Why America Needs a Left by Eli Zaretsky

Author:Eli Zaretsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Conclusion

The American Left Today

When American history is understood as it should be, as a series of deep, successive structural crises – slavery, industry, and global finance – and not as a linear unfolding, we can see that the left has been central to its history. America needed a left during the crisis over slavery in order to give abolition the meaning of racial equality. It needed a left during the crisis over industrialization in order to give the welfare state the meaning of social equality. And it needs a left in today’s crisis over neoliberalization in order to give America’s great technological advances and reorientation to a globalizing world the meaning of equality.

In thinking about the tasks facing the left today it is easy to become discouraged, but this would be a mistake. History encourages the long view. Each of America’s three great crises has been a secular crisis, stretching over decades, not years. Everyone in the United States today knows that the country has been in a major economic crisis since 2007, and no one knows how and when it will end. What many do not realize, however, is that today’s crisis is the latest expression of the long-term political, social and cultural crisis that began in the 1960s. Marginalized, confused and intimidated as the left is today, it has to be patient and reflective, because the country is again at a turning point. Far from awaiting “recovery,” the US needs to reanimate its core identity in the face of a major structural transformation. Only a left can precipitate the kind of discussion that America needs today.

Let us begin to think about today’s crisis and the potential role of the left in it by recapping the argument of this book. In the past, the left has emerged when the country was at a moment of crisis. As we saw, such crises were never simply economic crises, but rather turning points, correlated with epochal shifts in the structure of capitalism. Each of our three moments of crisis – slavery, industrialization, and neoliberalism – had two dimensions: a system dimension, whose resolution demanded a structural transformation, and an identity dimension, whose resolution demanded that the structural shift be given a meaning that deepens the country’s core identity. In each crisis, the left has been indispensable to the country’s struggle to deepen its understanding of what it means to be an American. In each case, the left’s contribution lay in its expansive defense of America’s core value, namely, equality. For each left, equality correlated with democracy, understood not in terms of voting, or blogging, but in terms of a common culture, of geographic, intellectual or psychical spaces where fellow citizens meet each other as equals. The left preserves this egalitarian democratic ideal through ordinary times, and safeguards it through emergencies. In crises, however, the left extends and deepens the ideal of equality in light of a new constellation of historical challenges.

The question, then, is whether we now face such a crisis moment.

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