Two Views

...but obviously is not, and should never be, the sole agent of intervention: the work needs to be divided and shared...

...We remember communist idealism all too well, because so many people on the left were seduced by it and became apologists for a murderous and tyrannical regime...

...We should be advocates of a division of labor among states, in defense of human rights and democratic politics...

...The left must be internationalist, which requires a certain moral-political stance first at the state level, then at the non-state level...

...you don't have to go to war to have enemies...

...This means that other countries have to recognize their own responsibilities...

...I put this first because the idea of an egalitarian politics without a base among industrial and service workers is an illusion— a common illusion among leftist defenders of "difference," but an illusion nonetheless...

...Right now, the European left is mostly committed to irresponsibility...

...So let's start there...

...If we are politically weaker, as we obviously are, it is not because we are fewer, but because of two long-term trends: first, the demobilization of the labor movement and the decline of the unions (liberals and leftists have paid too little attention to this...

...ACLU types...

...I am more concerned about, and feel more confident talking about, the kind of left that we need and don't have right now...

...We need to oppose the neoliberal economic order, but without setting ourselves against economic growth and globalization...

...But the sixties left no organizational residue, and we no longer can have any illusions about ideological coherence...

...And we should be defenders of schools that are integrated across the lines of class and race...

...It won't be easy to maintain moral clarity here and do everything else that the left needs to do, but that's what the times require if we are to maintain our rightful place in the political world, if we are to deserve not to vanish...

...There is a left reflex that says the United States is hopelessly corrupt, and its power should never be used...

...we think of them as thugs, which many of them were, but without young idealists they would never have seized power in Germany...

...If the Democrats can win with a strong liberal message, that would he great...

...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent and author, most recently, of Politics and Passion...

...The data are analyzed in some detail by David Plotke in the Summer 2006 issue of Dissent, and his piece is sharp and insightful but profoundly discouraging...

...It will take time to set the right back as far as we would like it to be, but it's vitally important to begin...

...But the real left, I mean, the left whose members vote Democratic (or should vote Democratic, though too many of them don't) but think of themselves as an independent political force—that left should never be muffled or evasive...

...I mean ideological enmity...

...That is the keystone of any decent welfare system...

...This is a reflex that we need to control...

...The history of humanitarian intervention provides a nice example of what this might mean: it was the Vietnamese who shut down the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia...

...Today we need to be clear about our hostility to religious fundamentalism—in all its versions, but most important, right now, in the form of Islamic radicalism, because this is by far its most threatening form...

...What these words mean is uncertain, but not all that uncertain, and we need to take them seriously...

...mitted to a radical revision of the way the tax system works, so that the burdens of both domestic welfare and an internationalist politics are shared fairly by all our citizens...

...all the people still fighting for civil rights...

...The refusal to rely on American power would be more reasonable if there were other powers that we could rely on...

...But if a muffled and evasive message is what victory requires, so be it...

...that's what I hope for...

...I am less sure about the existence of a politics like that today...

...Well, yes, despite the craziness of the Weatherman and the various neoLeninist sects in the seventies and the pusillanimity of many liberals in the eighties and nineties, I remember or think I remember an oppositional politics that had some weight and integrity...

...Here we have idealistic hatred of everything the Western left stands for (or should stand for...

...But the list coheres, I think—at least, it would be useful to try to establish the coherence and seek commitment across the board...

...But not "sans everything," as if we didn't care about the physical security of our fellow citizens...

...If churches can run daycare programs with federal money, why can't unions, neighborhood associations, and co-ops do the same...

...I am not going to talk about the Democratic Party's left...

...But the Bush administration has used this fact, has used the cover of war and terror, to push the country hard right on domestic issues...

...But after that we need to be a lot more inventive than the left has been in the past in designing the administration of welfare programs...

...The left we need would be strongly prolabor and committed to rebuilding the union movement...

...it was the Indians who stopped the reign of terror in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh...

...Did we ever have it—in my or your adult life...

...WHEN WE TURN to global politics, however, we will have a much harder time reaching agreement...

...If the left vanishes as a moral-political force, it will happen because we turn out to be incapable of intelligent enmity...

...The United States took the lead in Kosovo, DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 87 THE VANISHING AMERICAN LEFT...

...it was the Tanzanians who overthrew the murderous government of Idi Amin...

...We have to make the case that the physical security of our fellow citizens can be defended without torture, without a vast expansion of executive power, without illegal wiretapping, without the denial of human and civil rights to detainees, without the harassment of aliens and immigrants...

...We should aim at higher levels of participation in "helping" activities and mutual aid and a greater role for civil society...

...Ever since September 11, 2001, the really difficult political questions have had to do with global politics...

...Sometimes it is true that "all politics is local," but often there is Western state and corporate complicity in the patterns, and we must speak clearly when that is so, and work for radical change...

...We should, obviously, be the advocates of comprehensive national health insurance...

...But there aren't, and so we have to make judgments about when U.S...

...But I am not a political sociologist...

