From the begin­ning of the Amer­i­can repub­lic, most of the country’s thinkers and politi­cians have argued that our nation nei­ther had nor need­ed a Left.

His­to­ri­ans of the so-called lib­er­al con­sen­sus school argue that the Unit­ed States has sim­ply always enjoyed agree­ment on such mat­ters as pri­vate prop­er­ty, indi­vid­u­al­ism, pop­u­lar sov­er­eign­ty and nat­ur­al rights. Oth­ers claim that the coun­try nev­er devel­oped the left­ist work­ing class or peas­antry seen in oth­er nations, a claim often termed Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. Still oth­ers say that the coun­try doesn’t need a Left because it already believes in, or has even achieved, such goals as democ­ra­cy and equal­i­ty – a view held by Cold War lib­er­als and neoconservatives.

But these are all false and mis­lead­ing ways to under­stand Amer­i­ca. The coun­try has always need­ed, and typ­i­cal­ly has had, a pow­er­ful, inde­pen­dent, rad­i­cal Left. While this Left has been mar­gin­al­ized (as it is today) and scape­goat­ed (dur­ing peri­ods of nation­al emer­gency), the Left plays an indis­pens­able role dur­ing the country’s peri­ods of long-term iden­ti­ty crisis.

The Unit­ed States has gone through three such crises: the slav­ery cri­sis cul­mi­nat­ing in the Civ­il War; the Great Depres­sion pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the rise of large-scale cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism, cul­mi­nat­ing in the New Deal; and the present cri­sis of ​“afflu­ence” and glob­al pow­er, which began in the 1960s. Each cri­sis has gen­er­at­ed a Left – first the abo­li­tion­ists, then the social­ists, and final­ly the New Left – and togeth­er, these move­ments con­sti­tute a tradition.

At the core of each of these Lefts is a chal­lenge to the lib­er­al under­stand­ing of equal­i­ty – the for­mal equal­i­ty of all cit­i­zens before the law. In the first case, the abo­li­tion­ists, the issue was racial equal­i­ty. In the sec­ond case, the social­ists and com­mu­nists, the issue was social equal­i­ty, the insis­tence that democ­ra­cy requires a min­i­mum lev­el of secu­ri­ty in regard to basic neces­si­ties. In the third case, the New Left, the issue was equal par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il soci­ety, the pub­lic sphere, the fam­i­ly and per­son­al life.

Indeed, more than the strug­gle between Left and Right, the strug­gle between the Left and lib­er­al­ism over the mean­ing of equal­i­ty is at the core of U.S. his­to­ry. With­out a Left, lib­er­al­ism becomes spine­less and vapid; with­out lib­er­al­ism, the Left becomes sec­tar­i­an, author­i­tar­i­an and mar­gin­al. In con­trast, the Right is mere­ly a reac­tion to the Left.

But the dif­fer­ence runs deep­er still. Behind the Left’s com­mit­ment to equal­i­ty is a pas­sion for eman­ci­pa­tion from entrenched forms of oppres­sion. Crit­i­ciz­ing forms of dom­i­na­tion that lib­er­als tol­er­ate or ignore, the Left stands not only for equal­i­ty, but also for an enhanced con­cept of freedom.

When Marx described all of his­to­ry as the his­to­ry of class strug­gle, he gave us the idea of eman­ci­pa­tion as a con­tin­u­ous strug­gle, a project with a deep past and an extend­ed future. In this way, he coun­tered the notion – cen­tral to the lib­er­al tra­di­tion – that we are already free, or that we live in ​“free soci­eties.” Fur­ther, Marx is the only thinker who has pro­vid­ed a clear and lucid the­o­ry of cap­i­tal­ism, a social sys­tem orga­nized through the divi­sion of cap­i­tal and labor.

Such a sys­tem is dis­tinct from a mar­ket or exchange soci­ety, as described, for exam­ple, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or in the works of con­tem­po­rary lib­er­al econ­o­mists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krug­man. Such a the­o­ry of cap­i­tal­ism lies behind the sec­ond term we need to clar­i­fy, ​“cri­sis.”

Under­stand­ing crisis

Marx insist­ed that cap­i­tal­ism is intrin­si­cal­ly cri­sis-prone. The Amer­i­can Left inher­it­ed the idea of a cri­sis from Marx, not just the kind of ​“eco­nom­ic cri­sis” that char­ac­ter­ized the Great Depres­sion and that afflicts the coun­try today, but also broad­er crises reflect­ing Marx’s influ­ence on mod­ern his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, such as ​“the cri­sis of the Mid­dle Ages,” ​“the gen­er­al cri­sis of the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry” or ​“the cri­sis of the mod­ern state.”

