Being Too Leftwing–How Radical Progressives Miss The Point And Are A Dying Breed

Richard Seymour wrote an excellent article in The Guardian (12.29.13) in which he wondered why, after five years of economic turmoil, the Left had so little impact in financial, economic, or social reform.  His comments are even more relevant given the Republican win in 2016.  Despite a progressive candidate in the primaries and a left-of-center Presidential candidate, the Democrats lost the Electoral College by a sizable margin and although their showing in the general election was significant, it was by no means the mandate they were expecting.  The country had clearly moved on from both traditional Democratic cronyism and business-as-usual and especially progressivism, whose platform was nothing less than a radical restructuring of American society along secular, distributive, interventionist lines.

Seymour suggested a number of reasons valid when he wrote the article and especially so now.  First, the Left has been too tied up in dogma and factional rivalries.  That is, it has adhered to and insisted upon a doctrinal purity; but at the same time has been characterized by an unwieldy array of interest groups. All members of the progressive movement worship with the same prayer book and read in unison verse on gender, race, class, distribution of wealth, social equality, and international peace; but the hundreds of leftist interest groups – water, air, LGBT, fracking, etc.- leave the church and start bickering over money, power, and influence.

Such diversity of interests not only has prevented progressives from unifying and maximizing their political clout, it has hurt their brand. While the many causes embraced by the Left are understood by them to be part of a grand scheme, opponents simply have a greater number of targets at which to shoot.  Ironically those many groups opposing gay marriage, transgender teachers, welfare, environmentalism, and universal health care come together in unity far more than the progressives who promote them. They sing in harmony: “We hate liberals”. 



In an era of sound-bites and short attention spans, the progressive agenda with its array of causes cannot possibly compete with the conservative one – Individual liberty, small government, low taxes, religion, and family values. 


Second, because of an overweening insistence on doctrinal purity, the ‘progressive’ Left has turned into an exclusive club, turning away moderates and those willing to take a longer view of history.  This was not so in the past. Lyndon Johnson, for example, compromised much of his grand liberal vision to get what he felt were essential elements of the Great Society – Medicare and Civil Rights among the most important. Johnson indeed had his eyes on the prize and not on the purity of the product. An equal society and one with basic social services were far more important than the purity of the product.

Third, the Left is simply politically weak. Conservatives have been gaining power and influence and filling their treasure chests faster than the opposition. 

By the time oppositional forces work out an analysis of what is happening, figure out some tactics and get their people in motion, the terrain has already been occupied by those in power.

Seymour suggests that the real problem lies elsewhere. While these explanations of why the progressive Left has been so ineffectual have a certain resonance, they miss the point.

I would suggest that there is a problem with a certain clichéd way of being leftwing, which consists of a backwardness, a refusal to accept unyielding realities, which undermines one's ability to respond to emerging situations.

This is indeed getting to the heart of the matter.  The progressive left has become hidebound, predictable, and harshly intolerant.  Progressive Democrats have become the party of No, not the Republicans.



The Deep South is a region that progressives love to hate.  Many Southerners are gun owners, religiously conservative, in favor of energy exploitation and economic growth, resistant to federal government programs, and reluctant to accept radical social changes. Not only are so-called progressives unwilling to listen to Southern arguments but dismiss them out of hand.  Southerners to them are caricatures - redneck, Bible-thumping, duck hunting, double-wide Creationists not worth anyone’s time.  Progressives are absolutists.  There is their way and no other way.

There is one even more fundamental characteristic of progressives not mentioned by Seymour – their deep and abiding faith in social progress, the perfectibility of Man, and the ability of secular forces to create a perfect world. In this context the individual counts little compared to the group; and the group only matters if it is subsumed within an even large collective entity – government.

Government is the patriarch of American society, the father who looks after his children, guides them along the right path, is gently critical when required, but infinitely tolerant and respectful.

This secular worldview is antithetical to that of conservatives.  Only God determines the course of human history, and the only relationship that matters is that between the individual and the Almighty.  Reason is a false god.  Only the Word of God indelibly inscribed in the Bible is valid.  If society is to progress, it will do so only through individual enterprise guided by divine wisdom and spirit.
The essence of liberty is the freedom to follow God, to be untrammeled in that pursuit by social and secular forces. The early tenets of Calvinism still apply – not only is there nothing wrong in the pursuit of worldly wealth, such acquisition is a sign of Salvation.

