Views > April 20, 2008 > Web Only

The American Left: A Tale of Two Conferences

By Ken Brociner

By sheer coincidence, the two wings of the American left held back-to-back conferences in mid-March. What follows is not only a story about those two conferences, but also a tale of the American left itself.

Before it became known as the Left Forum in 2005, the annual gathering of leftists at New York’s Cooper Union College went by the name of the Socialist Scholars Conference. As in the past, this year’s conference billed itself as a meeting of “intellectuals and activists from around the world.” But it was mostly a coming together of the radical wing of the American left, with a concentration of activists from the New York metropolitan area.

Despite my alienation from the overall politics of the Left Forum, as I was walking around on Saturday, I did feel a kinship with many of the approximately 1,100 people in attendance. [Editor’s correction: This estimate is too low. Stanley Aronowitz, co-chair of the conference, states in his comment below that 2,300 people registered. See also Part 2 of Ken Brociner’s comment.] Given the average age of the activists and intellectuals who were shuttling back and forth between workshops and panels, it was obvious these folks have been in the struggle for decades.

But I also felt a mixture of sadness and anger. It was like I was in a parallel political universe from the one I inhabit. Nothing captured this surreal feeling more than the fact that the upcoming U.S. presidential election was all but ignored.

Here we were in the middle of compelling race for the Democratic nomination—a race that that has seen the emergence of a remarkable grassroots movement in support of Barack Obama’s insurgent campaign and yet one would barely know it from attending the Left Forum.

Even the panel “The interplay of movements and electoral politics in the U.S.” managed to focus on everything but the political race that has been capturing the imaginations of activists all over America. Instead such hot topics as how progressives can build a labor, green, or left party were addressed.

Some panels were better than others, but for the most part ideology—and a turgid and dogmatic one at that—appeared to have trumped everything going on in the world outside of Cooper Union.

While it might be tempting to dismiss the Left Forum as an annual gathering of the mostly irrelevant far left—doing so would be a mistake.

First, even though the activists who attend the conference each year represent a distinct minority of the American left, their visibility is disproportionately high. And because this wing of the left specializes in shrill ideological pronouncements, it has served to limit the overall appeal of the American left with its most important audience—the American public.

Secondly, the “explain it all” ideology that is so characteristic of the far left (everywhere, not only in the United States) siphons off a significant portion of the overall pool of potential activists. Unfortunately, instead of becoming involved in relevant political work, all too many of these activists wind up wasting their time on the abstractions of stale “ideological struggle.” Or worse, Nader-style Third Partyism.

On Sunday morning when I took my seat on the train to Washington, I couldn’t wait to leave New York and connect to the kind of pragmatic politics that I knew would be on full display at the Take Back America Conference.

This year’s conference was being promoted as “The Progressive Convention.” It is the one gathering each year where the progressive movement comes together. Despite the different functions and agendas of each of the component parts of the movement, practically every one of the 2,000 or so in attendance shares the same general goals and values.

Defeating the right and electing progressives to office serves as the overriding raison d’etre of the conference. Connected to those objectives are: broadening and strengthening the grassroots movement around the country; and advocating on behalf of an ambitious set of social, economic and political issues.

Take Back America 2008 was, as usual, rousing and inspirational. The keynote speeches that stood out for me were those given by Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future (the group that convenes the conference each year); Van Jones, a young and dynamic leader in the environmental movement; and Donna Edwards, the newly elected, soon-to-be, congresswoman from Maryland’s 4th district.

Borosage presented an analytical overview of the current political situation with a stress on how the progressive movement can shift things in a leftward direction. He once again restated his belief, which was clearly shared by most of the people at the conference, that the best way to move forward is to do so as “an independent progressive movement, not as an arm of the Democratic Party.”

Borosage’s perspective is spelled out in a paper that was distributed to everyone at the conference: “Progressives Rising—2008: As Sea-Change Election.”

