whether they could be expected to improve more under the challenger...

...Instead, it is penetrated, 84 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 and its messages diluted, by the influence of big money and by the compromises promoted by the Democratic Leadership Council...

...Just as important, that left, and the public policies it supported, changed American political culture...

...In principle the left is always internationalist, and the left of the biggest imperial power in the world should be internationalist...

...For just this reason, I doubt that the antiwar movement is over...

...Still, I understand the left as a constellation of political forces dedicated to greater social equality—of material goods, of respect, of cultural recognition, and of political access and influence...

...precedented...

...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 85...

...Moreover, the business agenda includes the goal of stripping government of the capacity to perform these functions over the longer term, by corrupting and discrediting its regulatory apparatus, by driving up public debt levels, and by dismantling progressive taxation...

...The mainstream media are made captive not only by corporate takeovers, but by a campaign of intimidation launched by right-wing media figures who cry "liberal" or "traitorous" at will...

...THE OLD New Deal Left, and indeed the labor movements spawned across the globe by industrial capitalism, were galvanized by a dream of power through the mass strike...

...Pocketbook politics may not sound like an Enlightenment ideal, but it was a vast and democratic improvement over campaigns dominated by patronage and tribal politics...

...I'll call that development the New Deal Left, and it had many accomplishments to its credit...

...Meanwhile, the public is subjected to theatrical displays of military machismo, accompanied by terror alerts about the dangers that lurk beyond our borders...

...ALL THIS IS TRUE, and I suppose it is what is meant by the vanishing American left...

...It builds looser collectivities, rooted not so much in huge factories, mills, and mines as in communities and smaller workplaces...

...But this left shows signs of actually developing an internationalist practice...

...Consistently, the business-populist right alliance, and the propaganda apparatus of government and media that it controls, is promulgating an antidemocratic culture...

...Very important to that left were the unions and a Democratic Party that had been enlarged during the 1930s so that it included not only bigcity fiefdoms and the white one-party South but also broad support from urban and workingclass voters in the North...

...It succeeded in making unions a legitimate partner in industrial relations, so that organized workers made large gains in wages, their jobs became more secure, and, as their standard of living rose, they also gained respect and standing in the larger culture...

...Recall that during the Vietnam War, it was the rise of antiwar protests in the army that so alarmed military leaders...

...Or think of the great 2005 strike by New York City transit workers, most of them African American or Latino...

...The living-wage campaigns launched by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and some unions are an example, as is the rapid growth of community organizations in the past few years...

...They shut down the city's subways during the peak Christmas shopping season of 2005, sending ripples of terror through the ranks of New York City's big merchandisers...

...Of course, the New Deal Left was also deeply flawed...

...On the one side, the business interest groups that lost their footing and influence in the 1930s, and then were rattled again by the black freedom movement of the DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 83 THE VANISHING AMERICAN LEFT...

...Only later could we see that its glory days were still to come...

...The images of workers marching together rank on rank, the echoes of labor and civil rights songs, the tales of heroic confrontations, all this seems to belong to the past...

...But what important political movement from the bottom has not become the focus of resentment and organized opposition...

...On the other side, the political bulwarks of the New Deal–Great Society era are weakened, in part simply by ongoing changes in the American economy...

...Last spring's immigrant demonstrations and strikes, in Chicago, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Detroit, Denver, Dallas, and elsewhere, were historically unTHE VANISHING AMERICAN LEFT...

...So, when I look around, I see many hopeful currents of activism...

...Nevertheless, the first major public sector strike since the air traffic controllers' debacle of 1981 did not lose, either...

...1960s, are not only resurgent, but in command...

...After all, imagine 1960, when the bus boycotts and freedom rides and lunch counter sit-ins in the South were over, and nothing seemed to be happening...

...As these examples suggest, the contemporary left is in many ways different from the New Deal Left...

...To be sure, the right is also mobilizing and doing its best to stir up resentment against immigrants for electoral advantage, with staged congressional hearings and theatrical proposals to fortify the border with Mexico...

...It features racial and ethnic minorities and women, where once the left featured white working-class men...

...In the place of a pocketbook politics that holds government responsible for the economic well-being of ordinary people, the policies demanded by business and religious fundamentalists are justified by invocations of market law or God's law...

...Only in retrospect do we appreciate the scale of the movement and recognize its disruptive force...

...The mass-production industries are shrinking, and the unions that emerged from them are on the ropes...

...Flaws and limits notwithstanding, it is easy to become nostalgic for this left because it did indeed make the United States a more equal and inclusive society, and it is vanishing...

...Although the contemporary left thus seems very local, it also has spectacular reach in part because it relies on the Internet...

...Understood in this way, there are many lefts...

...We may look back on these years to see not the vanishing left of the New Deal but the birth of a new era of left power made possible by the institutions of a complex global society...

...And this left is internationalist...

...The Democratic Party, once it had been shorn of its southern wing in punishment for caving in to civil rights demands, might indeed have become something like a working-class party...

...Immigrants are internationalist by virtue of their transnational circumstance and the transnational organizations to which this has given rise...

...The New Deal Left could also take partial credit for the development of the American welfare state, beginning with the Social Security Act of 1935 and extending through the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1966...

...Organized workers could shut it down, and because they could, they had the power to transform society...

...So I puzzled over the theme of this panel...

...The eventual outcome has been complicated by factionalism in the union and by the role of the courts, which have imposed huge penalties on the union...

...It was easy then to think that the black freedom movement had subsided...

...FRANCES Fox PATEN is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the current president of the American Sociological Association...

...Their potential was signaled by the "Justice for Janitors" campaign in 1990 , and since then, they have turned Los Angeles into a union city...

...Where the issues and allegiances that dominated American electoral campaigns had once been mainly about the tribal appeals of race, ethnicity, religion, and section, now political analysts thought that American electoral outcomes were determined by something they called "pocketbook politics...

...Even organized labor is becoming more internationalist...

...Reflecting the pressure of these groups, universities and state pension systems are moving to disinvest from companies that do business in Sudan...

...But so is the antiwar and student left, as evidenced by the anti-apartheid and anti-sweatshop campaigns and the almost intuitive empathy of antiwar and student left groups with the extraordinary movements that have swept across the global south, especially Latin America...

...If the New Deal Left saw the working class as its vanguard and the workplace as its context for organizing, other lefts identify different vanguards, organize in different institutional contexts, and advance different ideas and programs...

...Moreover, there is some evidence that antiwar agitation may be spreading to the troops...

...To be sure, it is always hard to assess the significance of contemporary events, and it is especially hard to assess ongoing political movements that do not emerge and grow in one smooth surge, but rather through scattered and episodic events...

...Her most recent book is Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America...

...EDS...