Progressives have not learned from history.  If the North had followed Lincoln’s way – a gradual and tolerant approach to Reconstruction – and had not gone down the path of the Radical Republicans, substantive positive restructuring of the slave economy might well have happened.  In fact, the punitive measures enforced by Congress simply drove the South into a different type of rebellion – a guerrilla war which lasted 100 years.

Progressives do not seem to realize that their demands simply drive conservatives farther to the right.  The enforcement of radical legislation, such as LGBT rights, is the one thing that will case-harden the opposition just as it did during Reconstruction.  During that period, the North was insistent that radical social change happen immediately; but Southerners who had lived with African slaves for 150 years found the ascension of illiterate, unschooled, former field hands absolutely incomprehensible and intolerable.



White Southerners took advantage of the Constitutional system, cannily worked the political aisles, exploited divisions at every level, and regained all of what they had lost.

Seymour concludes by saying that the Left is still hopelessly myopic in its attempts to counter the Right. It harps on the weaknesses of capitalism, and hammers away at its supposed excesses, predation, and inhumanity.  Yet, after five years of upheaval and financial paroxysms, capitalism is better than ever.  Stock markets are up, unemployment is down, housing starts on on the rise, Western Europe seems to have found its way, and the future looks good if not rosy.

The Left continues to rely on old organizational models, but the traditional progressive institutions which had political clout – most notably labor – have been replaced by more dynamic models of economic compromise.  The only old liberal institutions which are still in lockstep with the traditional Left are the universities; but academics, because of their protective Ivory Tower, are even more doctrinally pure and insulated from the rough-and-tumble of real world politics.

Finally the Left sees epiphany and resurrection in every social expression of progressive sentiments. Occupy Wall Street was the harbinger of a new liberal age.  It was just the beginning of what would be an eventual tsunami of progressivism.  Of course this never happened, and the Occupy movement is no longer. 


Only the term ‘The One Percent’ remains, but few on the Left have been able to capitalize on this critical sentiment because most Americans wish they were in the top one percent of America.

How Do You Explain America?

In the course of my many years travelling abroad, I have always been asked where one should visit in America.  “It’s such a big country”, foreigners say. “We don’t know where to start”.

I always answer Las Vegas.  Without a doubt this outsized, outlandish, fantastical, overdone, and gloriously glitzy city is America. We built the Eiffel Tower.

We built the pyramids and the Sphinx.

We love fake.  We are not interested in long lineages, castles, obscure wars and complicated history.  We like to keep it simple: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; and all the rest can be fake.  Las Vegas is a symbol of this indifference to what actually happened, and an exuberant embrace of what could be if shaped by American hands.

I visited Austin,Texas many years ago, long before it became the cosmopolitan place it is now.  I remember little except for the new upscale residential developments.  Each house was built in a different style – Mediterranean stucco, Tudor, Georgian, Antebellum South, Swiss chalet and many more. Not a one reflected anything of the Texas landscape, topography, and environment in which they were were placed. No design feature was Texan or Western. No trace of cows or saddles, open spaces or corrals. This was but my first exposure to American fantasy architecture. It is now everywhere like here in Potomac, Maryland. 

Las Vegas more than any other city captures the very essence of the American spirit – optimistic, forward-looking, enterprising, and individualistic.  We have jettisoned the past and offered to all citizens the promise of an unlimited future.

Next stop would be Los Angeles.  What is more American than Hollywood? America is a country of image, glamour, glitz, showmanship, and fame. If reincarnated, few of us would choose to come back as Richard Nixon, Millard Fillmore, or Susan B. Anthony. Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, or Scarlett Johansson would be much more like it.

Los Angeles has American style – sun, sand, and surf.  Beach boys, tans, palm trees, unimaginable wealth, and energy. This is what people in Minsk dream of at night – an endless summer, warm breezes, gorgeous women, beaches, boardwalks, and sun. They pray to God to release them from their gulag, brutally cold and unremitting winters, and boiled potatoes and vodka.

