What’s Left

A Robust, Confident Movement

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


What happened to the movement that integrated America, stopped the costly war in Vietnam and opened workplace doors for women? Several commentators offer opinions on where the left went wrong and where it should go.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT and author of the upcoming Powers and Prospects.

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There’s been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

People here should do what they did in the Haitian slums, where it was possible to construct grassroots organizations that enabled the democratic system to function. They forged a very lively and vibrant civil society. To talk about our bringing democracy to Haiti is a joke. We should look there and find out how it worked. It works when people get organized and are willing to work together and have a sense of solidarity and are willing to put aside their own immediate personal issues for a broader concern.

Pete Hamill is author of the forthcoming book, Piecework.

[A lot of what’s wrong with politics] started with Vietnam. The government got arrogant and lost its authority by waging a stupid war that they wouldn’t even declare. That started to unravel our sense of civility around political discourse. The left began to demonize its opponents, like LBJ, which the right has now really picked up on.

A lot of good things happened in the ’60s. But the left wore itself out by the time of Watergate. People were just tired of all the confrontationalism and overblown rhetoric, which just played into the hands of the right. The left became a compendium of grievances instead of a great, robust, healthy, confident movement to change the world.

Todd Gitlin is a sociologist and author of The Twilight of Common Dreams.

John Mitchell was right when he said, “This country is going to move so far to the right you aren’t going to recognize it.” The right took seriously the project of coming to power. Meanwhile, the left was tangled in knots. How did we lose? The main project of the left was perfecting differences. America is a bigger place than the Bay Area or lower Manhattan, and you can’t do serious politics by opening up divisions of race, gender, and sexuality.

Unless the setting is conducive to overall equality, the right can accentuate the zero-sum game where the proverbial white guys don’t see anything in it for them–and there are too many of them. What do people have in common? If it’s just about fighting for scraps at the bottom of the table then we all lose.

Robert Scheer is a columnist and a Los Angeles Times contributing editor.

We leaned too hard on the center. Going back to the ’60s and ’70s, we, on the left, felt mainstream liberals–Rockefeller and Eisenhower by today’s standards–were centrist. We thought domestically that we’d up the ante. These leaders collapsed. The Republican moderates collapsed too. Who’d have thought we’d have to fight about teaching Darwin? It’s rearguard and dispiriting…but we’ll win.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate