I find that I’m writing way more about politics here on the Orbiter forum than is probably good for me or that anyone else wants to see. So I may try to cut back – in the interest of better uses of my time, and to try to preserve what tattered shreds of reputation I may still possess here. Before I do, though, I want to commit to writing some thoughts that have been going through my head in light of the recent discussions and comments here. The subject is what I call “the missing firebreak,” and relates to this:
The terms "Left" and "Right" are legacies from the French Revolution. It's why there are bookstores still called, "The Left Bank," and sell political books mainly by socialist authors. But I'm not sure that the terminology really serves our interest anymore in that it limits our choices and understanding to an "either/or" dichotomy. Honestly, I don't think there are very many people that occupy either position completely.
This is a thought one encounters very often – and almost always from people on the left. (In fact, I can’t ever remember hearing it from someone on the right.) I think it’s wrong, and here’s why:
There’s a little game I play with friends of mine who consider themselves moderate Democrats. I call it “mainstream or extreme.” I’ll name a journalist or an author or a media outlet, and ask whether their opinion is that it’s “mainstream or extreme.” One that I have particular fun with is Amy Goodman’s radio show,
Democracy Now. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s broadcast every day on the Pacifica network. Most moderate Democrats, when asked the simple question, “Is
Democracy Now mainstream or extreme?” will answer “extreme.”
It would be very hard not to agree with them. Goodman’s a communist, the daughter of communists. Regular guests on her show include people like Noam Chomsky. The program is a forum for every far-left critic of capitalism and America one can imagine, from Ward Churchill to Naomi Klein. People who are regularly lauded as heroic include Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat. One of the show’s favorite causes is “Mumiya Abu Jamal” the convicted murderer of a policeman. On
Democracy Now every friend of Israel is an Islamophobic imperialist, and every enemy of America is a freedom-fighter.
The next question I’ll ask my moderate Democrat friends will be, “Which is more extreme, Fox or
Democracy Now?” The answer is almost always, “
Democracy Now.”
It’s a trap. Because the day I ask that question, I’ll have listened to Goodman’s show, and her guest will have been someone like Seymour Hersch or Bob Woodward or Bill Moyers or some other member in good standing of the non-radical left.
Now, the point is this: a program as far right as Goodman’s is far left would be off limits to any figure who hoped to participate in the mainstream of American cultural or political life. The equivalent would be as if someone like William F. Buckley Jr. or P.J. O’Rourke had appeared on a program that regularly featured interviews with people like David Duke and had special reports on the virtues of Holocaust deniers, and lionized Hitler.
This illustrates what I call “the missing firebreak on the left.” Ideas I hear expressed by “non-mainstream” figures on
Democracy Now are by and large more radical than those advocated by those in the “mainstream left” like Nancy Pelosi or Howard Dean in the political sphere. But what exists on the left that I do not see on the right (outside of religious issues) is an unbroken spectrum from the moderate to the extreme left. In fact, Barak Obama’s own political biography illustrates this. Saul Allinsky was a formative influence on Obama, as he was on Hillary Clinton. The “community organizing” group Obama worked for before he launched his political career was explicitly based on Allinsky’s writings and was founded by Allinsky’s disciples. Allinsky was an open and unrepentant Marxist. Obama’s connection with this group would be the equivalent of a Republican presidential candidate in his 40s having been a member of the KKK in his 20s – something that would act as a complete disqualifier from public life in America.
Let me cite just one other seemingly minor illustration of this phenomenon. The fascinating and repulsive figure, Roy Cohen, is a character in the wonderful play,
Angels in America. Cohen’s descent and death from AIDS is a plot element in the play. As he lies dying in the hospital, he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Rosenberg is portrayed as an angelic martyr. The truth, of course, is that, although Cohen was a nasty human being, Ethyl and her husband, who were convicted and sentenced to death as spies who passed nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union because they were themselves communists, were guilty of treason.
Angels in America is just the latest of many, many works of art and non-fiction that have portrayed the Rosenbergs as martyrs.
This is a key part of the utterly one-sided view of the 1950s “communist witch hunt” that is one of the founding elements of the identity of the left in America – from the mainstream to the extreme. The number of films portraying Hollywood’s heroic stand against the “communist blacklist” is too great to catalog, and every few years a new one is made. But the problem is that in the 1950s Hollywood was in fact full of communists. The story of Elia Kazan, who was himself ostracized and effectively blackballed in Hollywood, is quite instructive. He truthfully testified that there were communists working in Hollywood, and that they were working to influence how communism and the Soviet Union were portrayed in films. For this, he was branded by the leading culture workers in America as a traitor. When, as an old man, he was finally awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement, he was booed as he went onto the stage to accept it.
