He escaped the
death penalty, but
was robbed of his life
The positive
power of
the death knock
In my favourite place,
we were locked in
by 6.30pm
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth. Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR has been among the most prominent voices in the Megrahi affair, calling for a public inquiry and the release of an unpublished report into the case
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Obama may not stir
the soul, but he’s the
best we’re going to get
Leonard Quart
Countless canards have been repeatedly thrown at President Obama by Republican opponents like Newt Gingrich during this endless black comedy primary campaign, including that he is a danger to the country because he is a socialist and un-American.
Obviously, the pragmatic, pro-capitalist moderate-to-liberal Barack Obama, who is no favourite of our miniscule left, is nothing of the sort. I suppose we should feel lucky that Gingrich, the unlovable and narcissistic master of the big lie hasn’t begun to echo all those right-wing bloggers who see Obama’s ‘political roots in the Communist Manifesto’, and view him as ‘America’s first Marxist president’.
These ranting, paranoid bloggers should read, but I know won’t, a recent book by historian Michael Kazin called ‘American Dreamers’ (Alfred A Knopf) to see what real socialists, radicals and dissenters look like (they in no way resemble Obama). The book is a clear, sympathetic, but critically honest and nuanced analysis of the history of American radicalism from abolitionists and feminists of the antebellum era (many of them shaped by a social Christianity that perceived ‘the salvation of society as akin to salvation of the soul’) to the films of Michael Moore.
Kazin’s overarching point is that despite radicalism never getting close to achieving power in this country, and given that most of the alternate communities they created imploded, it has left a lasting mark on American lives, making for a more humane and just society. Among countless radical figures given their due in the book are abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betty Friedan, socialists like Eugene Debs, black nationalists like Malcolm X, and new leftists like Tom Hayden.
Kazin’s definition of radicalism is a wide-ranging one. Despite their political marginality, radical movements were able to profoundly affect the culture. From abolitionist fairs, to popular 19th-century utopian novels like ‘Looking Backward’, to gay pride parades, to the protest songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, radical cultural expression and ideas had, in Kazin’s words, ‘stirred the imagination of many Americans, particularly young ones’, and ‘did not have to win votes to become popular’.
During the first decades of the 20th century (the progressive era), the era of American radicalism’s greatest impact, three kinds of socialism came into existence. The first of these groups were the midwestern labourers and farmers who elected the nation’s first socialist mayor and Congressperson (gradualist ‘sewer socialists’), and made Oklahoma one of the reddest of American states today – a hotbed of evangelical, ordinary folks’ radicalism in those years.
A second group consisted of New York secular Jews who formed strong unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, operated socialist schools and camps, elected socialist state legislators, and published the Daily Forward. The paper’s long-time editor, Abraham Cahan, stated: ‘For the worker, the socialist ideal is a necessity…It gives him a spiritual pleasure which is higher than all’.
The third group consisted of a small movement of bohemians and cultural modernists, committed to a revolution in daily life – the politics of the self – but also advocated socialist and anti-war politics.
Barack Obama, is linked neither to any utopian vision nor to the radical transformation of American society. That’s just Republican campaign rhetoric without any basis in reality.
Writing about the Communist Party of the 1930s, Kazin views its greatest success occurring when it tactically chose to reject sectarian, revolutionary politics for a more pragmatic and popular ‘Americanism’ and gave up the class struggle for sanctifying the common man and producing odes to Washington and Lincoln. However, the Communist Popular Front, despite becoming an active supporter of the New Deal, enlisting many groups in anti-fascist coalitions, and achieving a party membership of 100,000, found its greatest triumphs in the cultural not political realm.
Countless writers, artists, photographers, film-makers, folklorists, and musicians – some of them party members, others liberals, and some relatively conservative like Frank Capra (eg, ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’) – championed ‘the people’ in their work. I have always felt that a great deal of Popular Front art sentimentalised reality, and self-consciously utilised folksiness as a style. It was nothing more than middlebrow art with a social conscience. Still powerful, if flawed, novels were produced like Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ and Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’, but Popular Front culture usually eschewed complex high art and criticism of American values for optimistic and ‘constructive’ works. Plainly, the success of the Communists during those years lay in their strategic dilution and even abandonment of their radical roots.
Dealing with the movements of the 1960s, Kazin points out that for the ‘movement’, ‘politics as conventionally defined, was of secondary importance to its historical achievements’. Despite the excesses involved in their embrace of ‘personal liberation’ and the self-destructive ideological turns some took (mouthing Maoist and Leninist slogans, or engaging in terrorism), the ‘movement’ helped end the Vietnam War and led to cultural transformations in gender roles, sexual morality, gay and racial identity, and environmental awareness. Obviously, it has always been easier for American radical movements to make gains in extending individual rights rather than making economic and political power more equitable.
Kazin’s book understands just how brutal and murderous the utopian impulse can become (eg, Stalinism). But despite knowing that most Americans would not find socialism desirable, he feels the ‘egalitarian ideal’ makes change more possible. And he quotes the great German sociologist Max Weber, ‘that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible’.
Of course, Barack Obama is linked neither to any utopian vision nor to the radical transformation of American society. That’s just Republican campaign rhetoric without any basis in reality. Instead, he is a politician grounded in a set of policy prescriptions, whose state of the union speech made the usual appeals to unity, bipartisanship and national purpose, and offered a laundry list of small improvements – few that will pass Congress. Still, there was a newly discovered, aggressive populist tone (inspired indirectly by the OWS movement), where Obama spoke about ‘restoring an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules’. Obama may be nothing grander than an extremely intelligent and more-decent-than-most politician struggling to pass relatively liberal legislation while trying to win re-election. It’s not an image that stirs the soul, but he’s undoubtedly the best we are going to get. And probably better than our often-benighted electorate deserves.
