What's Left?  (English, Paperback, Cohen Nick)

The Observer and New Statesman journalist and author of ‘Pretty Straight Guys’ charts the breakdown of the Left and the confusion, malaise and double-standards that have turned it into little more than a dysfunctional family.

The British Left in the 1930s offered us the welfare state. Black leaders, feminists and bohemians in 1960s America paved the way for the abhorrence of racial and sexual discrimination of the modern age. But despite the fact that the largest protests in history took place against the 2004 Iraq war, George Bush is still in place and Tony Blair has not yet been thrown out. What and, more importantly, who is the Left now fighting for?

Obsessed with the evils of Bush, western imperialism and white capitalists, the Left is no longer thinking straight. Why are anti-war protesters supporting suicide bombers; freedom of speech organizations demanding censorship to protect the delicate sensibilities of religious extremists; socialists unwilling to confront the extent of the atrocities committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein?

Skewed by the notion that white capitalists are responsible for all the evils in the world today, the Left is lurching dangerously to the Right. Nick Cohen ruthlessly dissects the behavior of those well-meaning people who form alliances with dictatorships. He concludes that, cut off from their working class power base, alienated from the poor and oppressed in the developing world, tied up in political correctness and confused about capitalism, about multi-cultural ism, and about sex, the Left can contort itself to such a degree that it no longer knows what's Right and what's Left. At a time when cynicism and spin doctoring have deadened real political debate, his voice sounds acute, vivid, and refreshingly honest. Witty and excoriating, ever on the alert against humbug, this book seeks to reclaim democracy, solidarity and the fight against totalitarianism.