What’s Left of the Left?

(Martha’s Vineyard Men’s Group, July 19, 2017)

let me BegIn By sayIng that I am honored to have Been asked again to address this august but politically incorrect, all-male group. (I want you to know that I caught hell from my daughters for even being here.)

Nevertheless, about seven years ago, my wife, Linda, and I hosted a reception at our home here on the Vineyard for the then incoming president of Brandeis University, Fred Lawrence. I am a member of the Brandeis class of 1957, and I recently attended my sixtieth reunion.

At our reception, I had the good fortune to meet Stan Snider and his lovely wife, Mary Ann, who are longtime Brandeis supporters, as they continue to be of many other outstanding causes. Stan invited me to attend these breakfasts, which he had initiated many years ago. He told me the group was unofficially known as the “homogeniuses.” Over the next several summers, I came to learn how apt his description was.

As for me, I have been something of an outlier here. Not only

am I no genius, but I have provided a slightly unconventional view of things (at least, for some in this group), and if you heard me speak here about inequality, the decline of unions, the gig economy, and the deprivation of voting rights, my talk today will be another aspect of my left-wing perspective.

As a union and worker-side lawyer for over half a century, I am all too familiar with what are called “captive audience” speeches, in which employers are legally entitled to harangue workers on company time and premises against unionization. For me, addressing this group over the past several years has been my own kind of “captive audience” speech, so please bear with me as I try to enlighten you (if not persuade you) about a subject near and dear to my heart, if not yours—namely “the Left.”

On my last birthday I turned eighty-two. I have considered myself a “leftist” for the last seventy years, from the time I first attended a left-wing Jewish summer camp in upstate New York in 1947, when I was twelve (which was even before my bar mitzvah). Thus, I have been a participant-observer of “portside” politics for the last seven decades. It’s been quite an interesting and remarkable journey, for which I have very few regrets. (To paraphrase that internationally known left-winger Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the people I’ve met, and the places I’ve been. . . .”) Contrary to the bromide often incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill (whom I admire on many counts) that “he who is not a socialist when he is twenty has no heart, and he who is still a socialist at forty has no head,” I remain a committed socialist to this day, joining many elders, and now millennials, in our unalterable beliefs in the possibility of achieving greater economic, social, and political equality and justice, through governmental intervention, and against tyranny, oligarchy, and dictatorship worldwide. A very tall order, indeed!

Since Donald Trump’s election, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the modern-day successor to the American Socialist Party, has grown almost fourfold from seven thousand to more

than twenty-three thousand members, most of whom are under thirty. I am a charter member. (Membership applications are available online!)

In my case, the fact that I have spent my entire career as a lawyer representing the rights and interests of working people has only served to reinforce my radical political bent, in light of what I have seen in terms of unrelenting employer indifference and hostility to worker concerns, needs, and rights in favor of maximizing profits at all costs and above all else. For example, a 2017 Economic Policy Institute study shows that 2.4 million low-wage workers in the ten most populous states lose a total of more than $8 billion annually, or an average of $3,300 each, by reason of having been paid below the legally required minimum wage. Shameful! And this is only one of many forms of employer deprivation of legally required wages, including the denial of overtime pay, that we now commonly refer to as “wage theft.” As a friend recently opined: “Steal a pair of sneakers from Walmart, and you go to jail. Steal your employees’ wages, and your profits go up.”

Of course, the history of the left in the United States goes back well beyond 1947, when I signed on, to the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it traces at least to the founding of the Socialist Party by Eugene Victor Debs and others around 1900, after he emerged from jail for the first time, for leading the Great Pullman Strike of 1894, which was broken when President Cleveland sent in troops to arrest the strikers. While in federal prison for six months for contempt of court, Debs studied the works of Edward Bellamy, Karl Marx, and others, and he emerged declaring himself a socialist. His first unsuccessful run for president as a socialist was in 1900. In 1920 he ran from the Atlanta federal penitentiary, where he was serving a tenyear sentence for simply having made a speech in Canton, Ohio, opposing the World War I draft. He was charged under the Espionage Act, enacted exactly one hundred years ago, for obstructing the draft. In the 1920 election Debs received over nine hundred

thousand votes. His sentence was commuted by President Harding in 1921, and he met with Harding at the White House after his release. Harding is reported to have said, “Well, I’ve heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally.” President Wilson had refused earlier to commute Debs’s sentence, considering him a traitor, despite the repeated urgings of his attorney general. Debs died in 1926 at age seventy. He left a great legacy.111

