“[The] Philip Blond thing is a really interesting thing. The marrying up of liberalism and social conservatism. Is there an equivalent for the left?”
That’s what I want to know: Who’s the Philip Blond of the left? Is there a Philip Blond of the Left? What’s the Front Porch Republic or Crunchy Cons of the left? Is there a Front Porch Republic or Crunchy Cons of the left?
People natter on about how close-minded and intellectually dead the right has become. And the nattering is on the mark if all you mean by the right is movement conservatism in the classic sense.
But there’s also The American Conservative and Daniel Larison and Andrew Bacevich and Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.
Is there anything or anyone remotely like that on the left — anything or anyone that challenges left-orthodoxy in any way at all? Or is it all just happy-clappy bobo-yuppie-establishment Obama-worship and advocacy for abortion and same-sex marriage?
There used to be people on the left like Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, Dorothy Day, and Charles Peguy.
What ever happened to that kind of left? Again, whatever happened to the left-wing Philip Blonds?

Maybe the neighbor guy just wants to take a nap in his own garden.
Sure, hammocks are more traditional, but maybe he needs the back support of a full-spring mattress.
I don’t like the idea of a clean yard as a requisite for strong community ties because I think it focuses on trivial externals rather than economic and political activities.
Well, that and also because I keep a goat in my yard…just a little one, though…
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3350/4598550734_00e095b663_o.jpg
In the background you can also see the second hand mobile home I dragged up beside the house for storage. I should probably do something about all that junk on the porch too…
If I had any neighbors, I wonder what they’d be saying about my yard…never got a chance to ask them, they tend to move away kind of quickly…I try to be friendly – invite them over to shoot Coke cans off the fence with my .22 rifle, that sort of thing….

Radical Hope is an absolutely fantastic book (as is the Charles Tayor review that goes with it.) But I’m slightly surprised to see it being used in this way by Jon Cruddas (whom I admire). It isn’t as though the organic feel, and the reality, of community can be restored simply by enforcing rules. That’s settling for the appearance of community over its reality, since, unless there’s some prior agreement about what sort of rules there ought to be and how to make them and so on, the new, and doubtless intrusive rules will be rejected, or at least fought. Anyway, if rgenerating community were that simple, someone would have done it by now. Or something like that. Anyway, neither Charles Taylor nor Jonathan Lear would make as crude a suggestion as Cruddas is making — best not stick it on them.
(That said, I’m slightly surprised at and by the conservatives who have enjoyed the book: it’s not the sort of thing, I’d have thought, that conservatives enjoy — hope is not a conservative disposition.)
Is there anything or anyone remotely like that on the left — anything or anyone that challenges left-orthodoxy in any way at all? Or is it all just happy-clappy bobo-yuppie-establishment Obama-worship and advocacy for abortion and same-sex marriage?
Presumably, you think the guy who wrote the book is a right-winger.

Rod, you should really read the criticism of using the GDP as a sole measure of nation’s well-being. It’s right up my alley and I think you would also enjoy it.
“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16GDP-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all”

BMX -
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt; assume that your post was not merely snark and that you don’t know that:
Philip Blond is to John Milbank
as
Red Tory is to Blue Labour.

Cirdan writes:
“Hope is not a conservative disposition.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The liberal disposition isn’t hope — it’s optimism.
Hope is what conservatives — or at least non-liberals — have instead of optimism.
Liberals — or at least secularists, most of whom are liberals, just as most liberals are secularists — deny the hope attested to by the Gospels and demonstrated by Christ’s Resurrection, which the Gospels recount and which most liberals, being secularists, reject.
In purely secular terms, you should educate yourself by reading Christopher Lasch’s critique of liberal optimism and the idea of “progress,” *The True and Only Heaven.*
That book is a masterpiece, and it makes the case that hope is the one thing that liberalism always has and always will deny — hence, Lasch’s own personal evolution beyond liberalism, and even, perhaps, beyond the left.

I think sometimes tidy does reflect deeper values. A few years ago I was involved in a project which required visits to a bunch of elementary schools. We went to some schools where kids were friendly, polite, and seemed happy to be there. We went to other schools were the kids were running wild – standing on desks, shouting, exhausted looking teachers.
I would say every school where the kids were out of control was also a filthy school – dirty bathrooms, stuff laying around everywhere, bad need for paint jobs. The schools where kids were well behaved and seemed enthusiastic about school were clean, lots of work hanging in the halls in nice displays, gardens and playgrounds outside. These schools were all funded the same. I bet one could come up with a lot of reasons for the disparity – but my impression is that maintaining one’s surroundings in a reasonable way does reflect on more important values – like teaching the kids to have respect for their community and also showing how important the child is by having a decent environment for the child.
BMX – I think there are a lot of Phillip Blond’s on the left – but they tend to be grouped among the environmentalists etc. Notions like limits, respecting place, developing local resources are boilerplate among the left environmental and peak energy movement. Some of Blond’s ideas are basic assumptions of the left. I would site movements that are the darlings of the left – permaculture and transition towns – as being consistent with Blond’s idea. It is no coincidence that most transition towns in the US are college towns or blue state places. Blond is deriving his work from distributism – which some would certainly see as leftie.

