By Eli Zaretsky
1. The Contest
EVER SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA, America's primaries and elections have alternated between contests and spectacles. Although the two have much in common--notably the acts of watching and being watched--there are important differences between them. A contest is a trial or struggle for victory involving roughly equal individuals; a spectacle is an event or scene that rivets the attention. Rules, procedures and the equality of all participants are crucial to a contest; there are no rules or procedures to a spectacle. A contest has a clear end point; spectacles drag on until the last onlooker leaves. Contests produce heroes; spectacles produce celebrities. Contests make onlookers feel exalted, as the contestants push beyond what they could not have accomplished without competition; spectacles often leave onlookers feeling degraded, as they sense they are somehow experiencing the lesser and not the nobler human capacities. Given the nature of the two-party system, it is no surprise that the Democratic Primary process, which opened in the form of a contest, has turned into a spectacle. Let us see how and why this occurred.
The first thing that makes a contest is a prize. In this case, the prize was the leadership of the Democratic Party. That prize was especially valuable because the Democratic Party had revolutionary and charismatic roots--in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian uprisings against the elitism of the "founding fathers." Historically the party of the white outsiders, of "rum, Romanism and rebellion," that is of saloon-keepers, immigrants and white Southerners, the party was transformed during the New Deal into something like the American analogue to a European-style workers party. Its chief defect during the 1930s, its compromises with the white South in such matters as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (which excluded sharecroppers), was remedied in the 1960s by its commitment to civil rights. To its first great universal entitlement program, Social Security, the party added a second, Medicare. To gain the leadership of the Democratic Party, then, was to gain control of a great legacy; it was very different from gaining the leadership of the Republican Party, which began as the party of a heroic, antislavery-minded middle class but became the party of the rich.
A long struggle for control of that legacy preceded the contest for the 2008 Democratic nomination. Beginning in the 1970s, it had become clear that the party had to transcend its roots in the industrial epoch. One response, epitomized in the slogan "the era of big government is over," was to embrace neo-liberal globalization in an uncritical manner. Taking a leaf from the party of Big Business, some Democrats including the Democratic Leadership Council, and such reformers as Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton, denounced "class struggle," as long as it arose from workers, blacks and immigrants. Corruption, the destruction of pension and health plans, the turning over of the great industries to financial speculators, the transformation of cities into theme parks, the privatization of education, the subordination of scientific research to commerce, the debasement of the public sphere: Democrats not only allowed this lethal tsunami of privatization to occur, they actively promoted it under the rubric of " the third way."
Of course, the Democrats did this because they were pursuing the professional classes, the soccer moms, and the educated, suburban elites who were relatively uncritical of neo-liberal globalization. In place of class politics, the Democratic Party supported the two-earner family, multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, the new, middle-class consumerist spirit of post-Fordist capitalism spawned by the Sixties. The problem was that this strategy left out the older working class base of the Democratic Party. While Democrats called for a non-ideological liberalism, one that might "cut through" a supposedly sterile Left/Right distinction, the Right failed to get the message. Running against the cultural Left, America witnessed, as Thomas Frank observed, "a French Revolution in reverse--one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy." The atrocities that followed included the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, the stealing of the 2000 election and the invasion of Iraq.
These atrocities precipitated the struggle for the Democratic legacy. At first, supporters of the Clinton administration and their current opponents were joined in opposition to the Right. For example, Moveon.org was created to fight the Clinton impeachment. However, in the early twenty-first century a divide opened. The Internet especially provided a pathway for Democratic insurgents who began to blame the vacillations and compromises of the Clinton administration for opening the way for the Republicans. The support of roughly half of the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, for Bush's 2002 authorization to use force in Iraq, proved a turning point. Pathetically, by caving in to "war on terror" intimidation, the Democrats in Congress squandered the moral force required to tell the American people that, for the most part, their sons and daughters had died for nothing in Iraq, that their treasure had been squandered, their future held hostage, and the carefully nurtured reputation of the United States thoughtlessly trashed. By 2004 Howard Dean's candidacy, based on a new generation of young people, on the Internet and on a principled opposition to the war, was directed as much against the Clinton legacy as against the Republicans.
