The Death of a Nation
BHASKAR SUNKARA
I’m often rattled by manifestations of my own intellectual impotence. A conversation with a professor who mentions whole genres of literature I’m unfamiliar with. An acknowledgment that I’ve been mispronouncing Die Linke and pronouncing Alexander Cockburn’s name a bit too correctly for a good year and a half. That stretch after reading Sula when I thought Toni Morrison was a guy. The feeling I get when I try to decipher Postone’s notion of abstract time… sobering, but undoubtedly healthy for a 20-year-old.
Thumbing through “the flagship of the left” lends itself to a very different sensation. Though not quite on a fast track to The New Republic levels of noxiousness, the deterioration of The Nation into a vapid, politically complacent mouthpiece of the establishment has been marked to any candid observer. Large tracts of the magazine are now indistinguishable from that of The Huffington Post.
It was not always so. The first issue of Dissent in 1954, a year a bit too devoid of red-baiting for their tastes, featured an editorial that lambasted the publication for being soft on Stalinism. A decade later The Nation published Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s plot to bring about the End Times. Amid the rancor of the Cold War and the neoliberal reaction that followed, editor Victor Navasky ran regular columns from two radicals in their prime: then Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens and—a follower of his own inchoate brand of a leftism—Alexander Cockburn. Navasky even gave exposure to Marxist economist and former Soviet agent Victor Perlo and named a young(er) Doug Henwood contributing editor a scant few years after the launch of Left Business Observer. Though never aspiring to be The New Masses, the magazine was described by Navasky as a debating ground between liberals and radicals.
Somewhere along the way, tellingly in sync with the collapse of the revolutionary left, the publication’s discourse veered off-course. During the Clinton and Bush years, under the stewardship of a well-intentioned scion of the ruling class, Katrina vanden Heuvel, always latent cognitive lapses became more pronounced. The fact that it was Clinton and not Bush who was at the vanguard of neoliberal restructuring and proved most capable of pursuing reactionary policies at home and abroad; punishing Iraqi children with draconian sanctions, homosexuals with the innocuously labeled Defense of Marriage Act and playing the role of paternal guardian with the Communications Decency Act, was ignored. Democratic policy could be wrong, but the idea that all segments of the diverse Democratic Party were good faith partners with ‘progressives’ could never be questioned. The result was a synthesis of dull policy-based objections to individual DLC proposals only occasionally interrupted by inadequate, liquor-sodden squeals from Hitchens and hyperbolic rants against the new Bush administration that never articulated a clear critique of the structures and social forces that brought to bear that presidency. This hollow liberal narrative was soon met in the “debating ground” with the radical chic “anti-imperialism” and Fordist nostalgia of glossy new contributors like Naomi Klein.
The election of Barack Obama has only made these shortcomings more glaring. The archetype for this regression has been the increasing prominence of Melissa Harris-Lacewell. What had begun with a few blog posts has spiraled into a featured new column, Sister Citizen, occupying print space belonging to Cockburn’s longstanding Beat the Devil series. What warrants Lacewell’s propulsion, through frequent MSNBC appearances and contributions to The Nation, onto the national scene? Early this year before the announcement of her promotion she was largely relegated to the web-only blogs section. Writing on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy Lacewell reminds readers that, “Military service is at the heart of citizenship,” and that, “Soldiers not only sacrifice for our safety; they sacrifice for our equality. Now is the time for us to make good on our end of the social contract.” After all in Lacewell’s view, “The implied social contract that binds a nation to her people is most fully realized in two primary acts: tax paying and military service,” service ‘we’ use to, “war against genocide and imperialism.” Soldiers are constituencies that the left far from shuns, but is there anything “progressive” about defending the institutional role the military plays in a capitalist society? Though her premise—urging the repeal of the homophobic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—is an agreeable one, her manner of argumentation is completely devoid of a substantive critique of the structures of American society. She may have come to “progressive” individual policy positions, but her worldview should be an antithetical one to readers who consider themselves champions of the “left.”
Questioned about my soft spot for the climate skeptic Cockburn or a flagrant imperialist in Hitchens, I reply that despite their inanities on individual issues there is something in their critique that is refreshingly novel. Hitchens, for example, has in the last decade littered the pages of The Nation and other mainstream venues with perspectives like these:
As it happens, I know enough about Marxism, for example, to state without overmuch reservation that capitalism, for all its contradictions, is superior to feudalism and serfdom, which is what bin Laden and the Taliban stand for.
