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"American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky."

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"That’s why we organized a public debate and panel discussion in Manhattan last Friday about Occupy Wall Street and left politics and strategy. Held at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side, the event was packed, the audience overwhelmingly young, and the atmosphere electric: just that morning, thousands had gathered to lock arms and defend the occupiers from Bloomberg’s threat to evict them, and the mayor’s last minute decision to back down had been cause for jubilation."

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What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR's New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the '60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement -- and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.

At least, that's the main takeaway from "American Dreamers," a new book by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion.

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"The current left is irrelevant, precisely because its first gesture, is to join with the powerful, in condemning it. It shows that the leadership of the current left is, in fact, on the side of oppression, so long as their own place in that oppression is more reasonable."

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"But let me propose instead a metaphor that I find more congenial for understanding the architecture of the political moment.

Let’s say you’re a player for a perpetually losing sports team in a league where there’s two or three teams that always dominate the competition year after year. Everyone but the die-hard fans have deserted you. Some of your former fans have just given up watching the sport altogether, some watch the winning teams diffidently from afar.

It’s a familiar scenario from a zillion sports films and even occasionally resembles the real-life narratives that emerge out of sports and games.

As a member of the always-losing team, you have a few explanatory options, which then suggest a few possible ways to act:"

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"the topic of 'Darwin, Dawkins, and the Left' because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing."

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"But the Left will never find out if there is a realistic political option within the Democratic Party if there is no commitment to building media and other messaging operations at both local and national levels to explain the value of progressive proposals.

And the hard reality is that other possible Left strategies – from third parties to street protests to romantic notions of “revolution” – have shown little or no promise either, in large part because progressives remain largely outside the national political debate. "

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Situations intends to address the current malaise of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness. We aim to explore the social conditions and lived experiences that lead to this malaise and to support explanations which do not reduce political phenomena to a reflection. Situations will foster modes of thinking that recognize the creative role that society plays in its own production. In opposition to simple determinisms, Situations will attempt to show the contingencies and peculiarities of political phenomena.

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This optimism about human nature, however, seems to coexist with a pessimism about the scope for institutional change....This “human nature-optimism, institution-pessimism” is, if anything (and to simplify), the mirror image of my view.

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"Open Left is a project aimed at renewing the thinking and ideas of the political Left. We seek an open conversation across the Left about the kind of society we want and how we can best bring it about." - by Demos in London.

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Power to the People? Conference notes, Birkbeck College, 9th May 2009

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left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons.

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critical of G20 protests...they “served a therapeutic rather than a political function.” ... they were irrelevant to ordinary people.
I agree. What they showed for me, though, is just how very far we are from any Marxist notion of revolution

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by Sheri Berman

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in list: Economic Crisis