....The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.
Full human liberation always remained the ultimate vision of the left--Marx, for one, was explicit on this point--but the left in its more than 200-year history has been flexible and adaptable in the forms it was willing to assume and the projects it was willing to undertake in pursuit of its anti-institutional goals. For more than a hundred years, the central project of the global left was socialism.
It's hard to credit today, but as recently as the 1940s most Western political elites believed government ownership of business and national planning were the keys to economic modernization. Even when socialism's economic prestige was eroded by the West's capitalist boom after World War II, socialism retained credibility as a means of income redistribution.
It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.
In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it, leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.
This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion and limit the autonomy of the family did not.
For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory "liberated" men.
With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.
The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.
Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.
If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.
SourceThis exegesis of the left's philosophy is largely in accord with where I find myself.
In Israel the principle internal tension comes from the divide between the Corporatist Jabotinski Faction of the Jews of the Diaspora (Likud) and their fellow Displaced Persons, the Socialists of the Kibbutzim (Labour). The Nationalists versus the Internationalists (Workers of the World Unite). This dichotomy is complicated by the presence of a Traditionalist Religious Faction.
(Please note - if you are offended by flippant comments be advised that I do not question the right of Israel to exist, nor the right of Jews to defend themselves nor to create a society in whatever fashion they see fit. They have exactly the same rights as any other group. They can have what they can hold.)
The same split of beliefs and factions are played out in every country in the world - including Canada.
The Kibbutzim were described by my Dad's mates in the Paras in derogatory (and I have no doubt, given that we are talking about 18-21 year old "celibates", envious ) tones, as Stud Farms. Their belief, slanderous or not, was that in the Kibbutzim men of their age not only were not forced to be celibate (officially) but in fact had access to all the women and would never have responsibility for their children because the "State-Kibbutz" would raise them. For a 19 year old Tom far from home with few friendly female faces around it all sounded too much like paradise and much too good for those "jew-boys" hiding guns to kill them, murdering them in their cots and hanging their sergeants. There was certainly a degree of animosity - mutual.
Leaving aside the viciousness of the jew-baiting inherent in that belief (in 1967 Dad could find himself cheering on Israeli Paras), the notion that fostered the concept of the Kibbutzm is at the heart of the ongoing pressure towards separating the family and the church from education, putting it in the hand of a socially inclined state apparatus (bureaucrats and teachers), reducing the standards for removing children from their family (residential schools were part of that continuum and related to the phenomenon that drew socialism out of Manchester churches and Ayrshire libraries and the CCF out of a Scots Methodist Minister - Bill Blaikie will understand the connection). It is also part and parcel with the push to national early daycare and keeping children in school longer.
State run "orphanages" are a staple of Stalinist (and for that matter Hitlerian) regimes. Ceaucescu's being only the most recent and notorious.
It is also the driving force behind Death/Inheritance Taxes. In the early 60s, when the Beatles wrote the song "Taxman" they and many other Brits, including my Father and Sean Connery, were driven to leave Britain by the taxes imposed by Labour. This was the era of the National Trust when impoverished "Great" families were required to sell-off/donate/open their estates because the tax burden was too great for them to be able to afford to keep their property. That was an explicit aim of Labour's socialist policies - to drag everyone down to the same starting point in the expectation that with an equal start and equal opportunity then an equal outcome would eventuate and the millenium would be achieved, So help them God. And God was an explicit part of their belief system (The hymn "
Jerusalem" (
lyrics)was, for many years, the Labour Party's anthem - sung along with "
The Red Flag" and "
The Internationale" - thus reflecting the the internal tensions within the Labour Party).
My Grandfather reflected the personal tensions of that struggle between Nationalists and Internationalists. He was son of an Ayrshire miner and Labour Party organizer and as such associated with Socialism. Burns was his favourite poet (Nationalist) but his favourite poem - after Tam O'Shanter - was "
Is there for Honest Poverty" - best known for its line ..."The Rank is but the Guinea's stamp, the man's the gowd (gold) for a' that" a favourite of the Internationalists and the Marxists. But he, like most of his ilk, was also a staunch Presbyterian, an Elder of the Kirk that held the Sabbath close and a practicing Mason (who like most in those days did not advertize the fact - even to his grandson). He was also a strong militarist, taking pride in both his family's military service and his own service as an "ERK" in the RAF during WW2. His wife, a fellow employee of the Co-Operative, and a member of "The Rural" and "The Women's Institute" shared his views
Jock Davidson and the Clydesiders like George Galloway were, and are an abomination to everything that they believed in.
No, I am firmly in agreement with the above article. It is not that there is a conspiracy. A conspiracy suggests a few directing the many. It is worse than that. It is a generalized, cross-cultural belief that somewhere, somehow, sometime - IN THIS WORLD - the lion shall lie down with the lamb (
here's the actual quote and
here and
here is its setting). Just as a note - there is damlittle of peace in that passage. It is all about revolution, red in tooth and claw, and divine retribution resulting in the good guys winning so that the only people left are those that agree with the aggrieved down-trodden.
That is an Old Testament passage - based on the concept of the perfectability of this world. A belief held dear by Scots and Boer Covenanters and Presbyterians and other Calvinists like the Huguenots.
The New Testament which defines "Christians", interestingly enough, takes the opposite view. There is no perfection to be found in this world. You will have to wait for the next to find peace.
PS - reference my previous submission - My Grandparents, dearly beloved but still stiff-necked Presbyterians and adorers of Tommy Douglas, would have been amongst the first to Tsk-Tsk at the notion of an unwed mother. The Left come by their intolerance honestly. It is in the genes and their traditional, family, upbringing.
