Socialism Won't Bridge Gap

The P.C. Circus is coming to Cambridge on Monday, and Carebears are the main attraction. Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal-Jewish Tikkun magazine, and Professor of Afro-American Studies Cornel West are scheduled to bring their travelling show to MIT's Kresge Auditorium. The message? A millenial panacea for the Black-Jewish divide entitled "Let the Healing Begin."

Lerner and West are engaged in a for-profit dialogue, hoping to solve the current impasse in Black-Jewish relations by selling a new book of mutual intellectual masturbation. In the $25 Jews and Blacks, one experiences the farcical and self-congratulatory conversation in which the two have engaged for the past several years. Their explicit (and flawed) purpose is the re-uniting of the two groups in a dynamic, progressive alliance.

Lerner is attempting to force what he calls a "Politics of Meaning" on America. He managed to seduce the President and First Lady into his cult of caring in 1992. When Hillary Clinton went public with the new-age guru's empathic proposals, she was reprimanded for trying to sell Lerner's newfangled socialism through a national healthcare plan. The Clintons have since put a great political distance between themselves and Mr. Lerner--to everyone's benefit.

Lerner's vexation is the "narrow self-interest" which he believes pervades America and is the causal force behind all of our social dilemmas. It is such a mind-set, he says, that has fostered the recent burgeoning of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism. He writes: "These kinds of sicknesses are expressions of the dominant selfishness of American society, and we do not believe they can be fully defeated without addressing the need to shift the dominant discourse from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring."

West is likewise attempting to push a distinctly socialist agenda. He sees a solution to the Black-Jewish separation in some version of a fundamentalist common religion that combines the Jewish and Christian faiths. In Jews and Blacks, he says to Lerner: "Both of our traditions place a fundamental stress on what I call non-market values...I'm calling for a dialogue about the relative failure or success of the U.S. experiment in democracy."

The Far Left may be dying in the Far East, but in the Cambridge Gulag it is alive and well. (The Lerner-West public forum is, in fact, organized by the Democratic Socialists of America at Harvard Divinity School.) Socialism itself is the primary error in judgment of both Lerner and West. Because of their lack of faith in our capitalist republic, they find it necessary to reconstruct the entire nation in order to defeat racism and anti-Semitism.

Both of these plagues will eventually be eliminated through the workings of a free and open society--a worthy goal for both liberals and conservatives. It is highly feasible that Jews and Black can reach common ground on more neutral political issues like the improvement of our educational system, the rehabilitation of neighborhoods through crime prevention and renewed family and work ethics.

The most inane and hypocritical aspects of Jews and Blacks do not lie in the authors' resistance to such a quasi-conservative agenda, but their denial that it is even morally legitimate. Lerner criticizes the great Jewish defection from liberalism as fundamentally anti-Jewish, attempting to restrict his people's political freedom. He writes: "It is only if Jews can stay connected to our task as witnesses to God's presence and hence as witnesses to the possibility of transformation from the ethos of selfishness to the ethos of caring (what I call a 'Politics of Meaning') that retaining one's Jewishness has a substantive point. So for Jews, the relationship with Blacks is not a 'nice fleel-good' kind of thing--it speaks to our fundamental identity as a people.

West goes even further than Lerner's hollow warnings of Jewish destruction. He threatens a defensive war against an oncoming American holocaust facing Blacks. "If we don't come up with a multiracial, progressive strategy, then we are simply headed toward Armageddon," he says. "I mean race war...That's quite imaginable in this society."

In setting out to solve a paramount contemporary American conflict, Lerner and West take on a heavy burden. Unfortunately, both attack the problem with a hostile pessimism through which they call for socialist revolution. The workers of the world might be more equal under a socialist regime, but that does not imply material comfort and therefore it certainly fails to correspond with racial harmony.

Liberal lovefests are nothing new here. On Wednesday, April 12 in the IOP Forum, there was a similar discussion involving three liberal Democratic congressional representatives: Barney Frank '61-'62 (Jewish), John Lewis (Black) and Alcee Hastings (Black). Students attending the event hoped to find a resolution to recent Black-Jewish tensions that have weakened the groups' relationship. Instead, they encountered three career politicians who were more eager to talk about the good old days of the civil rights movement than discuss current political strains.

At least Michael Lerner and Cornel West are frank in their discussions. The politicians at the Kennedy School seemed eager to head off potentially divisive questions, including ones mentioning Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan. They focused on the shared history of Blacks and Jews as minorities who have experienced extreme prejudice. How far can these shared experiences be taken?

Like Lerner and West, the representatives believed that the Black-Jewish alliance of the 60's can transcend time and political shifts. In the 60's, it was the Blacks who were balking (and rightly so) about civil rights to a government that was not particularly concerned. But over the last 30 years much has changed. One significant metamorphosis is that we now have a federal government openly and actively pursuing policies designed to benefit Blacks--and a largely white public that rejects such an agenda.

To dispute policies such as affirmative action should not be construed as anti-Black. Preferential treatment for Blacks, though perhaps historically justified, is an example of racially-biased government intervention and can therefore be viewed as an economic issue. Whether or not one agrees with affirmative action, disagreement on such matters must be tolerated by all parties. And so the question becomes: Can't we all not get along, at least politically?

Lerner and West, as well as the visiting congressional representatives, do not permit dissent from the liberal agenda. In particular, Lerner attempts to hold all Jews hostage to it. But growth comes from freedom in learning, not the didactic orthodoxy Lerner and West prescribed. Although they attempt to downplay their solution as final, they hold themselves as moral examplars for the rest of society. By for saking the American ethic of democracy and capitalism, the two have accomplished little in the way of solving any racial controversies in this country.