The 'C' Word

Al Giordano: 'Thirty-two and the years that followed marked a paradigm shift for the American left, a time when certain tendencies of its creative class finally engaged in a conversation with the workers and for years after that listened to them and served their interests in the books, plays, songs and movies and journalism they wrote (the later McCarthyism purges in fact were aimed at breaking that historic alliance). The irony of that moment was that it took an electoral campaign and an unlikely president to catalyze that alliance.

When we hear, in 2008, a major party nominee for president at an hour of economic crisis unafraid to use the word "capitalism" critically, we can see that the American left is at just such an historic crossroads today.