Ultimately, Barack Obama won the contest for the Democratic Presidential nomination because he spoke to this conflict most directly. By contrast Hillary Clinton, a Democratic Party insider who was herself already a target of the Dean insurgency, began her campaign by identifying with the "third way" revolution in the Democratic Party, including its uncritical embrace of the market and casual manipulation of symbols of identity (itself based on marketing techniques). John Edwards, on the other hand, resurrected the older paradigm of the Democratic Party, which charged the government, and especially the president, with advocating for the disadvantaged, and serving as a counterweight to big business. Obama, however, tried to articulate a third possibility, which seemed to echo Rousseau's idea of the "general will," as distinguished from the "will of all." The will of all is an aggregate, which composes a democratic majority by putting together the many particular interests that comprise a society; the general will is the common set of values that all the groups in a society share. To state the American people's common values--for example, patriotism, fairness, and decency--is to court banality, but to enact and embody them was something else. That is what Obama seemed to be about. In doing so, he gave voice to the Democratic insurgency and turned it into a narrow majority within the party, and potentially within the country.
By late February or early March, Obama had won the nomination. By February 19 he had won eleven straight primaries. For Clinton to best him she had to win all the remaining primaries at 60-70% of the vote, and that was extremely unlikely. The Clinton camp responded with a series of stories concerning the super-delegates' responsibility to choose a candidate on the basis of "electability," but these were always fantastical. Although the origin of the super-delegate idea did lie in the campaign professionals' reaction to the McGovern defeat in 1972, the purpose of the super-delegates was always to influence the primaries, never to overturn them. In 1984, for example, the super-delegates announced their preference for Mondale over Hart, and Mondale won the primaries. In 2008, the system worked as intended when numerous super-delegates announced for Clinton, thus bestowing her air of "inevitability." Had the super-delegates ever overturned the overall primary vote, the costs would have been the suppression of the African American vote (key to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri), and the youth vote. Indeed, such a decision might well have destroyed the party. Thus Senator Patrick Leahy was right when he said on March 28, 2008, "Senator Clinton has every right, but not a very good reason" to stay in the race. What then happened? How did a contest turn into a spectacle?
2. The Spectacle
LET US RETURN TO THE MINDSET THAT EXISTED LAST FEBRUARY, THAT IS, THE MINDSET OF the Democratic contest. At that point there were clear and definite rules that governed the contest. For example, everyone agreed that the victor would be the one who received the most delegates in the primaries. Similarly, everyone agreed that the primaries held in Florida and Michigan would not count. Such agreements were deeply rooted in conceptions of fairness, equality and meritocracy inseparable from the idea of a contest. In a contest, furthermore, any individual could participate, regardless of race, gender or ethnic origin (although in this particular contest the contestants had to be born in the United States). Political contests also were thought to prioritize argumentation and rhetorical persuasiveness, as shown by the importance assigned to debate. There seems, finally, to have been a certain resonance between the form of the nominating process, namely the contest, and the content of the politics that triumphed in February and March, namely universalism. Obama seems to have won because he presented himself as a unifier, indeed, as the first person in a long time who affirmed universalism and who wanted to take the country back to its last true moment of self-knowledge, the Civil Rights movement.
The spectacle, by contrast, is something different. Spectacles, like contests, exist in all societies, but the modern spectacle is the product of the commercial revolution of the nineteenth century. Like advertising, spectacles appeal to the senses, to primal loyalties, to unconscious wishes and to charisma. Their purpose is to obscure, not clarify issues. The modern spectacle developed alongside the two party system and as we are now witnessing, party politics can provide the greatest of all spectacles. Spectacles, furthermore, tend to revolve around individuals. The Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858-60) were our greatest political contest, but the birth of the party system revolved around a charismatic individual, Andrew Jackson. After the battle of New Orleans, wrote Michael Rogin in Fathers and Children, Jackson portrayed "himself as the tribune of the people against selfish and entrenched leaders. He relied on personal leadership to overcome [obstacles]. He fought conspiratorial enemies who were seeking to overwhelm republican virtue." After he left the presidency a new breed of politicians appeared, "men of humble origin who challenged genteel officeholders by courting voters assiduously in the oral style of rural vernacular" (Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution). Critical to these new politicians was the refusal to offer voters clear-cut alternatives, especially on divisive issues such as slavery. Instead they substituted ties of personal loyalty to a leader, "the sentimental bonds which develop among men who have worked as a team in victory and defeat, and ... the pragmatic importance of winning for the sake of gaining office or exercising power" (David Potter, The Impending Crisis).