Bradley,
John Milbank has never been a liberal and — having endorsed the political project of his former student Philip Blond — he may arguably no longer be a leftist anymore.
As Milbank himself put it in a recent interview with Ben Suriano at *The Other Journal:*
“The hard thing for critical thinkers to do is to think outside leftism. They have to see that if neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have totally triumphed, this is because the left in its traditional mode is incapable of carrying out an adequate critique of capitalism. In the end, this is because [the left] is atheistic — one needs to be religious to recognize objective values and meanings as not just epiphenomenal … [The left] is more or less now defining itself as scientistic, which actually permits an underwriting of a new mode of fascism and racism as I mentioned earlier … Left Christians now must stress the Christian bit much more if they are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.”
Milbank is opposed to abortion, he’s opposed to gay marriage, and he and his ideas were not embraced — even nominally — by either Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg, as Philip Blond and his ideas were embraced — if only nominally — by David Cameron.
It seems to me that all this supports my initial observation — which wasn’t intended to be snarky at all.
There doesn’t seem to be anything remotely fresh or interesting at the level of ideas going on on the left. There are some leftists — like Milbank, or, in any earlier generation Christopher Lasch — whose thinking takes them to some fresh and interesting places. But that thinking also tends to take them beyond and outside the left.
It may be that fresh and interesting thinkers on the right are at an advantage, because they have pre-liberal Tory or traditionalist or small-r republican traditions to return to, whereas the left, being fundamentally just liberalism or post-liberalism, can never really accommodate the same degree of fresh, interesting, and heterodox thinking.
My guess is that ultimately the whole notion of “conservatism” and “the right” in the day-to-day sense in which those terms tend to be used is a misnomer. The “conservative” movement or “the right” in a day-to-day sense are just alternate types of liberalism. Authentic “conservatism” or the authentic “right” is what preceded liberalism and what offers hope of succeeding liberalism in a better world to come.
Milbank’s “radical orthodoxy” seems to me to be much more in keeping with that kind of project than the sort of happy-clappy secularist-laissez-faire-modernism that one finds on the liberal and largely atheist contemporary left.

Cecelia,
I think that just as movement conservatism isn’t really very conservative, but rather merely classical-liberal, the parts of the left or of movement progressivism that you mention aren’t really leftist and aren’t really progressive at all, but are rather aspects of traditionalism, radical orthodoxy, small-r republicanism, even Toryism, that are being recovered by those on the left, who move beyond and outside the left to just the same degree that they recover those roots. Distributism ultimately derives from Roman Catholic social teaching and, even further back than that, from Anglican Christian Socialism and Disraelian One-Nation-Toryism. Chesterton and Belloc only really got going with the Distributist project when they gave up on the Liberal party and opted not to go the Labour route. They were both Roman Catholics opposed to eugenics, which was sort of their contemporary moment’s hot-button culture-war equivalent to abortion or same-sex marriage. The contemporary equivalents of today’s bobo-yuppie-establishment — such as the Bloomsbury group — had nothing but sneering contempt for the Chesterbelloc and for Distributism. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were “leftists” of a sort who embraced Distributist ideals, but they were also Roman Catholics, and Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in paritcular is rather a no-no in large swathes of the contemporary left, which in any event hasn’t really showed all that much interest in Distributist ideals overall, and less and less as the spirit of the more positive parts of the 60′s counter-culture have waned.

BMX,
I’m fairly sure the aforementioned Archbishop Rowan Williams considers himself on the left.
A number of the South American left-wing leaders in recent years have been explicitly agrarian, and post-marxist rather then traditionally marxist. The association of ‘the left’ with support for abortion is characteristic of America and maybe to some extent England (though much less there) but isn’t necessarily true of developing countries, where poor rural people tend to be both socially moderate to conservative, and also in favour of left wing economics.
Personally I couldn’t see myself ever voting Republican, inspite of my disgust with legalised abortion, because it seems to me that while there is a place for pro-lifers in the Democratic or Labour parties, there’s much less of a place on the right for those who are critical of capitalism.
Re: think there are a lot of Phillip Blond’s on the left – but they tend to be grouped among the environmentalists etc. Notions like limits, respecting place, developing local resources are boilerplate among the left environmental and peak energy movement. Some of Blond’s ideas are basic assumptions of the left.
Very true, Cecilia.

BMX,
Could you clarify your question a bit? Cecelia’s response tips me off a bit, because your reply to her makes it something of a talking-past each other exercise:
Your initial question seems to be: Is there anyone with a high profile (publishing books, being covered by media, etc.) on the left challenging left-orthodoxy? Cecelia’s answer could be taken as an implied no, that the challengers are there but do not enjoy a high profile (nor will they for the forseeable future).
I see two issues here. The public debate issue is a dead fish, because “public debate” has become more like a beauty pageant, with the “sexiest” talkers getting the coverage no matter the substance (if any) of what they are saying. The grassroots debates continue, more energetically in some places than in others, but unless you are there to see/hear them, you may not think they exist.
I’ve been challenging feminists for years, and survive to tell the tale. Some of them think I’m lying when I call myself a feminist, but that hasn’t stopped me. Not very high profile, but there’s at least one example.

Hector,
Rowan Williams is sort of an aging hippie, sort of a British version of a Jesus freak. It’s less interesting to me who does or who doesn’t call himself or herself a “leftist” or a “liberal” as it is interesting to me who is and is not accepted as such by the left or by liberalism more generally. And I’d have to say that even Rowan Williams doesn’t really make the cut. Not many Christians do — at least not Christians who affirm the doctrines of Christianity as something other than “metaphors” for or “narratives” symbolic of the contemporary left.
As for Latin America, I think the fact that you have to go to a whole other continent to find any self-identified “leftist” who challenges liberalism only goes to prove my point.
As for the Republican Party, with the exception of Douthat and Salam, none of the “conservative” or “right-wing” figures I mentioned are Republicans. Nor am I one myself.
Again, I have to ask, is there anyone on “the left” as independent from movement liberal orthodoxy as the figures at Front Porch Republic of The American Conservative are independent from movement conservative orthodoxy? I can’t think of any who are.
Abortion is a good test case. Who are the pro-life liberals, or leftists, or progressives? Very, very few come to mind.
I suppose there is the Jim Wallis evangelical left, but that crowd are just as much of a bunch of unctuous and obsequious lapdogs of the Democratic Party as the religious right are lapdogs of the Republican Party, and at least the Republican party somewhat upholds the religious right’s position on abortion, whereas the evangelical left go around breaking down in tears and fainting and carrying on at Barack Obama rallies like the man was Jesus Christ, even though he is radically, radically pro-abortion, to the point of being one of the very, very few politicians who defends even partial birth abortion.
In closing, a question: Do you vote Democrat? Did you vote Obama? If so, given your stance on abortion, why? How *could* you? The Front Porch people and The American Conservative crowd often and possibly mostly don’t vote Republican. Why not the same kind of independence on the left, even where an issue like abortion is concerned? I mean, what does being “on the left” even mean anymore, if one goes along with the mass holocaust of unborn children in the name of maintaining the capitalist economy, in the name of commodifying women, by dismantling the family, which Christopher Lasch — maybe the last truly admirable American leftist — was right to call “a haven in a heartless world?”