In a post-Seattle interview with Rhys Southan:
There is no longer a general socialist critique of capitalism — certainly not the sort of critique that proposes an alternative or a replacement. There just is not and one has to face the fact, and it seems to me further that it’s very unlikely, though not impossible, that it will again be the case in the future. Though I don’t think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any means all resolved.
Contradiction, an inexorable occurrence in class society, means nothing to Alterman, Lacewell, Hayes or even Klein for that matter. Lacewell’s deficiencies just stand out, because her ahistorical, bourgeois worldview is married with high school yearbook-quality prose. This amalgamation was on showcase in her latest piece on the Tea Party Movement:
When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than act of racism. It is an act of sedition.
As Jesse Lemisch ably replies:
It seems utterly suicidal for the Left to invoke “sedition,” as Melissa Harris-Lacewell does in condemning Teabaggers in The Nation. What a proud tradition we would join by doing this: Alien and Sedition Acts, Palmer Raids, Smith Act. And what’s up with Harris-Lacewell’s adoration of The State, with its “monopoly on the legitimate [sic] use of violence, force and coercion”? Huh? Are we really happy with this utterly unqualified approval of such government action, and, as a result utterly unqualified prohibition of such things when used by non-governmental people? There goes the picket line, and anything else that they might deem to be “coercive.”
After a September piece of hers urging us to “Lose the Love/Hate, But Keep the Hope,” little should surprise us:
Within days of Obama’s election, progressives began talking about “holding Obama’s feet to the fire.” This is an old fashioned way to approach being part of a governing coalition. The left has been trained in adversarial techniques. Shout from the outside. March through the streets. Make lists of your demands. Demand to have your interests taken into account. […] This new moment calls for new ways of engaging politically.
The chutzpah of a progressive movement that once wanted to overturn class cleavages, a hallmark of human society since the Neolithic Revolution, has eroded to the point where the mere thought of implementing a social democratic program elicits trepidation:
When Obama suggested that we change politics in this country it was more than a call to change the political party in the White House. It was an indictment of a winner-take-all mentality that has led to tyrannical governance, which fails to protect the interests of political minorities. We won an election; we did not stage a coup. The left will get some, but not all of what it wants, and that is OK. It is better than OK, it is the heart of democracy.
And then there’s the realization that the more money you can muster the better your political interests will be represented. Let’s not tell the corporations about this avenue of bourgeois democracy:
By retreating to outsider angst the left forgets one of the most exciting lessons of the Obama campaign: that ordinary people working for common purpose wield tremendous power. For those of us who work for our income and have modest means, it was unbelievable to watch ourselves become donors to a political campaign and find that those donations made a difference.
There is no reason to stop now. If you found $50 for “Obama for President,” then you can find $50 for an advocacy organization that fits your political interests. If you started an “Obama for President” Facebook group, then start an “Americans for Public Option” Facebook group.
I remember reading the rest of the piece after my September tonsillectomy, doped up on Codeine, choking on my own blood and mucus, as if in a desperate plea for help:
Did you make an Obama-inspired YouTube video? Make one today for universal health coverage. Send it to everyone, get it to go viral. Did you have a pro-Obama blog. Make in an Obama-watch blog and keep people informed of the opportunities we have to impact policy. Did you knock on doors or make phone calls? Then join a local advocacy group and put that energy into pressing for fair housing. We elected Obama. We can change America.
Put down the hammer and try a screwdriver.
But we should not assume that all our problems are nails. Some are screws. If you bang away on a screw you get a big mess. So instead of always assuming we are faced with a problem that requires complaint from the outside, why not ask what we can do to help Obama achieve a new direction for America? How can our energies and efforts on a local level move us toward a better and more accountable government? […]
Are we ready to see if a screwdriver might be more effective than a hammer? Of course we are not throwing out the hammer, because sometimes a nail needs a good smack.
Somewhere even Thomas Friedman is banging his head against his keyboard, asking, “What the fuck?” I think too highly of The Activist’s readership to spell out exactly why this is the most insipid piece of political writing to ever appear in a national political journal, but briefly; where is the liberal-left that has been too strident in their denunciations of Obama? The one that’s by-and-large, like myself, celebrating the passage of a health care bill dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation and the GOP a few decades ago? The one that’s sitting idly by while the ruling class allows our civilization’s very existence to be threatened by ecological catastrophe?
