45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable retrospective AND helpful analysis, July 2, 2000
This review is from: The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Modern War Studies) (Hardcover)
When I first saw the title of this volume, I'd anticipated that the author might be a right-wing activist. And while I appreciate varying opinions, i.e., different from those of the lefty ideologues with whom I work who delude themselves into thinking that anyone outside of their clique has the least concern for their opinion, I've about had it with the Horowitzes and the like who've merely changed the names of their enemies but haven't grown beyond their santimony and Manicheanism. Ellis introduces himself by stating that he's always voted for Democrats, etc. In other words, he's not someone just slamming at "liberals" but examining persons with whom he might have something in common. As a leftist myself (with growing reservations about that status), I've found the left to dread self-criticism. So I welcomed that kind of examination.
The book is set up historically, from the 19th century egalitarians, like Walt Whitman, then onto the 60s, that era of (alleged) social experimentation, then onto the present left. I'd started the book about five times and got caught in the introduction which was already good. Then, on a few days off, I decided to read the whole thing, and I'm glad.
I agree with an earlier reviewer that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are the "stars" of the book. They felt they were such pioneers, changing the world by leaps and bounds. Yet they'd (1) romanticized the victim (Southern blacks, Vietnamese, Third World in general) and (2) demonized anyone who didn't think the same way they did. It was, in that era, the radical leftists, not the Limbaughs, who decried "liberals," who were ostensibly not changing the world fast enough. Only we dyed-in-the-wool radicals had the gumption to do that. And what happened? They had interminable meetings, membership who couldn't distinguish between leadership and despotism, whose leader therefore became unaccountable to ANYONE, and were eventually usurped by the Leninist vanguard who changed their practice from nonviolence to violence almost as an end in itself.
The only fact I wish Ellis had emphasized more here was that these radicals were quite affluent. They were largely under- and graduate students at some of the finest institutions in the U.S. While I don't begrudge them for that (as I too am a product of a fairly affluent background), it is a factor that needs to be stressed. Many of the organizers' mistakes were, I believe, based on their lack of touch with the people whom they though they were organizing. For instance, they thought that organizing the poor blacks in the South would be the same as organizing the northern urban poor. They failed miserably at the latter because their assumptions--based on their own relatively affluent experience--were lacking.
That would also help to explain the issues of ideological purity that came up--and still comes up--repeatedly in the ranks of the left.
The book's co-stars are probably the "radical feminists." I mean, that Catherine McKinnon is taken seriously by anyone is a sign of a real "movement" weakness. But Ellis's history indicates that she didn't start some of the more "radical feminist" foolishness. Rather, it started in the 60s in organizations whose members left calling their founders fascists! Thus even some traditional "left" journals that Ellis pointed out call McKinnon and anachronism. Anyway, Dr. Ellis is wise in examining that, while you and I might feel McKinnon and her ilk are of the intellectual substance of the World Wrestling Federation, there are "scholars," e.g., people in the "women's studies" programs, who take them seriously. And that's frightening.
Among the strengths of the book is that Ellis not only covers the history of those events and their characters, but he also examines WHY they were failures. (I relate with that too as I work for an organization that has done little studying of what's gone on with "egalitarianism" in the past. Its members think, therefore, that we're a collective pioneer. But I see the same things happening that the author described again and again--while he acknowledged that the same things had happened a million times before that. So the same mistakes keep happening).
The portion of the book on radical environmentalists may have been redundant if not superfluous. They may be even more separatist than many of the other groups. And in their case, their romanticized victims are the Native Americans who, of course, can do no wrong. One of these groups' major peeves is consumerism. While I have sympathy with that peeve, I often find the left to be intensely hypocritical; many of their members complain of OTHERS' consumerism, while they carry their cell phones, their palm pilots, and they maintain their web pages all in the name of that abstract "organizing." While I don't have any strong feelings toward the environmentalists, i.e., I don't endorse what they do, though am not a proponent of logging companies, I suspect their overall influence is weaker than that of the "feminists" and other elements of the contemporary left.
The final portion of the book is, of course, the summary. And that too I feel is well done. Ellis ties loose ends together by asking many relevant questions. These questions need to be examined by honest members of the left wing, if they plan to be effective.
Were I permitted more words, I'd probably go into more detail about the book. I suggest you read it yourself, not to demonize anyone, nor to canonize them, but to see that the same mistakes are NOT made again, all in the name of "changing the world."
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rigorous and salutary analysis of utopianism, August 22, 2001
This is a terrific work of cultural history, literary criticism and political philosophy. Ellis declares early in his book his own liberal-left political sympathies, before proceeding to identify the inherent illiberalism of much that has passed for left-wing thought in American history. His range is wide, and his knowledge of American culture impressive. But what is most devastating about his descriptions and analysis of the romantic illusions he catalogues is his awareness of the ostensible justice of the claims underlying them.
The abolitionist movement against slavery was a great moral cause, yet it included a wing devoted to violent and messianic extremism. The early activists in Students for a Democratic Society at least were aware of the need to formulate their demands in the language of liberal rights, before veering into advocacy of Maoist terrorism. Ellis traces these developments not to any simplistic teleology of the collapse of radical ideals into totalitarianism, but to the implict illiberalism of believing that all good things are necessarily compatible with each other, and that mere preferences (environmental protection, for example) should be treated as moral axioms. The sharpest analysis of this phenomenon in the book is Ellis's devastating exegesis of Edward Bellamy's now-forgotten but once vastly-influential utopian novel Looking Backward. Because the scheme of social organisation depicted in the novel has no awareness of how to reconcile conflicting claims to scarce resources or incommensurable values, the vision that it propounds is one of unabashed totalitarianism. Illiberalism and even totalitarianism are integral parts of the American left now; Ellis demonstrates how and why that intellectual tradition developed.
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