What do these two items signify? They illustrate that the left in America has never made a clean break with Marxism. In the 1930s, being an open Marxist was all but mandatory if one was a “progressive” intellectual or artist in Europe and America. A huge portion of those who created the products of our culture turned a blind eye to the increasing evidence that leaked out of Stalin’s Russia that in fact the Soviet Union was a totalitarian tyranny. It is difficult today for many to understand the context in which
The Road to Serfdom was written. At the time – the early 1940s – to be well educated and to work as an intellectual or an artist in the West was to be a Marxist. Very few of the people who fell prey to these seductive ideas ever really made a full, complete and public disavowal of them.
When the “witch hunt” began – and it really only lasted a very short time – the left hunkered down. It quickly blew over. And then the 1960s were here and it was smooth sailing. Herbert Marcuse gave Western intellectuals permission to put a slight “post modern” gloss on core Marxist theories, and what he called “the long march through the institutions” began – i.e. the process of getting a new generation of leftist intellectuals into influential positions in academia, media and the arts.
So what? One of the most common responses to these ideas I encounter from my moderate leftist friends is that, well, yes, there may be radical left-leaning people in academia, but they really don’t have that much influence on society at large. Bullsh*t. You don’t end up in a position of influence in our society if you don’t pass through a university. And the vast majority of people who go to university don’t end up as critical thinkers who spend a lot of time, both while they’re in university and later, engaging in scholarship and analysis of political philosophy. Instead, they absorb views from the professors to whom they are exposed, largely in an unconscious and unreflective way. Now, do these views have a great influence on people who go to university and become engineers or business people? No. But then, those people also don’t take very many history or sociology or political science classes, either. In fact, they take the minimum number of classes in such subjects that they can, pay as little attention in those classes as they can, and forget what little they learned despite their inattention as soon as possible.
People who end up working as journalists and filmmakers and movie producers, though – that’s a different story. The unrepentant Marxism (candy-coated with a post-modern gloss) to which they are exposed in university has a huge impact on their world view. Are the reporters and anchorpeople and commentators you see on the cable news networks deep thinkers about political philosophy? Do they spend a lot of their time studying history? No. But they do very much have political views that influence what and how they report. Where do those views come from?
Now let me be clear: I don’t think there’s any kind active conspiracy to coordinate the leftist views expressed in popular culture. There doesn’t have to be. When a critical mass of people in these fields share common – often unconscious – views, a natural and organic web of mutually supporting images and words take shape without the need for any active coordination. So the images of the evil capitalist or dangerous, dishonorable militarist general one sees in movies echoes the steady, subtle slanting of the news against capitalism and the military. And those subtly slanted news stories and editorials make the images in movies and fiction seem all the more real and compelling. This process went on so long that when a single media outlet – Fox – was established that didn’t conform to this organically whole leftist world-view, it was jarring and seemed like IT was the only voice that was singing a song in a ideological key. Everything else made sense, and fit together. Fox was the only one in the choir not carrying the tune.
For the record, I never, ever watch Fox news, nor do I ever, ever listen to “right wing talk radio.” I can honestly say that I’ve never heard Rush Limbaugh’s voice. My exposure to what would be called “right wing” material is all in text and all on the web. I don’t know if this makes any difference but, again, for the record, I’m sure Fox and the radio talkers are definitely ideologically motivated.
My point is that I’m not denying that there’s an ideological slant to the ‘right wing” media. It’s not even that there’s a left-wing slant to the rest of the mainstream media. I simply can’t have any respect for anyone who denies the latter proposition. No, my point is that the slant on the left is deeper and reaches into a far more dangerous foundation than what seems to animate the ideology on the right. On the right, with the exception of matters of religion in America, there is a firebreak. Racism is openly and completely rejected by the mainstream right, and there’s a void between the “right-most” intellectuals and writers on the right and people who are more extreme and do hold racist and genuinely fascist views. This void, this firebreak, doesn’t exist on the left. There’s a smooth and unbroken spectrum on the left from the center all the way to the most open and hard-core revolutionary Marxists. The absence of that firebreak has real effects on our public life, both in our culture and in our politics.
EDIT -- Oh, and "The Left Bank" bookstores explicitly refer to the "left bank" of the Seine in Paris, a traditional bohemian district. The other part is just an ironic )and probably intended) bit of a joke.