Re: Did you vote Obama? If so, given your stance on abortion, why? How *could* you?
I can answer this for myself: because there was zero evidence that a vote for the McCain-Palin ticket would do anything to alter the abortion license in this country (based on the past record of the GOP) and plenty of evidence from the same past record not to mention the candudates’ own words that McCain-Palin would lead to yet more ghastly public policies that are no less inimical to the value I place on human life.

I suspect part of our difficulty here is what do we mean by “left”. I would have defined myself as a leftist well into middle age – although I was always opposed to abortion. For me ( as Hector noted) there was no place on the right for someone who was critical of capitalism and supportive of environmentalism. However – despite the stereotypes – there is a place on the left for someone who opposes abortion.
Nowadays I have little use for the usual left-right dichotomy. I think we have rendered it meaningless. Certainly with respect to our major political parties they are the same with regards to a willingness to forget that their job is to serve the people – not corporations or lobbies. I also think we have become so divided that it would be better for us all to abandon these distinctions. I am as an example – very impressed – so far – with the ability of the Brit Tories and the Lib Dems to focus on what they agree about and to be able to respect each others divergent POV. I think it matters less what you call yourself – what tribe you identify with – it natters more where you stand. If anything – ideology has surely failed us.
I think Dorothy Day would be a prime example of this – in that she does not comfortably fit in either the left or the right. I suppose one would say she was a leftie in that she identified and fought for the disenfranchised and was part of the international worker movement. But she also opposed social security because she thought it contributed to making people slaves of the state (hardly a leftie POV).
Franklin said: Cecelia’s answer could be taken as an implied no, that the challengers are there but do not enjoy a high profile (nor will they for the forseeable future).
Correct Franklin – there are and have been for sometime challengers to the what we see as the typical leftist (and right) view and they have been around for a long time. But they are under the radar and seem increasingly to be discouraged hence slipping into doomerism ( with of course the exception of the Transition Town folks who are amazingly positive). I also think that once you hit the – marxism is not the thing and capitalism also doesn’t really work – you end up being neither left nor right but picking and choosing pieces of what makes sense to you.
Franklin says: The grassroots debates continue, more energetically in some places than in others, but unless you are there to see/hear them, you may not think they exist.
Yup – but the internet has created more access. I think a big part of why the left – or anyone for that matter – shows so little interest in distributist ideas is because they do not know anything about it – one is very unlikely to see discussions about distributism in the media
I do think that sometimes the distributist/localist movements tend to look a lot like individuals making choices about their own lives and often those choices look very “back to the land”. What is interesting to me is that to the extent that we now see serious efforts at implementing distributist ideas in the US – it is happening in urban areas. I think this is because they are desperate and so willing to go outside the normal left-right box.

Perhaps it is the “normal left-right box” that is the problem.
It has been shown several times that a more accurate description of Human politics requires at least two dimensions—a map instead of a spectrum.
(More on this later; I’ve children to feed now.)
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Well, if you want neighborhoods without trash and mattresses in the yards, some which have been rehabbed by gay folks are quite nice (at least around where I live.)
Oh, wait. Did I just miss the point?

Jon,
You could have voted for a third-party candidate or not voted at all.
That would have been preferable to voting for a baby-butcher like Barack Obama.
There are choices beyond the Republicans and Democrats. There seem to be at least some “on the right,” some “conservatives” who grasp that fact, but hardly anyone “on the left,” hardly any “liberals” — at least so far as I can see.

Cecelia,
You say there is a place on the left for those who oppose abortion. Where is it? Name one institution. Name one publication. Name one organization. Name some individuals who aren’t marginalized to the point of ostracism within their institutions, organizations, or publications.
There is clearly at least some space on the right for people who are critical of capitalism. The American Conservative. Front Porch Republic. The whole Red Tory project in the UK. This blog.

Is there anything or anyone remotely like that on the left — anything or anyone that challenges left-orthodoxy in any way at all? Or is it all just happy-clappy bobo-yuppie-establishment Obama-worship and advocacy for abortion and same-sex marriage?
Sure there is.
Rachel Maddow, Arianna Huffington, Chris Hayes, Glenn Greenwald, Jared Bernstein, Andy Stern, Nouriel Roubini, Naomi Klein, the guys at Open Left, Marc Ambinder, Ta Neshi Coates.
Many of the people you mention aren’t challenging right-orthodoxy, unless you define it merely as markets. Is there a single pro-choice, pro-gay person on that entire group.

Peter,
I’m not familiar with Jared Bernstein or Andy Stern, so I can’t speak to them.
But everyone else you mention — except for Nouriel Roubini — is an utterly predictable left-wing establishment hack.
You’ll have to do better than that.

