The Left and Realignment

132 the minnesota review John O'Kane The Left and Realignment We didn't need the results of the recent elections to tell us what has been becoming clear for some time. The Left in the United States, and parallel to trends in many Western countries, has given way to disarray and fragmentation in the face of the realignment of the "New Right." Whether marxist, socialist, or merely the social-democratic mainstay, the Left has been unable to keep attracting the groups that have traditionally given it support: youth, the enlightened and upwardly mobUe middle classes , the working class. It even seems now that Jimmy Carter's brief rise to national prominence was possible only because he repealed to the religious constitutency that gave Reagan such a boost in 1980. It's not just that the "New Left got old," as friends have somewhat aptly commented in recent days, but that with the movement of this group into the protected position of middle age other historical changes have occurred as well. WUhelm Reich gave us the first analysis of that volatUe era preparatory to the electoral onset of another "New Right" in the European twenties: German Fascism. Written in 1933, his The Mass Psychology ofFascism looked at the election results during the 4-5 years prior to Hitler to learn why a significant part of the poulace began to vote against their own political and economic interests and turned to the alluring symbols and myths offered by the Right to satisfy the tastes or desires of an increasingly bellicose and avaricious mass. The eras are not strictly similar but their comparison is suggestive. Once periods of prosperity begin to disintegrate , those on the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder, those most affected by depression and recession, do not always take their place in a political grouping that can correct the immediate damage. Perhaps the effects of impoverishment are so great at such moments that the disgruntled need assurance more than anything else that others below them are worse off. Advanced capitalism's refined system of hierarchies, even within the poorest sectors, makes it inevitable that nearly everyone is on the bottom and trying to be on top of someone else. The effects of castration may make them particularly susceptible to the Right's variable efforts to restore a sense of "individualism," the exaggerated and contradictory meanings of this term being trotted out in times of greatest dissolution . Nearly all blacks remained committed to the Left coalition, and the statistics after four years of Reagan show that they are surely at the bottom of the hierarchy. The buck had to stop somewhere. Maybe all we need do is reread Genet's The Balcony, or take another look at Dusan Makaveyev's films, those that were most responsible for bringing Reich's ideas to bear upon the curious fate of the 60s New Left. O'Kane 133 A Left realignment wUl have to understand, and be better prepared to combat, the irrational and narcissistic factors currently circulating in the political culture. That America's declining economic prosperity didn't produce what could reasonably be expected, a positive class realignment at the ballot box, suggests the need for a strategy to include these "psychological effects" within an overall leftist initiative. Perry Anderson has monitored developments with the Western Left since his coming of intellectual age in the late 50s, when the Cold War was nearing its end and the opositional voices squelched by superpower confrontation could be heard again. His concern with the fate of the Left within an international scheme is an appropriate one given the virtual lack of any indigenous leftist or marxist culture (or tradition) on his native soil of Britain at the time of his intellectual maturity. Forced to look to the European continent and elsewhere for the true successors of Marx and Engels, his writings since that time have made use of all the resources of international thought to explain the current state of Marxism. His major books trace this concern ; they have paralleled the movement of the epicenter of leftist thinking from the Latin countries—France and Italy in particular—to Britain itself by the...