The left may learn from past mistakes

[Robin Landseadel]

Somehow this reminded me of Vineland and Against the Day.	

	On the whole, Kagan writes without evident bias, analyzing
	quite evenhandedly the rifts—which at times she suggests were
	doomed to be insurmountable—between the revolutionary and
	reformist camps in the Socialist Party as well as in the
	International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. If anything,
	Kagan seems to have more sympathy for the centrist
	"constructivist" leadership than do many historians who write
	about labor and radicalism. Her overall point, made without
	stridency, is that sectarianism, caused mainly by misguided
	revolutionary hopes, should ultimately bear the burden for the
	party's demise. Socialists, she seemed to say with some
	sadness and frustration, have often been their own worst
	enemies. In places, her tone even implies that she may
	consider this an ongoing characteristic of the American left.
	"Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of
	sectarianism," she wrote; "it is easier, after all, to fight one's
	fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe." In
	any case, there is no question that Kagan wrote not a
	propagandistic celebration of socialism's heyday but a judicious
	account of its self-destruction—with the hope that the left might
	learn from past mistakes.

http://www.slate.com/id/2254406/pagenum/all/#p2