The distinction between the contest and the spectacle is a heuristic one, but it can be clarifying. If I am correct in asserting that what we have witnessed since February is the transformation of a contest into a spectacle, then it is important to note that this transformation accompanied an increasing emphasis on race and gender, the two great axes of the cultural revolution of the sixties, the two great identity groups within the Democratic Party, the two forms of oppression and inequality that render existing claims to universalism false. Let us begin with the significance of race, which actually erupted first.
The turning point in the history of the modern Democratic Party was the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and subsequent attempts to right racial injustice such as affirmative action and bussing. The latter attempts in particular precipitated the decline of the party, which seemed poised on the hinge of an impossible dilemma, favoring blacks against disadvantaged whites or turning toward whites to the disadvantage of blacks. Obama, a black man who did not run as a black candidate, cut through this dilemma decisively. This raised the hope of a genuine revival, a return to the party's greatness, rooted in a sense of justice that transcended party. However, there was no way to deny that much of Obama's charisma rested on his role as the first viable black candidate for president in American history. The spectacle involved in the symbolism of a black president, in other words, was present from the first. Nothing demonstrated this more than the surprised enthusiasm of numerous commentators, including Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Tim Russert and David Brooks to the initial Obama victory in Iowa, the night of January 3, 2008. To a man, these hardened, cynical, battle-scarred veterans predicted that Obama would win the New Hampshire primary a few days later and would be swept to the nomination.
The symbol of the first woman president soon followed. In the five days between the Iowa Primary and the New Hampshire Primary the women's vote shifted from a 5% advantage for Obama to a 12% advantage for Clinton, a change of 17%, and this is a party that is 55% female. Later in Ohio, Clinton won 58% of women voters, including 68% of white women. Even when one parses these numbers to account for differences in age and education (Clinton's support is much stronger among older and less educated women), these numbers are significant. As Geoff Garin, one of Hillary Clinton's pollsters, wrote, "if you have to pick a niche in the Democratic Party, women is a pretty good niche to have."
Later the post-Iowa shift was described as the "New Hampshire effect": Hillary "gets backed into a corner, takes a few days to find her footing (or her voice), then fights back against a perceived injustice--the 'boys' club,' the news media, the disenfranchisement of voters. This prompts an outpouring in her favor, whether because of sympathy for a perceived victim or anger at the forces against her or a belief that some injustice is, in fact, occurring. And then she works it, with fund-raising appeals and pleas at rallies, where she makes her fight for survival a fight for the larger cause." In fact, the whole country and especially men pulled together after New Hampshire and tried to see things through Hillary's eyes. Frank Rich, Hendrick Herzberg and Bob Herbert all wrote eloquent columns criticizing Obama for calling Hillary "likeable enough," rightly saying we all have to bend over backward to protect against sexism.
Of course a large proportion of Clinton's female support was based on agreement with her positions, or on other estimates that she is the best person for the job, for example by reason of her experience, "toughness," intelligence and the like. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there was an additional factor. Anyone who understands the special obstacles and forms of derogation that all women face can understand why a woman would bond with another woman, even if they did not see eye to eye on every issue. Any woman who has been harassed by her employer, degraded by a male doctor or professor or lawyer or accountant, whistled at in the street, suffered through an abortion or a divorce or a bad marriage with a bullying husband can sympathize with Hillary's compelling story. Here was a woman who took second place to her charismatic, philandering husband for decades, stood by him through public pillorying, became an object of taunts and insults herself, and yet emerged with her inner strength intact, able to compete more than competently in the male-dominated world of presidential politics, albeit with scars, but also with humanity, generosity and admirable good humor. Any empathic person would be inclined to support such a person, and certainly women, who have gone through the kind of things that Hillary has gone through, would be so inclined.
