Hate Mail

or make that Hate Mail Maybe

No, I'm not worried about "splitting the left".  Not for a second.   "The left" as it's presently understood is broken and doesn't work, whole or split.  It hasn't worked in almost half a century.  History isn't going to retrieve any old coalition of the left that seemed to work at the time when it lost its ability to do things.  We have to look at how and why that coalition failed if anything like a left that works is going to succeed.  I think for a lot of people, the perceived and real need to avoid a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States was what didn't cause that split to happen in a period when it might have worked.  The need to get the United States out of the Vietnam War, as well.  But, once there, that thing you don't want split off dominated and destroyed the political effectiveness of the real left.  Even the anti-war movement would have been better off without them, they probably inhibited the growth of the anti-war movement, they, themselves, never being large enough in numbers to have tipped the support for the war into opposition in the early months and years of that effort.

A "left" such as the one emerging on blogs and webloids in the past decade based on the sure fire strategy of insulting most of the people in the country, not to mention the world, on behalf of a tiny fraction of snobs motivated by ideological hatred of most people is what you seem to think can remain together with those of us whose goal is to make change.

The sure fired result of that left is that most people either reject it, outright, over those insults or due to the fact that it is insanely unrealistic and, in fact, is no part of any real left that will ever do anything positive.  Its only success has been in discrediting the real left.  If I didn't know better I'd think it was the invention of the oligarchs and fascists who have been its greatest beneficiaries.

I am hoping to be part of the "third option" that Marilynne Robinson advocated in her great, suppressed essay Mother Country, one based on the most idealistic values of traditional American liberalism, most idealistic in no small part because it is also the one proven to be most practical.   The entire mass of theoretical leftist pie-in-the-sky that has never and will never come to pass in real life is nothing as compared to the most modest of laws passed which have made equality and justice real in the lives of the least among us.