Most leftist reformers of this period [pre-Sixties - ACIN] were blissfully unaware that brown-skinned Americans in the Southwest were being lynched, segregated, and humiliated in the same way as were African-Americans in the Deep South. Almost nobody in the pre-Sixties Left thought to protest against homophobia, so leftists like F. O. Matthiessen and Bayard Rustin had to stay in the closet. From the point of view of today's Left, the pre-Sixties Left may seem callous about the needs of oppressed groups as was the nation as a whole.
But it was not really that bad. For the reformist Left hoped that the mistreatment of the weak by the strong in general, and racial discrimination in particular, would prove to be a by-product of economic injustice. They saw the sadistic humiliation of black Americans, and of other groups, as one more example of the selfishness which pervaded an unreformed capitalist economy. They saw prejudice against those groups as incited by the rich in order to keep the poor from turning their wrath on their economic oppressors. The pre-Sixties Left assumed that as economic inequality and insecurity decreased, prejudice would gradually disappear.
In retrospect, this belief that ending selfishness would eliminate sadism seems misguided. One of the good things which happened in the Sixties was that the American Left began to realize that its economic determinism had been too simplistic. Sadism was recognized as having deeper roots than economic insecurity. The delicious pleasure to be had from creating a class of putative inferiors and then humiliating individual members of that class was seen as Freud saw it - as something which would be relished even if everybody were rich.
With this partial substitution of Freud for Marx as a source of social theory, sadism rather than selfishness has become the principal target of the Left. The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many member of this Left specialize in what they call the "politics of difference" or "of identity" or "of recognition." This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.
This shift of attention came at the same time that intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor unions, partly as result of resentment over the union members' failure to back George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. Simultaneously, the leftist ferment which had been centered, before the Sixties, in the social science departments of the colleges and the universities moved into the literature departments.
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