It is not surprising that Gene Debs is Bernie Sanders’s hero. Bernie, as you must know by now, is a lifelong democratic socialist. (The term democratic was adopted early on to distinguish us from the “anti-democratic” socialists—namely, the communists—and not to indicate what kind of “big D” Democrats we are.) Debs’s picture hangs proudly in Bernie’s senatorial office. Indeed, in 1979 Bernie made a documentary about Debs that is available on YouTube.

That there is historic continuity between Debs and Bernie is clear. And indeed, that Bernie received more than 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries last year is a signal to me that the Debsian socialist vision and flame has never been completely doused, but like those miraculous Chanukah candles, they continue to flicker in the American political consciousness—as we shouted out during the 2016 primary campaign: “Feel the Bern.” (I should mention that Bernie defeated Hillary in the Democratic primaries in every Martha’s Vineyard town.)

During the intermittent period since Debs’s death, socialists have not been without influence or successes. Many of the reforms of the New Deal, such as Social Security and the minimum wage, came from such socialists as Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas, who was long known as “the conscience of America.” I remember

111. See Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989); and Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949).

as a young lawyer being inspired by Thomas, who fancied himself a quipster, advocating a society “based on deed and need, versus greed and breed.”

And socialist A. Philip Randolph, who headed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union (see the documentary 10,000 Black Men Named George), brought about the end of Jim Crow employment in defense industries in 1941 and segregation in the military in 1947 by threatening President Roosevelt and later President Truman with protest marches on Washington. Randolph finally did lead a march in 1963, when a quarter of a million Americans, Black and white, participated in the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was a major turning point in the civil rights struggle.

Also, Michael Harrington, a longtime democratic socialist leader until his death in 1989, at sixty-one wrote The Other America, which sparked the Kennedy-Johnson War on Poverty. It was an ambitious and high-minded war, but President Reagan cynically declared about it in 1987 that “poverty won!” Indeed, in my view, all the Right can claim as achievements in the twentieth century and beyond is to have opposed and thwarted progressive advances in social and economic conditions in our land, and under Trump they are now engaged in undoing significant social progress already achieved. I should add that while democratic socialists may be few, our presence provides important public voices that have the potential for providing both leadership and direction regarding national policies, just as have many of our leaders in the past. Bernie remains one of those voices.

At the polls, third-party efforts, including those of socialists, never succeeded in gaining significant political traction. Indeed, they more often served to distort the presidential election results as between Democrats and Republicans. First, there was Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 “Bull Moose” campaign against President Taft and Woodrow Wilson, which resulted in Wilson’s election (Wilson 41 percent, Roosevelt 27 percent, and Taft 23 percent). Then, there

was the 1948 election (Truman 49.5 percent, Dewey 45 percent, Thurmond 2.5 percent, and Henry Wallace 2.5 percent); the 1968 election (Nixon 43 percent, Humphrey 42 percent, and George Wallace 13 percent); the 1992 election (Clinton 43 percent, George H. W. Bush 31 percent, and Perot 19 percent); and the 2000 election (George W. Bush 47.87 percent, Gore 48.38 percent, and Nader 2.7 percent—with Bush taking the presidency by winning the Electoral College vote, 271–266, despite his losing the popular vote).

Often during many twentieth-century elections, the differences between the two major parties seemed to some voters on the left as a choice between Lewis Carroll’s “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” But more recently, the Republicans have been moving solidly rightward, and the Democrats correspondingly leftward, so that the clear political realignment that many of us on the left had hoped for many years ago has arrived. But there is the caveat entitled “Be careful about getting what you wish for.” So we got our desired political realignment, but we got Donald Trump to boot, as well as a more politically divisive country. Good or bad? That remains to be seen.