A cri­sis is not sim­ply a calami­ty. It is a turn­ing point dur­ing which deci­sions are made about society’s future direc­tion. Crises have nar­ra­tive struc­tures, as in the Greek tragedies, where the sub­ject arrives at a deci­sive moment and must direct­ly con­front his or her fate. It is dur­ing peri­ods of cri­sis that the Left’s active involve­ment becomes indis­pens­able to the nation.

To under­stand why, we must dis­tin­guish between ​“nor­mal” peri­ods and crises in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Dur­ing nor­mal peri­ods the coun­try tends to get along with such ideas as indi­vid­u­al­ism, plu­ral­ism and pri­vate prop­er­ty, and with calls for ​“prag­ma­tism,” ​“bipar­ti­san­ship” and pass­ing beyond ​“obso­lete” Left/​Right con­flicts. In crises, by con­trast, many Amer­i­cans strive to form a new or revised agree­ment on val­ues, not a mere compromise.

Crises occur because of epochal trans­for­ma­tions in the deep struc­ture of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism. Still, as such they are not mere­ly ​“eco­nom­ic” crises. Rather, they are tec­ton­ic shifts dur­ing which Amer­i­cans re-eval­u­ate their assump­tions, val­ues and direction.

Dur­ing these peri­ods the nation has to look inward and sum­mon up its uncon­scious and inher­it­ed pow­ers, not just rely on its every­day assump­tions. And when the nation does look inward, it needs the deep con­cep­tion of equal­i­ty that the Left provides.

America’s three crises

The three crises we are dis­cussing – slav­ery, cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism and hyper-glob­al­iza­tion – con­sti­tute a counter-nar­ra­tive to the one that begins with Independence.

Each cri­sis is asso­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar stage in the his­to­ry of cap­i­tal­ism: prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion in the form of slav­ery and Pres­i­dent Andrew Jackson’s ​“Indi­an Removal”; large-scale cor­po­rate accu­mu­la­tion lead­ing to the New Deal; and, in the case of the New Left, the shift from man­u­fac­tur­ing-based Key­ne­sian­ism to finan­cial-indus­try dom­i­nance, which began in the 1960s. The shift from each stage to the next was not socioe­co­nom­ic alone. Each shift, rather, brought a cri­sis of author­i­ty, iden­ti­ty and gov­ern­ing pur­pose that could not be resolved by ref­er­ence to the polit­i­cal thought of the Rev­o­lu­tion or to the Amer­i­can Constitution.

Under­stand­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ry as a series of three suc­ces­sive crises gives us a new con­cep­tion of the nation. The actu­al found­ing of the Unit­ed States should be seen in its com­mit­ment to equal­i­ty and jus­tice, not sim­ply to polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence. Each cri­sis involved a refound­ing of the coun­try, a trans­for­ma­tion of its iden­ti­ty and of its con­cep­tion of legit­i­mate order, one that placed equal­i­ty at its cen­ter. In each case the Left sup­plied the indis­pens­able idea of equal­i­ty that spoke to the country’s iden­ti­ty. In each refound­ing, more­over, the Left’s role was quite specific.

Slav­ery may have been abol­ished with­out the abo­li­tion­ists. A mod­ern state may have been cre­at­ed with­out the social­ists. And a postin­dus­tri­al, con­sumerist Amer­i­ca, and the end of Jim Crow and the fam­i­ly wage, may have emerged with­out the New Left. But what the Left did was give an egal­i­tar­i­an mean­ing to each of these trans­for­ma­tions – it artic­u­lat­ed racial equal­i­ty as the mean­ing of the Civ­il War, social equal­i­ty as the mean­ing of the New Deal, and a broad­er vision of democ­ra­cy as the mean­ing of the 1960s.

