Patrick,

Yes, I’d consider the Black Panther Party and SNCC during its Black Power phase to be members of the radical Left. Besides their explicit development of Marxian revolutionary thought (which they both embraced and substantially altered in order to adapt it to the situation as they saw it), it’s also worth noting that a number of other paradigmatic New Left groups at the time (SDS, Weather, the Young Lords, American Indian Movement, etc.), and other groups with roots in the radical Left (New York Radical Women, etc.) considered SNCC in its Black Power phase, and the Black Panther Party, to be leading members of the American Left.

None of this, of course, is the same thing as saying that they were correct; I take “Left” to be a term of ideological analysis, not necessarily a term of praise. As for myself, I think that there are valid criticisms to be made of the Black Power tendency, but they are mostly criticisms that applied to the New Left as a whole at the time (e.g. the pseudo-revolutionary embrace of violent, patriarchal masculinity); as for the debate between integrationist approaches and Black nationalism, I think there are important and valid criticisms on both sides, but I don’t have any strong opinion as to who’s right, all things considered (and since I’m not a member of the Black community I don’t think that any strong opinions that I had about the best way for Black people to organize themselves, or the best things for them to fight for, would be worth much anyway).

And even if I don’t have my family’s support — which, frankly, I do not — I’m still married. … Marriage may be a bond between two individuals, affirmed and supported by those the couple elicits for help, but it can’t possibly be — and should not be — with everyone.

If marriage is a chosen bond between individuals that doesn’t require the support or recognition of other people, then what’s keeping same-sex couples from getting married now? Nobody, as far as I know, is forcibly preventing gay couples from committing to each other ‘till death do they part, and holding a ceremony to formalize it where they say “I thee wed,” and describing themselves as “married,” “spouses,” etc. thereafter. So then what’s all the fuss about? Same-sex couples can already get married today, if that’s all that there is to it.

Ayn Rand, for good or for ill, is pretty decisively not a founding figure in modern conservatism, but rather in modern libertarianism. Many conservatives did read her books at some point or another, but she was and is reviled by movement conservatives, from National Review’s slashing review of Atlas Shrugged, in which Whit Chambers declared “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’,” to their surprisingly nasty obit on the event of her death in 1982. The hostility was over a number of issues, but especially her militant atheism, her hostility to cultural traditionalism, and (according to Rand at least) her willingness to insist on free market policies as a matter of moral principle when conservatives were willing to compromise for the sake of religion or the purchase of political pull.

Vacula: “It’s a very narrow view of oppression that leaves very little room for the negative(/sexist) influence of female anti-feminists on women and ‘bad’ feminists on men, much less the positive impact of male or female pro-feminists on women.”

You raise some important points, but I don’t understand what you are trying to highlight when you mention the “negative influence of … ‘bad’ feminists on men.” Speaking quite frankly, I have never met a man who talked up some kind of hostility or political opposition to feminism on the “bad experiences” he’d had with feminists, who had any genuine knowledge or understanding about feminism as a movement or as a body of theory. Men who make this complaints very typically have had some limited unhappy experience with feminists in their area, or an impressionistic idea of who feminists are and what they do as gleaned from the mass media; have made little or no effort to make themselves less than ignorant about the history or theory or practice of feminism, as explained by the women involved in it (say reading a book, or even keeping up with a feminist periodical over any period of time); and are extremely petulant about remaining in their state of ignorance while also expecting feminists to cater to their delicate sensibilities. Thus when they start talking up bad experiences with “bad” feminists, what follows is a mishmash of anecdotes, caricatures, ignorance, half-truths, dishonesty, and nonsense. Having tried talking with men like this before, I can’t say I’m very much interested anymore in trying to deal with them or take the trouble of educating them; at root, the problem isn’t the fault of feminism, and probably isn’t the fault of the feminists that they’ve encountered either; the problem is that they are not making a good-faith effort at learning or understanding.

Maybe there are men who fit the description you offered but aren’t like this; I’ve yet to meet them, though. Or have I simply misunderstood your point?

