Why this blog

I've been intimately involved with the organized left for over 40 years, ever since my college days started back in 1965. Now, however, my intimate partner, the left, has grown daft, paranoid and hostile, and so this blog is a wake-up call to the left to get its act together, and stop, utterly stop, its obeisance to Political Correctness.

The left has seemingly been irrelevant to lived life now since at least the early 1970s, much to the diminishment of political and social life since then. While certain left ideas are more relevant than ever, especially in economics and economic policy, other leftist ideas which have gained fasionable currency are not only irrelevant but actually harmful, and the left that is organized into various groups here in the U.S. is simply a disaster. We, the left, are now our own worst enemy.

This undermining of the left by the left itself comes from both the Right and the "Left" wings of the left, from the very leftists themselves. On the Right is the slavish tailing after whatever Obama offers, and craven submission to the Democratic Party. On the "Left," however, is ultraleftist disaster: Politically Correct adherence on cultural and social issues with no dissent or raising of caveats allowed, whether it be on feminism, racism, what constitutes left and "advanced' culture, what is retrograde and what is not, what is "working class" and what is not; with the result being the stifling of any honest discussion on the left of all kinds of issues, baiting of those leftists who do try to dissent as "retrograde" and still slaves to "'male' or 'white-skin' privilege," of being "elitist" or "offensive," and myriad other charges. This results, needless to say, with a left absorbed today not in the advancingof its ideas and in recruiting, reaching out, but in censorship and the imposition of self-censorship in the name of Political Correctness.

In concrete terms, this means the denial that, e.g., blacks and women are individuals with varying mixtures of virtues and faults, but instead the left insistence that their structural oppression does not deform them to various degrees, but rather, only makes them into Ideal Types who can never do or say anything wrong. It means romanticizing them, and painting a Manichean picture of them as forever struggling against another Ideal Type, the Forever-Evil white, educated male. Talk about regression to Rousseau's Noble Savage!

But an obvious political conundrum arises: if women and blacks (not to mention gays, Hispanics, "conscious" workers, and others) are so Ideal as a result of their structural oppression (a structural oppression which I readily admit), then why is capitalism, which socially created these Ideal Types, something to oppose? After all, its oppression is only creating--paragon Ideal Types full to the brim with virtue! That would only make capitalism a moral good, and its sturctural oppression merely a challenge to face and overcome through Politically Correct deference to the Ideal Types--especially if one is a white, educated male such as myself. (However, I would like to point out that my college education came from Michigan State and Indiana Universities, not the schools of the Ivy League or the elite state universities of, e.g., Ann Arbor and Berkeley, where many of my fellow leftists were educated.)

Most especially this white, educated male, despite 40+ years of devotion to the left, but now found to be hopelessly Politically Incorect by his fellow leftists because he asks too many Politically Incorrect questions and raises too many Politically Incorect objections. Never mind the substantive, logical and reasonable basis of these questions and objections. Even substance, logic and reason come under attack by today's left as being somehow subordination to capitalism, to the minions of the right. After all, according to our modern leftists (especially those infatuated with Postmodernism, or just going along with it because it's the trend), science itself is but a pernicious ideological construct of capitalism and repressive institutional structures! There is no Logic and Reason, because everything is really nothing but competing Ideology.

So I'm thrown back on believing with the most Politically Incorrect Liu Shaoqi: "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao have all made mistakes." Yes, and so have Fidel and Raul Castro, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Al Sharpton and Michael Harrington. So has George Fish, the writer of this blog. But the ideal of leftism was expressed precisely in the third verse of the Internationale: "We need no condescending saviors." No, comrades and fellow friends of discussion and debate, we do not need to close off full and unfettered inquiry by canonizing infallible Popes of Revolution and demanding strict adherence to Political Correctness. If anything, what we need most of all is what was advanced (but never sriously implemented) bu the Chinese Communist Party in 1957: "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand schools of thought contend." Open up the floor for full discussion and debate! Nothing is too sacred, or too Politically Incorrect, to be denied the floor! Let all say what they will, and let them all be judged by merit and truth, but never by adherence to Political Correctness. No censorship, but only responsibility for one's ideas and actions. And that's why this blog, "Politically Incorrect Leftist." Because my home is still on the left, despite the too-frequently obtuse and willfully ignorant characters I must now share my quarters.