Of course, identity politics can create oppositional as well as supportive voting blocs. Therefore, in the midst of the New Hampshire reversal, almost like a magician who distracts an audience to perform a trick, the Clinton circle set out to racialize the campaign. They did this by such tactics as dropping hints on Obama's drug use and comparing the Jesse Jackson campaigns of the 1980s (which were explicitly based on the Rainbow Coalition, rather than the effort to articulate a general will) to the Obama campaign. Disingenuously, Hillary Clinton claimed to take Clinton supporter Robert Johnson at his word that, when he insinuated "Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won't say what he was doing," he was referring to community organizing and not to drugs. The Clintons paid a big price for the strategy of racialization. According to John Judis, "in a December Pew poll, Clinton trailed Obama among black voters in South Carolina by only one percentage point--44 to 43%. Even as late as the post-New Hampshire primary Pew poll, Obama was ahead of Clinton nationally by 52 to 33% among black voters. But after Clinton turned negative, Obama regularly won 90% or more of the black vote."
Racialization culminated in the Reverend Wright explosion. In discussing this incident, I want to make perfectly clear that I am referring not to the reality of Wright's life and achievements, but rather to the media spectacle that the connections between Obama and Wright provoked. Although Obama responded to the controversy with a brilliant speech (March 18, 2008) that spoke equally to blacks and disadvantaged whites, the aftermath demonstrated how impossible it would be for Obama to avoid racial politics. That this was not merely the result of the Clintons' strategy became clear when Wright appeared at the National Press Club on April 28. Considering the course of events overall, one might describe Wright as Obama's unconscious. While Obama presented himself as post-racial, Wright's apparently impulsive and unrestrained eruption evoked the blackness that every American fears lays behind the mask of whiteness that middle class blacks routinely wear.
According to many reports, there was "inexplicable" laughter, for example when Wright was asked about patriotism, at the Press Club appearance. If these reports are true, the laughter was the predominantly white audience egging Wright on (even though the audience was mostly Obama supporters). As excerpted by the media, the Wright performance was embarrassing, including, for example, letting the honkies in on supposed secrets of black culture, like "the dozens." The opening scene of Ellison's Invisible Man takes place in the deep South: two black youths forced to fight each other to exhaustion for the amusement of the jeering white crowd. At the National Press Club Wright seemed to bask in Obama's light, while letting America know what a fraud these Harvard "Negroes" are.
Just as the Wright incident represented an eruption from the deepest well-springs of African American history, so a driving theme in Hillary Clinton's post-Iowa campaign became the solidarity of women, the widespread conviction that Hillary was the victim of sexism and that someone entitled to a prize had been unfairly cut back, deprived, restricted, and by a man. Of course, more than this was involved. The decline of the economy, the shift in the electorate's preoccupations from Iraq to pocketbook issues, the rising price of oil and Hillary's well-known self-image as a "fighter" all helped her campaign. So too did the Clintons' genius at simultaneously obfuscating and guiding public opinion, the media's interest in keeping the race going, and strong distrust of Obama--perhaps racist, perhaps not--in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Appalachia. Nonetheless it is hard not to see that the emotional core of Hillary's quixotic drive to the endline, as well as the money and the votes, came from white women's sense of solidarity with her. Like the Wright protest against universalism and "assimilation," women's identification with Clinton arose from a genuine injustice, namely sexism. Nevertheless, the psychologies of the two protest movements were different. The feminist psychology that underlay the Clinton campaign, a psychology whose main spokespeople were Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, was a psychology of entitlement, a rage at being simultaneously idealized and thwarted. The Clinton campaign rode that wave of righteousness and anger, carefully titrated for maximum political effect. The Wright eruption, at least as exemplified in Wright's own appearance, came straight from the id, unmediated by any strategists, and it reflected the humiliation and self-abasement that accompanied hundreds of years of slavery.
