What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way [Paperback]

It could fairly be argued that what has always united the myriad groups, factions and parties comprised under the term "left-wing" is not so much their ideology as their self-image. They have always seen themselves as the champions of progress, the defenders of the poor and marginalised, the fearless pursuers of impartial justice. Their opponents are the bone-headed defenders of tradition and privilege who ensure the executioner's face is always well-hidden.

These typically liberal traits - an effortless moral superiority, instinctive support for the underdog, and opposition to the status quo - are undoubtedly very easy to ridicule. But they are not inherently malign or wicked. They only become dangerous when they are un-coupled from any sort of genuine altruism. This is what Cohen means when he says the Left has lost its way.

In Cohen's view, substantial segments of the left are in danger of allowing their movement to degenerate into a trite, self-indulgent counter-culture, in which an angry anti-establishment posturing conceals a lack of a positive political programme. Stop The War and Globalise Resistance, two of the most visibly popular left-wing campaigns, are defined by what they're against, not what they're for. Many people on the left are far too ready to draw an artificial moral equivalence between true tyrannies overseas and the very real but usually much milder moral failings of our own leaders and institutions. The author sets out to explore what's gone wrong and why.

Cohen is probably correct, at least from a British perspective, when he says that most liberals and socialists would find it quite difficult to imagine what a society significantly more left-wing than ours would look like at the present time. The defeat of the blue-collar unions and the rise of popular capitalism in the 1980s left socialism reeling. Tony Blair's reformed Labour party appropriated the rhetoric of conservatism, helping to close off space for a radical alternative. Even the minority who are still prepared to put forward a case for nationalised utilities and a more progressive tax system often feel compelled to admit that the welfare state has had unintended negative consequences. Liberals are no longer sure that history is on their side.

But perhaps more debilitating still is the social chasm that has opened up between the old, working-class, union-based left, and affluent cosmopolitan liberals in the public sector and cultural industries, a phenomenon Cohen explores in the chapter "What Do We Do Now?" He concludes with the depressing observation that a person who lacks empathy even with his or her indigenous working class is likely to be, at best, lukewarm about offering solidarity and support to people overseas, whether it's Iraqi trade unionists at risk from Ba'athist death squads, or Indian feminists trying to put an end to dowry murders.

The influence of the postmodern theorists, Cohen explains, has also been thoroughly disastrous. Despite, or because of, their impenetrable jargon - "homogenizing epistemic logic", "representationalist discursive areas", etc - many of these obscurantists were able to achieve a high degree of credence in university humanities departments. Their contention that everything is a social, historical or linguistic construct opened the door to moral and cultural relativism, so that it became permissible to combine vaguely egalitarian-sounding rhetoric with an implicit rejection of universal human values: "Homosexuality, blackness and womanhood became separate categories that couldn't be criticised or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was a culture of wife-burning or suicide bombing" (p105). A recurring theme of What's Left is that you must never underestimate the impact that cranks, contrarians and loonies can have on mainstream political thought.

Nick Cohen has frequently been derided as a "neoconservative" for his views on the Middle East and especially Iraq. But the charge is little more than a playground insult. Cohen is not some kind of wild-eyed utopian seeking to remake the world in his image. "There is no necessary virtue in wasting other men's blood and other taxpayers' treasure in other nations' conflicts rather than attending to pressing issues at home," he insists. Moreover, he is as critical of the excesses of Cold War militarism as he is of the unbridled free market and of rampant social inequality.

What he finds distressing is not so much that "the liberals" opposed the Iraq War, but rather that so few of them were prepared to give even qualified support to the occupation after "major hostilities" had ended. The "Bring the troops home now!" crowd didn't actually want Iraq to be subjected to an escalation of terrorism, years of hideous sectarian civil war, and the real possibility of a Ba'athist counter-revolution. But they refused to confront the reality that this was the likely consequence of what they were demanding.

We are also presented with a fascinating and convincing insight into possible reasons for the revival in anti-semitism, and of conspiracy theories in general, on the left. In the final chapter, entitled "Why Bother?", Cohen leaves us with the thought that we need to rediscover the best traditions of the "old left", whose sense of solidarity has remained relatively uncorrupted by postmodernism.

I disagree with Cohen on one or two specifics (the Kosovo conflict for instance) and he does overgeneralise a bit. But overall the book displays tremendous insight, scope, humanity and moral clarity.

Many reviewers of this book - whether writing in newspapers or here on Amazon - seem to distort its arguments. I think (cross) leftists and (smug) rightists both want Cohen's conversion to be more dramatic than in fact it is. I'd skimmed through some of these reviews before reading "What's Left?" and was expecting his perspective to be close to that of, say, Melanie Phillips. But he hasn't abandoned the Left completely, only certain tendencies and views within the Left which he sees as sinister. He has been characterised by some reviewers as a fan of Bush and an unequivocal supporter of the second Iraq war. But this clearly isn't the position he sets out in "What's Left?"

The book is polemical and aimed at general readers, and clearly Cohen has had to shape and select his material in the most rhetorically effective way. Sometimes I felt the argument had been flattened, a middle position excluded. Yet on the whole I thought "What's Left?" was nuanced, thoughtful and consistently absorbing.

I notice, when I search for "Nick Cohen What's Left review" the first results I get are negative reviews from the Guardian. Peter Wilby ends his with "he is, and always was, a political innocent". Perhaps it is just a coincidence that that last word was the same one quoted by Cohen in the book as being used by Tariq Ali to describe hero Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya because he supported the UN-backed coalition in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Wilby's comment is no more appropriate than Tariq Ali's.

The worst review I saw was from Beatrix Campbell, who is clearly in Cohen's firing line. "It is written with ... bad manners: intemperate, petulant, abusive", she barks, perhaps referring to a different book to the one I read. She also states that "It starts from Cohen's support for the Bush-Blair new imperialism". Well, since even his tacit support for the war only comes in chapter 11 out of 13, I can only assume that she flicked through the book from back to front.

Although Peter Oborne wrote a generally positive review, it starts with what looks like derision when he lists a random selection of Cohen's "enemies". The fact that he could not fathom why Virginia Woolf came in for criticism shows that he was just not paying attention.

There is evidently no lack of support for the book in the reviews in these pages or for that matter elsewhere but perhaps it's worth adding a few words of my own: It is well researched, well reasoned and extremely well written. He has not renounced socialism as his detractors would have you believe and he reminds us of that throughout the book. His equivocation also makes his arguments more powerful. It is a pity that he could not fully explain why the mindset of the far left (e.g. the Stop-The-War Coalition) has to some extent permeated the mainstream. As he put it "the propensity of liberals everywhere to portray a global clerical fascist movement as a rational response to Western provocation", but this is something that I noticed soon after the invasion. Just because Bush used the term "War on Terror" the media could not bring themselves to use the word terrorist to describe even those who beheaded Margaret Hassan.

Just one other little example of how far that attitude spread was described by Cohen: Kanan Makiya wanted some kind of post-war truth and reconciliation as happened in South Africa. He wanted to enlist the help of German archivists to go to Iraq to teach Arabs and Kurds what they knew about preserving historical records and balancing the demands of confidentiality and openness. However, so strong was the German government's antipathy to the war that it prevented its citizens from taking any part in reconciliation after it.

Finally, I quote from chapter 11 to show Cohen's real attitude to the war:

"From the point of view of the liberals, the only ground they would have had to concede if they had stuck to their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to Al-Qaeda ... They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American Troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis.... The second choice... was to... pretend that `the United States' was THE problem and Iraq was its problem".