"The 'Left'"

Over at the liberal New Republic website, Jonathan Chait has a brief but enjoyable post (with a great graphic) observing that he is not a leftist, arguing that the left has minimal impact in current American politics and is therefore, for him, not worth discussing much, and noting that he gets criticized by the left when he disagrees with it and criticized when he ignores it.  Nothing especially dramatic or non-obvious, but it provides a nice window for thinking about arguments over the state of political rhetoric in the past week.  

Some liberals, without doubt, reacted instinctively to the Tucson shootings by pinning them, directly or indirectly, on the rhetoric of some (but not all) voices on the right.  My Facebook friends' updates bore witness to this.  But many didn't, and few who did as an initial matter seriously pressed the point.  A larger percentage of people on "the left" may have done so.  But Chait is correct: the left is a minor class in American politics.  (Perhaps not in the blogosphere, but if you rely on the blogosphere to take soundings of American politics, you're already lost.)  Many like to say that the academy itself is leftist, although given the apparent contempt with which those critics view academics and their repeated assertions that the academy doesn't represent America, I'm not sure how much we should care about this.  It doesn't happen to be true of the legal academy, in any event, which skews liberal but definitely not left.  (There are exceptions, of course; but with all due respect to SALT members and the like, not all of whom are genuine leftists, they have minimal numbers in the legal academy and even less influence.)

Yet my Facebook friends' updates (my "friends" tend to range fairly widely on an ideological axis) were also full of accusations that "the Left," usually capitalized, had taken advantage (or, immediately and anticipatorily, that "the Left" would take advantage) of the shootings for their own ends.  What are we to make of this?  One possibility is that they were wrong, but that's an overstatement; some leftists did accuse the right or far right of being responsible for the shootings.  A better possibility is that they were correct but didn't really have "the Left" in mind; they had "liberals" or "Democrats" in mind, in which case they were basically wrong.  Finally, perhaps they did have only "the Left" in mind.  If so, however, they were speaking about a minor subset of the American social and political scene.  That's fine, as long as they realize they were speaking about a trivial number of people (both in terms of numbers and influence).  I have nothing against conservatives fulminating against "the Left," any more than I have anything against liberals fulminating against, say, the Birchers.  Everyone is entitled to a relatively trivial hobby.

None of this is meant to make light of those conservatives and right-wingers--bloggers, politicians, and such--who have received death threats from their opponents at different times (as have some liberals and leftists at different times), and whose view of events was likely to be skewed by the unrepresentative sample they confronted.  It is worth noting, however, that, on their logic as I understand it, we can draw no conclusions about "the Left" from those who make death threats: they're just lone nuts and say little about the influence of leftist rhetoric--which, in any event, is vanishingly small in American politics.