Lord Karth,
here you go:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/quiz.php

I think again BMX – we have to agree on what exactly it is we are talking about -
first of all – Red Torism is under NO circumstances anti abortion. There is no challenge from the Red Tories to Britain’s abortion law – so let’s keep apples compared to apples. One cannot insist that an American red torism challenge abortion when in fact the right version does not under any circumstances challenge abortion laws in Britain.
Second of all, you are asking for institutions, publications, and organizations on the left – I have already answered that leftist folks who are inclined to reject leftist orthodoxy are seriously under the radar – although Commonweal on occasion strays into that territory and is clearly anti abortion. But more to the point – if you are talking about either left or right rejections of left or right orthodoxy – they all are by their nature “under the radar” – more grassroots small groups that do not yet have widespread support. The are not “establishment”. And while I love FPR it is by no means anywhere near having a large following – and features lefties as well as righties as its contributors and followers. TAC may periodically have a bit of something that pokes holes in Conservative orthodoxy – but rarely and they are certainly not a publication committed to an alternative to said right wing orthodoxy. As I already said – you will find a leftist oriented challenge to the reigning paradigm on environmental sites like energy bulletin or Sharon Astyk’s sites.
It is clear you are making abortion the litmus test – sorry but it is not a litmus test among the Red Tory’s nor it is the one and only feature of rejections against the positions of the established conservative and liberal parties in the US (or the UK). You’ve turned a discussion about community, localism,limits, critiques of a capitalist system into the abortion litmus test. We are obviously not having the same conversation. There also seems to be confusion between mainstream versus the fact that the critiquers are of course more likely to be grassroots – hence no represented by magazines etc.
Blogs generally speaking are not the same as mainstream media – so while this blog may have a substantial following – it has no where near the influence of say – the NYT etc. I would not – at least now – expect to find those who reject either right or left wing orthodxy on TV.
But more to the point – what I see among those who are utterly disillusioned with the current system is that they are rejecting the limitations of terms like left and right. So seeking a “left” oriented critque of our current society may by the nature of the beast – be a fruitless exercise

Cecilia,
You’re collapsing the distinction between the British Conservative party and the Red Tory project.
Philip Blond is pro-life. John Milbank is pro-life. Even Rowan Williams is pro-life, I believe.
And arguing that dissident right-wing factions like Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative are, well, dissident doesn’t bring any to existence a dissident left of the sort that simply seems not to be there.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crowing that there’s not one there. I wish there was one there. I would patronize it and support it if there was one there, just as I patronize and support the dissident right.
But until there are institutions, organizations, publications, and individuals — however few or however small — that can credibly be identified as constituting a dissident left, there might as well not be one at all, in the sense that there is nothing that anyone potentially sympathetic like me, can turn to, and grab ahold of.
Peter’s attempt to define a “dissident” left consisting of Greek gold-diggers, MSNBC hosts, New York Times reporters, and Atlantic magazine pundits just goes to show how pathetic, how cringe-inducing, the effort is even to pretend that there’s a dissident left.
The left is the establishment now. It’s completely and utterly bourgeois. There’s nothing dissident about it at all. Liberal is the new conservative. Left is the new status quo.

Re: But she also opposed social security because she thought it contributed to making people slaves of the state (hardly a leftie POV).
Cecilia,
People sometimes oppose newfangled innovations because they can’t wrap their minds around them. Florence Nightingale, though famous for her hygienic reforms in healthcare, flat-out refused to accept the germ theory illness right through the whole of her very long life.
Or consider an even more famous case: Einstein was openly skeptical about quantum mechanics.
I doubt Dorothy Day would have issued with social security today.

Give it up Cecelia, BMX has declared that there are no dissident Leftists. So he has written, so must it be.

Re: You could have voted for a third-party candidate or not voted at all.
That would have been preferable to voting for a baby-butcher like Barack Obama.
Please provide evidence that Barak Obama has had or performed a single abortion.
And no, that is not a snark. Abortions are not performed by the government (unlike wars, which are conducted by the government). At the final throw each abortion is the crime of an individual woman who chooses one and an individual doctor who performs one. Government is not responsible for that. To be sure, in an ideal world Roe vs Wade would be overturned, and if my state put a referrendum on the ballot banning all non-medically-indicated abortions I would vote for that ban. But I am abundantly aware that we do not live in an ideal world, and I do not tailor my politics to utopian fantasies. As Mr Buckley once said, Don’t immanentize the eschaton. Abortion is a besetting sin of this age as slavery was in antiquity, and serfdom in the Middle Ages. I am male so having an aborion is not something I need worry about personally; nor am I a doctor. And there are other battles to fight and other dragons to slay that are more vulnerable to our weapons today.

BMX,
The furthest left party in the UK political discourse, Sinn Fein, is pro-life.
Now, to state the bleeding obvious, there is hell of a lot wrong with Sinn Fein, and of course I wouldn’t advocate voting for them. However, it does weaken your case to note that the most extreme far-left wing party in the British Isles is also opposed to abortion. As it happens, abortion is (I believe) a conscience vote issue in England, such that Labour Party MPs can vote against abortion and not be disciplined by their party.
George Galloway, another British icon of the far-left, is also pro-life. About a quarter of the Democratic Party in this country is pro-life. And what do you mean by writing Rowan Williams off as an ‘aging hippie’. You don’t have to like him, or grant him any authority, to concede that he is a very influential figure, and therefore the fact that he is a pro-life man of the left, carries a lot of weight (at least in England).
And since you brought up England, what’s wrong with me bringing up Latin America as an example of a region of the world where anti-abortion sentiment often accompanies left-leaning economics? Most of the immigrants to the United States come from Latin America (certainly more then from Britain) and one may hope that they will bring their pro-life, economically progressive views with them. Even if there isn’t a significant Christian-socialist current in the United States today, there may well be one in the future, if we get enough immigration from our southern neighbors.
In answer to your question, I do generally vote Democrat. I didn’t vote for Obama because his policies were so extremely pro-abortion, and I probably won’t vote for him if he runs again in 2012. However, I do vote for other Democrats, and will do so again. That said, Obama’s opposition to weapons of mass destruction, and his commitment of the United States to reduce our nuclear arsenal, certainly counts as a pro-life issue in my book. To possess and use weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction is as much a crime agains innocent human life, as is abortion.

…and I’d also note that the decent left in NI, the Social Democratic Labour Party, is also pro-life.

