Weblog
11/09/01 10:08 PM: And now, Divided
An interesting piece at washingtonpost.com
This article, by Michael Kelly, talks about how the left has been divided following the September 11 attacks.
Here is a brief exerpt, follow the above link to read the whole article.
“This split on the left is producing two excellent, related, effects. The first is to begin the process of rebuilding a responsible left. In recent years, it has increasingly seemed that to be a person of the left meant to be for, well, let’s see, there was freeing Mumia, and there was, um …
This was not healthy, not only for the Nation but for the nation. In the years when the loony left was the dominant left, the sane and sober (well, relatively speaking) left seemed often a voice carping in a double wilderness, lost not only in the larger national conversation but also within its own conversation. It now has a chance to re-emerge, to divorce itself from the dilettantes of the English Department, and to fashion a grown-up politics of the left, one that actually functions as an effective force for the liberal approach to the real concerns of the country.
The second cheering effect is to nip more or less in the bud the anti-globalism movement. This movement, which was growing, offered the outgroup left its first real chance in many years to fashion a radical politics of destruction with some measure of mass appeal. The human costs of globalism, and the policy elite’s disdainful unconcern for those costs, had given rise to a fragile coalition that promised the possibility of fulfilling the hard left’s eternal dream: Workers of the world, unite. (Under us, of course.) For a brief moment, labor union working men marched in the streets with the Cub Scout anarchists and the perpetual protesters.
That’s gone now. It went up in a cleansing puff when the radicals hit upon the brilliant notion of segueing the anti-globalization movement into an antiwar, anti-America-the-oppressor movement. This was an error in judgment with significant consequences. Working men will not march in the army of the flag-burners. They will march in the army that is setting out to kill the people who killed so many of their union brothers in the fire and police departments of New York City.”
