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John Hellebrand

The Agony of the American left

 

From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 24.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The Agony of the American left
Christopher Lasch
Penguin Books, 50p

The editor at Penguin Press would have had a better title for this generally boring book if he had titled it The Agony of the American Liberal. Christopher Lasch, as well as the old fighters for good causes clustered around the New York Review of Books, has given us the reheated leftovers of America before Vietnamisation. McCarthyism, Populism, the Cold War, and Black Power, they’re all here.

The last essay in the book The Revival of Political Controversy in the Sixties, dribbles to the pious end that: ‘Essential liberties have survived even in our flawed democracy. If these are destroyed, liberals and radicals will go down together.’ Yes, and then Christopher Lasch would have to find something else to write about. What makes this book so bad, and many like it cluttering up the bookshops in the quick rush to cash in on the present Americamania, is that it is continuously characterizing and attempting to delimit the outlines of America without coming to grips with its basic structures. Where are the essays concerning the transformation of American trade unionism since 1945? Where and what is the American rank and file? Lasch cannot answer these questions because he has thought them out of existence. For Lasch the problem is to make liberalism look like Marxism. What a waste.

 
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