Boston just doesn’t do it for these romantic dreamers, or Philadelphia.  Few Americans want to visit these cities.  They are stolid and old-fashioned. There is the Liberty Bell, Faneuil Hall, and the Ride of Paul Revere, but they are passé  and part of an American history remembered only vaguely.

American tourists don’t really want to visit Washington, DC, but feel some duty to come. Washington is a dull, bureaucratic, height-limited, fashion-less city. Although there are always hundreds of tourists in front of the White House and around the Washington Monument, but they record, check it off the list, and leave. Where they really want to be is Las Vegas, Hollywood, or especially Miami.

Miami is next on the list of recommended places to visit. It is hot and cool. Even the poor Bulgarian living in Vratsa has images of South Beach dancing in his head.  All those pastels and bikinis, azure waters, and endless white sand beaches.

Blazhe from Bulgaria knows only babushka-ed women with steel teeth, hard work in the nickel smelter, smoked fish and pickles; but in Miami there are hot Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans.  No one wears clothes.  They drink rum, dance the meringue under the palms, and make love by the ocean.

Pamela Druckerman, writing in the New York Times (12.28.13) writes of explaining America to 7-year old French children.

I arrive for the talk with a stack of American images: Mickey Mouse, pancakes, the Statue of Liberty (with its French connection), Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong on the Moon. I chose them because they were iconic and kid-friendly. But once I saw them all together, I realized that they conveyed the same message as “High School Musical”: Yes you can. That we’re an optimistic people is hardly surprising. But I was surprised by how pervasive this sentiment was. Even the steaming stack of pancakes seemed heroic.

It is not an easy job to sum up America; and when asked to do so we pick iconic images.  The French would laugh at this simplistic graphic notion of culture and statehood, and talk endlessly about Charlemagne, Napoleon, The Sun King, the glorious Revolution, and France’s anointed role as the Defender of Europe, and the champion of Western civilization.  They can never understand how we are all about image, presentation, and simple symbolism. Imagine a treatise on Deconstructionism by Derrida or Lacan illustrated with images of Dior, Chanel, the Brasserie Bofinger, or the vineyards of Bordeaux.  Impossible. French seriousness requires density and intellectual weight, not pictures.

The visitor to America should spend no time in museums nor listen to lectures on Revolutionary history at the Old South Church.  He should waste no vacation time on Congress and should avoid lectures on G-men, J.Edgar Hoover, and the FBI.  To do tourist things would be to conclude that America is no different from any other country with its set of particular laws, rules and regulations; struggles and statesmen; and going about its daily business of buying, selling, and negotiating.

Visits to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami require no thought, just experience.  If France is all about intellectuals, philosophy, and history; America is about sensation, promise, image, and fantasy.

I used to have San Francisco on my list, but despite the Bay, the Bridge, the fog, and the hills, it doesn’t have a big message. Super-gay San Francisco with the Castro, Bay-to-Breakers parade, and Halloween transvestite get-ups is great for Americans to gawk at; but the city doesn’t have national allure.  It is not thoroughly American like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, nor dreamy enough like Miami.

New York City also was on my list, but cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai are far more exciting, with more energy and vitality.  The East is where cities are expanding and exuberant.

New Orleans once had a certain cachet, but the French Quarter has always been cheap and tacky, and particularly after Katrina the city is a wreck – a few garden neighborhoods surrounded by ghetto. 

Chicago, made somewhat iconic by Carl Sandburg and Studs Terkel, may have some resonance with Americans who appreciate its muscle, stockyards, and Midwestern-type energy; but it would be lost on most foreigners.

Finally, I would send foreign visitors to the Mississippi Delta and have them drive from Memphis to Natchez visiting Indianola, Yazoo City, Belzoni, Clarksdale, and Greenwood. The Deep South is no longer a unique America, but every Northern city lives with its history. No one can understand America without understanding black urban America.  It all started in the Delta.  Cotton fields are as iconic as the glitz of Las Vegas. Once again, it takes little thought to create images of the Old South.  Gone With The Wind does the rest.

I am glad so many people want to visit the United States, and I hate to see them waste their time.  So for all you who are thinking of a trip, head to Vegas.

The Lost Art Of Communication–Is It Really In Danger?