At the final throw each abortion is the crime of an individual woman who chooses one and an individual doctor who performs one.
“Crime” has a specific meaning – an act contrary to the laws of the State.
In the US, neither the woman nor doctor is committing a crime.

“Hope is not a conservative disposition.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The liberal disposition isn’t hope — it’s optimism.
Hope is what conservatives — or at least non-liberals — have instead of optimism.
Liberals — or at least secularists, most of whom are liberals, just as most liberals are secularists — deny the hope attested to by the Gospels and demonstrated by Christ’s Resurrection, which the Gospels recount and which most liberals, being secularists, reject.
In purely secular terms, you should educate yourself by reading Christopher Lasch’s critique of liberal optimism and the idea of “progress,” *The True and Only Heaven.*
Presumably, if liberals are human, conservatives are non-human. It just doesn’t follow from the fact (even assuming it were a fact) that the liberal disposition is optimism, that conservatives are disposed to hope. Your evidence — Christopher Lasch’s essay — is pretty poor. He airs a bunch of vivid generalities: liberals are optimistic, not hopeful, because they believe that history is on their side — progress is inevitable; and that hope is a disposition of character than a judgement of how things will turn out. Both are silly. Liberalism’s historical conviction is that progress is possible, not that it is inevitable. Hope, it’s true, is a disposition of character. But it’s a disposition directed at the future. And it involves a judgement about the nature of that future: those who hope are those who think it worth believing that the future will bring some good which they want but don’t have just now. There’s no incompatibility between being a disposition of character and involving judgements about the future. The slaves of Lasch’s example, who hoped that their freedom would come, prove exactly the opposite of what he thinks they do.
Conservative hope can’t be defended on religious grounds. Not all conservatives are Christians, and some liberals are Christians. (I know — funny, isn’t it?) And the point here is to And you can’t combine this argument with Lasch’s argument. Lasch says that liberals don’t have hope because they believe that the triumph of their cause is inevitable. Likewise, believers believe, or ought to, that the triumph of their God is inevitable. So Lasch’s argument applies to them: if he’s right, there is no such thing as Christian hope, either.

Is an utterly predictable left-wing establishment hack.
Then you aren’t paying enough attention. Leave the statist conservatism of the white boys at the Front Porch gaving at the navels over organic salads and craft beer and read a little.

Peter,
Leave the statist conservatism of the white boys at the Front Porch gaving at the navels over organic salads and craft beer and read a little.
Speaking for myself–a white boy who does engage in navel gazing, on occasion, but doesn’t drink draft beer–I find that a rather harsh dismissal, though I strongly agree with the general point that you’re making, a point also made by Hector, John E. and Cecilia. BMX’s determination to declare any self-described leftist or liberal who doesn’t dissent from a particular core of socially liberal ideas (abortion rights, etc.) as a “left-wing establishment hack” is depressing (though unfortunately common). However, some of that reading you encourage him to do would broaden your own appreciation of FPR as well. Yes, most of the folks over their are TAC-type conservatives. But some of us are on the left, just of a more populist/distributist/socially-democratic variety. And incidentally, Christopher Lasch–a solid (though dissident!) Democrat on the left–would, I think, completely agree with us.

Russell Arben Fox,
My dismissal of most of the people Peter mentioned as hacks wasn’t made just on the basis of their support for abortion “rights,” though I do think that’s a fair enough basis, among other bases, for thus dismissing them.
Would you argue that, say, Arianna Huffington or Rachel Maddow is in the tradition of Christopher Lasch? Really?
I’m glad you’ve weighed in, because I was going to mention you as an exception that proves the general rule about there not being many dissident leftists or liberals around.
Still, I think the fact that you publish mostly at a place like the Front Porch, populated mostly, as you yourself admit, by paleoconservatives, only goes to prove my point.
And the same could be said of Hector, Cecelia, and others here.
If there’s such a “vibrant” and thriving dissident left out there just under the surface, then why are you guys hanging out on a crunch conservative or traditionalist conservative site?
I enjoy In Medias Res, but what other venues — if any — are there where anything remotely like the Laschian tradition is being carried on by anyone who calls himself or herself a “leftist” or a “liberal.”
I can think of various places where that tradition is being carried on by people who call themselves “conservatives” or who identify as being “on the right,” but not so much on Lasch’s own original side of the fence.
Actually, right now there’s a piece in New Republic where Alan Wolfe back-handedly compliments but more or less dismisses Lasch as a kind of interesting but failed heretic from liberal orthodoxy. That kind of condescension strikes me as being pretty typical of the contemporary left’s approach to Lasch.

Re: Crime” has a specific meaning – an act contrary to the laws of the State.
Come now. Are we forbidden to use words in their larger, metaphorical sense? When the old abolitionists described slavery as a “crime” should they have been corrected by frowning grammarians because the Peculiar Institution was still perfectly legal?

Hector,
I think it’s less far afield to talk about the British context for these three reasons:
(1) The U.S. and Britain share a primary language, which makes cross-national exchange of ideas much easier than it is between the U.S. and Latin America, such that there’s much more cross-pollination of ideas between the U.S. and Britain than there is between the U.S. and Latin America. Would that it weren’t so, but that’s simply how it is.
(2) The U.S. is a former British colony, much of whose culture and institutions are founded on British precedents, such that contemporary British intellectual life remains cognate with contemporary U.S. intellectual life in way that contemporary Latin American intellectual simply is not and has never been. Again, would that it weren’t so, but that’s simply how it is.
(3) There’s active and visible collaboration between U.S. dissident “conservative” or at least non-liberal, non-leftist thinkers and their British counterparts. Philip Blond visited the U.S. in part at Front Porch Republic’s behest. John Milbank has taught at U. S. universities, etc, etc.
It would please me to no end if, say, The Huffington Post or the Rachel Maddow Show made common cause with pro-life, socially conservative Catholic-populist Latin American dissident “leftists” of the sort you describe. Such common cause would represent a major, major step forward for liberalism and the left, and it would represent a much needed breath of fresh air and of new life into outmoded and ossified parts of the political scene. But until such a step is actually made, my assessment will stand.
I wish you, Cecelia, Russell Arben Fox, and the rest all the best and the best of luck in reviving liberalism and the left. But I think you have a hard row to how and would be better off doing as John Milbank recommends and trying instead to think beyond or outside liberalism and the left.

