Word: lader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...legal observers seem prepared to bet next Sunday's collection plate that the court will tamper with the church's tax status. But Lawrence Lader, president of the plaintiff Abortion Rights Mobilization, suggests that the suit could have a restraining effect anyway. As Lader puts it, "I hope this frightens people enough to make them obey the law." More sobering than the suit, perhaps, were the results at the ballot box: Frank, Shannon and McGovern all won their primaries...
Moreover, Lader insists, the Left's pragmatism and spontaneity and its very lack of structure made it particularly effective in challenging American neoimperialism in Vietnam...
...movement leads to another in Lader's account of the Left in the U.S. The unifying framework of the Left as he sees it is constant experimentation and struggle for new tactics and methods of organizing. The Left consistently attempts to break down old forms of society and to replace them with new ones, he says, though no hardline Marxist doctrine is followed. (Lader refers to this again and again throughout the book--the list of those leaders with little or no exposure to Marxist teachings extends from the labor leaders of the 40s to the radical feminists...
...HOWEVER, Lader goes too far when he contends that the Left will continue to build on some of the ideas of Marx--the "humanist ideals of Marx," he calls them. The New Left is not downgrading Marxism, he says, but instead reinvigorating it in new forms, a confusing idea in light of his early insistence that the New Left developed solely on its own pragmatic base and owed little or nothing to Marx. To the non-Marxist unfamiliar with the "humanist" ideas of Marxism, this "reinvigoration" of Marxist ideals does not make sense. To the Marxist, it may even appear...
...Lader's detractors charge that his own personal involvement in the Left may have "dimmed" his objectivity. But why should a confessed liberal writing about Leftist movements by any more suspect than a CIA-sponsored professor writing about foreign policy or a member of the privileged class setting down his version of the history of the American people? Indeed, it would be ridiculous to insist that this book be purely objective. Like Walter Cronkite reading the casualty reports during the Vietnam War, the author's feelings do occasionally overcome his carefully documented (some 40 pages of notes and sources) facts...