Yet another academic has taken out her cudgel to hammer away at modern society, this time the erosion of personal, live communication at the hands of modern technology.  Sherry Turkle of MIT has published a new book, Alone Together, in which she laments the passage of ‘boring’ conversations, the ones that although they may not be full of humor, insights, or passion, serve as the glue of human relationships.

The leisurely dinner table conversation is a good example.  Pleasantries are exchanged, old chestnuts are trotted out, family jokes retold, experiences shared about trash pickup and the principal of the local elementary school are what keep us together as a social unit.  We look into each others’ eyes, read body language, and restate our love through story and anecdote.

Interpersonal communication is at risk in this new world of smartphone communications. The time-honored dental chair conversation between dentist and patient – your mouth rigged up to a jaw jack, he banging on about his parrots for half an hour may disappear as both of you are plugged into Spotify. 

The pastor who collars congregants on the way out of church to “share a few more words about Jesus” but who takes forever to get to the point may become a relic of the modern technological age. 

“George, how’s your long game?”, Pastor Heinz asked the owner of the Bridal Shop downtown who rarely came to church. “I hear you’ve got one helluva short game, but those drives are killing you.”

No one listened to Heinz because of his absolute inability to connect with his flock either collectively or individually, and his tortuous metaphors were the worst. 

“Jesus loves the long game”, the pastor went on, backing away from the snorted garlic-whisky breath of his congregant. “He knows that we are all short-sighted, chipping away at the ball, trying to get it in the hole, taking divots and adding to our score; but he knows that if we can hit the ball down the straight-and-narrow, we will always be on course for a par game.”

In a depersonalized world the Pastor Heinzes of the world will be goners, critics say. QR codes sending smartphone-using worshipers to religious sites will be posted throughout the church.  Websites will be featured on electronic displays above the altars after the list of psalms and hymns are deleted.


Once again, however, the Chicken Littles are wrong.  Everyone is talking– informal chats between colleagues at the coffee machine; whispered gossip in the ladies’ room; endless stories of South Beach by garrulous hairdressers; girly teenagers’ slamming dorky boys; playground trash talking; pick up chatter at singles bars; in-jokes at upscale restaurants; and talk of spreadsheets and the competition over lunch. It never stops.  These are not insignificant exchanges, people talking ‘at’ each other (a pet peeve of Turkle), but to each other – establishing status, turf, personality, individuality.

“I can’t, in restaurants, not watch families not talking to each other,” Turkle tells me. “In parks, I can’t not watch mothers not talking to their children. In streets, I can’t not watch mothers texting while they’re pushing their children.” (Megan Garber in The Atlantic 12.27.13)

Not so in tony neighborhoods where compulsive helicopter moms and snowplow parents are the rule not the exception.  They are constantly, incessantly talking to their children trying to get them to say their first words before eight months, string sentences together by the time they are one, and make logical sense before two.

Families are obsessively child-centered, hysterically worried that they are not paying enough attention to their children and creating early crises of self-esteem to go along with retarded intellectual development.  In these homes there is little space for adult conversation – only when Jonathan is put down – and at the workplace.  If these harried mothers prefer the computer screen, texting, and emails, there is good reason.  Peace and quiet.

The data are everywhere: The pair of high-school-age girls walking down Boylston Street, silent, typing. The table of brunchers ignoring their mimosas (and one another) in favor of their screens. The kid in the stroller playing with an iPad. The sea of humans who are, on this sparkling Saturday, living up to Turkle’s lament—they seem to be, indeed, alone together.

This is nonsense.  Yes, the teenagers are silent and typing; but more than likely they are setting up their social life.  The smartphone makes this all so incredibly easy. GPS-enabled apps let them know who’s in the neighborhood; texting eliminates endless and pointless calling, and more efficiently coordinates groups.  Yelp and Urban Table provide instantaneous reviews of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; Google Maps plots the fastest way to the café or club.  Teenagers are using their phones to be sure, but the real question is how are they using them.

The generation that Turkle slams is perhaps more plugged in socially than any other before.  Smartphones are social facilitators, tools to enhance interpersonal communication, not discourage it.

