Week 12: Legacies of the New Left

Week 12. (1) Nationalisms of the New Left? Social Movements as Nation-Creators (2) Liberal Imperialism, aka Neo-conservatism, aka Paleo-social-liberalism: Left-liberals reject the New Left. (3) Multiculturalism, aka the New Left in Middle Age: Contrary of Civic Republicanism, A Variety of Liberalism, Destroyer of Class Solidarity?

Brian Walker, "Social Movements as Nationalisms; or, On the Very Idea of a Queer Nation," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26, Supplementary Volume 22 (1997): 505-547

Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion," The Weekly Standard 25 August 2003

Andrew Heywood, “Multiculturalism,” Political Ideologies, pp. 310-333

So you'd like a brief overview of "neo-conservative" principles, pointing out how un-conservative and radical they seem, as well as describing Christopher Hitchens's spectacular conversion from social democrat to neo-con/paleo-social-liberal after the Iraq War...

Watch "Hitch-Cocked: A Conversation with Christopher Hitchens" (2005)

So you'd like to see how neo-conservatives/paleo-liberals arose out of the old liberal socialist alliance, in reaction to the New Left...

Watch "Arguing the World," dir. Joseph Dorman (1998)

So you'd like to see a 21st-century liberal imperialist/neo-con/paleo-liberal outlook...

Check out The Weekly Standard, Commentary, or The American Interest (the paleo-social-liberals' answer to Foreign Affairs).

So you'd like to see a 21st-century neo-conservative journal of ideas...

Check out National Affairs

Neo-conservative/paleo-social-liberal think tanks

American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute (West-Coast Straussians), the Foreign Policy Initiative

So you'd like to know more about imperialist ideologies....

Check out Duncan Bell, “Ideologies of Empire,” Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, pp. 536-562

So you'd like to see a 21st-century multiculturalist outlook...

Check out The Prisma: The Multicultural Newspaper.

So you'd like a history of how multiculturalism grew out of the New Left, and how it separated from the labor movement, and made its peace with corporate capitalism...

Check out this interview about Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010)

So you'd like to know about a famous US legal advocacy group that is a watchdog for multiculturalism, and offenses against it, as well as against a strong central state...Check out Southern Poverty Law Center and their Extremist Files, which cover white nationalists, black nationalists, immigration-restriction advocates, states-rightsers, and anarchists.

So you'd like to see a review of the history of multiculturalist policy...

Check out Bhikhu Parekh, "Revisiting The Future of Multiethnic Britain: The Parekh Report 10 Years On"

So you'd like to see a systematic presentation and defense of multiculturalist doctrine...

Check out Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Harvard UPress, 2000)

So you'd like to see a prominent neo-con/paleo-liberal declare that the multicultis have won the battle for education, and the late twentieth-century culture wars more generally...

Check out Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Harvard University Press, 1997)

So you'd like to know why some people think multiculturalism was one of the best things that ever happened to neo-liberal capitalism, because it shifts attention away from economic class...

Check out Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Holt, 2006)