Difficult as it will be for Obama to transcend the racial politics signified by his relation to Wright, his campaign is premised on his effort to do so. At the present writing, this is not the case with Hillary Clinton's supporters, so it may be worth further investigating the basis of her support. On the core issue of America's place in the world, she was the most conservative Democrat running for president. Not only did she consistently defend her vote in Iraq, explaining that Saddam Hussein was a "megalomaniac," she also defended her vote against the Levin amendment (which would have required Bush to get congressional approval for the war, failing a UN resolution) and for the Kyle-Lieberman amendment, which authorized the use of "military instruments" in Iran. In her last debate she called for a Sunni-based NATO meant to encircle Iran and threaten it with "massive retaliation" and "obliteration." These positions were so at odds with the Democratic rank and file that they were widely taken as aimed at the general election, except for the last proposal, which was assumed to be aimed at the upcoming West Virginia and Kentucky primaries.
If Hillary Clinton's politics do not explain her appeal to Democratic women, what then of her life story? Clinton's father, Hugh, was a self-made businessman, a martinet and a bully, who regularly humiliated Hillary's mother, Dorothy. The Rodham household was the scene of unending strife, much of it political, as her father was an extreme right-winger, and her mother a New Deal Democrat. According to Carl Bernstein's sympathetic biography, Hillary grew up amid discord, with her mother continually walking out and then returning to Hugh's side. Clinton later repeated her mother's pattern. Graduating college in 1969, as second wave feminism erupted, she was highly unusual in not pursuing a career of her own. Instead she became a rural Arkansas lawyer whose true vocation was to stand by the side of a powerful man whom she alternately criticized and defended. Throughout the nineties, she was a sort of "co-president," defending her husband against "bimbo eruptions," threatening to leave him, returning to his side, representing the party militants, and so forth. Watching Hillary on a national stage today, noting her obvious verve, brilliance and combative zeal, one can imagine her saying to her mother (who travels with her on the campaign), "if only Dad could see me now." Indeed, according to Bernstein, Hillary only had one period of genuine peace, her years as Senator when she operated as her own person, rather than defining herself with and against a powerful male.
Hillary Clinton, then, has a strong identification with her mother and with women in general, and a conflicted relation with her father and with the primary man in her adult life. This is a not unfamiliar pattern, and helps explain her appeal, including the present boomlet for her vice-presidential nomination. Yet democratic elections are about more than empathy and identification. Democratic elections presume voters who are able to weigh their immediate emotions and identifications against other, rational and universal considerations, voters who can identify with the experience of others, mediate these identifications through rational debate, and there by turn spectacles into contests. Thus, while it is easy to understand why women in general might be inclined to vote for Senator Clinton, it is harder to understand why a left-feminist perspective has only lately and barely (cf., "The Feminist Debate," Tikkun email blast, February 4, 2008) emerged. Why, in other words, has a feminist anti-Clinton position been relatively slow to materialize, and why does it remain reticent, especially given strong pro-Clinton feminist statements by Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and many others?
To answer this question it is necessary to form a conception not only of what is meant by feminism, but also what is meant by a Left. The idea of a Left arose in the course of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century and has as its essence a deepening and critique of the liberal traditions of self-government, natural rights and formal equality. Genuine equality is at the center of the idea of a Left, and the meaning of equality constantly evolves in response to mass upheavals. In this conception both racial equality and gender equality were present in the origins of the Left (Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution against slavery, and Mary Woll-stonecraft, the founder of Anglo-American feminism, were both Jacobins) but their meaning, and the relations between them, have changed and will continue to change. Socialism, in turn, sometimes equated with the Left tout court, was only one moment in the history of the Left.
In this view feminism is not a "standalone" tradition, one that can be advanced without considering the differences between Left and Right. Rather, between the 1790s, when modern feminism emerged, and the 1970s, when the particularly American version of "radical" or "second wave" feminism erupted, there was a deep divergence between what was once maligned as "bourgeois feminism" and what was equally mischaracterized as "socialist feminism." Putting aside the many different issues that characterized women's politics, the nub of the difference lay between women for whom the achievement of women's equality was a single issue which had to be defined and fought for in its own terms alone, and those women who regarded women's equality as one among a range of issues, including racial equality, social equality, international justice and peace. In Britain, for example, where the relations of feminists and the Left have tended to be less conflicted that in the United States, and where the role of the monarchy gives a different cast to gender than in the United States, hardly any feminists supported the election of Margaret Thatcher even though she was the first female Prime Minister in British history.
