For a liberal left

I hadn't previously come across Matt Taibbi, but he's making some criticisms of the US left, and my goodness, the Euston Manifesto seems rather mild by comparison. Here's part of the intro:

The word ['liberal' - NG] has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I'm not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do - iconoclastic columnists and journalists who've had bylines in places like The Nation - they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

"Fuck that," responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. "I'd rather talk about my genital warts. I'd rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact."

"Ugh. Not sure I want to go there," read one e-mail.

"I really wish I wasn't associated with the left," sighed a third.

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that's a bad sign, and it's worth asking what the reasons are.

So, what are the reasons, according to Taibbi? Relentless abuse from the right-wing media is part of it, but most of the reasons are internal to the US left itself. It's quite a charge sheet: 'living in the past', 'mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense', 'high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging', no organizational capacity, 'politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines', hardly any real 'connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion' and more. Much more. It's written with some zest:

What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word "oppression" escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word "Amerika"... Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.

And still there's more. It's a long piece.

The thing I want to focus on is this: Taibbi has a problem with the the word 'liberal', as you can see from his opening, and then again from his penultimate, paragraph. For him, 'the word "liberalism" describes an era whose time is past'. I would say: on the contrary. Even allowing for the fact that the word is differently understood on the other side of the Atlantic, and whatever the problems may be with a section of the US left and the Western left more generally, if the left is to have a successful future it must continue to embrace liberal values (in the classical sense) where it already does so, and it must begin to embrace them where, as yet, it does not. As is well known, much of the history of the left has been associated with illiberalism, including of a most lethal kind, and the antics Taibbi is put off by and apologias we've been hearing from the same quarter since 9/11 reinforce that association. The word is only a word, 'hairless' or otherwise; but the central values it has stood for are values the left has to make its own, and a continuity through use of the word is one good way of registering that. (Via Matt Zeitlin.)