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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1999730,00.htmlWhile it's agenda has triumphed, the left itself has in most respects wholly collapsed. It is one of the weaknesses of Cohen's book that he never quite pins down what "the left" is. Discussions of the book risk reproducing the fault. But it is facile to deny that the problem exists. Neither socialism as a programme nor the parties that espoused it - and these are surely somewhere near the heart of any definition of the left - have survived into the modern age with credibility. Foul though they and their ideas are, the parties of the extreme right actually have more purchase on the politics of the early 21st century than the parties of the left.
That doesn't mean there is no one left on the left. Self-evidently there are lots of people, even if they are neither as numerous nor as influential as the rightwing press imagines. But they lack anything remotely resembling a programme, let alone a programme that all of them agree on. With nothing to say to the rest of the world, the left tradition has taken cover in single issue campaigns, in inertia, or in the gesture politics of so-called defiance. Socialism is dead. There remain only socialists.
Cohen is merciless about a left generation that has unmoored itself from political action. He chides those who have grown up believing that it is possible simply to "be" leftwing - as both he and I were brought up to be - without having to do anything practical about it. Part of this is well aimed. Yes, the left has increasingly retreated from the street to the sofa. Watching The Trial of Tony Blair qualifies in some quarters as proof of political commitment. The left has always been far too comfortable in the purity of its own ethos, a comfort which absolves it from the inconvenience of having to take responsibility for anything, and gives it the self-sustaining gratification of permanent betrayal. But he is also very unfair. Most people who think of themselves as leftwing are not hypocrites. They want to live an ethical life. The trouble is they are waiting for a call that shows little sign of ever coming.
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