Leave the Left Out of It
‘The Left’ is like Keyser Soze, the legendary antagonist in The Usual Suspects around whom the entire story revolves but who (caution: spoiler!) doesn’t exist.
That’s not true. Of course the Left exists. They were your professors in college. But the Left that has been spoken of on a daily basis since Barack Obama began appointing moderates to his cabinet is, at best, a misnomer. What is really meant by ‘the Left’ is ‘liberals’. But liberals are NOT the Left.
Contrary to what one is led to believe about them, based on all the current speculation about growing left-wing dissatisfaction with Obama’s new and markedly centrist team of advisors, the Left isn’t one bit surprised and really doesn’t care.
The Left knew all along that Barack Obama was a Clintonian democrat who maybe harbored some hard-edged thoughts about race and class in America, but for the most part doesn’t approach existing political processes and institutions as a problem. As a liberal, Obama isn’t interested in overturning the system but in legitimately participating in it.
This is what was either naive or cynical about the conservative smear strategy, which tried to paint Obama as radical, fringe, socialist, and so on and so on. Everyone who knows him knows that he’s a run of the mill liberal, not a radical, and I doubt that anyone on the Left voted for Obama thinking he would start the revolution.
The only real surprise so far is that no one on the Left believed that Obama would make any significant gestures towards curbing the dominant role that laissez-faire principles play in American life. That he IS going to do that, and the extent to which he may be able to do that, is a surprise, and entirely the serendipitous result of the economic recession and the urgent need to do something about it.
The problem with the way the political spectrum is represented in popular discourse is that, by casting liberals as ‘the Left’, it tends to excludes more radical and challenging perspectives from the conversation. They’re so far off the map that we don’t even bother including them within the topography of political perspectives and debate.
So be it. The radical Left in this country is, let’s face it, fine with that, regardless of how much they talk about wanting to change the world. The one thing they really do NOT want to change, even if they won’t admit it, is that they are VERY comfortable with their excluded position. Because, only from an excluded or silenced place in popular discourse can they derive the benefit of operating outside the orbit of the political and intellectual status quo, and speak TO the status quo as sources of sagacity.
So, the radical Left and the center Right have struck something like a bargain: ignore the Left, or call someone else by that name, whatever it takes, so long as the mainstream of political thought continues to be regulated by the normal limits of the market and its adjunct, the state.
That way, the Left can hold onto its ‘radical’ place outside the sphere of realistic change, because to work within it – to work within the realm of policy, legislation, and so forth – would be inimical to the concept of radical critique. Radical critique is, in its essence, a critique of the discourses that define what counts as change, and of the systems that delimit what changes are imaginable and possible, as opposed to progressive politics, which does not question the system but seeks to work within it to achieve it aims.
The left isn’t grumbling about Obama’s centrist team. They’re not even spending much time celebrating the windfall opportunity to nationalize finance, the car industry, health care or other things. The Left is, and will always be, more occupied with trying to theorize this current crisis as an inevitable consequence of the direction of late capitalism, trying to theorize the new post-racial politics of race that Obama seems to have successfully ushered in, trying to articulate better than we have so far the linkages between American consumerism and its impacts, via the recession, on developing economies around the globe.
The Left has bigger fish to fry and isn’t losing sleep over the lost opportunity to pick a center-left cabinet member over a center-right cabinet member. They all look alike from the vantage point of the Left.
So, when speculating about who’s disappointed in Obama and why, let’s be more specific by calling them liberals and progressives, but leave the Left out of it. They prefer it that way.
Stumble It!
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