By way of closing, worth mentioning is that I’ve heard only good things about Harris-Lacewell’s character and if her RateMyProfessors.com page is any indication, she’s an engaging educator. I can also only assume that one doesn’t become an Associate Professor at Princeton University by virtue of being an idiot. She just happens to be a reactionary who doesn’t write very well and does so in a publication I pay for.
Admittedly, singling out The Nation and a specific commentator is unfair. There isn’t an alternative hub of vibrant discourse on the left of its relevance and I just renewed my subscription to the rag last week so I can read the occasional Ehrenreich or McLemee piece buried behind the subscriber firewall. The current state of The Nation and the quality of her contributors is merely a reflection of the banality of the modern political discourse, a product of the disappearance of the structural critique. The Nation was never ours, but it was a halfway house for radicals. Fond memories can be kept, but it’s high time the left had vibrant political organizations, commentators and publications explicitly of its own. Forums that would ask their economics analyzing contributing editor what he thought about the worst financial crisis in generations, not let Foreign Policy be the only one paying Leo Panitch any mind, give Adolph Reed Jr. a regular column, acknowledge Barbara Ehrenreich between best selling books and cultivate a new generation of critical thinkers. A venue that would make The Nation look like The New Republic and Dissent resemble Commentary, one that wouldn’t be afraid to implore readers to put down the screwdriver from time to time and try a hammer, because sometimes a nail needs a good smack.
whether someone writes ‘very well’ is a matter of opinion, not of fact. there have been innumerable times where I have read a magazine where one or two of the writers didn’t write ‘very well’ (in my opinion). However, how does that equate to the decline of the entire magazine? That is a bit overdramatic i would say.
since you pay for the magazine, you feel that you deserve to read articles by people who can write ‘very well’ in your opinion. have you considered the idea that the magazine is optional, and if you do not like what you read, you can stop paying for it?
For example, it would be silly of me to buy a compilation album and then complain that half the songs were bad. When you pay for a magazine (or an album) with many different voices, you may not agree or like all of them. but again, your sensibilities about one author have no relation to the quality of the magazine/album overall.
Plenty of things can be said about this piece, but “mistaking the forest for trees” is not one of them. Did you ignore the whole 4th paragraph? Or the description of Lacewell as an “archetype”?
There has always been writing of disparate quality in The Nation, but it was a real “debating ground between radicals and liberals.” It isn’t anymore. It’s banal and politically complacent. MHL’s column was just an easy example and is only a symptom of a wider trend on the political left. It’s our fault that the anticapitalist critique is gone, as such, meditations on the state of “liberal-left” publications should be viewed as self-criticism.
“MHL’s column was just an easy example and is only a symptom of a wider trend on the political left.”
Thanks for clarifying this. Is there a reason, then, that this article is focused on her, in particular? You even chose to put her name in the title of the piece, as if she was solely responsible for this problem. Sloppy journalism, and not very respectful either.
Sorry, that should say that The Activist chose to focus on her in their Facebook post about this article. I see that your title does not include her name.
The statement you quote from Hitchens as an example of the freshness and lucidity of his insight is in fact a classic example of the glib and thoughtless rationalisation of which he has produced dozens of similar examples in the course of his lurch to the right. Bin Laden and the Taliban stand for feudalism? Really? Is there any sense in which this absurd judgment can be justified? Bin Laden, the successful capitalist entrepreneur? The Taliban, the movement that sought to build a developmentalist state with the assistance of US capital? The ‘war on terror’, so-called, has not been a war between competing modes of production. The fantasy that has been or could be is presumably an artefact of Hitchens’ vulgar progressivism, in which one must defend even an imperialist state provided it is socially more advanced than its immediate competitor or victim.
Hitchens’ Marxism has always been glib (“vulgar” is an excellent description). In that quoted passage though, beyond the reeking stagism, there is an acknowledgment that capitalism is a system with “contradictions.” Even in his decline he recognizes that history hasn’t reached a standstill (even if the Left has), more than one can say about others.
I will say that in regards to Indian peasants, the brutalities of capitalist accumulations seems pretty damn historically progressive.
“I will say that in regards to Indian peasants, the brutalities of capitalist accumulations seems pretty damn historically progressive.”
Which “Indian peasants” are we talking about here?
