But I think if this trend of an establishment left continues, it will be much easier to find radical leftists who will reject this establishment cultural leftism – not just because it’s the status quo, but because it’s an image without substance. This could be the dynamic that finally dislodges the narrow identity politics described above from the radical leftist movement.

I think we should anticipate a left-dominated government that will seek to moderate and stabilize capitalist institutions and will make “awareness” of these cultural issues paramount. The best thing that could happen would be for the left to return to a radical class / labor movement that appeals to people in the broadest possible sense, rejecting this apologist rhetoric in favor of a popular, classical leftism opposing the establishment qua establishment and divisive identity politics qua identity politics.

But that’s a tall order – I dare say it’ll take more than fourty years!

Jeremy, good comments. A problem that I see is that those things that do the most harm to group the Left claims to champion at the same time frequently find their most vigorous proponents on the Left. For instance, in the early 80s Walter Williams published “The State Against Blacks” which documented all sorts of ways state intervention undermines black community, social and economic life, yet he was not only ignored but ridiculed by the black civil rights establishment. Studies have shown that inner-city blacks have a higher quality of life in Houston than in other cities. Not coincidentally, Houston has no zoning laws. When has the Left ever spoken up against zoning ordinances?

Arguably, the most serious problem faced by women that men don’t deal with as much is violent sex crimes. It seems to me the solution is more women who are armed and trained in the art of self-defense. We know what the typical liberal view on that is.

One of the ways they’ve become the establishment is by creating images of a movement for change without substance. Of course, Obama epitomizes this marketing approach to cultural transformation. Alter the packaging and people will think it’s a new kind of corn flakes.

The irony of the matter is that these leftist issues are still problems in important senses, but since the mainstream left has built their image around looking like they’re fixing them, they’ve never been addressed on an institutional level. It’s easy to go after individual bigots – much more challenging to address the structural racism of things like housing projects and welfare programs. It sucks that environmentalism is a cultural movement and not a radical political one like it should be. But culture is much more easily co-opted by capitalism than structural change. And so it goes with the institutional nature of things like racism, sexism, etc. – in all cases the goal is to preserve existing power structures as much as possible while playing lip service to ameliorating these ills.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/attackthesystem/

The left feels the nascent power of being in cultural ascendancy, and dutifully drop, or at least soften their stance, on issues that would really shake up the power structure, such as the prison system and the military industrial complex. Why should they weaken state power just at the moment they are finally able to wield it?