When the New Left erupted in the 1960s and 70s, it rejected both liberalism and Marxism, and tried to establish entirely new grounds for a left rooted in such ideals as participatory democracy. Second wave feminism actually arose in that context, especially in the deep South Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, with its intense self-consciousness regarding democratic small group processes. By 1970, when radical feminism as articulated by such figures as Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone erupted, the radical feminists rejected the New Left as sexist, exploitative of women, and deaf to feminist demands. Certainly, there was truth in these criticisms, but was it the whole truth? Many other feminists at that time did not believe it was the whole truth, and for a few years, organizations like the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the New American Movement and New University Thought argued for feminism along with a broad range of other issues. Tikkun itself, truth be told, has a part of its roots in this period in the history of the Left. By the late seventies, however, such "socialist-feminist" or "mixed-left" tendencies had foundered, but not because they lacked feminist support. Rather, they foundered because the Left as a whole went into decline. Nonetheless, this resulted in the left-feminist position being weakened, as we see today in the relatively unchallenged idea that a victory for Hillary Clinton is a victory for feminism. Today it is widely taken as axiomatic that the New Left was simply unresponsive to women's demands and that only a single-issue women's movement (a movement in which such issues as race and poverty were addressed only when they involved women of color, or poor women) could address women's concerns. The conflict among feminists that existed in the seventies has been submerged in the standard histories of the period such as Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open or Alice Echols' Daring to be Bad, according to which all New Left men rejected all feminist issues.
The most important present consequence of the relative weakening of the Left in general, and of left-feminism in particular, concerns the relation of gender and race. Speaking as a feminist--a term I will not cede to those who would restrict it to women--I do not believe that sexism is less important than racism, but it is different. In an article entitled "Women Are Never Front-Runners " published in the New York Times the morning of the New Hampshire primary, Gloria Steinem wrote: "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life. ... Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter)." In a much more moderate vein, Hillary Clinton in a speech in Philadelphia said neither Barack Obama nor she were represented in the original Constitution. Both Steinem's and Clinton's statements, if not outright wrong, were at least misleading. Women were citizens (although unequal citizens) for centuries while blacks were slaves, and although blacks technically gained the vote before women it was not until the 1960s that they actually were able to vote in most of the country. These are not unimportant distinctions, especially given the fact that at every point in the history of feminism--the abolitionist movement of the 1830s, Reconstruction in the 1860s, Progressive reform, the achievement of women's suffrage in 1920, and the Civil Rights and New Left movements of the 1960s--gender and race have been counterpoised to one another. It will be sad indeed, if we have learned nothing from this history that can be applied to the Clinton campaign.
Let me conclude. I have suggested that the struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can be understood in terms of the role that contests and spectacles have played throughout our political history. While it is tempting to laud the contest and bemoan the spectacle, the matter is more complicated. We need contests, because ultimately we want to concede the force of the strongest argument, but spectacles are equally essential to democratic politics, as we see from the French Revolution on. Perhaps the spectacle corresponds to needs for public action, quasi-religious communion, and mutual recognition that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of rationality. In any event, the New Left, the Black Power movement, and the women's movement all unfolded under now-familiar klieg lights. The shift from a relatively unified "class" politics, characteristic of the New Deal era, to a politics based on demands for identity and recognition seems to be linked to a new predominance of the spectacle.
The dreams defeated in one period of history wind up resurfacing in another. The charismatic campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have their roots in the spectacles of the 1960s. Obama's quest for a "general will" harks back before the sixties to the Civil Rights movement and also claims to transcend the conflicts that followed the Sixties, but as the Wright incident showed, he will be unable to avoid the insistence on identity that emerged in that decade. Clinton began by disowning charisma for wonkishness, but the more she affirmed her roots in second-wave feminism the more intense, if also the less hegemonic, her campaign became. Sorting out the relations of race and gender and relating both to an overall telos of equality will undoubtedly consume much energy in the next administration. Meanwhile, the Left that emerged in the 1960s, as well as its Jacobin, socialist, communitarian, religious and other predecessors, constitutes an enormous reserve of social thought and moral reflection without which we will not be able to orient ourselves.
Eli Zaretsky teaches history at the New School for Social Research. His Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life and Secrete of the Soul have been widely translated. He is working on a book entitled The Idea of a Left.
