"There are leftists, but there is no left"

Yeah, but that goes back to my question: Was the left destroyed or did it destroy itself? I mean, the party channeled that vitality toward defending this failed system -- which offered no democracy plus a lower standard of living. Great idea, sign me up.

Right. And coming out of World War II, you had American society going through tremendous changes, and you had corporate rulers worried we might fall back into the Great Depression. Their answer was partly the Cold War, and partly consumerism -- we go from a society built on self-abnegation and saving money to a society where everybody moves to the suburbs, everybody has two cars, everybody needs their own washer/dryer -- but the left had no answers. There was really very little in the way of an attempt to make sense of it.

In fact you had this odd break after the bitter infighting around communism and McCarthyism -- and then came the New Left. And I'm struck, in the book, by what you say the New Left had in common with the way the Communist Party worked -- that the emphasis on identity politics seemed borrowed from Popular Front-ism (when communists advised members to work through existing organizations to try to move them left). In both cases, there was no focus on cross-issue politics, on class, there was no overarching ideology -- the communists because they didn't want to be honest about what it was; the New Left because it really didn't have one. And they were both dead ends.

I love the story I use in my book about [leading antiwar activist] Jerry Rubin, because it encapsulates what the problem was. Here you had this great antiwar movement, where most people who got involved were in it because they wanted to end the war, but when someone suggested they might actually end the war, Jerry Rubin panicked: "What would happen to the movement?" he wanted to know. His private belief was that this was some kind of revolutionary moment and that it couldn't just "succeed." But this was true of a lot of people in SNCC [the Students' Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], the environmental movement.

I think it's true to this day. I think a lot of people on the left who get involved in single-issue movements -- antipoverty movements, welfare organizing, labor, education reform -- have this nihilistic belief that they can't really solve the problems they're purporting to address, because "the system" is so corrupt it won't let them. If they did their jobs as advocates successfully, the issues would go away and they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

Yes, there's some of that, and even worse than that is every one of these movements begins to operate not as part of a coherent left, as it did in the early 1900s. All these movements existed, but they were all held together by common goals and principles of the socialists who were the dominant force on the left at that time. Today, they all become like any other lobby group, and they become more and more narrow ...

And there's a zero sum approach, where if Latinos get some, blacks get less, if women get better jobs, men have to lose.

And yet, the left still has this approach to politics where they talk about coalitions as laundry lists of organizations and groups whose basic approach is really divisive.

There's no vision of a common good.

Right. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, it should have been possible to put that whole period behind us and start thinking: Now, what's a left that works in this country? What is the potential in the United States for the kind of society that would let us all lead humane, comfortable, secure, creative lives? But it's not happening.

Anywhere?

Nowhere!

Well, you've always been a comparative realist on the left, and negative about the potential for third parties, given our "winner take all" system. In These Times sponsored a lot of debate over the Nader campaign, but I know you were very critical of it yourself.

I was very critical, but of course we were open to our readers' opinions and we had a lot of readers who just loved Ralph Nader. And it isn't even a question of Ralph Nader. Right now Nader is working with Dennis Kucinich, who's running in the Democratic Party.

Which is what you think he should be doing?

Well, not necessarily. Look, I've been criticized for saying everybody should rush and join the Democratic Party. That's not what I'm saying. I think there might be congressional districts where you can do something different. I think there are congressional districts where the left should run somebody in Republican primaries. My real model is the Non-Partisan League, which was in neither party, but which got control of all of North Dakota with allies in both parties, because it utilized an open primary system. Whereas the Socialist Party, which had the same exact platform, never elected anybody except in a couple of districts.

But the problem with the Green Party is that it doesn't tend to run in Republican districts or challenge Republicans. It looks for places where it's got some strength -- which tend to be places that elect Democrats. So they go up against Democrats.

And they split the left.

But supporting Kucinich is a step in the right direction.

Yes. I mean, Kucinich isn't going anywhere. That's not the point. The point is that Kucinich is doing in the Democratic Party something that's analogous to what Nader did -- he's getting some large crowds, he got 10,000 people in Minneapolis, and they're hearing his ideas and they're getting excited. I think he's bringing people into the process. And then when he's forced out, they have the option of hooking up with someone else because he's doing it within the Democratic Party framework.

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