Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2005

POST-ELECTION REVIEW

Beyond the Alienated Left

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Joel Schalit

With the defeat of John Kerry, it has become commonplace for pundits left and right to make the two following observations: first, that Republicans won the election based on their emphasis on cultural values; second, that the Democrats lost because they lacked an ideology that could have subsumed Republican discourses about morality into a more progressive political language about America. While both observations have a basis in truth, neither of them adequately explains why conservatives won the election and the so-called liberal/Left lost out.

The Republicans won because they spent over a quarter of a century on political education and grassroots organizing in the form of evangelical cultural outreach. While the Democrats argued legislation, the Republicans built faith communities. Within these communities, they worked to create Christian versions of every institutional and cultural interest of Americans, from faith-based charter schools to faith-based welfare to faith-based rock 'n' roll.

In organizations like the Promise Keepers, the mega-churches, and the anti-abortion movement, middle Americans found a secure, comfortable bulwark against postmodernity. In a world that seemed increasingly uncertain, they found spiritual leaders who insisted that the Christian path was straight, narrow, and clear. In a world in which everything seemed relative, they could rely on their neighbors to show up at church. Above all, they were reassured that they would not need to negotiate contemporary society alone.

The role this gradual cultural creation of community played cannot be underestimated in this election. American society is increasingly atomized. The economy of the United States is now consumer- rather than manufacturer-driven. Unlike manufacturing, where each must work with another as a team, in a service economy, I am best off when I am on my own, protecting my own interests, with no one responsible for me except myself.

We buy into this economy, even as we long for more connection. The cellphone symbolizes our alienated state. We value the cellphone precisely because it bridges the void between ourselves and those with whom we desire to share our life experience. In a world to which we feel little relation, the cellphone becomes a lifeline, connecting us to sources of personal meaning. Yet as we rely increasingly on the cellphone, we are drawn ever farther from the world in which we actually travel. We no longer see the barrista serving us coffee, the driver in the car crossing the road.

The Left has embraced this kind of alienated lifestyle. We have prized the virtual, the simulacrum, the situation. We feel proud of our sophisticated ability to change, chameleon-like, with circumstance. Lovers of information technology, we cherish the flexibility of the globalized service economy, which for those who can surf its tides can bring a feeling of freedom and control. Even as we protest global capital, we embrace the culture that capital creates. Indeed, we rely on global capital's disdain for extra-economic social narratives in order to frame our response to it. In short, it is the Left, not the Right, which supports the status quo from which most ordinary Americans feel disenfranchised.

The best response to alienation is community. The Republicans caught American's discontent with postmodernity and responded with faith-based communities. These communities tell their members that they are not alone. They offer actual people to whom the individual can turn and actual places to which the individual can go.

If the Left is to gain any traction in American politics, we must reject the alienated position of postmodernity. We must, as Jurgen Habermas suggests, focus on rebuilding an authentic civil society marked by real communicative acts between members. We must reclaim ideology, understanding that attempts to tell one coherent story, even if fictional, also have the effect of actually creating bonds between people willing to follow the story line.

Most importantly, we must move out of the realm of theory altogether and begin, as our opposites on the Right have done so successfully, to create facts on the ground. Moveon.org and other groups were a good start, but these were still largely virtual communities. Virtual communities are not enough. We must re-value grassroots community work like joining the parent association at school, engaging in public gardening projects, working on prison reform. We must then create a framework in which these separate projects are all understood as part of a bigger story, the story of tikkun olam, of making the world a better place.

Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is senior editor of TIKKUN. Joel Schalit is managing editor of TIKKUN.

Source Citation

Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green, and Joel Schalit. 2005. Beyond the alienated left. Tikkun 20(1):57.