Articles

The Need for a Critical Left

By Eli Zaretsky
Tikkun
November-October 2004

Why is it that in the United States today the Right Wing has developed a politics with a spiritual dimension; a politics that regularly connects the public with the private; a politics animated by a moral vision, a strong sense of community, a powerful and trusted leadership, and an awareness of its own redemptive role—everything, in short which the Tikkun Community's "Core Vision" urges upon the Left? In particular, in the present situation—I write this in the final months of the presidential election—why is a completely failed president able to run for office with a sense of moral rectitude and self-certainty, while his opponent, the advocate of entirely reasonable policies, seems, as I write, to wallow in confusion, opportunism and a sense of inevitable doom?

To discover how the Right Wing has been able to monopolize the essential symbols of American life—the flag, honor, and family—we must return to the history of the American Left. In this brief note, I want to situate the Left in relation to the presidency and political parties.

The American presidency is unique in the world in the way in which it encapsulates a sense of national unity and purpose. Many other nations, especially in Europe, are held together by a common race or culture, even a common language. The United States, by contrast, is made up of many races, cultures, beliefs, languages, and the like. In fact, in the United States, the presidency, along with the Constitution and the Supreme Court, constitutes the principal public locus of charismatic meaning—the only connection with the sacred and the universal, as opposed to the profane and the particularistic. No American Left worthy of the name can develop unless it maintains a consistent, ongoing, and complex relationship to the presidency, one that is sensitive to the role of leadership and moral principle in the country as a whole.

What then is a political party, at least in the United States, the country that invented the form? A political party is an association of different, often divergent, interests brought together as a means of guiding and modifying the trajectory of capitalism—leading it into certain directions, taking advantage of it for particular sectors or interests (for example, farmers, industrialists, or the West) and, in general, tempering its quasi-natural force. Compared to the two major political parties, the Left, at least since the 1840s or so, has been a much smaller social and, especially, intellectual movement, able to conceptualize philosophically and historically the nature of the capitalist transformation of its time, and to approach it critically. In other words, the Left examines capitalism from the standpoint of such critical ideals as justice and freedom, rather than from the point of view of immediate self-interest.

The really great presidents in American history—those who were able to give the country its sense of connection to enduring moral and spiritual values—were, of course, party leaders and party builders. However, what gave these presidents their moral force and coherence was not their parties but rather the existence of a critical Left, one that kept the presidency "honest," so to speak, by constantly forcing it to reorient itself from its immediate and particularistic concerns to the larger issues that are always at stake. Let me illustrate this with two examples: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Abraham Lincoln presided over the beginnings of the first great change in American history—its transformation into an engine of large-scale commercial and industrial capitalism between the 1850s or so and the 1920s. America became an industrial, urban, and global nation, and the Republican Party (which Lincoln largely created), won most of the elections, and so, for the most part, guided this shift. The Democratic Party, by contrast, was the party of the outs, the "losers," the disgruntled—the Party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Lincoln had to bring together interests as diverse as Southern Whigs, newly emancipated slaves, Northern industrialists, and land-grabbing Westerners. He had to create a strong national government as opposed to the state-centered system that had protected the South, and he and his successors had to free up a market system (as opposed to the feudal plantation system based on slavery). But what gave Lincoln's presidency its charisma and power was its relationship to the abolitionists who constantly redirected attention back to the moral and spiritual stakes of slavery and then to the continuation of black oppression.

One way to grasp this point is to describe the exchange between Ulysses S. Grant and Otto von Bismark that occurred in 1876 when then ex-President Grant visited Germany: "What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people," said Bismark, adding "but it had to be done—you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany." "Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery," answered the General. "I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment," said the Prince. "In the beginning, yes," Grant responded, "but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle." Ultimately, when war broke out, it was the abolitionists who gave it its meaning.

My second example is Franklin Roosevelt. The "New Deal Coalition," which he created, presided over the transformation of the United States into a mass production, "Fordist" society. It created the modern welfare state including such "entitlements" as social security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare; it supported an enormously successful trade union movement, one that transformed the lives of the American working class; it integrated immigrants into a new, "ethnically" pluralist polity; it put the force of government behind conservation and rural development; it helped forge the great "popular front" that defeated fascism; and it sponsored the "second reconstruction" of the Civil Rights movement. Roosevelt, like Lincoln, was a master politician who had to play bankers against farmers, internationalists against autarchic economists, Southerners against Westerners, Churchill against Stalin. But what gave this enormous transformation of American society its coherence and meaning were the Social-Democrats and Communists who raised so-called "economic" issues to the moral and at times spiritual level.

We often hear it said today that the Democratic Party should return to the self-interested "bread and butter" issues that supposedly defined it during its heady days. As I write, John Kerry is being urged to change the subject from foreign policy to the "pocketbook" issues in which, polls supposedly show, Democrats have the advantage. This, however, fundamentally misconstrues the matter. The reason these issues were so important in defining the Democratic Party in the 1930s through the 1960s is that they were part of a coherent narrative, one that was culturally conservative perhaps (focused on family, child rearing, and the protection of old age) but that made moral sense and that connected the individual with some sense of cosmic order. These were not simply "pocketbook" issues.

These examples should shed some light on our present dilemmas. The paradox of our time has its roots in the transformation of our society that began in the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, in contrast to nineteenth-century "free labor" capitalism and twentieth-century mass-production capitalism, the transformation of the United States into a consumerist, post-Fordist, globalized economy has been led by representatives of the Right. Sadly, pathetically, even tragically, if we seek a successor to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, we will find him in Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, the Left has developed with very little relation to the presidency or to political parties. On the contrary, it has developed largely as a cultural Left, which understands culture as an essentially separate sphere. This understanding, as I have argued elsewhere, is itself rooted in capitalist development, but no Left has yet turned this connection into a matter of public awareness.

Let me be clear: the great social movements that were born in the 1960s and 1970s—the women's movement; gay liberation; black, Hispanic, Asian and other forms of national or "racial" consciousness—these movements necessarily and inevitably have pursued their own interests with very little attention to the genuinely global transformation that has occurred alongside them. In other words, blacks will pay close attention to Africa (at times) and American feminists will address the oppression of women in Asia or Africa, but this is not the same as an attempt to understand the global totality, as abolitionists understood the global totality when they posed the question as one of freedom versus aristocracy, or as Communists understood the global totality when they framed the question as one of rational planning and cooperation as opposed to the unbridled market.

Let me stop there—just where a reasonable analysis should start. Of course, I do not have an easy solution. For reasons which were partly matters of structural transformation and partly matters of will, the Left and the world have moved in two different directions since the 1960s. The disastrous present situation—whoever wins the election—is the result. The path toward radical hope requires that we understand the roots of our despair.

Eli Zaretsky is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004) and Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (1976; rev.ed. 1986). He is currently writing a book entitled Five Essays on Psychoanalysis.

Copyright 2004 Tikkun Magazine. For more information on Tikkun, visit http://www.tikkun.org.

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