What defines a ‘leftist’? Depends who you ask.

In the spring of 1967, I was a college senior who received a surprising opportunity. Two members of my college history department invited three students — of whom I was one — to a daylong historians’ conference in Binghamton, New York, an hour from our campus in Ithaca. I was taking Russian history courses, and the headliner of the conference, the celebrity speaker, was author and activist Isaac Deutscher.

Deutscher wrote well-received biographies of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. He also began a biography of Vladimir Lenin, no more than a fragment when he died. The Trotsky bio is exhaustive and exhausting. Three volumes. Clearly, Deutscher revered Leon Trotsky.

When describing Deutscher, “activist” is an understatement. He was a Polish communist whom Stalin expelled from the Communist Party in 1932 for challenging the maximum leader. Trotsky was still alive and active then. (He was murdered by Stalin stooges in Mexico in 1940 at age 60.)

The Binghamton trip was the first time I had seen a communist, except on television. And this one had met founders of the party, participated in the endless internal debates, national congresses, the formation and disintegration of factions, banned by Stalin himself. He had done it all — except overthrow a government. I didn’t believe communists had a recognizable body type or a red skin tone, but after reading my assignments and digging through John Birch Society pamphlets, I thought a communist, especially a European communist, would be immediately recognizable.

Deutscher was 60 years old and spoke a familiar dialect: professorese. His appearance was striking, and I guess you could say communistic. He looked like the mature Lenin, about the same height and build, with a Van Dyke beard and balding pate. This look was obviously cultivated, and later I thought how strange it would be to hear someone lecture on John Lennon who looked like John Lennon.

Deutscher died a few months after I saw him in Binghamton.

When I was young, the word “communist” was thrown around loosely. There were real communists, mostly in Russia and China, but anyone who was simply disagreeable might be called a communist — as in George Orwell’s anecdote about the British lord dining at the Ritz who was convinced his surly waiter was a communist.

The word “leftist” has had a similar destiny. It has little specificity any more and is typically heard in dismissal or derision, as with Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s assertion that leftists are running the recall. Talking to signature-gatherers, I quickly concluded they are middle-class folks who don’t like Dunleavy’s policies and know nothing of the left. Isaac Deutscher they are not.

The political terms “left” and “right” have a pedestrian origin — from the seating of the French Assembly members in 1789, during the revolution. For probably 100 years, a leftist was someone who believed in state ownership of industry, diminished influence of capital, union power and sexual equality. A few American leftists were violent — the anarchists who set off bombs at the New York Stock Exchange in 1920, for instance.

As editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, I received emails and phone calls from readers who denounced me as a leftist. This usually meant I had criticized one of their cherished beliefs. On occasion, I was told to “go back to California, where you came from,” and one guy said he knew my “type.” I had gone to Harvard, owned a Mercedes, ate quiche, and made $200,000 per year. I never attended Harvard, didn’t own a Mercedes, rarely ate quiche and received less compensation than the lowest-paid lawyer on Wall Street. I was married in San Francisco — but that doesn’t make me a Californian. I tried to explain this to one correspondent, who then threatened to sue me for “liable.” It struck me his suit was “libel” to fail.

I do, however, see what my correspondent was driving at. In his mind, a leftist is an elitist, someone with a fancy education, money and exceptional material comfort. This perspective of the left is interesting. A leftist used to be a worker trying to get his fair share; now a leftist is somebody who has his fair share and somebody else’s. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has been called a leftist. He is worth about $62 billion. Can Mike Bloomberg possibly be on the same continuum as Trotsky and Deutscher?

I will say Bernie Sanders is some kind of leftist: an incoherent one. He visited Cuba and liked the universal literacy but didn’t like Castroism. This has the intellectual heft of a teenage guest on “American Bandstand” telling host Dick Clark he loved the beat of “Island Girl” but did not like the words.

A wise old man I met in New York told me “All analysis begins with a definition of terms.” Something to think about next time you call someone — or yourself — a leftist.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.