"There are leftists, but there is no left"

In These Times founder James Weinstein on the American left's "long detour" with communism, its current crisis, and the hope he sees in Howard Dean.

By Joan Walsh

Oct 30, 2003 | Nobody would mistake left-wing scholar and publisher James Weinstein for Roger Ailes. But long before there was a Fox News, Weinstein knew that the failure of the American left to become an enduring force in American politics was in part a failure to compete in the marketplace of ideas and in the world of media -- and that back when the left thrived, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it relied on a web of local, regional and national newspapers and magazines. So while most of his colleagues focused on their books and the world of academia, he played a leading role in founding journals like Studies on the Left and Socialist Review, starting San Francisco's Modern Times bookstore and, most notably, In These Times newspaper.

I worked at In These Times in the mid-1980s, back when it called itself "an independent socialist newspaper" (being more honest about his politics than Roger Ailes, Weinstein didn't choose the motto "fair and balanced"). I saw the label as one of Weinstein's charming eccentricities -- he was determined to revive socialism's respectability, take it back from those who had stolen it -- but the paper's left-wing politics were not eccentric; it was unexpectedly hardheaded. That was where I lost my romance with identity politics, with believing that some amalgam of women, blacks, gays and other pissed-off people would gradually rise and transform American politics. The paper covered all those movements, but critically. And it backed efforts to work within the Democratic Party, like Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, discouraging the vanity and nihilism of third-party politics -- the impulse that ultimately turned into Ralph Nader's disastrous Green Party run in 2000, which gave the presidency to George Bush.

Weinstein knows disastrous third-party efforts firsthand -- he was a Communist Party member for a short time in the 1940s, and became briefly infamous on the left in the late 1970s for helping to confirm historian Ron Radosh's revisionist account of the Rosenberg case: that despite the left's claims that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were falsely accused and wrongly executed for spying for the Soviet Union, Julius did in fact pass information to the Soviets. (He also favorably reviewed Radosh's "The Rosenberg File" for In These Times.) To many on the left Weinstein's admission was heresy, given the history of redbaiting and right-wing witch hunting the left had endured in the 1950s. But Weinstein has always reckoned clearly with the contradiction of that decade -- redbaiting was a disaster, but so was communism, and both had hurt the American left.

Weinstein retired as publisher of In These Times in 1999, though he still supports its work, and this year he finished his fourth book, "The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left." He calls himself a "pathological optimist," and he thinks that despite its "long detour" -- the Soviet experiment and the years American communists spent defending it -- the left can once again play a vital role in reforming American democracy. Salon spoke to Weinstein by phone from his home in Chicago.

Your book charts the development of an authentic, indigenous, vital American left -- and an American socialism -- through the beginning of the 20th century. Then it all came apart with World War I, when the left's opposition to the war was used to tar it as treasonous and anti-American, and there were a whole string of government efforts to target and dismantle it. Was that really the first time the left was attacked as "traitorous"? Obviously, there are echoes today.

Well, it was, really. Before that, there were some movements and groups that were attacked as "un-American," given the prevalence of immigrants in their ranks. But not "anti-American" or treasonous. Still, the socialists gained a lot of support during the war, in fact, that led to the government's efforts to disrupt the party. It's hard for people to understand today how unpopular that war really was.

Yes, it's linked with World War II as one of the "good wars."

Right, but it was very unpopular at the time, and one big factor was the number of German immigrants in the U.S., many of whom did oppose the war ...

For nationalist reasons.

Some of them. But not all of them. Of course, the German socialists -- who were particularly powerful in Wisconsin, especially Milwaukee -- were totally anti-Kaiser. They didn't oppose the war because they supported the Kaiser.

But they were smeared that way.

Yes. Then later, with the rise of the Soviet Union, the left was considered "anti-American" because it was seen -- the Communist Party, at least -- as supporting an enemy that was supposed to be very powerful and threatening, but that was basically weak and desperately trying to catch up with American capitalism's level of industrialization.

But you've always been very honest about the fact that the American Communist Party was supporting the Soviet Union, which was our enemy, and how that support completely disfigured the American left, with ramifications to this day. In fact, reading the book I found myself going back and forth between feeling like the left has been destroyed by the government -- looking at World War I, the Red Scare, the Palmer Act, McCarthyism, through COINTELPRO in the '60s -- and the notion that the left has destroyed itself. Thanks to its romance with the C.P. and the Soviet Union in the '40s and '50s, and then with violence in the '60s. Where do you come down on that question?

Look, I wrote this book to make clear that, as you say, there was an American left, an American socialism, and through the first 20 years of the 20th century, it was growing and important. Much of what it advocated for we take for granted today. Especially after the New Deal -- Social Security, workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, the eight-hour workday, the 40-hour week, minimum-wage laws -- the ideas of the left became mainstream ideas. But they started out as totally marginal. You also have to understand, the left was in every aspect of American society back then: Two-thirds of the original members of the NAACP were socialists. The first people who got arrested for advocating birth control -- Margaret Sanger, etc. -- were socialists. Many trade unionists were socialists. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the children of the ruling class, was a vigorous organization. It had become an important aspect of every part of American life, and its programs addressed the problems of the emerging gigantic corporations -- it was an attempt to stabilize the system, which meant to humanize it.

So as time went on, and especially in the New Deal, the ideas that had originally been totally marginal became the property of the mainstream of American political discourse, and meanwhile socialists had nothing new to say, because the Russian Revolution had thrown the whole movement backward. What came to mean "socialism" after the Russian Revolution was this incredibly backward, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society whose main goal was to catch up with the west. I mean, in my book I show how the Russian city of Magnitogorsk became the model of a socialist city, but it replicated Gary, Ind. -- everything radiated out from the steel mill! -- which was probably the worst failed American city. I mean, they had no idea what socialism was. It was a terrible throwback, the use of slave labor, the absence of any kind of political democracy. And yet the communists, who really were at the time the most vital force in the American left, were defending it.

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