It is no accident that Bernie Sanders chose to participate in the Democratic primaries rather than run a third-party campaign against the two major parties. The Democratic Party’s left wing proved far more amenable to Bernie’s candidacy and views than even he had anticipated. And in light of the political realignment that has emerged, it is clear that this was the right decision for Bernie despite Trump’s victory, since it served to make progressive political change a viable and permanent part of the Democratic Party’s political future, which it must now articulate and advance, as problematic as that may be. Indeed, recent polls indicate that Hillary Clinton’s campaign suffered as a result of the perception that the Democrats are the party of Wall Street. And President Obama’s recent $400,000 fee for a single speech at a Wall Street firm did not help to undo that impression.

In my view, the Democrats must now articulate a program of popular general advancement in employment conditions and opportunities, single-payer health care, free public college tuition, environmental protections, true infrastructure repair and development, law enforcement reform, aid to declining communities, and fair and realistic tax policy—if they hope to regain control of Congress and the White House and lead the country forward in the years to come.

Despite all of the foregoing, the question remains as to why at this time Bernie has emerged as so popular an American political figure, and what, if anything, has changed to make it possible? Can it simply be attributed to Bernie’s rhetoric, platform, and personality, or are there other, deeper circumstances in our history that may be responsible? These are the questions, among others, that I propose to explore today.

In this connection, it is appropriate to note that 2017 is the onehundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, because if there is any single historical event that can be said to have served to impede the progress of American socialism in the twentieth century, it was the successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The Soviet putsch sent shock waves throughout Europe, which was then three years into the bloodiest war in history, as well as in the United States, which had just entered that war on April 6, 1917, on the side of Britain, France, and Russia. American radicals, socialists, and pacifists had vigorously opposed America’s entry into the war from its beginning, on anti-war and anti-capitalist grounds.112 Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson’s principal campaign theme in his 1916 run for a second term was “He Kept Us Out of War!” But once the United States entered the war, the government turned against war opponents with the greatest energy and zeal.

112. See Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

In the years following the war’s end, the Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted the infamous Palmer Raids, in which hundreds of radicals and anarchists were arrested and deported during the so-called “Red Scare.” It is not without significance to subsequent American history over the next more than half century that on August 1, 1919, Attorney General Palmer appointed then twenty-four-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to head a new division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, known as the Radical Division. Hoover ultimately became head of the FBI in 1924, which he ran for fortyeight years, until he died in office at age seventy-seven, on May 2, 1972, on the eve of the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in. During Hoover’s tyrannical almost-half-century incumbency at the FBI, during eight presidencies, he and his acolytes proceeded to monitor and suppress the Left (and the civil rights movement as well) at every possible turn, and they viewed left-wing political movements as an expression of anti- and un-American activity. That Hoover’s intense surveillance and persecution had a deeply adverse impact on the Left’s growth and development during his incumbency is undeniable. I and people I know here on the Island and elsewhere long had FBI files based upon political associations and activities. Indeed, by 1960, the FBI had compiled lists and dossiers covering 430,000 individuals and organizations suspected of subversive activities. In addition, it engaged over 100,000 informants to spy on, and infiltrate, suspected organizations and their members. A standing joke about the Communist Party was that half its funds came from Moscow and the other half from the FBI.

In addition to intense anti-Left persecution by instrumentalities of government after the Russian Revolution, the American Left was engaged in deep internecine warfare up to the period leading into World War II and beyond. First, a deep schism developed in the American socialist movement between pro- and anti-Soviet wings and factions commencing in 1919. These splits also occurred

in left-wing parties worldwide. The fissures widened further with the death of Lenin in 1924 and the ascension of Joseph Stalin to supremacy in the Soviet hierarchy. The subsequent expulsion in 1929 from Russia of Leon Trotsky, who had been a major ally of Lenin, and his establishment in exile of an international socialist movement opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship further fractured the Left. The murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 by a paid Stalinist assailant was another horrible chapter in international left-wing history.

An example of both persecution of leftists in the United States and left-wing divisiveness occurred in July of the following year, 1941, when the Justice Department deployed the Smith Act (enacted in 1940 as the Alien Registration Act) to indict the entire leadership of the Minneapolis local of the Teamsters Union, who were members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; the Department also indicted leaders of that party itself. (That union local had been the center of the bloody but successful Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, and it had organized some two hundred thousand over-theroad truck drivers in the Midwest into a single bargaining unit.) The Smith Act made it a crime to teach, advocate, or threaten the violent overthrow of the government.

