TIME TO END THE MOVEMENT'S FRAGMENTATION
GITLIN, TODD
Time to End the Movement's Fragmentation BY TODD GITLIN The Left's rhetoric may carry a lingering appeal to universals (democracy, justice, equality), but its practical activity is specialized— in...
...For how many more decades...
...Functionally, the Left has limited itself to those who think of themselves as members of one or another tribe...
...It can happily sit in the box seats and amuse itself at the spectacle of Jews and African-Americans, African-Americans and Korean-Americans, Chinese-Americans and Latin Americans knocking each other around...
...The idea of a common past was excoriated by New Left, feminist, black, and other historians as a silencing that worked to the advantage of white males...
...The Marxist fantasy of The Revolution was a move to finesse actual differences into a reconstituted uni-versalism—one fine day, The Revolution/Party/Class would dissolve all difference...
...Where does the symmetry of the rainbow come from...
...They aspired to become not Americans, but women, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Chicanos, gays, lesbians...
...Single authority that descends automatically from on high is oppression...
...Claims of universality were seen as the mask of privilege...
...The freedom to slip out of the melting pot is basic...
...Where there had been Life and Look, there emerged Runner's World and Savvy...
...They lost their desire to speak with one voice...
...That is what it has instead of a largeness of vision...
...Markets fragmented...
...On campuses and in the common culture, the rallying cry is "diversity"—of faculty, students, cultures...
...Instead of thinking together about limits to the market as a principle of economic organization, we have in effect ceded economic thinking to the Right...
...After twenty years of caucusing, we know where the gulfs are...
...They preferred color to bleach, whole wheat and rye to white bread...
...Time to End the Movement's Fragmentation BY TODD GITLIN The Left's rhetoric may carry a lingering appeal to universals (democracy, justice, equality), but its practical activity is specialized— in the domestic sphere as pro-choice, pro-spending for AIDS treatment and research, pro-affirmative action, pro-homeless aid, anti-censorship, anti-development...
...As a result, a marvelous political opportunity has been squandered...
...His latest book is "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage...
...So the emergence of difference and the proliferation of identities— of ethnic caucuses and hyphenations—was and remains defensible...
...Apart from sectarian groups awaiting the latest incarnation of The Revolution, politics on the Left shows a tendency to devolve into lists...
...America today, along with its Left, suffers from an exaltation of difference—as if commonality were not also a value...
...Many of the upwellings of that decade were generalizations of an impulse toward the protection and sanctification of difference...
...They wanted to find roots, not nondescript Americanness...
...Even Establishment institutions lost confidence in their ability to speak in the name of universal needs...
...If there seemed in the late 1960s to be one big movement, it was largely because there was one big war...
...we ought to be looking for the bridges...
...I do not know what a Left—or America-would look like if it sought to transcend or honor the differences of its constituencies...
...and in the international arena as pro-rainforest, anti-Salvadoran military aid, pro-statehood for Palestine, pro-Sandinista...
...On what common ground do we meet to cooperate...
...Millions, then tens of millions of Americans were looking for some self-definition close to home...
...The question is: Does the Left want to stand for something other than an aggregation of interest groups...
...And if not, are we willing to cede national power to a Right that has no ambivalence about authority...
...Todd Gitlin is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...This essay originally appeared in somewhat longer form in Tikkun magazine...
...That fantasy had a pathos that derived from its nostalgic attempt to square the circle...
...Just what do we mean when we speak of living multi-culturally...
...The scatter of specialized movements is one legacy of the 1960s...
...Why...
...The balkanization of American society, as of the Left, has its affirmative side, just as Nineteenth Century nationalism did...
...While the Left brandishes the rainbow or the quilt, the Right wraps itself in the flag of "common culture...
...What was happening instead was that the liberation impulse, ignited by blacks, was becoming generalized...
...This fact was disguised by the exigencies of the Vietnam war...
...Or the stitches of the quilt...
...Ethnicity and gender became badges of pride...
...I am saying that we— from all our preoccupations—ought to be asking these questions...
...Meanwhile, instead of federating to take advantage of the Cold War thaw by organizing for drastic cuts in the military budget to the benefit of all minorities as well as the working poor, the various Lefts have been preoccupied with their distinctive and sometimes competing—dare I say parochial?—concerns...
...I hasten to add that the idea of multiculturalism has value as well as tremendous appeal, but is undeveloped, incomplete...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