Turkle makes many a priori and often patronizing judgments about young people, assuming that they are enslaved by a dehumanizing technology, alienated from one-another, and self-excluding themselves from the real world.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Gen X and Gen Y are smarter than Turkle’s generation (she is 65), and have little use for the old-fashioned, formulaic, and idealistic notions of community and social solidarity. Not only can they multi-task (a remote impossibility back in the Dark Ages when Turkle grew up), but can easily balance electronic communication with face-to-face interaction.  It is not either or but both. Young people “talk at” each other for a purpose – to set he table for personal interaction.

There has been a lot of noise recently about the use of cell phones on flights.  Most people are rightly concerned that the cabin will turn into a barnyard of cackles, bellows, and moos.  Given the opportunity, people will prefer to talk than to read or think.  Surfing the web or texting for the five-hour flight to the Coast will never be enough.  There’s all that catching up to do with Molly, Grandma, and Bill from Kenyon.  The urge to communicate, to engage personally, and to be real hasn’t disappeared.  It simply has been redirected and re-engineered.

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”

Every few months a colleague of mine has a two-hour long phone conversation with his close friend who lives in New York.  In their busy lives they can find little time to actually make the short trip between cities; but keep close with our infrequent, but intimate catch-ups. They talk about everything – work, children, family fractures, gossip about friends, Israel, education, wine, and travel.  Both of them always pick up on personal cues. A change in tone or register.  A hesitation.  A particularly enthusiastic story. They read each other perfectly.

Many social conservatives like Turkle would have been appalled at the introduction of the telephone 100 years ago.  It would dehumanize and alienate individuals from their community.  It did no such thing, of course, and facilitated personal communication.  No more wasted trips to see Aunt Margie who was getting her hair done when a visitor dropped by.   No more empty round-trips to the notions ship because Millie the shopkeeper was home with her sick mother.  The phone enhanced interpersonal communication.


In the first days of the Internet, fathers began to email their daughters who had left home. Much of father-daughter time previously had been spent in familiar parent-child routines – predictable questions about courses, boyfriends, social activities, money, and the future.  On email, however, both father and daughter became adults. Fathers were no longer just fathers but close adult friends who shared stories, reflections, observations, and very personal feelings.  It was a watershed moment.  Another case of electronic communication bringing people closer, not splitting them apart.

Ah, opines Turkle, but things have changed:

The logic of conversation as it plays out across the Internet, however—the into-the-ether observations and the never-ending feeds and the many, many selfies—is fundamentally different, favoring showmanship over exchange, flows over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you. “That’s not conversation,” Turkle says.

Again, nonsense.  Twitter, for example, can be tailored to suit one’s individual tastes.  While there may be a lot of senseless banter in some people’s tweets, on thousands of others there is an exchange of ideas.  Facebook indeed has far too many posts on cats and dogs, but there are just as many highly personal and informative ones.  Users love to see pictures of the children of their former colleagues with whom they maintain a connection through social media.

FB friends post art works, archival photographs, quotes from literature, news of former colleagues. And the much-maligned selfie shares important information – what friends are doing, with whom, and where.


Once again it is patronizing to tar everyone with the same brush.  The young people of Gen X at Harvard and MIT (Turkle’s stomping grounds) are far from the selfie, showmanship crowd.  Yes, they shared a few pix of the bros at the brewery and some bashing jokes; but all in all this was a serious bunch. They were at home virtually online or actually in bed.

Garber and Turkle close with a smug observation about young customers in an Apple store:

I look around the store, packed with products that promise connection, and remark that it looks and feels like a temple. Turkle nods. She surveys the airy space, streaked with sunlight, bustling with people, and thunderous with the din of human voices. “Everybody’s talking,” she muses. “And nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.”

Of course the customers are talking about what’s on the machines.  That’s what they’re bloody well in the store for.  What else are they going to talk about? Relativity, Kant, environmentalism?  Apple’s canny store design is all about talking on the phone and talking about the phone.


To paraphrase the old real estate adage: Context, context, context. It shows insularity and preconception to toss all users of electronic media in one ignorant category.
So, there is no such thing as the lost art of communication. It, like everything else in this dynamic, fluid, ever-new country of ours, is simply morphing, changing, and restructuring. It is presumptuous to assume otherwise.