Not everyone votes for President (or for officials at the state or local level) based on the issue of abortion. I’ve voted for Republicans and Democrats throughout my adult life and have never taken abortion into account when voting. Although I would like to see as few abortions as possible, I view the starting point that leads people to have abortions as not a governmentally controllable issue. I mean, it’s not as if the government ever will require people to certify, at the moment that a man says to a woman (or a woman to a man), “ooo, baby, I want some, let’s do it” that they are thinking about making a baby or pledge to raise it if the woman is impregnated.
There’s no way for the government to regulate the often impulsive behaviors between married and unmarried people alike that lead to unwanted pregnancies, except when they result from criminal acts. And there already are laws on the books to take care of such crimes. There always have been and will be some abortions. Even now, when reliable and readily available contraceptive measures are available. There were abortions when having them was illegal and there would be if they became illegal again, also. So no, I never vote on the basis of a candidate’s position on abortion, I find the issue, at its core, due to the way pregnancies occur, to be unrelated to what a candidate will be dealing with once in office. So I vote based on his or her positions on other issues that I depend on him or her handling. The abortion issue I leave to individuals, their families and to churches, to deal with, for the most part. If married and unmarried people can be encouraged to exercise more impulse control (good luck with that), to rely on family planning (natural or artificial) or to be willing to have and raise babies together, great. If not, I don’t see that there’s much a President can do about it.

Not meaning to be personal, BMX, but your rhetoric here, for me, epitomizes the key and in my never humble opinion critical obstacle: Divisiveness. You, with many others, focus (and, with too many as well, obsessively) on labels and abstract constructs. What I appreciate in forums like FPR (and too few others) is a balancing focus on the practical, on how outcomes are viewed not as blameworthy towards some philosophy, but how the can be changed.

Cirdan,
Once again: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
And for good measure: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. *Wrong.*
You understand neither liberalism nor Christopher Lasch.
In that, you’re in good company quantitatively and bad company qualitatively.
Quelle damage.

Don’t forget, some of us are neither liberal nor conservative. We’re moderate, in the sense that we lean a little right on some issues and a little left on others so that it evens out as centrist or moderate. Right now it looks as if the British have a better sense of how to speak to us than do our countrymen here in America. Binary right/left divisions don’t work for us. The Limbaugh types who bray that moderates are squishy and have no principles totally fail to understand us. For example, one survey last year showed that many independents lean a little right on fiscal issues and a little left on social issues. (Interesting to see Laura Bush come out in support of gay marriage recently:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/may/12/laura-bush-gay-marriage-abortion )
How people who i.d. neither as right or left vote is going to depend on where they feel more at home or how they prioritize the various issues.

Both George W. and Laura Bush have been liberals all along, so no news there Indy.

Come now. Are we forbidden to use words in their larger, metaphorical sense? When the old abolitionists described slavery as a “crime” should they have been corrected by frowning grammarians because the Peculiar Institution was still perfectly legal?
On the contrary – as one who supports the right of women to manage their own reproductive choices, I fully support your use of the word ‘crime’.
It will help to remind those who have complacent in the idea that Roe v. Wade is settled law that there are others who would be pleased to see what is now a protected legal option become criminalized.

You missed my point. If you look at Laura Bush’s comments, they sound like the sort of thing any of our acquaintenances in the ordinary, non-political world might feel free to make. She could not, not while W was in office. Big weakness in our system, and “we the people” largely are responsible. Too many of us dream of a non-existent, “make us feel good world” when we turn to the political. Too often, feel good comes down to silly stuff, like “give me someone to turn into a villain, I don’t wanna grow up, I miss the comforting comic books I read when I was a kid.”
Among our friends, comments such as Laura Bush made might well trigger a thoughtful discussion among us about the pros and cons of the issues. Depending on the composition of the group, the discussion might end in “I see where you’re coming from although I’m sticking to my view” or some form of “let’s agree to disagree.”
In the “ZOMG, they are SO evil” comic book political world, that rarely is possible. Political framing has become too constraining, too immature, too schoolyard cliqueish. And sometimes too removed from reality. Remember when someone in the comboxes asked earlier this month why a post about unwed mothers wasn’t entitled unwed mothers and fathers. How often is a dude brave enough to ask that? Dudeness is hard, man. Talking about stuff dudes do is hard. Admitting why and how pregnancies occur and why both parties make the choices they do is particularly tough.
So lots of weakness in political discourse, not just in discussing social issues. Compare “dialogue” on political sites with how we talk within our circles of families, friends, and colleagues. Look at how most people project enormous weakness, even when they think they are projecting strength. Why? Poor models, to some extent. When I saw Donna Brazile argue for doing away with punidts last week, I gave a thumbs up. She wrote, “Get rid of the left-vs.-right commentators who are just out scoring points for their team. This sort of opinion-mongering is not only boring and predictable, it is destructive of the truth. If your only credentials are ‘GOP shill’ or ‘Democratic hack,’ you’ve no business cluttering up the airwaves or the op-ed pages.”
One reason I enjoy reading Rod and Sully is because neither falls into hackery as much as most opinionators do. If Rod ran for office, I might consider voting for him. Some of the people who comment here, whose ideological positions might not be that dissimilar to his? Probably not. That’s the way we indies roll.
Perfect captcha for a “politics in the U.S. is silly, man” post: is comical.

