Dr. Frank's What's-it

Good Talk

There's a terrific interview with Paul Berman in the current New York Press.

Excerpt:

I regard myself as of the left, and my complaint about a great many other people on the left is that they are stuck in the past. They are seeing events now through lenses that were ground in the 1960s, and lenses that were ground in the 1960s were partly derived from lenses that were ground in the 1930s that were partly derived from lenses ground in the 19th century.

There’s a way today in which there’s nobody more conservative than a standard leftist. My argument is that a standard leftist is someone to be avoided at all costs. I’m in favor of unstandard leftism, or anti-standard leftism. That ought to mean asking oneself these very fundamental questions, which the people I write about in Power and the Idealists are asking themselves, that have to do with this question of resistance—“What is the real oppression of our time?” Not what some ism tells us is the oppression of our time, but what is actually happening, who are the people that are actually suffering, and can something actually be done to help them?

What I know from having published Terror and Liberalism is that all over the world there are people who share the ideas in that book. There is a kind of sleeper political tendency that could be conjured into existence. You’re talking about clusters, but these clusters exist in every country, and I’ve been in touch with them. There is a kind of hidden continent of an alternative political view that exists. The great disappointment is that Tony Blair hasn’t articulated it better than he has. Bush has made things very confusing by using some of the language that this new tendency would use, but in a very disappointing way, because he talks the talk but he doesn’t walk the walk. He combines some of these principles with other principles that are dreadful and have nothing to do with a renovated left.

I get accused all the time on the left of not being any different than Bush and the neocons, but that’s not true because I think I’ve laid out some alternative principles that are very different. In Terror and Liberalism I called for a third force or a new radicalism, and that’s asking people to step forward and offer an alternative to Bush and the neocons on the right wing on the one hand, and the antique or conservative left on the other hand. I have to admit I haven’t gotten very far with that.