I’m just asking because you could be referring to Hitchens’ ‘bon mot’ about the genocide against the Native Americans. But if you’re actually referring to “Indian peasants” as in peasants from India, then you really need to re-read your Irfan Habib. British capitalist imperialism brought about a neo-feudal system in India (contrary to the run-of-the-mill histories involving the ‘cash nexus’ and that) that was rather novel – a tributary form of extraction made all the more brutal by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation that drove it. The salient consquence was successive, unprecedented famines that wiped out tens of millions of people without a particle of social progress to show for it. In all seriousness, reactionary fundamentalists like Maududi were more progressive than the “capitalist accumulations” that the British introduced. That’s a point that Hitchens would have made, were he half the contrarian he likes to think he is.
No time for a full response, but I read Hitchens’ review of Said’s “Orientalism” in The Atlantic from a few years back and I completely disagree with the “progressive” imperialism shtick he seems to work from (there was a British “marxist” who pushed this analysis in the early 1990s, can’t remember his name).
I’m referring to capitalist accumulation over the past 20 years in India in places like West Bengal, which has been fractious, uneven and brutal, but which I don’t see any alternative to.
“there was a British “marxist” who pushed this analysis in the early 1990s, can’t remember his name”
Bill Warren is probably the man you’re thinking of.
“I’m referring to capitalist accumulation over the past 20 years in India in places like West Bengal, which has been fractious, uneven and brutal, but I don’t see any alternative to.”
Well then you’re a CPI(M) man. I don’t myself see the basis for claiming that such neoliberal enclosures have been socially progressive, and it really won’t do to write off events like Nandigram as marginal to this narrative – yes yes, fractious, uneven, brutal, but no alternative, etc. The reality is that the CPI(M)’s neoliberal policies could not have been pursued without demonstrating control of the territory, and brutally suppressing opposition. Neoliberal policies have always been achieved at some blood price or other. It’s simple bad faith to sweep this sort of brutality under the rug of ‘progress’ and pretend, in the parlance of Thatcherism, that there is no alternative. Somewhat more prosaically, these policies are also disaggregating and weakening the social agencies that have sustained the CPI(M) dominance in West Bengal. It’s not just a brutal policy, in other words – it’s a suicidal one that invites the rise of the right and of all sorts of potentially murderous particularisms.
I thought this was a brilliant analysis, (no, not too strident!) and expressed much better than I have been able to what has happened to The Nation. I gag whenever I hear MHL’s insipid commentary on NPR, why should I have to read her in what passes for a lefty publication. I especially liked: “Forums that would ask their economics analyzing contributing editor what he thought about the worst financial crisis in generations, not let the Financial Times be the only one paying Leo Panitch any mind” Spot-on, but rather than Panitch, we get Klein. Canadian, but that’s the only point of comparison.
You compromise your own credibility when you impugn MHL as “right-wing.” God knows I find both her writing and her analysis (sic) to be as objectionable as you do. But to me, she smacks of the typical careerist liberal professional who is sliding down the slippery slope of DLC’ism, corporate liberalism, or what have you. Perhaps on occasion she has uttered support for positions that are “objectively right-wing” — but the political landscape does not consist solely of principled and consistent “anti-capitalists” (as if this itself is a unitary and coherent position), on the one hand, and “right-wingers,” on the other. If this crude mock-up is your road map, then you’re going to get lost quickly, and not help anyone else find their way, either.
Also, there’s too much sophomoric namedropping and cheerleading going on in this piece. Henwood/Panitch/Reed yay! Klein boo! As it happens I considerably prefer the politics and the insights of the former trio to the latter individual, and having followed some of your commentary here and elsewhere, I have a clear idea why you do too. But the way you communicate it here is not very appealing — it is redolent of persnickety fan-boyishness. But maybe something more substantial could not be expected from this particular short essay.
(BTW, Panitch’s feature article appeared in Foreign Policy, not Financial Times — as your link shows.)
I hereby predict that many (most?) members of the Platypus collective will, sooner or later a) discontinue their vanguardist theorizing and ease into apolitical vocations or b) continue their theorizing and morph into something more or less akin to Paul Piccone — eccentric and provocative, perhaps, but decidedly not “left” nor partaking any longer of a pretension to regenerating a morbid “left.”
You compromise your own credibility when you quote and criticize a “right-wing” moniker that appears nowhere in the article.
Correct you are, and my mistake. Sunkara uses the even more outrageous term “reactionary”: “She (MHL) just happens to be a reactionary who doesn’t write very well and does so in a publication I pay for.”
