The death of Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of many books, is an irreplaceable loss not only personally, for those who knew him, but for the broad “progressive” movement, where his populist brand of anarcho-syndicalism — the leftist equivalent of “crunchy conservatism” — set him apart from the bullhorn-shouters and sloganeering ideologues of the haute cuisine Left. His passing, after a two-year battle against cancer, marks nearly the end of what remained vital and interesting about the American left in this country. There is simply no one even remotely like him. As Jesse Walker described his first encounter with Cockburn’s prose: “I had never read anything like this before.”
What’s particularly poignant about his passing is that we’ll never read anything even remotely like it again. With his death, a certain current in American politics, with its roots on the left, has lost its only remaining voice.
Accounts of Cockburn’s career in the obituaries describe him as a “radical leftist,” but this is only half-true. He was a radical, all right, but as for the “leftist” — I have my doubts. And so did his readers at the Nation, with whom he engaged in a long-running debate over what constituted proper left-wing orthodoxy. This debate included his editors: one “Beat the Devil” column in the Nation bears this footnote:
“The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wishes it to be on record that she takes exception to the description of Dissent as ‘obscure.’ I suggest a poll of the American people.”
There was a running tension between vanden Heuvel and Cockburn over the Obama Question, and his other “deviations” from the left’s party line: approached by his critics, vanden Heuvel averred “I don’t read Counterpunch” — Cockburn’s feisty newsletter which featured material far too radical for the Obama-worshipping “respectable” Nation. Then there was the “Bush/Hitler” debate, and the climate change controversy — the latter brouhaha the final straw for the kind of up-marketsandal-wearing lefties who still read the Nation. After all, Cockburn was a shameless recidivist: when Bill Clinton was targeting the alleged danger posed by the militia movement in the 1990s, Cockburn defended them, likened them to the Zapatistas, and described one militia rally he attended as “amiable”: he was also staunchly opposed to gun control, a classical leftist position long-forgotten by today’s paladins of political correctness and federal control of everything.
