The Missing Music of the Left

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From The New York Review of Books:

In 1962, my Harvard social science teacher, Michael Walzer, mentioned in passing, in the run-up to a classroom discussion about the preconditions of the Nazi ascendancy, that one reason the 1918–1919 German revolution—a short-lived sequel to the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime—was doomed was that it did not have a song. Though he recently told me that he doesn’t remember uttering these words, they have stayed with me. I take him to have been referring not to a specifically musical deficiency, but to a more sweeping cultural one—the absence of an animating spirit that crosses boundaries with panache. Such a spirit may be the Holy Grail that idealists seek.

To speak of literal music for a moment more, it has been a very long time since insurgents worldwide shared a moral equivalent of “The Internationale,” the anthem adopted by the (second) Socialist International in the late nineteenth century and subject to the contesting claims of socialists and communists ever since. International solidarity and the putative brotherhood of workers crashed and burned in 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the Kaiser so that Germany could slaughter its ostensible class allies, and left-wing parties across Europe split over whether to support their respective nation-state or oppose an “imperialist war.”

In 1917, Lenin’s Bolshevik heresy was able to capitalize on antiwar sentiment in Russia to seize power. A few years later, the Soviet Union was promoting a version of “internationalism” that conveniently withered into a defense of the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests of the moment. As Vaclav Havel wrote in his great 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” universalist slogans like “Workers of the world, unite!” shriveled into loyalty cheers lacking any concrete meaning.

All these years later, the left is still tuneless. Missing from social democracy is a galvanizing cross-border spirit, a sense of historical destiny, and yes, a literal song. In the twenty-first century, attachment to the identity tribe is fiercer, more binding, than any attachment to a common purpose. Today’s most prominent left-wing chant, “The people united will never be defeated,” is a tautology. When it originated, in Allende-era Chile, it meant something topical. Today, it is strictly sentimental. Trump supporters could cheerfully sign on to their version of what it means to be “the people united”—designating immigrants and Muslims, not the bourgeoisie, as the excludables.

. . . .

Michnik mentions two themes: globalization (“which dealt a blow to national identities and other forms of identity”) and cacophony (“a flood of information and an ordinary person cannot differentiate between truth and lies”). For me, that word cacophony is of the essence: it took his insight beyond what others, too, have noted about disinformation and today’s post-truth regime, and back to Walzer’s remark in 1962. If there were to be a global spirit to override nationalisms and tribal allegiances, what would constitute a consensus on the musical program?

As for globalization, it not only chews up national identities, it also sets national passions against national passions. Where there is no all-embracing song book, what chance does reason have to enfold people into a common project that takes rationality and solidarity seriously? The mass distribution of disinformation strikes blow after blow against the elemental reason that must undergird the formation of common purposes.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books