Indy,
Your views don’t line up neatly with either political party, but they do line up extremely neatly with the dominant ideological paradigm that both parties basically support at the end of the day: liberalism.
Rather than an “independent,” you’re basically a libertarian or “liberaltarian” — i.e. economically, socially, and culturally laissez-faire.
Rather than being more idiosyncratic than the two main parties, you’re actually less so — you’re just straight forwardly liberal all down the line, whereas the Republicans have to pay at least some idiosyncratic lip-service to social and cultural traditionalism and the Democrats have to pay at least some idiosyncratic lip-service to economic populism.
I think that’s basically Andrew Sullivan’s position, too — liberalism all down the line — which is why it makes sense for you to be a fan of his.
But why Rod Dreher of all people?
Rod’s views are the opposite of Sullivan’s and of your own.
Rod’s a moral and cultural traditionalist and an economic populist. He’s a conservative not a liberal. He’s a communitarian not a libertarian. He’s religious, not a secularist.
So, I don’t really get the appeal. If you wouldn’t vote for someone who agrees with Rod, then why vote for Rod? It makes no sense.

If you wouldn’t vote for someone who agrees with Rod, then why vote for Rod? It makes no sense.
Reading Rod isn’t voting for him. Open-minded folks read lots of people they disagree with on some issues, even on who they would vote for. They challenge your perceptions, you challenge them, and life moves forward.

BMX
I think I have been pretty clear that I do not find terms like “left” or “right” to be particularly helpful or even descriptive. And while I appreciate your good wishes I personally have no interest what so ever in reviving liberalism. What I do have an interest in is 1) living my own life in a manner consistent with what I believe (and have been taught) is right and 2) working to preserve (as best one can) what seems valuable to me. In short – I have no use for ideology and as Franklin says well – I have an interest in ” a balancing focus on the practical, on how outcomes are viewed not as blameworthy towards some philosophy, but how the can be changed”.
I think ultimately the most destructive aspect of the application of labels to people is the divisiveness they create as well as dehumanizing people thru the use of stereotypes. I have said this before – at some point – we need to stop being left right liberal conservative and start being neighbors – Americans – people who share the same space and the same consequences to our problems.
Hector – it is some stretch to call Sein Finn “pro life” – LOL – and I share your umbrage over characterizing the Archbishop as an aging hippie Jesus freak. Williams clearly is an active participant in the public debate in the UK and he is listened too as is the RC archbishop.

Dude, if you want to label me a liberal, be my guest. Won’t stop me from considering voting Republican sometimes, as I have in the past. Whatever. The label someone feels they have to hang on me can never diminish me, I can only do that to myself. I haven’t. So w00t.
Rod? Sully? You can see the wheels turning. Less closure than among most folks. Honest enough to admit dude, there’s stuff I don’t know, stuff I’m struggling with, help me out, guys. Or even, I was wrong. Both have rethought their positions on the Iraq war. Good on them. I would consider voting for dudes capable of doing that. Wouldn’t for ones who can’t.
Saying, “I don’t know, or “I messed up” is a rare quality these days, especially in political dudedom. Big difference on Rod’s blog and on Sully’s blog from the thundering voices on talk radio and tv who are all “I’m all knowing, I have the answers,” and even tell listeners sometimes, “Rush will tell you when you need to act.” When we know from our faith, if from nothing else, how frail we all are and how much we all struggle.

A question, BMX. You’ve decreed that I’m a liberal. I’m not a decree handing down dude myself –that’s not where my faith has led me me — but whatever. If I believe in fiscal prudence, support some combination of decreasing spending and increasing revenue streams (of the type Steve Pearlstein has discussed) to bring down the deficit, read Bruce Bartlett on fiscal and economic issues, support a strong national defense with Gates-type reliance on hard and soft power, and support marriage equality, despite being straight myself, do you believe my only option is to vote Democratic? It hasn’t been over the last few federal, state and local elections. I’ve voted for Rs and for Ds over the last couple of decades, while holding largely the same beliefs. Are you telling me, don’t bother listening to the GOP candidates ever again, you’re a liberal according to our standards, I’ve put you in the box with the other folks so stay there? I could do that, dude, but I’m not an obedient, stay where someone put me type of person. Too resistant to being fenced in, like to listen to both sides, decide for myself.

Cecelia,
I didn’t mean my description of Rowan Williams as an “aging hippie” or a “Jesus freak” in a derogatory way. Those are terms that Williams has used before in describing himself. A hippie or a Jesus freak is generally a good thing to be, a much better thing to be than a liberal or a leftist in the classic sense. I mentioned above that I admire many aspects of the 60′s counter-culture for the way that they were radical-orthodox in recovering pre-liberal and pre-modern roots. One example would be the hippies’ embrace of traditional folk music and blues. Another would be their embrace of the arch-traditionalist J. R. R. Tolkien’s *The Lord of the Rings.” Another would be their interest in Eastern religions. And another would be their, yes, “Jesus freakery.” All of those moves are moves in the right direction — no pun intended — moves away from, instead of further toward, liberalism and the left.
Captcha (and I swear I’m not making this up): “1967 lionized”

Indy,
When I say you’re a liberal or a “liberaltarian” that has nothing to do with whether you vote Republican or Democrat. Both of those are liberal parties, more or less. And all of the policy positions you list are consistent with my description of you as a liberal or a “liberaltarian” straight down the line. It sounds like half of you is a Republican sans the social and cultural traditionalism and half of you is a Democrat sans the economic populism. In other words, it sounds like you’re socially, culturally, and economically laissez-faire. In other words, it sounds like you’re a liberal or a “liberaltarian” straight down the line. That’s not an evaluation, let alone an insult. It’s just an observation. It’s just a description.

There used to be people on the left like Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, Dorothy Day, and Charles Peguy. What ever happened to that kind of left? Again, whatever happened to the left-wing Philip Blonds?
The great division of 1968-1972 happened, hon. People like Lasch chose to remain on its far side, mourning Mayberry and persisting in a notion of the kind of country envisioned by FDR and his party through LBJ’s Presidency.
Jimmy Carter genuinely believed his election meant the restoration of that vision in American public life. The Left took his demise (and the subsequent failures of Mondale and Dukakis) as lessons about its real viability.
Hope is what conservatives — or at least non-liberals — have instead of optimism.
Prospects of success, however faint, entail optimism. Hope is the consolation that follows upon failure.
If you will own hope, shouldn’t you own the failure that precedes it as well?