...Finally, and perhaps this is the most difficult thing, we need to recognize that although we have opponents at home, with whom we are engaged in democratic debate and competition, we have enemies abroad, with whom we are engaged in a much fiercer kind of conflict...

...there are many other ways to support friends and comrades around the world...

...Every international brigade doesn't have to be a military force...

...It isn't enough to point to Guantanamo and the Patriot Act and shout "fascism...

...The standard enemies of the left are all the people, East and West, North and South, who have a vested interest in economic inequality, in the gender hierarchy and in the authoritarian rule of oligarchs and plutocrats...

...power should, and when it should not, be used...

...We may not remember the idealism of the Nazis...

...88 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...

...feminists...

...We are critics of many aspects of our domestic society and of U.S...

...And yet there are people on the left who insist that the dangers posed by this hatred are exaggerated (or even invented by right-wing politicians) or who make excuses for it, invoking cultural difference or imperialist oppression— as if our enemies were (secretly: it would have to be secret) advocates of multiculturalism and national liberation...

...The enthusiasm of many African American clergy for Bush's "faith-based" welfare initiative should have alerted us to the need for our own version of a decentralized system...

...the readers of left magazines, and so on, I doubt that our numbers have dropped all that much...

...I can't make educated judgments about our standing and influence in American society...

...So leftists here must be especially clear about the American need for partners, real partners, who do their share of worrying about how the world goes, and who can act with vigor and consistency, sometimes alongside the United States, sometimes independently of it or in opposition to it...

...Still, if you add up all the "fragments"—environmentalists...

...antiwar activists...

...First, as American citizens, we should not adopt the easy anti-Americanism that fuels and disfigures so much of the global left...

...The principles are big ones, like freedom, democracy, and—the defining principle of any left—equality...

...I don't study the latest survey research...

...Difference" (especially religious difference) should mostly be accommodated in after-school and weekend classes, but we can live with head scarves and yarmulkes— we don't have to be Jacobin secularists...

...Perhaps the most important contribution the left can make would be to expose the complex patterns of politics and finance that make for grinding poverty, rampant disease, and governmental failure in the developing (or not developing) countries...

...We should share a commitment to a set of principles, even if we disagree sharply about how best to represent those principles in the "real world...

...The problem is that too many of these commitments are defended by single-issue groups that don't take much of an interest in the other items on the list...

...We need to insist that the dangers of domestic terrorism can be forcefully addressed (let's admit that we need some forcefulness here) within the constraints of constitutional democracy...

...But the left can provide volunteers, resources, political defense, ideological reinforcement...

...And, for all our failings, we could have been a force for good in Rwanda and could still be such a force in Darfur...

...My views about the Democratic Party are very simple: I want it to win, because any Democratic victory would be a setback for the far right...

...What's been vanishing in this country over the last years is a left that doesn't deserve to vanish...

...and second, the mobilization of evangelical Christians, who were largely withdrawn and politically passive back in the sixties (and also, though we never noticed it, bitter and resentful...

...Public education has to have a central role in any left program—and it has to be funded in a way that reflects its centrality...

...All this is probably not controversial, or it is controversial only at the margins...

...multiculturalists of all sorts (well, of some sorts...

...Americans active in global civil society in organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders...

...Back then, there were still some illusions about ideological coherence and perhaps some sense that we were actually building organizations...

...What would a left be like that had commitments like that...

...We should have a redistributive program with teeth in it, which means that we are cornTHE VANISHING AMERICAN LEFT...

...foreign policy, but we also know that our country can be and has been a force for good—in the Second World War, to take the obvious example, but also, in my view, in the founding of the UN, in the rebuilding of Europe, in Korea, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in the defeat of communism, and in the first Iraq War...

...We should be the defenders of a secular curriculum, with strong intellectual content, imaginatively taught, by teachers who are respected and decently paid...

...There will be many times when state support for democratic dissidents abroad, or for some fledgling human rights, or feminist, or environmentalist movement in the third world isn't possible or isn't wanted...

...It is doing the best it can, I guess, 86 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 given poll data that strongly suggest that if it prevails, the party will lose the next presidential election...

...The stakes are higher here, because the issues reach to war and peace, life and death around the world...

...We should have a clear position or, because we are an argumentative lot, a range of positions that have a strong family resemblance...

...But internationalist commitments must also be expressed in the work of parties, unions, associations of all sorts, in global civil society...

...The so-called "war" against terrorism is mostly police work, and we need to think seriously about rules of engagement for the police...

...That we actually make an effort to do this, and that we do it only on behalf of men and women who are committed to freedom, equality, and democracy (and refuse to support illiberal movements just because they are anti-American)— that is the true test of leftist internationalism...

...BUT OUR MOST dangerous enemies right now are people who defend inequality, hierarchy and authoritarianism idealistically, with ideological fervor and organizational discipline...

...here we have fanatical zeal, cruel intolerance, a cult of death, a passionate commitment to the subordination of women, vicious anti-Semitism, and a pervasive hostility to liberalism and democracy...