Characteristically, this prosecution was applauded and supported by the American Communist Party. Eighteen of the defendants were convicted and jailed. The prosecution had been instituted by then Attorney General Francis Biddle. In his memoirs published in 1962, Biddle said that he regretted having authorized the prosecution.113

It was perhaps poetic political justice that less than ten years later, in 1949, eleven Communist Party leaders were themselves indicted under the very same Smith Act for engaging in “subversive” activities. Their convictions were upheld by a divided Supreme Court.

113. Biddle, In Brief Authority (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 152.

Similar prosecutions followed. Another major development was the federal indictment and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 for espionage by having passed military secrets to the Soviets. They both were electrocuted for their crimes in 1953. Despite outcries of their innocence by the Communists, who tried to make the case a national cause célèbre, the Rosenbergs’ guilt was confirmed by Soviet documents released by Russia in the 1990s.

In terms of continuity in American history, one of the federal prosecutors in the Rosenberg case was Roy Cohn, who later became counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during a period of extreme anti-Left paranoia that we refer to as “McCarthyism.” Indeed, President Donald Trump continues to accuse his detractors of engaging in it. It is of some historical interest that Cohn went on to be a lawyer for, and mentor of, Trump. Perhaps that is how he became aware of it.114 Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, shortly after having been disbarred, was the subject of Tony Kushner’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway play Angels in America.

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 was seen by some as providing an opening for the Left after the eight years of President Eisenhower’s moderate Republican incumbency. But the issues of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, engineered by the CIA in 1961; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and the expanded American involvement in Vietnam ensured that the Left would remain both divided and suspect during the sixties and seventies. The assassination by Soviet visitor Lee Harvey Oswald of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the assumption of the presidency by Lyndon Johnson, who proceeded to escalate the Vietnam War, made matters even worse. Civil rights demonstrations helped to advance the civil rights cause, but anti-war demonstrations helped cause President Johnson to decide not to run for reelection in 1968.

114. See Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, “What Donald Trump Learned from Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man,” The New York Times, June 20, 2016.

The riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the subsequent trials of the “Chicago Seven” probably helped achieve the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency in November 1968 and again in 1972. Nixon, of course, had been a master of “red-baiting” throughout his political career, beginning with his successful 1946 campaign for the House seat of California Congressman Jerry Voorhies and thereafter in his vicious and successful 1950 campaign for the California Senate seat against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he dubbed “the Pink Lady.” Douglas, on the other hand, called Nixon “Tricky Dick” for his many campaign dirty tricks. As a congressman, Nixon was an active member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose investigation led to the perjury conviction of former State Department official Alger Hiss for denying under oath his communist involvement. And the Nixon Watergate tapes reflect Nixon’s deep-seated hostility toward communists and the Left generally.

The Solidarity union movement in Poland in the early eighties, the later events in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the lowering of the Soviet “hammer and sickle” flag for the last time in Moscow on December 25, 1991, ended three quarters of a century of a monstrous global social, political, and economic disaster. For some, the failure of Soviet communism represents a demonstration of the mistaken historic socialist ideology and hopes. But for most democratic socialists, the Soviet demise inspired the figurative singing of “Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!”115—that is, it freed working people and many others across the globe from the yoke

115. The lyric was written by socialist Yip Harburg, who also wrote “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” My friend Harold Meyerson and Harburg’s son Ernie wrote his biography, Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz? Yip Harburg, Lyricist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). I learned today that Harburg was a longtime Vineyarder and golfing partner to some people in this room.

of a complete perversion of socialist ideology, which had served to enslave rather than liberate, its original intention. Regrettably, new right-wing authoritarian structures have been imposed in Russia by a corrupt oligarchical “power elite.” Simply put, Putinism has replaced Stalinism.

In any event, the demise of Soviet communism as a world force has taken away from American right-wingers a major quiver for their anti-Left bow and has required them to find new ammunition in their never-ending anti-Left assaults. To be sure, the playing field has not been leveled by the Soviet demise, considering the tremendous advantage the Right has in terms of “dark money” and the resulting political power that it commands. It was Louis Brandeis, who often was accused of being a socialist but was not, who said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Still, Bernie’s successes, and the emergence of a new generation of optimistic and committed young and even older people to his ranks and causes, and beyond, provide hope that the future holds better prospects for democracy—and the democratic Left as well—despite Brandeis’s dire prediction.

