In Sunday’s New York Times, the historian Michael Kazin published an essay asking, “Whatever happened to the American Left?” It begins:

Sometimes, attention should be paid to the absence of news. America’s economic miseries continue, with unemployment still high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens is wider than it has been since the 1920s.

And yet, except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.

It really is astonishing when you think of it. Here we are in or near to a depression, and the Left is … well, where is it? For liberals to bitch and moan about how Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan did all these mean things to them to make left-liberalism unpopular — well, it’s whiny and unattractive, and utterly beside the point. I say this as someone who is on the Right myself, but who finds himself at odds with much of what the Right in America has turned into, and who, as someone whose view of economics centers around Catholic social teaching, would like to see an economically more populist party as a counterweight to the GOP. I say this to let you know that I’m not gloating over what’s happened to the Left.

Kazin goes on:

If activists on the left want to alter this reality, they will have to figure out how to redefine the old ideal of economic justice for the age of the Internet and relentless geographic mobility. …

Instead, the left must realize that when progressives achieved success in the past, whether at organizing unions or fighting for equal rights, they seldom bet their future on politicians. They fashioned their own institutions — unions, women’s groups, community and immigrant centers and a witty, anti-authoritarian press — in which they spoke up for themselves and for the interests of wage-earning Americans.

Today, such institutions are either absent or reeling. With unions embattled and on the decline, working people of all races lack a sturdy vehicle to articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society. Liberal universities, Web sites and non-governmental organizations cater mostly to a professional middle class and are more skillful at promoting social causes like legalizing same-sex marriage and protecting the environment than demanding millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

This is hugely important, and I wish Kazin had spent more time on this point. When liberal writers criticize conservative voters for putting culture war issues ahead of their economic interests, I wonder if it ever occurs to them that liberals do the same thing. The working-class and lower middle class voters in this country are socially conservative. Do you really think the Democratic Party would give up its advocacy of abortion rights, gay rights, “diversity,” for the sake of winning elections and doing something that would benefit the working and middle classes economically? Of course they wouldn’t. These things matter as much to the ideological Left as abortion, gay marriage, and so forth, matter to the ideological Right. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t matter, mind you; I’m just trying to say that the fact that culture, not economics, has been the main battleground of American politics since the Sixties and Seventies is not because the right wing has bamboozled Americans.

Take a look at this long interview Prospect magazine did with Jon Cruddas, a Labour MP who observes that the British Left abandoned local interests to pursue abstract egalitarianism, and assumed falsely it was doing right by the working class as long as it kept welfare-state managerialism going. Here’s a key excerpt; “DG” is one of Cruddas’s interviewers:

DG: And don’t we have to acknowledge that there’s an element of tragedy here, that so many of the good things have come out of bad things, and vice versa. Look at British social attitude surveys—we are much more tolerant and much more liberal, we’ve embraced multiple forms of family and sexuality and race and gender difference but that’s partly a function of the fact that we’ve become more abstract to each other and real community—with its binding but also excluding norms—has broken down in many places.

JC: That’s why the Phillip Blond thing is a really interesting thing. The marrying up of liberalism and social conservatism. Is there an equivalent for the left? Is there an anti-statist, values-based politics that offers Labour an opportunity for reconciliation within itself and with its core supporters? Rebuilding the covenant in terms of housing, work, and actually your vote mattering as well. But I wouldn’t fetishise specific policy remedies. It’s more of us getting into the right space where we can acknowledge the pros and cons of 13 years of a Labour administration and also reintroducing a more empathetic language. I think what we’ve really lost is a warmth, a compassion in our language—it’s partly managerialism but it’s also the consequence of a conscious political strategy and our encampment in a specific part of the electorate.

DG: This is King Canute stuff. You talk about values and community—but all the parties bang on about that. But so many of the modern social trends—including our geographical mobility or the greater freedom people have to leave marriages and relationships—work against stable communities, this is where the tragedy comes in. The modern, less constrained individual likes the idea of community but then acts in such a way as to undermine it.

JC: The world is a complex place, politics 101. All I’m saying is that the interesting things that I’ve seen over the last year are around that garden rather than something in Whitehall.

DE: Do you think that political engagement is a virtue in its self? Is it morally superior to go to a political meeting than go to a football match…

JC: Don’t know, never really thought about it. But yes I think there is such a thing as a virtuous life. I heard an interesting speech recently by the Archbishop Rowan Williams. And you take Nichols, the new Archbishop of Westminster, what interests me is to compare and contrast the speeches they make with the speeches of Blair and Brown. They’re poles apart and it’s not left-right, it’s about forms of living, it’s about forms of neighbourliness, it’s about your role and duties, what is a virtuous life? And that is what really interests me—can you appropriate some of that back into politics.

Where are the American left-of-center thinkers and politicians who are talking like that, or thinking like that?

For that matter, where are the American right-of-center thinkers who are questioning the priorities of conservative politicians and movement leaders, and whether or not they have abandoned the interests of their constituents in favor of advocating for economic and nationalistic abstractions?

Most interesting line in that Cruddas interview, which was conducted in his constituency, near a front yard (garden) where a new program has helped the locals start taking better care of their property, renewing a sense of communal pride and community: “All I’m saying is that the interesting things I’ve seen last year are around that garden rather than something in Whitehall.”

UPDATE: Comment from reader JLF strikes me as very, very true:

Let me suggest another paradigm. By concentrating on the demographers’ definition of the Baby Boom generation and ignoring the cultural roots, most have missed the real shift in America. Beginning in the 1970′s the Me Generation took over. Those Boomers born after 1955 (and thereby never to suffer from Vietnam or the draft) have pretty much defined modern American, left and right.

It’s all about me now. It’s what I want, whether it’s not to pay taxes or not to pay for health care. Its what I define as the superior good, whether it’s ending an inconvenient pregnancy or carrying it to term. It’s what gives me comfort, whether it’s acts of charity or acts of conspicuous consumption. It’s all about me.

The sun rises to my east and sets to my west. I’m the center of it all, as are my ideas of political or social truth. And since I define truth by my being, whether I’m a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, I’m right and the others are wrong. After all, why should I compromise when compromise denies me what is by right mine.