What is the Left? More accurately, what is left of the Left? The Left was an active rainbow of ideologies until Lenin's Soviet Union went belly-up and Mao Zedong's Communists officially adopted heresy under the guidance of Chairman Deng, who did not care what the color of the cat was as long as it caught mice. The Red Book of Mao was dumped for the Black Book of Deng; red and black became the colors of the ink on the new Chinese national balance sheet, and red was not the preferred hue.
Since 1990, a landmass stretching from the border of divided Germany to the Pacific, and a mindset that spread across every continent, has redefined itself. The Soviets went the way of the union, and the notional rule of workers and peasants has surrendered to an oligarchy protected by the industrial, military and bureaucratic power of the state. China's dictators sneer at the "bourgeois" notion of a free election; bread, counterfeit and dollar reserves are the new trinity.
So who is Left? A Parisian might have an answer: the Left is a Bank that harbors a variety of cafes, talk shops and attitudes untethered by a common conviction but still rooted to a common cause. Having lost an ideology, the Lefists are left with themselves.
The Left has reached its comfort zone; it has become liberal. Does that put the Dalai Lama to the left of the Chinese Communist Party? Anything is possible.
The dialectic is no longer a debate between Right and Left arguing about moral and economic supremacy. Left and Right now sit on opposite ends of the seesaw of events, in a game best defined by that archetypal liberal, Arthur Schlesinger, in the book that won him a Pulitzer at the age of 29 (he was also a professor at Harvard at that age), his biography of Andrew Jackson: “...when liberalism has resolved the crisis and restored tranquility, conservatism has recovered power by the laws of political gravity; then it makes a new botch of things, and liberalism against must take over in the name of the nation." Or in the name of the world.
The bull run of conservatism, ending in the neocon calamity of a bull run amok, has simply cleared space for the return of the anti-Right, a far more accurate term than Left and more inclusive than Liberal. From where do we start counting the new deliverers? Hugo Chavez is certainly liberal with his language; and anyone who can smell sulfur on the spot where George Bush had been standing twenty-four hours before deserves credit for metaphors. But you could never stretch the definition of Liberalism to include Ahmadinejad. Liberalism is much more than a one-point program, even if that point is Bush.
On the Indian subcontinent, we are not witnessing a rise of Leftist 'regimes', an anachronism that seems to have survived in the editorial department of the Washington Post, which still believes that the Right has governments and the Left has regimes. But we are witnessing a reaction against the World Bank/IMF catechism as statistics that charm investors and distress and frustrate the poor. The anger is sharpest, paradoxically, in the singular Left fortress of Bengal, whose "regime" has been regularly re-elected for the last thirty years in a free vote. The next elections will test the tensile strength of the world's most successful democratic Communist party.
The traditional Left, incidentally, has no issue with the concept of globalization: the Comintern was global before the World Bank was born. The problem lies in the one-size-fits-all convictions of the Right, an economic dictatorship that seeks to control local resources for primarily its own benefit, before it permits a trickle of good to find its way elsewhere. Doctrinaire dictatorship killed the Old Left. It could prove equally lethal to the Contemporary Right.
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