Another cause of the current left-wing revival can be traced to the Great Recession of 2008/2009. You will recall that it began with the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble. The resulting decline in wealth caused huge reductions in consumer spending and business investment. Massive job losses followed. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. labor market lost 8.4 million jobs, or 6.1 percent of all payroll employment. This was the greatest employment loss since the Great Depression. And the decline in family income, the loss of health insurance, the increase in poverty, and the drop in the stock market undermined significantly public confidence in the capitalist economy and system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the governmental loans to bail out Wall Street and the auto industry served to support the notion that government was in the corner of

the big banks and big business. As many on the left declared, it’s “socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.”

In response to the adverse impact of the Great Recession, by 2011, almost spontaneously, there emerged the anti-capitalist, anti–Wall Street Occupy movement, which engaged initially in an encampment in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan near Wall Street, with similar sit-downs occurring later across the country and the world. In the U.S. the movement focused principally on economic inequality and declared itself the representative of the 99 percent in its confrontation with the 1 percent, who the Occupiers felt wrongfully owned and controlled a huge and inordinate share of the nation’s wealth. The movement lacked organizational structure, leadership, and permanency and ultimately faded out of the picture. But the fact that so many citizens were prepared to express their deep political anger and frustration in such a dramatic fashion left a permanent impression of deep public discontent that may have found new expression in the Sanders, and perhaps even in the Trump, campaigns.

For socialists especially, the rightward shift of large numbers of white working-class voters has been most bedeviling. Traditionally, and ideologically, we always considered working-class voters to be the backbone of the Left, since they had the most direct and immediate confrontation on the job with corporate power and the employer class, and historically they regarded Democrats more worker-friendly than Republicans. But the loss of almost 7 million manufacturing jobs since 1980, particularly in the “rust belt,” the corresponding decline in the size and strength of the labor movement, cultural and lifestyle issues and differences, and the deplorable fact of Hillary Clinton in her election campaign having tagged all Trump supporters as “deplorables” caused a cleavage between middle-class Democrats and Trump working-class supporters. In retrospect, Trump’s populist promise of restoring millions of wellpaying jobs was an important factor in his victory.

In the wake of Bernie’s campaign, as well as the shocked reaction of the Left to Trump’s election, huge numbers of citizens have come forward to involve themselves in opposition and “Resistance” to the Republican election victory as well as such Trump and Republican policy initiatives as repealing Obamacare. And people who have never previously been involved in political activity have picked up the political cudgels.

There are numerous new groups on the left that have emerged after the Trump victory. From the Sanders campaign an organization emerged called “Our Revolution,” dedicated to electing progressive candidates on a local, state, and national level; growing new political leaders; enacting progressive ballot initiatives; and combating Trumpian efforts to dismantle the vast safety net created during the New Deal. Also, an organization known as “Indivisible” emerged after the election with a similar agenda. It came out of a political handbook published online by a group of former Democratic House staff members who thought that creating a Tea Party–like entity and program would be effective on the left. Thus far, both of these organizations have been highly successful in organizing across the country. And there are many others with similar objectives.

Let me conclude by making a point about the overall task of the Left at this time, as I see it. The threats we face today are not merely to the achievements of the welfare state as it has developed over the last eighty or so years, as ominous as they may be. Our constitutional democracy, the rule of law, trust, and truth are also under tremendous assault from the Right and the Trump White House. Protecting these institutional interests are generally seen as centrist political values. But I believe that doing so has been an essential element of the democratic Left’s program historically. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, which now has over 1 million members, was founded in 1920 by a small group of pacifists, socialists, and feminists, including Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, Arthur Garfield Hays, Jane Addams, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Preserving and advancing democracy, the Constitution (despite its many weaknesses), a free press, and free speech are objectives and values that extend across a broad political spectrum, requiring the cooperation of many who may not agree on everything. But the right to disagree, too, must be respected, and protected, for and by all. This is an important task that the Left must undertake mindfully today.

Finally, I commend to you Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s splendid recent pamphlet On Tyranny: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, in which he makes twenty recommendations on how we may together resist the tyrannical encroachments on our freedoms and liberty presented by the Trump regime. If we work together, we can survive to see our democracy preserved intact for our children, grandchildren—and beyond.