In the most poignant panel of the conference, Jesse Jackson, Roger Wilkins, and Taylor Branch reflected on how “the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement” might be applied in the event that we have a Democrat in the White House come 2009.

At a Take Back America press conference it was announced that a loose coalition of progressive groups will be mounting a huge $ 400 million-plus effort to register voters and advocate for candidates in the run-up to November 4 elect.

The AFL-CIO will be spending more than $53 million on outreach to union members. Individual unions within the labor federation, along with the seven unions in the Change to Win coalition will be spending another $300 million or so mobilizing their members, as well as on direct contributions to progressive candidates.

MoveOn.org announced it is planning to spend more than $30 million on the presidential race and in key House and Senate races.

The economic justice group ACORN, a nonprofit organization that cannot advocate for candidates, announced it will running a massive voter registration drive aimed at low-income minorities—to the tune of $35 million.

Other groups participating in the press conference included Rock the Vote, Planned Parenthood, and the National Council of La Raza, each indicating that they are involved in mobilizations of their own.

As the AFL-CIO’s Karen Ackerman made clear, the overall progressive effort to turn out the vote on Election Day will be the most extraordinary mobilization of its kind in American history.

On my flight back to Boston, I was thinking about the two conferences I had just attended. Sadly, one wing of the American left is still stuck in a rigidly ideological view of the world, rendering themselves politically irrelevant. On the other hand, the pragmatic wing of the left has become a real player in American politics and is stronger than it has been in decades. If the Democrats can recapture the White House, this wing of the left should be able to claim at least partial credit for the victory. As a result, progressives are likely to have at least some influence on the new administration’s policies, while at the same time expanding both the ranks and the reach of the progressive movement itself.

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• Reader Comments

  I didn’t attend the Left Forum this year (or last) and Ken Brociner’s article didn’t give me any information about what I might have missed.  It did tell me how uncomfortable Ken feels in certain left circles, but that in itself is not particularly interesting, unless perhaps, you know Ken personally (I don’t).  Maybe the idea of Ken listening to a panel on Venezuela or Iraq is inherently funny.  Who knows?  A different, more interesting article would have covered the two conferences with the same attention to detail.  Keynote addresses could have been compared.  We could have been treated to an overview of panel topics, or what the two conferences understood to be the major issues of the day.  Presumably the US presidential election is not the only thing that deserves attention in this world?  But that other article would have meant focusing on something other than personal discomfort.

  Posted by MenacingToad on Apr 20, 2008 at 8:10 PM

  This is an awful article. I absolutely agree with Menacing Toad’s sentiment. The author offered nothing but a caricature of the Left Forum and his own ideological drivel, which clearly rests in his own blind spot. In These Times has to do better. I am in full agreement that any left movement has to mix ideology and pragmatism, but this authors rabid pragmatism and belief in electoral politics as the only avenue for change, is wrongheaded. Moreover, it discounts the LONG history of movement building in the US and beyond that has happened out side of electoral politics. We need to do better then Mr Brociner if we are to build a thoughtful, flexible and growing left movement that is able to have a political understanding of the world while building party and network apparatuses that operate both within and beyond electoral politics.

