One of the most aggravating things about looking at the history of the left, how it failed, how it failed to learn from its failures and even failed to learn from what worked. We have had a gift for choosing what didn't work, especially in the period when the liberal programs of Franklin Roosevelt produced a class of relatively affluent liberal rank and file and their children for whom many of the planks in the liberal platform weren't a dream for the future, but what they grew up expecting out of habit.
It wasn't any accident that the last period of real success for the left, when it was capable of making revolutionary changes happen was around the struggle to end Jim Crow, to end legal discrimination against black people and other members of oppressed members of minority groups, people for whom the post-war prosperity didn't happen and, in many cases, were not much better off than their ancestors had been in the period after reconstruction ended. That a large group of people need to have a real stake in liberalism for it to work is not a scientific law but it would seem to make complete sense. I don't think that it would have worked then if the people in that group with the biggest stake in the struggle had not been saturated with the metaphysical prerequisites for their claim of rights to have any reality, found in their religion.
Those are not found in materialism at all. I think the lack of that is one of the main reasons that Maxism not only failed to produce anything like American liberalism delivered on but, also, why it produced the opposite of egalitarian democracy and a decent, peaceful life. Not only does a materialist, one who presses their ideology, not believe those are real but they inevitably have to attack them because they can't be found within their ideology. I think facing the fact that the history of atheists purportedly of the left leads to the inescapable conclusion that their hostility to religion is, for almost all of them, far stronger than any devotion to those metaphysical matters of faith and that, inevitably, materialism will win out over every other consideration, to the detriment of the basic substance of liberalism was the hardest thing I've ever had to face. The fact is that much if not most of the program of the materialist left, including things such as the championing of the porn and prostitution industries, is what they substitute for a real agenda. That it turns out to, actually, favor modern slavery, right wing publishers and, extended into political terms, such as the Koch bros and other fascists, does nothing to refute my conclusions.
One of the biggest frustrations in reading the history of success of the left from the beginnings of Franklin Roosevelt's administration to the election of Richard Nixon is how the Communists and others attached themselves to that success and damaged it, discredited it and, most damaging of all undermined and diverted it from continuing to make success. All in all, the pseudo-left, the ones who never did anything much to further progress, were the best and most effective tool for those on the right who opposed The New Deal and The Great Society and, of course, the Civil Rights movement.
Those guys have been poison to the real, working, effective left yet they are constantly presented as the quintessence of the left, the real left, the only heritage of the left. I have come to conclude that maybe that is, as well, a part of our continuing eclipse, something that might not be just another coincidence, though that is based only on the fact that it, in the end, has also benefited the Republican right to have liberals so basically misled about out history.
In reviewing the claims of membership numbers in the Communist and other parties of the pseudo-left, I came across one estimate that at one point in the 1950s more than a tenth of the Communists may have been plants and informers, primarily from the FBI and other police agencies. Agents provocateurs were also a standard feature in those counted as members of, not only the Communist Party but in any organization of the left. In reading some letters of and to Eugene Debs,there was one extremely interesting one, by Ernst Untermann charging a prominent "comrade," George Shoaf, of being that kind of agent and clearly mentioning the internal undermining of socialism through those means. While the Pinkertons seem to be a quaint name from the past, the Associated Press and Merchants and Manufacturers' organizations were present, charged with being among those who benefited more from Shoaf's actions than the Socialists did. I will say that of those "leftists" I'm aware of who have turned to the far right, often with a great improvement in their incomes and lifestyle, have generally been from the materialist, atheist "left". A lot of those mentioned in the article as being fools and tools and dupes were prominent members of the socialist movement.
One of the things that has become evident to me in reviewing this history is that anyone who advocates violence should be suspected as being a plant with a goal of undermining and discrediting the left. Or even if they aren't an actual plant of doing the same thing for whatever personal goals, self-aggrandizement and cult building for personal edification being the equivalent as those are the fundamental goals of our political opponents and their oligarchic sponsors, as well.
Another thing that has become evident to me is that Christian liberals have to spit out the gag placed on them by atheists and others and begin to assert that their beliefs are, in fact, the strongest resources and means of sustenance of a real left, one that will convince people to support it, to win elections and to make laws.
As our past two Ivy League presidents have shown, as the other elite, well educated members of our governments and courts prove, the best wisdom of academia is no guarantor of that. Our continued failure proves that having the facts won't do it. You have to really, really believe that you are required to do justice, to practice equality, to respect rights, etc. or you'll find excuses to put something else before those. Most typically, expediency. You will constantly and cynically convince yourself that people can't be convinced to sacrifice anything toward those goals. How can you expect to convince other people to do those hard things if you undermine the very claims that they are a moral obligation?
Not only a moral obligation, but that they apply to you as well.
ReplyDeleteA small example is Archbishop Romero, who, in true liberation theology style, argued that the work of the Church is to accompany the people. Very much the same sentiment as expressed by Dorothy Day, who insisted those who worked with her realized they were the visitors, the poor were the natives, and so had to be respected.
Only when you first apply justice to yourself, do you get to preach justice for others. Justice is not done to others; it is allowed for all.
That is an often overlooked teaching of Christianity (it goes back millennia). It is an almost non-existent teaching in secular political philosophies, even that of John Rawls.