The Left at War (review)

As someone who respects Michael Berube's work, I found this work to be both a sad and bad book.

Sad because it reflects a left that has largely accepted self-segregation and a hip version of what Herbert Marcuse called repressive tolerance—a left without a commitment to replacing capitalism with socialism. Bad, because Berube has engaged in what I call "Billy the Kid" scholarship, shooting down or in this case putting down others with no sense of history as it affects real politics and culture.

It is as if Berube and his subjects live in the world of the Young Hegelians that Karl Marx parted company with in the 1840s—a world where criticism becomes an end in itself and theoretical debates grow more and more heated as they become less relevant to political economy and social struggle—a world of, by and for abstractions.

First, Berube surfs the internet to confront a wide variety of academic and popular critics of the Iraq War. He then looks at the debates concerning cultural theory in Britain, defending Stuart Hall from contemporary left critics.

Finally, he deals with and rejects left criticisms of cultural studies as a field, and ends in praise of "equality and freedom." As the old parody goes, "love me, love me, I'm a liberal."

Berube has little interest in history; I see him repeating it, that is, searching for a "vital center," a "democratic left" in a post cold war world. Instead of definitions and connections, he has assertions of the kind Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made against those he regarded as pro Communist liberals in the late 1940s and of course Hannah Arendt reached in Origins of Totalitarianism. Berube's straw targets are the "Manichean Left," as against Schlesinger's "tender-minded" liberals of yesteryear.

If he were to rewrite this book, Berube might ask himself these questions. Where are the parties of the left, e.g., the Communist Party USA, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and groups like the Committees of Correspondence (COC) who don't exist in this work? Where are academics like Stanley Aronowitz, who have long connected theory with practice in the university world, who are either totally ignored or in Aronowitz's case mentioned only in regarded to his comments on his wife, Ellen Willis (who is significant in Berube's narrative)?

Where are the long-term effects of the cold war induced political repression on U.S. universities and media, the corporatization of public universities in recent decades, as the cold war liberal political consensus developed into the late and post cold war Reagan-Bush hegemony in U.S. politics? For Berube, Margaret Thatcher exists largely because of Stuart Hall's analysis of her. Ronald Reagan is invisible, and Bush-Cheney are the flip side of the "Manichean Left."

Relating political theory to popular culture can be enormously valuable when connections are made to the development of policy within a context with a clear framework. Sadly, Berube has not written such a book, which would have increased respect for cultural studies among humanists and social scientists.