The Feminist Saving Remnant

...Diggins says, correctly, that "How American women of the '60s generation came to liberate themselves and later enter the academy is one of the best success stories of the 20th century...

...as a new intellectual class with a profoundly radical view of the nature of history and reality...

...He might have added that feminism is perhaps the only movement in which the academy and the extra-academic world are in continual and fruitful contact...

...Neither does it have anything to say about the fact that African-Americans who are not safely inside the middle class have practically no chance of getting a nondrug-related job or of being protected from police brutality...

...So I think Diggins is right in declaring that the Academic Left is "obsessed with the omnipresence of power...

...And they are quite often enforced, even if not so often as we like to think...

...Diggins offers us a crisp, lucid account of the three earlier Lefts...

...The nonfeminist portion of the Academic Left simply does not count...

...These developments may endanger not only all that feminists have achieved in the last two decades, but all that the various American Lefts Diggins describes have achieved in the last nine...

...He sets forth a very useful and enlightening division of this class into four generational cohorts: "the Lyrical Left" (typified by Max Eastman), "the Old Left" (typified by Irving Howe), "the New Left" (the one visible at the 1968 Democratic National Convention), and the contemporary "Academic Left" (the one visible only in certain departments of our colleges and universities...

...Developments reminiscent of Weimar...

...I find it hard to imagine that what goes on in the academy under the headings of "theory" or "cultural studies" will someday have nonacademic reverberations...

...I am not blaming feminists for lacking an agenda that bears on those facts...

...Further, Luce Irigary's suggestion that feminism will be to the next century what socialism was to this one may well be right...

...I am merely noting that the steady decline in real family income, plus the growing desperation in the inner cities, is rapidly creating as dangerous and volatile a political climate as our country has ever faced...

...Ninety years ago it would have been inconceivable that black men should be served, gracefully and cheerfully, by white waitresses in Atlanta restaurants...

...Still, he makes an important point when he says, "Instead of carrying on the futility of a participatory democracy with the underclass, radicalized women went straight for what one called 'the power grab.' " And again when he says, "another anomaly of the contemporary Left is that its feminist wing had found a home within the system...

...The Academic Left refuses to admit that the pursuit of those values by the earlier Lefts actually accomplished a lot, particularly in the areas of social justice and tolerance...

...the Left that Allan Bloom, William Bennett and Dinesh d'Souza have attacked...

...He does not shed much light on this success, though, and he does not attempt to foresee what the next generation of feminists may try for...

...John Patrick Diggins has trimmed his subject down to almost-manageable size by focusing on 20th-century American intellectuals who have described themselves as "Leftist...

...It is natural to give the American Left some of the credit for these positive changes...

...Or that up until the late '70s the gap between rich and poor would continue to narrow...

...the intellectuals' claim to have detected the root of all social injustice in private ownership of the means of production is no longer believable...

...Certainly the revisionist treatments of American history that Diggins discusses at length are too remote from any political scenarios or agendas to be of consequence...

...Given the collapse of the noncapitalist economies, "socialism" is no longer a word to conjure with...

...My own hunch is that future historians will look back on the last two decades as a period in which the only struggle for social justice that made any headway was feminism...

...There is no real break between Women's Studies programs and the mass demonstrations for abortion rights, nor between the two and the activities in the thousands of shelters and support groups that have been cobbled together over the last two decades in response to the needs of battered women and victims of sexual assault...

...But the last three chapters, on the Left of the '70s and '80s, are as uneasy and awkward as most attempts to see the present with the eyes of the future...

...author, "Objectivity, Relativism and Truth" and "Essays on Heidegger and Others" There is much more tolerance, and much more social justice, in the United States today than at the beginning of this century...

...If I am right in contending that feminism is virtually the only substantial Leftist initiative we have left, however, things are pretty grim...

...surely the worst setback for the prospects of a color-blind America since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr...

...taking us from the alliance between the Wobblies and the first generation of Greenwich Village poets and painters to the alliance between the angry draft-age antiwar students and the San Francisco "beats...

...Indeed, the first six chapters of the book (a revised version of his The American Left in the Twentieth Century, published in 1973) present a convincing and coherent narrative...

...Yet "the American Left" is supposed to cover all these people...

...It would also have been inconceivable that candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination should publicly court leaders of organized labor, that one Justice of the Supreme Court should be black and another female, and that homosexual candidates for public office should step out of the closet...

...Yet feminism gets a scant eight pages in Diggins' book, as opposed to a whole chapter on revisionist histories of American society and another on theory (de-construction, Foucault, Antonio Gram-sci, and all that...

...I am not sure that without this "wing" the academy, or the country, would have any Left...

...For feminism has little to say about the fact that the Republicans have spent 12 years looting the country, and that the blue-collar voters have apparently turned their backs on liberal Democrats once and for all...

...But everyone who tries to define "the American Left" runs into trouble...

...He tells how it felt to be a member of each, what they accomplished, and how their reach exceeded their grasp...

...He wants "to see the Left as it saw itself...

...In 1900 nobody would have predicted that at our end of the century half the population would go on to post-secondary education...

...they have quite enough on their plate...

...As long as it refuses to recognize that American history is a story of progress made by insisting on the validity and importance of Enlightenment values, the Academic Left's impotence will match its self-indulgence...

...As long as it remains scornfully unpatriotic, and devoted to wholesale critique as opposed to retail reform, the sole accomplishment of this Left will be to provide privileged sanctuaries for ferninists...

...Reviewed by Richard Rorty University Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia...

...Although I admire Jacques Derrida and Foucault (not La-can), I have never been able to see them as offering much useful advice for the promotion of tolerance and social justice...

...It is not clear what the black preachers in small Southern towns who put their lives on the line as members of the Civil Rights Movement have to do with the celebrated "old Partisan Review crowd...

...are likely to make the Academic Left's debates over the definitions of "ideology" and "hegemony" sound sillier than they already do...

...He is also right in arguing that any Left which abandons the values of the Enlightenment is giving up on democratic politics altogether...

...It is not clear what the Wobblies have to do with the current leadership of the UAW, what the striking coal miners of the '30s, standing off the goons with squirrel rifles, have to do with the students who occupied college presidents' offices in the '60s, nor what Sacco and Vanzetti have to do with present-day radical lesbians who write books about Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan...

...I am writing this review the day after the acquittal of Rodney King's assailants...

...steadily increasing middle-class insecurity combined with a steadily increasing willingness to scapegoat racial groups (not just African-Americans but Asian-Americans as well...

...laws the original Progressive Movement hardly dared dream of proposing...

...The single Leftist position of similar scope retaining any plausibility is the feminist claim that an end to the subordination of women might change our sense of the possibilities open to modern society...

...Such exceptional continuity between the academy and what we academics refer to as "the real world" suggests that Diggins' term "feminist wing" is misleading...

...it has] no theory of freedom...

...Or that all sorts of laws designed to protect the weak against the strong would be on the books...