Is it right to make a 'witty' blog title with a punning usage of the terms "left" and "right"... if not, what's left?

I received a panicked email from a reader yesterday. It contained an expression of horror that was recently photographed for a national newspaper and in the frame was Nick Cohen's book 'What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.' The reader wondered how I could reconcile Cohen's "bilge" with my "lofty-lefty" ideals and sought reassurance that the inclusion of the book was a "post-modern ironic gesture" of some kind. I am afraid to say that my answer was a disappointment. As I explained in a personal email, and now in more detail here, there are a number of very useful lessons to be learned from Cohen's polemic but its inclusion was not a subtle statement - merely a coincidence (the photographer wanted to have books in the shot and it was close at hand. Sorry.)

But whilst I'm on the subject of Cohen and the future of the 'left' in a post-‘Blairite’, Obama scented era...

Let's get one thing very clear from the start - I am in no way a Cohen apologist, but I will not got so far as this reviewer who said: "Nick Cohen’s book takes its place with the autobiographies of Robert Kilroy Silk and Derek Hatton as one of the worst books I have ever been asked to review." However, despite a very clear stance on the book as a whole, they did make a rather interesting point that I feel is a useful springboard for further discussion:

"Cohen makes some legitimate criticisms of the anti-war movement, of its self-hating moral relativism, of its crass anti-Americanism, of its self-absorbed fears of terrorist retribution, of its indulgence of anti-Semitism and Islamic reaction. Yet even these pointed observations are drowned in a torrent of self-exculpatory bile. Everything comes back to Cohen’s inner turmoil, and the ongoing battle for his soul, between the former Blair-baiting journalist and the new Cohen, Blair apologist and laptop bombardier."

N.B. For a more balanced overview, this article from the Guardian (including a broad spectrum of opinion) should give you the gist of the book's successes and failings.

Obviously, there are some elements of Cohen’s politics I find detestable – especially in his new found role as best friend of neo-cons. Many examples of this new attitude can be found in a recent article he wrote:

"It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg [a man in the same hysterical, reactionary vein as Melanie Phillips]. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share...

'Liberal Fascism' [Goldberg's book] is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal...

Goldberg certainly leaves them little left to be proud of as he provides an alternative history of an America that Simon Schama lacks the intellectual courage to confront...

Beginning with the Black Panthers, multiculturalism [Melanie Phillips territory again] has also placed racial and religious identity above all else and beyond the reach of rational argument. Fascism was a pagan movement, whose mystic tropes are repeated by new age healers, vegetarians and greens...

Hillary Clinton's admittedly sinister desire for the state to take the place of the family..."

etc

Each of the above statements is ridiculous in the extreme. However, we must not allow our immediate distaste for his odd mix of hawk and hammer politics to justify ignoring some essential messages contained within Cohen's pages. The basic thesis of the book is that the 'Left' have always had a strong set of guiding principles and objectives that, with varying success, have given them a clearly defined cause. However, since the collapse of socialism in the 1980s the 'Left' have been in malaise and have resorted to blind anti-Americanism and a dangerous spiral of 'my enemy's enemy' alliance identification. For obvious reasons, I am painting in broad strokes but so does Cohen. One of my principal criticisms of his work is his tendency to use rather limited and obscure examples to tar an entire movement (of almost unparalleled diversity) with the same brush.

Peter Oborne, in the Guardian's summary article referred to previously, argues that - "The section on how the Socialist Workers Party (a marginal organisation taken with perplexing seriousness by Cohen) evolved from a half-baked Marxist sub-group into a repository for Muslim grievance is very nicely done." However, one group with extremely limited influence (and integrity) does not a movement in crisis make. Of course Cohen cites other examples - "Chomsky's erratic public career, including a brief spell as apologist for Pol Pot, gets the treatment it probably deserves." - but the book's main argument is that the Left's opposition to the 2003 Iraqi invasion was inspired by intense anti-Americanism (motivated by residual resentment of the free market after the fall of interventionary, statist Socialism?) and thus contradicted its previous vow to oppose fascism whenever, wherever it is found (i.e. Hitchen's Islamofascism.) This 'my enemy's enemy' criticism is repeated so often throughout the book that it dulls to such an extent it enters the realms of lounge music - incessant and inappropriate.

The charge that the 'Left' lost sight of its real target - intolerant, violent and repressive groups or individuals - as it fell over itself to find a common cause in attacking 'the Great Satan' is reasonably valid and must be levied against many 'so called' advocates of the left. However, to argue that this was the reason that most on the 'Left' campaigned against the 2003 invasion (myself 11 year old self included) is frankly ridiculous and where Cohen's analysis falls down. Whilst Chomsky and Said can be accused (even if not in a particularly sophisticated way) of blind anti-Americanism, the same cannot be said for Robin Cook.

