Not Your Fathers SDS
The contrast is illuminating. Two articles back to back in the Feb 13 Nation provide a clear explanation for how NOT to and how TO build a viable political movement. The first is about the “progressive” student organizing on college campuses, which manages to go on for four full pages without ever mentioning capitalism. Welcome to the new left, which in fact, is not a left at all. The article never touches on class or even economics. This says it all, “the rhetoric was moderate, it was billed as non-partisan and the people running it weren’t the crazy activists” Gagorama,how about “ the student conference of Campus Progress featured keynote speaker Bill Clinton..promoting a centrist agenda.” Pleeease. ‘the new student politics should not be defined by revolutionary idealism but by pragmatism.” “Anytime CAP is associated with anything far left, it’s going to hurt us.” Watch out for Scary Ideas, Ideas are Dangerous! Students Can’t Handle Big Ideas! “Notably missing from the list of YP4 (Young people For) efforts, not to mention those sponsored by Campus Progress, is anti-war activism.” Pathetic “fine, upstanding ,clean shaven young white men standing up for this new brand of progressivism.” It has come to this.
Flip the page and you have a great article by Jeff Faux called The Party of Davos where he lays it out in economic terms, class terms, is not afraid to use scary words like exploitation or oppression. Not words the “resume pushing College Dems” like to think about. “Davos is .. the most visible symbol of the virtual political network that governs the global market…and is writing the constitution of a single global economy.” Could the delicate, pragmatic ears of students understand this expression of injustice? “In the absence of global democracy,the forces that act as counterweights to the power of the investor class in national economies- labor, civil society, and progressive political parties- are to weak and unorganized to create a global social contract…the constitution of the world economy protects just one class of global citizen-the corporate class.” The same Bill Clinton did all he could to protect this new order and gave us NAFTA.
Think of all the right- wing hype that the campuses are overrun with pinkos. I wish.
posted by troutsky @ 8:06 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Think of all the right- wing hype that the campuses are overrun with pinkos. I wish.
As an academic -- and especially as a red academic on the job market -- this issue has been very high on my rader screen.
The claim that college faculty are predominantly "leftists" is, of course, nonsense. And I suspect most of the folks pushing it (barring a few apparently paranoid lunatics like Horowitz) know it's nonsense.
The reality is that what is hegemonic on campus is a sort of mushy wet centrist liberalism, of the sort your first paragraph describes. I have no doubt at all that a sizeable majority of faculty, especially in liberal arts disciplines, identify as "Democracts" and even "liberals". But all that means, in most cases, is that they vote the Democratic ticket. They're not activist and they're not ideological.
In contrast, the right-wingers, while indeed a numerical minority, are tightly organized, highly ideological, and intensely active, at least in the legal academy, which is what I'm most familiar with.
Actual radical leftists are the real rare birds, seldom seen and even more seldom heard from -- except when one of them says or does something (actually or supposedly) outrageous (see, e.g., my former grad school chum Nick DiGenova, of "A million Mogadishus" infamy).
I am not of that world but was flabbergasted when going to the odd public lecture at campuses like Wake Forest or Greensboro that well organized groups of Young Republicans would show up to heckle and sneer at anti-war speakers and no left opposition would stand up to challenge.(me and a couple of my rag tag comrades)The 'middling'"mushy" group of moderates were inarticulate and ill-informed( at least with bullet points) in comparison.
U of M here in Missoula could use a few more 'red academics' and the Clark Fork runs right through town!
Post a Comment
<< Home