Even so, sometimes a difference of degree can be perceived as one of character instead if that degree is relatively large. There is such a perception with regard to the Bush administration in particular, and it’s widely held.

Sure, but I think there are clear reasons for regarding that perception as clearly mistaken. As dangerous as the Bush regime is to us, and as deadly as it has been to others, I don’t think there’s any reasonable standard of comparison by which it would compare unfavorably, in terms of degree, to the absolute depotism and overt reign of terror that reigned against American Blacks from 1788-ca. 1968. Bush is bad, but as a matter of degree he is not worse than even Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, let alone the slave power and Judge Lynch. At the most he represents a lurch back towards the worst elements of Cold War militarist statism.

I understand the dialectical impulse, but part of my worry is that appealing to wistfulness for the Old Republic is likely to purchase whatever insight it offers to the interlocutor only at the expense of blinding them to very important facts about American history, and thus leaving dangerous prejudices about the past untouched (in fact I think that something like this is precisely what happened with the transition from the anti-statist elements of the old liberals and the Old Right, which combined genuine libertarian insights with mythistorical Old Republic nostalgia, to the brazen Caesarism of the New Right).

A lot of people on the Left who participated in, or supported, Black Power and the Black Panther Party criticized King in particular, the SCLC, and the emphasis on integration as the be-all and end-all of liberation for Black people. Kwame Toure (nee Stokeley Carmichael) and Jamil al-Amin (nee H. Rap Brown) were two of the leading figures, and the trajectory of SNCC from 1965 to 1967 an indicative moment. Carmichael and Brown both explicitly criticized integrationist civil rights legislation as a mere palliative, began talking about “self-determination” for Black people as the proper goal rather than “integration” into existing social structures, and aimed to align the Black liberation movement in the United States with revolutionary Leftist movements in Africa and the Third World broadly. The Nation had a bit of a discussion of the criticisms in broader historical context (reviewing the radicals of the Old Left as well as the New) back in 1998, by Robin D. G. Kelly, entitled “Integration: What’s Left?”; you can find it online at http://tinyurl.com/byq5w … Stokeley Carmichael’s SNCC position paper on “The Basis of Black Power” is also online at http://tinyurl.com/e4okd — which defends Black self-determination and Black nationalism, although it mostly leaves the criticism of the NAACP and SCLC integrationist approach tacit rather than explicit.)

gabriel: Your main problem, from a practical POV, is that the current left is doing great without you and they have their own agenda, pretty much centered on things you technically don’t like.

What is the statist Left currently doing great at? Nothing in the United States comes to mind. The dominant tone of every orthodox Leftist publication and organization at the moment seems to be a combination of outrage and despair. Even hand-wringing lefty Democrats seem to be pretty firmly convinced that the project of the Left is in a state of debilitating crisis.

On a global scale, they’ve won some a series of recent elections in South America. But in Brazil (for example) the victory has already led to a great deal of tension between the governing Left, the grassroots state socialists, and the autonomists (whose relationship to the State is ambiguous at the most, and often straightforwardly hostile) who laid much of the organizational and ideological groundwork for recent electoral wins.

That’s about the beginning and the end of what comes to mind in terms of Leftists “doing fine.” Maybe you could explain what it is that you had in mind?

It’s also worth noting that, while I can’t speak for Brad, I can say that my dialectical goals in advancing “Left Libertarianism” (and related notions) have as much to do with convincing libertarians to stop being corporate (patriarchal, etc.) tools as it does with convincing leftists to stop being state socialist tools. Whatever my opinions about the various departments of the left (and my hopes vary a lot depending on the departments in question), I am quite sure that the goal with regard to libertarians is achievable and that it will (1) get libertarians closer to the truth of matters, and (2) improve their ability to work substantial changes as libertarians, quite independently of whether the established left cooperates or not.

ericvfsu: “However, it is also possible that having an abortion does increase somewhat the possibility of depression or other disorders. Is anyone out there willing to objectively consider that possibility? I know, I know – more studies, better designed studies, this one not conclusive … All true. However, if an effect were at some time established, how would you digest that fact? Just asking.”

