Cambridge Common

[...]
I think that the obvious nature of our beliefs is really a reflection of how successful they have been over the last century, between the New Deal, Civil Rights, the Great Society, the sexual revolution, and so on and so forth. Every so often we need to be reminded that we live in a pretty liberal country, regardless of who runs it.

My response in their comments section (now spell checked) was as follows:

While I think this would be a nice reality to live in, I don't think any of us do. First of all, to the premise that the modern left does not think about political philosophy: I think that this is true of most "politicos" who populate the IOP and Dems board meetings (I love you guys but it's true), and absolutely not true of the activist and intellectual left. What is true is that the politico left essentially ignores the activist/intellectual left both at Harvard and in modern politics, and instead plays games of tactics and targeting that have little or nothing to do with shifting the modern day discourse and reestablishing a leftist ideological cohesion.

To argue that the New Deal, Civil Rights or the Great Society simple came out of the "known" liberal tradition of America is simply bad history. The New Deal found its intellectual basis in leftist intellectuals of the 30s, post-Marxist intellectuals from New York who studied Trotsky and Dewey and Lippman. The Civil Rights movement found its intellectual bases in people like Reinhold Riehber (sp?), southern religious traditions, and radicals like C. Wright Mills. The Great Society found its intellectual foundations in the children of the Old Left like Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden.

While I think it would be safe to say that much that goes on in modern American leftists intellectual circles is not helpful (moral relativism, for instance), there is a ton going on that, quite frankly, most people involved in mainstream politics simply don't pay attention to either because they are 1. not interested, 2. worried of being perceived of as "radicals" or 3. lazy. Take your pick...

The reason that it's important for the left/democratics/liberals (whatever you want to call people who seek social justice, equality of opportunity and coherent communities), is that it is simply not possible to have a sustained life of political sacrifice fueled on the ideological fumes of when you read "Theories of Justice" freshman year. To truly commit yourself to a set of principles, and fight for those principles your entire life, you need to have a deep and profound set of beliefs that rises above bad pop history and superficial platitudes from the likes of mainstream democratic politicians.

As you can tell from my shoddily done intellectual history, it's not really where I'm at my best. If I retyped it I would distinguish between Harrington and Hayden, for instance. I would have including W.E.B. DuBois and Gandhi and Dr. King in my discussion of the Civil Rights Movement. I would have moved Mills into the column of inspiration for the New Left/Great Society (not that the two were actually THAT linked) as opposed to the Civil Rights Movement. Well, there are a ton of people I should/could have included, and I'm sure many I don't even know to include...

But that's neither here nor there. The point stands and the original sentiment is an incredibly important one to defeat in our political allies. We absolutely DO need a political philosophy, we need a set of analysis that asks and answers the questions: How can democracy truly function in the bureaucratic world of corporate media? How can solidarity be maintained in a country that is increasingly personally isolated? How can our capitalist system be checked at a time at which it increasingly seems to put profits before people? How can the left negotiate post-modern concepts of power in relationship to things like free speech, gender, sexuality, race and still maintain an open liberalism? These are not simply logistical questions, but philosophical ones that requires thinkers like C. Wright Mills (my newly discovered favorite) or Michael Harrington or W.E.B. DuBois or John Dewey.

While I don't know who that person is for us today, to not look for them would be the biggest folly. Intellectually, the modern left is a generation that is adrift, with different branches of our movement finding refuge in widely different intellectual ports, and no unity in sight. If we ever want to move as one again, if we ever want to be able to truly exist within an ideological movement for social justice and equality, we need to rediscover what those vague concepts mean in relation to the modern world, and John Rawls ain't cutting it.