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May 14, 2004

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Getting Back on Track

James Weinstein. The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left. Westview Press, 2003. 286 pp.

Reviewed by Jason Schulman

James Weinstein has not given up on American socialism. His admitted “pathological optimism” appears to have little diminished from the days twenty-eight years past when he founded he founded the still-running biweekly newsmagazine In These Times, or even from thirty-five years ago when he founded the journal Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review, and today Radical Society). He still sees the US as “tending inexorably, if fitfully, towards a more inclusive democracy.” And, just as he angered some on the Left when he confirmed that Julius Rosenberg did in fact pass information to the Soviet Union, he will doubtless anger yet more with this book of history and strategic advice.

Much of the history that Weinstein covers in The Long Detour will be familiar territory to many leftists. Here again is the story of the Socialist Party (SP) of Eugene Debs, Morris Hillquit, Victor Berger and Big Bill Haywood, and its forerunners in utopian colonies and the Socialist Labor Party. Not much is new here—though Weinstein’s representation of Marx’s critique of anarchism is appreciated. Marx denigrated workers’ “spontaneous” fight for the right to vote and to organize unions, to which Weinstein responds perceptively: “When the left fails to create viable movements that offer a place in which to act on the left’s own behalf, anarchist ideas and groups have had a lingering appeal, especially to newly radicalized young people.” Contemporary radicalism offers proof positive of this statement. Weinstein’s main aim in telling the story of the SP once more is to stress that the reforms offered in the party’s program eventually became part of mainstream political discourse, even as the party itself declined. Also notable is the struggle of the SP to distinguish itself from Progressive Era reformers without marginalizing itself.

In his chapters on the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, Weinstein revisits another well-documented history—one that veteran leftist readers probably already know and which newcomers may not find particularly relevant or even interesting. But even today it’s worthwhile to explode Stalinism’s socialist pretensions, and perhaps nothing does it better than Weinstein’s example of how the Russian city of Magnitogorsk—in the 1930s the very model of a “socialist” city—was modeled after Gary, Indiana’s giant US Steel plant. The USSR was, in Weinstein’s words, “an amalgam of the worst aspects of feudalism, the harshest practices of capitalism, and social protections associated with socialism”—and indeed, it “put the finishing touches on the American left” by distorting socialism’s very meaning, even as the Communist Party USA was just becoming a real presence in American life. He critiques the American Communist Party for, ironically, bequeathing an “aversion to universal principles” to the New Left via its operation through—and submersion into—single-issue movements. This is a fair point. Also, he is not far off when he discusses how, in the 1970s, the post-New Left’s “attacks on traditional institutions—grossly exaggerated by right-wing media—helped create a large working-class constituency of ‘Reagan Democrats.’”
Weinstein goes awry, however, in his criticism of mandatory busing to achieve school integration of black and white children. He claims it accomplished nothing except segregation within schools. This may be, in fact, what happened, but his discussion fails to engage with the history of the Black Freedom Movement around public education, particularly in Boston, where it was determined that the School Committee engaged in intentional segregation and hence desegregation was necessary. Weinstein makes it seem as though busing was an arbitrary decision made in the 1970s; he fails to mention that black parents were effectively agitating for it as early as 1950. That is, as Ruth Batson said at the time, black parents simply wanted to get their children “to schools where there were the best resources for education growth.”

Premonitions of Weinstein’s final chapter, What Is To Be Done, appear in his discussions of populist and socialist Democrats such as Upton Sinclair, Floyd Olson and Huey Long, and particularly in his discussion of the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota. Throughout the 1910s, the Socialist Party tried to organize farmers across North Dakota, and failed. In 1915, the same year that North Dakota switched to an open primary, Socialist organizer A.C. Townley founded the NPL. Since the Democratic Party was a nonentity, the NPL ran candidates as Republicans. But NPL candidates didn’t join the GOP or become a part of the party structure. In 1916, it swept its way into office, taking control of the North Dakota House of Representatives and elected a governor. By 1918, it completely controlled the government of North Dakota, an accomplishment that far surpassed the Socialist Party’s electoral fortunes—and yet the SP and the NPL had the very same platform.
It isn’t surprising, then, that Weinstein argues against efforts to build an independent leftist party in the US and is in favor of running leftists in Democratic Party primaries, of doing to the Democrats what the Christian Coalition did to the Republicans. Of course, he is arguing for more than just electoralism; rightly, he says we should emulate the New Right in “establishing institutions devoted to winning the battle of ideas by relating to our natural bases among the American people in terms that they understand and around issues that most concern wider constituencies at any given period.”
Weinstein’s critique of Ralph Nader’s run for president in 2000 and Green Party strategy in general will not endear him to many contemporary leftists. The problem is that there has yet to be a credible third party strategy for overcoming the barriers of our non-parliamentary, single-member-district, gerrymandered electoral system. Furthermore, given the complete absence of party discipline in the Democratic and Republican parties, it makes little sense to denounce leftists who run (or even, heaven forbid, get elected) on those ballot lines as corporate sellouts. That said, Weinstein runs the risk of becoming the mirror image of his third-party critics. Was Bernie Sanders wrong in running for Congress as an independent? Is the Vermont Progressive Party wrong to not be a Democratic caucus? I’d hardly say so. Leftists would do better to reject an either-or approach to electoral coalition building, focused solely on building a new party or on realignment within the Democratic Party. Where third party candidates are able to mobilize progressive coalitions of a significant size, there is no good reason to not support them.

The Long Detour may not be essential reading for long-time leftists. But it is essential reading for those new to the Left; no other book in recent memory packs so much history and analysis into so few pages. And it is refreshing to read an author with a sense of realpolitik who nevertheless understands that humanity’s long-run alternatives are, indeed, socialism or barbarism.

Jason Schulman is a doctoral candidate in the PhD program in political science. He has written for New Politics, Science & Society, Logos, and Radical Society.