That’s a good question, and an important one.

I can’t speak for anyone else, of course, but my answer is that I’d digest it the same way I’d digest any other fact about medical risks attendant on abortion, or any other medical procedure: it should be honestly and neutrally documented as a side effect, and women allowed to make their own decisions in light of the knoweldge. (The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for how I’d take a genuine demonstration that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, if it ever happened.) I think Lucinda Cisler makes the point excellently in “Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women,” in regard to the particular case of restrictions for “safety” in the case of late-term abortions:

3: Abortions may not be performed beyond a certain time in pregnancy, unless the woman’s life is at stake. Significantly enough, the magic time limit varies from bill to bill, from court decision to court decision, but this kind of restriction essentially says two things to women: (a) at a certain stage, your body suddenly belongs to the state and it can force you to have a child, whatever your own reasons for wanting an abortion late in pregnancy; (b) because late abortion entails more risk to you than early abortion, the state must “protect” you even if your considered decision is that you want to run that risk and your doctor is willing to help you. This restriction insults women in the same way the present “preservation-of-life” laws do: it assumes that we must be in a state of tutelage and cannot assume responsibility for our own acts. Even many women’s liberation writers are guilty of repeating the paternalistic explanation given to excuse the original passage of U.S. laws against abortion: in the nineteenth century abortion was more dangerous than childbirth, and women had to be protected against it. Was it somehow less dangerous in the eighteenth century? Were other kinds of surgery safe then? And, most important, weren’t women wanting and getting abortions, even though they knew how much they were risking? “Protection” has often turned out to be but another means of control over the protected; labor law offers many examples. When childbirth becomes as safe as it should be, perhaps it will be safer than abortion: will we put back our abortion laws, to “protect women”?

“The nomination of Alito is an abomination, but as Knapp points out, it is a defilement of a corpse of a constitutional Republic, which if not completely dead yet, has at least jumped the shark in my own opinion.”

I’m trying to imagine a defiled corpse jumping the shark. A zombie on water-skis? In a leather jacket?

In any case, I think that the “constitutional Republic” jumped the shark around the time folks agreed on the three-fifths compromise, and the idea that “a republican form of government” in the several states could include the absolute tyranny of the landed gentry of the South over millions of their fellow creatures. Alternatively, if you think that something has to have actually gotten started before it can be said to have “jumped the shark,” I think that the Whiskey Rebellion seems as good a time as any to call it. Certainly, to mix the metaphors again, by the War of 1812, the Creek War, etc. the corpse was already beginning to smell.

“Four decades ago, the Democrats fought the right fight.”

Four decades ago, the Democratic Party in my home state was ardently committed to the strategy of “massive resistance” to desegregation. The Freedom Movement was fighting against the established Democrat power structure; a Democrat mayor fought for bus segregation tooth and nail, a Democrat governor proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and a Democrat police commissioner turned firehoses and attack dogs on unarmed children. Over in Mississippi (home of Jim Eastland) and Georgia (home of Richard Russell) and Arkansas (home of Orval Faubus) the situation wasn’t much different.

“What kind of Democratic Party would greet Dr. King today?”

I find it hard to imagine how the Democratic Party of today could manage to displease Dr. King more than it did at the time, given that at the time it was held in a stranglehold by his cruelest and most powerful enemies.

“Across decades, they have walked away, abandoned, left town, turned away, did not show up. Finally, as a party they just morphed, became the lesser versions of the modern Republicans.”

Not so many decades ago, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Jim Eastland, Richard Russell, Bull Connor, and nearly all the other deadly enemies of the Freedom Movement in the South were Democrats. Those billy-clubs and mounted cops and attack dogs were ordered by Democrat governors and Democrat commissioners. Many of these folks were the elite of their state parties and power brokers in the highest levels of government and the national party committee. Established “liberal” Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy depended on their favor, bent over backwards to please them, and stonewalled or went on the offensive against civil rights activists such as the delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who stood up to challenge the stranglehold of militant white supremacy within the Southern state parties.

How could the Democrats walk away from anything when they were never there to begin with?