  Posted by twolfson on Apr 21, 2008 at 6:58 AM

  I write as a member of the Board of Directors and the program committee of the Left Forum. Bogdan Denitch and I were the founders of its predecessor, The Socialist Scholars Conference. Both of us spoke on panels at this year’s Left forum. Ken Brociner’s piece on our conference is a fairly accurate reflection of the discomfort a left-liberal might have experienced at our conference. Yes, it is a conference of radicals, but also includes some folks traditionally associated with the politics of Democratic Socialists. A representative group of participants was there from the Village Independent Democrats, AFL-CIO union staffers and officers, and I said hello to some Dissentniks and members of the youth section of DSA as well. In short, it was as ecumenical as any of previous conferences, but did have a preponderance of panels and speakers of the radical left. They included plenary speakers like best-selling author, the anti-slavery historian Adam Hochschild, Mamoud Mondani. professor of middle eastern studies at the left-wing Columbia University, Naomi Klein, whose book on neo-liberal economics has struck terror in the hearts of Democrats as well as Republican Friedmanites, and the well-known utopian Grace Lee Boggs. Also Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Tariq Ali.
  Our board includes Bill Fletcher Jr. and the social movement theorist Fran Piven, an ardent left-Democrat as well as Rick Wolff and Bill Tabb whose economics surely violate the precepts of free market ideology. Board member Julia Wrigley is acting provost of CUNY Graduate Center and Nancy Holstrom is a Rutgers University Philosophy Professor. Michael Smith is an active civil liberties attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
  The conference organizers certified that 2300 people registered, not 1100( brociner’s numbers recall shades of the notorious NY Times report on anti-war demonstrations) and we had 110 panels ranging from discussions of financialization that featured Robin Blackburn, among others, feminist theory and practice, issues of race and class and extensive panels on US foreign policy, including, but not limited to the war against Iraq.Some of the panels would have shaken the liberal imagination. Others were a bit one-sided But the committee encouraged panel organizers to display differences. Thus many of the panels were debates rather than expositions and extreme left-wing publications such as the New York Review of Books had book and journal exhibits.
  I hope this provides some detail as to the nature and activity of Left Forum 2008.

  Posted by saronowitz on Apr 21, 2008 at 9:46 AM

  Part 1 of a reply by Ken Brociner:

  Menacing Toad” wishes I had discussed the two conferences in equal detail. But in a brief column (as opposed to a longer news report), I simply didn’t have the space to include a comprehensive analysis of the Left Forum – or such an analysis of the Take Back America Conference, for that matter. It is true that I devoted more space to the TBA conference. My primary reason for doing so is that I view the TBA gathering as being highly relevant to the real world of politics and movement building – whereas I see the Left Forum as mostly just another left-wing conference that is long on rhetoric, theory and posturing (though there were some exceptions).

  I certainly agree that “presidential elections are not the only thing that deserves attention” and I clearly indicated that at a number of places in the column. But we are in the middle of a campaign that holds enormous significance for the U.S. and the rest of the world, as well as for the American left itself. As such, it seems to me that a gathering of leftists meeting less than eight months from election day should have devoted a lot more attention to figuring out how to prevent the Republicans from controlling the presidency for another four years. Instead the Left Forum devoted most its collective energy on practically everything but how to defeat John McCain in November.

  Twolfson claims I believe that electoral politics is “the only avenue for change.” I suggest he re-read what I actually wrote. In fact, I said that connected to electing progressives to office are the goals of “broadening and strengthening the grassroots movement and advocating on behalf of an ambitious set of social, economic, and political issues.”

  Posted by kenbrociner on Apr 21, 2008 at 8:15 PM

  Part 2 of Ken Brociner’s reply:

  Stanley Aronowitz points out that there were some people at the Left Forum who do think it is important to actively support efforts to elect Democratic candidates to office. Of course there were. But he doesn’t at all dispute my overall observation that the Left Forum mostly ignored both the presidential campaign and the grassroots movement that has come together in support of Barack Obama’s remarkable run for the White House.

  I apologize for understating the number of people who attended the conference. I was facing a deadline and went with the estimates of two people who were there. I should have made more of an effort to contact the press office. (I did call a number of times but no one answered). May I suggest that in the future conference organizers put a post-conference report on the web that provides a summary of what happened along with such basics as how many people were in attendance?

  Posted by kenbrociner on Apr 21, 2008 at 8:19 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 19 posts.

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Also by Ken Brociner

• The American Left: A Tale of Two Conferences
  
• The American Left: Liberals, Progressives and the Left
  
• The American Left: A Two Track Strategy For 2008 And Beyond
  
• The Left’s Identity Crisis
  What does it mean to be a progressive in 2007? What do we stand for? What do we believe in?

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