{"id":1063,"date":"2006-04-15T06:25:54","date_gmt":"2006-04-15T06:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:42","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:42","slug":"euston_weve_had","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1063","title":{"rendered":"Euston, We’ve Had A Manifesto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norm Geras<\/a> – who I’m happy to have drunk a Tsing-Tao or two alongside – has something on his site I hope you’ll all read. It’s a manifesto for a Left that makes sense.<\/a><\/p>\n

A. Preamble<\/b><\/p>\n

\nWe are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1) For democracy.<\/b><\/p>\n

\nWe are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures \u2014 freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the separation of state and religion. We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold.<\/p>\n

\n2) No apology for tyranny.<\/b><\/p>\n

\nWe decline to make excuses for, to indulgently “understand”, reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy \u2014 regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s more, read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nThe New Statesman<\/a> has an article about how this document came to be.<\/p>\n

On a Saturday last May, right after the general election, 20 or so similarly minded people met in a pub in London. We had no specific agenda, merely a desire to talk about where things were politically. Those present were all of the left: some bloggers or running other websites, their readers, a few with labour movement connections, one or two students. Many of us were supporters of the military intervention in Iraq, and those who weren’t – who had indeed opposed it – none the less found themselves increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse. They were at odds, too, with how it related to other prominent issues – terrorism and the fight against it, US foreign policy, the record of the Blair government, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, attitudes to democratic values. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m sorry I missed it…must have been quite a “do”.<\/p>\n

\nNorm interviewed me<\/a> a long time ago, he asked:<\/p>\n

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I answered:<\/p>\n

The opposite of romantic self-annihilation, and when I can convince you to figure out what that is, we’ll all be better off.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, we’re headed that way.<\/p>\n

And I’ll enthusiastically sign up to walk there alongside him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norm Geras, crack British batsman, steps to the plate and swings away…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}