Getting the Left Right

My review of THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL by Eric Lott, posted on Amazon last week, is only an attempt to report on this richly intellectual work. It's not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one.

Fairly Fierce, Fiercely Fair, May 2, 2006

In THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL, Eric Lott makes a convincing argument that liberal intellectuals such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Henry Louis Gates, and Michael Lind among others have attacked the libertarian multicultural left in order position their nationalistic brand of "boomer" liberalism as the best hope against the tide of red state conservatism. And that by doing so, they are doing the work of the right wing.

To a large extent, because the brand of liberalism endorsed by these writers is for most Americans what the left is understood to be, some readers may find Lott's distinction between liberal and left confusing at first. But for those who can make the necessary distinction, Lott offers a bracing, erudite criticism that is long overdue

As one who has read many of the writers and Mr. Lott examines, I find his judgments fair but also, where appropriate, unsparing. Indeed, Mr. Lott bends over backwards to give credit to many of these authors.

For instance, he gives Michael Lind due appreciation for his original thinking on Jefferson and his influence (negative) on American culture. He also credits Stanley Crouch for Crouch's dead-on assumption that American culture is African American culture, or at the very least, a Creole culture. Lott is dismissive, and rightly so, of Crouch's quasi-conservatism on political issues as they relate to race, finding him to be cranky and wrong-headed. But Lott is not mean-spirited in this criticism. He simply believes Crouch is wrong.

Lott maintains that the attempted marginalization of the radical left by these writers has been counterproductive to the stated goal of many of them: to get the necessary electoral heft to drive the right wing from power. He argues that by holding the left at arm's length they have unwittingly promoted the reactionary statism of the Bush administration.

Making this case by showing that their ascendance paralleled the rise of the Clinton administration, an administration which pursued a "triangulated" center, a course which in most ways promoted a watered-down Eisenhower era Republican agenda, Lott shows that the Clinton era was more than problematic for the left, that in fact it was disastrous.

He offers considerable evidence for his views through close readings of these author's works. Indeed, one only has to read a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times in which he congratulated liberals for turning away from multiculturalism and toward a more adult "Trumanesque" nationalism to see how much territory these writers have surrendered to the right, and to see how correct Lott is.

Lott offers up as an example of a cogent left-wing critical voice Armand White, whose collection of essays on popular culture, THE RESISTANCE: TEN YEARS OF POP CULTURE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD is, as Lott suggests, the work of an original radical voice. I had not read White, An African American cultural critic whose works in the collection were mostly published in "The City Sun," a black newspaper in New York, until Lott's book convinced me that I should. White's film and music criticism ranges freely from Metallica to Madonna, Spielberg to Spike Lee, Michael Jackson to Public Enemy. Like Lott he is bracing, gutsy, and original.

In reading many of the works of the boomer liberals Lott discusses, I often found they gave me a sense of possibilities foreclosed, of options elided, of nostalgia for a vanished pre-radicalized 60s. If you've ever had the same reaction to these writers, I highly recommend reading Lott. His prose is dense, but ultimately rewarding, and every once in a while, unexpectedly, hilariously funny.