A Turn to the (New) Left?

"Toward an Appropriate Politics" by Charles Siegel, in New Perspectives Quarterly (Fall 1995), 10951 W. Pico Blvd., Third Floor, Los Angeles, Calif. 90064.

An air of exhaustion hangs over the Left these days. Siegel has a tonic he thinks would revive it: a return to certain themes of the New Left, which "wanted people to con- sume less, do more for themselves, and live as much as possible outside of the economic system."

During the 1980s, in reaction to the Reagan administration's efforts to curb the welfare state, the Left "retreated to older progressive ideas about social issues" and let the Right have the issue of empowerment, says Siegel, transportation chair of the Sierra Club and author of The Preservationist Manifesto (forthcoming). "The New Left of the 1960s wanted to break up bureaucracies to give people control over decisions that affect their lives. But now the Left just demands more bureaucratic social services--and as a consequence, it has become increasingly irrelevant.

Most people, for example, see clearly that--with the landscape littered with broken families and both parents in most intact families working--there exists a "parenting deficit" in America today. Yet the Left, Siegel says, "ignores this new problem" and pushes early-20th-century progressive mea- sures (e.g., more money for day care and for schooling) in whose efficacy even it no longer really believes. Leftists back these programs to help children and working mothers cope but "have no vision at all of a better future," he asserts.

Conservatives, meanwhile, defend the traditional family but "cannot get at the root of the problem," Siegel argues, because of their belief in economic growth. They "promote the growth of a consumer economy that leaves people with no time for their families and that takes over most responsibilities of individuals."

If it would stop its outmoded demands for more government services and focus "on humanizing our society by limiting both big government and big business," Siegel believes, the Left "could dominate the political debate."