Do some of you still find the concept of the Old Left, particularly those who hold socially conservative views while maintaining economically left-wing or anti-capitalist positions, politically foreign or difficult to reconcile with contemporary left-wing politics in America?
I'm asking this because a little while ago, a person sent me a message saying that the concept of socially conservative leftists was somewhat foreign to them, as the variation of leftism that most people here are exposed to tends to incorporate both economically left-wing and socially progressive values. Initially, they assumed an inherent contradiction between being socially conservative and economically left-wing, since the two are often treated as politically incompatible in contemporary American politics.
However, historically, that hasn't always been the case, especially when you look at older generations of leftists, traditional labor movements, and socialist movements outside the Western world(e.g., Christians for National Liberation (CNL) in the Philippines, Nyerere's Ujamaa in Tanzania, Nasserism in Egypt, and Ba'athist Arab socialism in Iraq, etc.), where anti-capitalist economic positions have often coexisted with socially conservative attitudes toward religion, family structures, gender roles, etc.
I grew up in this tradition, as did my father and his father before him (none of whom were particularly religious, btw). The men in my life believed that a post-capitalist society would still need socially conservative values in order to promote a functional collective because, say, for example, if you're trying to build a society around collective ownership and mutual responsibility, how exactly would that society function if everyone prioritized their individual desires over their obligations to their families and communities?
From their perspective, simply abolishing capitalism wouldn't mitigate selfishness or the tendency to prioritize personal interests over the collective good. They believed that traditional family structures, intergenerational obligations, and certain cultural expectations helped cultivate the sense of responsibility necessary for a socialist society to function. In other words, economic collectivism needed to be accompanied by a social and cultural framework that encouraged people to place the well-being of their communities above their individual interests. My father isn't a campist either, and he doesn't believe left
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