After panning Sanders’ campaign yesterday, I offer this addendum today: the reinvigorated left is a wonderful development for American democracy and for all those who desire a more just society, even those of us who are not leftists.
Liberals who are sympathetic to the need for profound change in American society—though via reform rather than revolution—should be cheering the rise of the left for at least three reasons.
First, a visible and vocal left serves as a check on the invariable liberal impulse to tack to the center—no matter how awful that center is on the merits. With a viable left as an alternative, liberals must worry not only about appeasing the reactionary right. They must also address their left flank by making meaningful change on behalf of working people.
A rough analogy: As awful as Cold War era communism was, its very presence as a potentially attractive alternative was salutary in some democratic societies because it compelled the gains of capitalism to be widely shared. As I said, this is only an analogy—the American left’s desire to be more like Denmark does not portend gulags folks!
Second, a reinvigorated left challenges the American foreign policy consensus that has focused on imposing capitalism rather than prioritizing human rights. This consensus is grossly immoral, and makes the United States less safe besides. It also places an absurd faith in the power of military force to accomplish good in the world. Liberals, for all their supposed grounding in evidence and reason, have pursued this bloodthirsty militarism despite the overwhelming evidence of its futility. The left sees more clearly than do liberals that imperialism is coercive and inimical to human freedom, even in its supposedly benign American guise.
Third, a viable left serves notice to the American political system that liberalism is an ideology! It opens up a broader range of possibilities for Americans to imagine, and a larger field on which the American political debate can play out. It moves liberal shibboleths from the realm of common sense to their appropriate status of contested ideological claims.
There’s still a long way to go in making the left critique more visible and more effectual in American politics. Just this week a New York Times reported piece referred with a straight face to Pete Buttigieg’s “common-sense centrism.” Such nonsense was the norm when a dormant left was all but written out of the American political conversation. Liberals should be glad their claims are no longer common sense.
The polarizing style of the left is admittedly obnoxious, but then, it wouldn’t be a left if it thought liberals were its natural allies. Liberals are very good at explaining why gradualism is the only reasonable path forward. The left is needed to goad us, to remind us that this gradualism is not only a statement of what is possible; it is an ideological and temperamental disposition. The left is here to expand what is possible. May its influence grow.
Colorblind Christians 