Cohen has often been accused by his critics as having little link to the 'Left' beyond his mother's ethical grapefruit purchases and so his attacks can be classed as another spasm of the 'Right'. Such a disownment lessens the betrayal as Cohen desperately lunges (not unsuccessfully) at a number of highly respected and influential figures within the widest possible definition of the 'Left'. Admittedly, whilst still writing for the decidedly liberal Observer, his recent articles suggest an ever increasing shift to the right. But not only does such a move prevent some very useful criticisms sinking in, there is also very little need to disown Cohen for his attacks - his targets are too insignificant. In a chapter entitled 'The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement', Cohen admits: "A theme of this book is that ideas on the fringe are worth examining." This really is a central theme (and problem) with his work - the targets of his most stinging rebukes are much maligned "hangers on" to the broadly defined left.

Cohen takes the easy pickings of the movement's loonies - for example, the Respect Party's George Galloway gets beaten to an intellectual pulp and not one welcome in the ever popular fashionistas' ethical smoothies (as if we didn't know he was an egocentric, fascistic regime apologist). However, the best he can throw at the wider "good and well meaning" people of the left, the Liberals he refers to in his title, is that they attended marches organised by Galloway as leader of the Stop the War Coalition. But Cohen himself undermines this point almost within the next paragraph. He speculates about the euphoria that Galloway and his fellow far left crackpots must have experienced when addressing "not hundreds but hundred of thousands" at the largest political demonstration in British history - against the proposed 2003 invasion of Iraq. He then reflects that only a week or so later, at the local council elections, far left parties only won a single seat in the entire country (out of thousands of potential seats) in Preston (Town Centre) ward.

George Galloway's exploding ego and bad judgment is exemplified by his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother 2006

So obviously the vast majority of liberals had enough sense to attend a march in solidarity with a cause (that Cohen claims, in one of his most mendacious moments, was "against the overthrow of a fascist regime") but easily ignored the speeches of crack pot loonies from platforms along the way. Surely that's a positive? Cohen doesn't seem to think so. He examines over a century of the 'Left' highlighting misguided individuals and bad decisions but he has to spread their political blood so thinly in order to stain an entire movement that there is relatively no effect. Still, his criticism of Chomsky and Galloway is well deserved (but far from original) and he cogently argues against the assumption of an "Israeli root cause" to all Middle East issues:

"Sexist judges used to say that women who went out in mini-skirts were 'asking for it'. Their provocative dress was the 'root cause' of their rape. So it was with the intellectual left after 9/11. We 'had it coming'; we were the root cause of our own murder. Just as judges once removed responsibility from rapists... so intellectual leftists made mass murder a natural response to external provocation."

'What's Left?' contains a great deal of lucid and cogent argument but its premise is too large and its victims are too minor. At one point Cohen even admits that:

A complaint about my argument could be that 'you can always do this.' You can always discredit decent people by isolating the malevolant hangers-on who join them in upsurges of radicalism.

...and he's right, infuriatingly so. It's an 'enjoyable' read - always good for the ego to point at crack pots and feel self-satisfied - but please don't call it a polemical attack that "charts the breakdown of the Left and the confusion‚ malaise and double−standards that have turned it into little more than a dysfunctional family". In the concluding chapter, Cohen quotes a W. H. Auden poem and then reveals a very telling insight into his thinking:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

I can hear the same being said about today's radical generation and I feel sorry for the poor dears. For when their fury passes, what will they have left?

But Cohen fails to mention another (admittedly less successful) stanza in the same Auden poem:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love each other or die.

Of course, this is a rather sorry state of affairs to find yourself (and your 'movement') - and I'm sure that the 'Left' isn't there yet - but here's where I really differ from Cohen. Until this point I find it very difficult to disagree with anything he says. Of course I take objection to his over generalisations and suspect framing of analysis to try and stain everyone with the political blood of the looney fringe. However, almost without exception his analysis is sound - selective and hardly representative - and true. But when he tries to argue that the entire 'Left' is in disarray - drowning in soy latte (but never from Starbucks) - I fear he really has lost the plot. I cannot and do not pretend to speak for the 'Left' or even a minority of it, I speak only for myself and my experience, but this is enough to clearly attest that Cohen is talking utter nonsense. So George Galloway dresses in lycra and purrs like a cat in a desperate lunge for popular appeal, but social democrats the world over are as passionate, committed and principled as ever.

By all means go out and read Cohen's book, by all means get angry at every other page and throw it against the wall at the end, by all means don't buy so many Chomsky rants with catchy titles but don't lose heart or extrapolate a crisis from crackpot cases. Then sit down, have a cup of tea and snuggle up with 'The Audacity of Hope'.

"All I have is a voice..."

- W.H. Auden