“Also, there’s too much sophomoric namedropping and cheerleading going on in this piece. ”
This is, though a gross misrepresentation of what’s going on in the piece as a whole, an interesting point, only because it calls into question why the American left, throughout the generations, seems to amass plenty of star individuals, but hasn’t sustained a prominent movement. I think it has to do with the atomization of left intellectuals in a geographically big nation without a Party or militant working class movement to orient their politics around. Plenty of good theoretical work by some, but no praxis. Plenty of busy-bodied “action” by others, but no theorization.
Here is a little Catholic homily on Matthew 25: 32: There are sheep and there are goats, and it’s important to know the difference. But separating of the sheep from the goats is not something that should be done gleefully or with too much gusto. Purer, smaller churches are full of kooks. And it’s not like the soundness of their doctrines will save them from their organizational impotence. I have heard Harris-Lacewell say some things on MSNBC that are a bit goatish, but maybe she’ll come around.
Thanks for reading the Nation so I don’t have to. I remember it being OK when I started reading it in the 1990′s, but I was a teenager then and probably didn’t know any better. At least they gave Alex Cockburn two pages back then, and he was really great before he went off the deep end (although even in the old days he occasionally veered off into right-wing populist crankery. His fondness for jury nullification is the example that springs to mind.)
I think it is sheer folly to hope that MHL might “come around,” as if it would signify anything weighty if she did. And IMO Sunkara is right to disembowel The Nation for what it has become. His analysis is all the keener because he’s pretty clear-minded about the limits of the Nation in its “better” days. What I find annoying is his more than occasional lapses into the overheated rhetoric of “everyone to the right of being consciously socialist is a ‘reactionary’.” Obviously he is way too smart to really believe this. What it really amounts to in the end is little more than giving something of a free pass to non-socialists who are erudite and aesthetically pleasing (post-911 Hitchens), and bashing non-socialists who spout public relations doggerel (MHW). That may be worthy literary criticism, but as political strategy it is woefully limited.
Scanning the website of The Nation at this moment and I don’t see anything worthy of disembowelment. I agree that Hitchens’ cleverness does not excuse him from being an asshole, it really just aggravates his worst features. But I am saying that an eagerness to excommunicate and anathematize is not really about maintaining intellectual rigor in movement publications, it is about indulging in the sectarian impulse that is the ruin of the radical left. We do it when our Trot gland secretes too much of its special bile.
The point of the piece might have been a little unclear (if I’d actually known that people would bother to read this one, I would have spent some time on it), so I’ll try to reiterate some things:
In regards to MHL (isn’t it funny how her acronym resembles the equally ghastly, but far more amusing, BHL?) “coming around,” it would be utterly insane for her suddenly develop some class consciousness and throw her lot in with our tiny fringe. It actually wouldn’t be unprecedented– look at Chris Hedges’ recent turn from bourgeois journalist to radical– but if Hedges’ is any indication, it wouldn’t really do any good for her professionally or for the wider movement. The point of this piece wasn’t a critique of individuals, Harris-Lacewell, et. all, for the purposes of cleansing the movement of “apostates” (if anything my softness on Hitchens shows a trepidation in dealing with genuine apostasy), but rather to acknowledge the decline in the discourse of the liberal-left (as most prominently represented by The Nation) and relate this decline to the collapse of the broader anticapitalist left.
This isn’t a blame liberals for being “stupid” or weak post either: If you were Katrina vanden Heuvel would you be looking for a palatable, media-exposed writer like MHL or a curmudgeony radical holdout?
Assuming that it is even desirable, how can there be “popular front” between liberals and socialists when there is no visible socialist movement? How can there be an honest “debating ground” between radicals and the broader “left” without confident, principled socialists?
A lot of it comes down to the question of organization. A good first step to reconstitute the left would be the “pre-political” work necessary to allow for the organization of anti-capitalists into the type of (non-electoral) Party (capitalization intended) that Fletcher mentions in his “It’s Time for the Left to Get Serious” speech. One that would not operate on the basis of a prescribed “line”, would embrace genuine internationalism and would allow for free discussion and debate and the formation of permanent factions within itself. I have no doubt that such an organization wouldn’t attract hundreds of thousands overnight, but it would be a good starting point to work from. Part of this recomposition would mean supporting our own publications and cultivating our own writers (there are plenty of good publications worth reading already out there like New Politics). Obviously the base for a future democratic movement would be self-described liberals/social democrats who haven’t been introduced to the structural critique, students and the unpoliticized/apathetic, but, if history is any example, we won’t be able to take advantage of favorable objective conditions if we don’t have an organizational framework already in place.
You mean the very much need Death of 0bamanation.