Overview
There was once a familiar American left. Progressive unions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, campaigns against poverty and war —all were recently a part of our national scene. Today all are faded or gone.... Now from Michael Tomasky, one of the most intelligent voices of the American left, comes a stirring challenge to our nation's progressive tradition." Left for Dead" examines the troubling recent history and tenuous future of our nations' once-significant progressive movements, and makes an uncompromising study of how the left has been destroyed by its own contradictions and ills—and what must be done if there are any hopes for revival. Tomasky explores how today's left lost control of crucial issues such as welfare, affirmative action, and health care. Rather than blame the forces of the right for the left's slippage, Tomasky explores how today's left has found its own way of 'making enemies of everyone'—narrowly representing eccentrics, academic specialists and malcontents above the vast expanse of working-class Americans, whom it has come to regard with near-contempt. Tomasky traces the uneasy relationship between the left and the Democrats, the dead-end pursuit of welfare rights in the halls of academia, the confused and ultimately failed campaign for national health care and the ill-conceived politicking over immigration....It is from these ruinous times, however, that Tomasky finds the potential for a newly impassioned and American left, one that can understand all that is good and promising in America and can become reconnected with the hopes and the motivations of everyday people....If there is to be a recognizable American left in thenext century, this thoughtful and urgent work can begin the discussion that will take it there.Editorials
Library Journal
According to Tomasky, a columnist for New York magazine, the left end of the political spectrum needs to revisit its most fundamental assumptions. "It's a basic rule of evolution: adapt, or die," he says. In clear, jargon-free prose, Tomasky chides leftists for favoring shopworn slogans over concrete policy prescriptions. Rather than bringing fresh ideas to bear on welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and other critical issues, progressives have ceded the public debate to others, he charges, by turning a blind eye to the feelings of middle-class Americans. "Left and right are both guilty," he says, "of applying inflexible ideology to a real world in which the factors in operation are far more complicated and nuanced than either side allows." But the Left, far more than the Right, has lost any sense of a connection to a mass constituency that can reasonably aspire to political power. This discerning critique of contemporary progressive and multicultural politics is likely to provoke discussion across the Left/Right divide. Recommended for all libraries.Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New YorkKirkus Reviews
A thoughtful, good-natured critique of the left by one of its longstanding supporters.Tomasky, a columnist for New York magazine, seems to delight in the unreality of contemporary American politics—in, for instance, the fact that the Pentagon insists that even though the Cold War is over, the nation needs to be able to wage two major wars simultaneously, or in the way in which politicians of both parties agree that the poor need self-discipline and the wealthy need a tax break. That there is no organized leftist response to such claims, he continues, is the fault of the left itself; under Newt Gingrich the right has coopted the left's historical language of "community and aspiration," while the left has been absorbed by infighting and self-righteousness. "The left loves the idea of self-examination," he writes provocatively, "but abhors its practice, because any serious self-examination will show that the left is considered broadly and laughably irrelevant by many people." Tomasky goes on to argue that while the left has always been negligible in number, its proponents can make a difference in national politics. That will not happen, he maintains, unless the left changes its "tendency to find what's wrong with others' ideas rather than what may be right with them, to impute bad motives to their proponents, or to take a line of text or one plank in a proposal as proof that the writer has moved to the right or that the proposal is reactionary." Spurning a place at the table in rational discussions of illegal immigration or affirmative action can only increase the left's irrelevance, he says; instead, progressive causes need to recapture the Enlightenment belief in "democracy and reason not as dead ends but as unfinished works that can and must be improved."
A book that may speak to a small audience, but that speaks eloquently and sanely all the same.