If they’re both “liberal” parties, I’m in good shape having voted for both over the years. Harder to keep open the option of voting for either than it once was, but i don’t rule out things getting better in the future. I’m very comfortable with some ambiguity, understand that parties evolve. The Democrats of today are different from the Democrats of LBJ’s day or Carter’s day, from what I’ve read. GOP might evolve over time, too. Demographics probably will affect that. The Republicans might even be lucky enough to have a leader with Obama’s serenity, confidence, maturity, willingness to listen and calm demeanor arise some day. (No, don’t laugh everybody, why rule it out? In theory there is no reason why someone with those characteristics can’t exist on the right. Right now the Rush-types rule but they might not forever.) The UK seems way more mature about some of these things than we Americans are here. Interesting to watch, Sully’s was an interesting place to follow the coverage of the election.

BMX,
Once again: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
And for good measure: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. *Wrong.*
You understand neither liberalism nor Christopher Lasch.
In that, you’re in good company quantitatively and bad company qualitatively.
Lasch’s piece is just bad. If Lasch is right — if liberals can’t have hope because the object of their longing is inevitable — then Christians can’t have hope either.
He seems to have mixed up certainty and inevitability. If you’re certain that something will happen, then you can’t hope that it will: there’s no room for hope, which needs risk, or at least uncertainty. But something may be inevitable — guaranteed to happen — without it also being the case that those who believe it will happen, believe it with certainty. Maybe I’m morbid, but I know that my death is inevitable, while being very uncertain about it. Lasch notices that people believe in the inevitability of particular events, and then assumes that that precludes hope. Nope. Hope precludes certainty, and remains compatible with inevitability.

Re: When you talk about “the great division” do you mean when your comrades in China killed all those people? Or do you mean when your comrades in Russia killed all those people? Or do you mean when your comrades in Germany killed all those people? Or do you mean when your comrades in this country started killing all those babies?
Huh?
The mass killings in Russia and Germany happened before 1968, for the most part and I’m not aware that most of the Generation of 1968 was either Maoist or Stalinist, even those who were Marxists tended to be of the dissident, anti-stalinist variety. As for China, I doubt too many of the new left supported what was going on there- they tended to be pro-Vietnamese, but I don’t think that many of them were pro-Chinese. And as for abortion, _some_ of the left in Western countries supported abortion, and others on the left didn’t. You’re tying together a lot of things that aren’t necessarily related.

BMX, you have got to learn how to argue with your opponents here without insulting them. I’ve unpublished a couple of your comments because they cross the line into incivility. Ad hominem verbal attacks on other commenters are disallowed here, as are personal insults.

Disagree with BMX’s assertions, and be vilified. Criticize BMX’s rhetorical style, and be ignored. I don’t see dialogue here, I see grandstanding.

BMX,
As someone who considers herself part of the “Laschian Left,” let me start off by answering your question directly: are there any thinkers/commentators on the Left who are critical of – what was it? – the “happy clappy Bobo Yuppie Establishment” – or something. Well, yes (see: Thomas Frank, Michael Lind, Michael Kazin, E.J. Dionne, Caitlin Flanagan, Amitai Etzioni and – much as you want to dismiss this one – Jim Wallis.) My guess is that some of these people would pass your abortion litmus test and some would not, but more broadly, all of these people who self-identify on the Left have been critical of individualist, cosmopolitan liberalism.
That said, there is some truth to what you’re saying, and I find that personally disappointing, but also easy to explain. As unfashionable as it is, political party cannot be divorced from ideology. Political thinkers tend to reinvigorate the thinking of the party that most closely corresponds to their specific ideology during the party’s “out years.” For instance, you can’t examine Buckley’s effect on the conservative movement without looking at the failure of the Republican Party – 1. To win majorities; and 2. To promote conservatism – as the baseline for Buckley’s ascendancy.
The Left had a chance to have their “wilderness years” in the early part of the decade, which coincided with the growth of blog culture and the rise of small dollar donors (which, remember, was going to democratize campaign spending and act as a natural CFR. Yeah, THAT worked well). In any event, the Left wasted its soul-searching moment on fighting it out on these terms: The establishment wing of the Democratic Party – the DLC – stood as the easy target (as does any establishment wing of any institution, but this one especially well-deserved). The direction of the assault on that establishment didn’t come from the Laschian populists like the many people who contribute here and on similar sites. It came from the “Kos-ian Left” – the Bobo-Yuppie class you identified. The storyline became Progressives (Kos-ians), against the Establishment (which had already been uprooted by the free market DLC less than two decades earlier.)
So all the out-of-power thinking my side did during that time broke down along three lines:
1. Progressive vs. Moderate
2. Insider vs. Outsider
3. Backbone vs. Milquetoast
All of those arguments culminated in the Lieberman vs. Lamont primary a few years ago, as it was widely assumed by commentators that those, and those alone, were the divisions within the Democratic Party, and – by extension – Lefty politics. The “thinkers” produced from the wilderness-years, with the exceptions already listed above, held more to framing (George Lakoff) and demographics (Texiera and Judis) than any reconsideration of how liberalism should be defined or substantive arguments on philosophy.
The Right will win again, the Left will have another crack at wilderness years, and hopefully next time we’ll be a little more thoughtful about it.
[Note from Rod: "BMX" is the latest nom de blog of a person who has been repeatedly banned from this site. I'm going to unpublish anything he writes here, either as BMX, Mr. Moto, Peter Clark or any other fake name. But thanks for your thoughtful reply, Mary C. -- RD]

I knew I’d leave someone out – add Amy Sullivan to that list.