With­out the Left, the mean­ing of each reform would be ambigu­ous. Con­sid­er the abo­li­tion of slav­ery. As David Brion Davis writes in Inhu­man Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slav­ery in the New World, the ​“sense of self-worth cre­at­ed by duti­ful work” that replaced slav­ery could have become either ​“a way of dis­guis­ing exploita­tion” or a spur to redeem­ing the ​“equal­i­ty [of] peo­ple of sub­or­di­nate sta­tus.” The abo­li­tion­ists, the first Amer­i­can Left, secured the lat­ter mean­ing. Sim­i­lar­ly, the pow­er­ful mech­a­nisms of the New Deal could have been used either to help res­cue Wall Street from its con­tin­u­ing dis­as­trous errors, or to advance the con­di­tion of indus­tri­al work­ers, immi­grants and South­ern blacks. To the extent that the New Deal did the lat­ter, it was thanks to the efforts of the social­ists – under­stood broad­ly to include a great range of Amer­i­can reform­ers, includ­ing Com­mu­nists. Final­ly, the 1960s could have pro­duced either a world­wide demo­c­ra­t­ic trans­for­ma­tion cen­tered on an expand­ed ide­al of equal­i­ty or a mer­i­to­crat­ic, sex­u­al­ly lib­er­at­ed, con­sump­tion-ori­ent­ed world of gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, mer­ce­nary armies and exquis­ite cafés. The New Left sought to estab­lish the first out­come; to the extent that it failed, the long-term mean­ing of the episode remains to be seen.

In each of these crises, the Left did not cre­ate the call for equal­i­ty. That call arose, rather, from social move­ments – that of labor, African Amer­i­cans and women – sparked by the large-scale shifts in the struc­ture of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism. The Left con­tributed its part by plac­ing the ide­al of equal­i­ty at the cen­ter of the country’s col­lec­tive memory.

We have been remind­ed in recent years of how impor­tant col­lec­tive mem­o­ry is to pol­i­tics. The Tea Par­ty move­ment, for exam­ple, argues that activist gov­ern­ments con­tra­dict the found­ing fathers’ sacred writ. Orig­i­nal­ists insist that the Con­sti­tu­tion con­tains eter­nal truths. The Left and most lib­er­als, by con­trast, argue that the nation’s iden­ti­ty is an ongo­ing nar­ra­tive, con­stant­ly rede­fined, but mov­ing in the direc­tion of greater equality.

Thus a cru­cial moment for the first Amer­i­can Left occurred when Lin­coln insist­ed that the asser­tion in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence that ​“all men are cre­at­ed equal” was ​“of no prac­ti­cal use in effect­ing our sep­a­ra­tion from Great Britain … it was placed in the Dec­la­ra­tion not for that, but for future use,” by which Lin­coln meant the eman­ci­pa­tion of the slaves. Like­wise, Eleanor Roo­sevelt under­stood the nation’s iden­ti­ty as an ongo­ing project when she arranged for black sopra­no Mar­i­an Ander­son, denied access to the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion Con­sti­tu­tion Hall, to sing on the steps of the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al. The memo­r­i­al, she grasped, had been put there for ​“future use.” In his speech to the 1963 March for Jobs and Free­dom, Mar­tin Luther King Jr. observed that the Negro after eman­ci­pa­tion had been giv­en a ​“promis­so­ry note,” and that the note had come due. Barack Oba­ma ran for Pres­i­dent in 2008 as a ​“com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er,” implic­it­ly draw­ing on rec­ol­lec­tions of the civ­il rights strug­gle. In each case, the Left con­nect­ed the present to an ongo­ing quest for equal­i­ty, seek­ing to re-found the coun­try on an egal­i­tar­i­an basis. Far from being irrel­e­vant, then, the Left has been cen­tral to the country’s effort to estab­lish a coher­ent history.

When we have seen a Right that has gen­uine intel­lec­tu­al force and charis­ma – as we got in the Unit­ed States after the qua­si-defeat of the New Left in the ear­ly 1970s when the ideals of racial and sex­u­al equal­i­ty sur­vived but the broad­er idea of a Left went into hia­tus – it nec­es­sar­i­ly dressed itself up in the left­ist ver­nac­u­lar of protest, dis­con­tent, minor­i­ty voice and exclu­sion. But any attempt to exclude the Left, and to form a coali­tion between lib­er­als and the Right, can­not resolve the country’s cri­sis. Only a revi­tal­ized Left, which fur­ther deep­ens America’s egal­i­tar­i­an com­mit­ments, can move it in a pro­gres­sive direction.

The struggle over what equality means is at the core of U.S. history. Without the Left, liberalism becomes spineless and vapid; without liberalism, the Left becomes sectarian and marginal.