to keep the Irish from ruling the world.” This old joke is an invitation to introspection.
What did God create to keep progressives from leading America? How did the Left, which set the national agenda from the mid-‘50s to mid-‘70s, end up muttering over a glass of warm beer in the corner?
Was it identity politics?
The problem with identity politics is not that it annoys the white working class but that it uses a nationalist template for liberation. Nationalism stresses the differences between groups; socialism emphasizes the similarities. To create a unifying and humane vision—a socialist vision—is simply impossible if the starting point is a set of intensely nationalistic identity movements. They must agree on common goals, and they’ve never thought about what they have in common; they must trust each other, but there’s no ideological basis for trust. Nor is there any particular pressure for mass action; the inward focus on shared identity and its complexities often seems sufficient.
If this weren’t the case, the need for “intersectional feminism” (for instance) would not exist.
To take a contrary example, the different ethnic groups in the US were able to unite against fascism during World War II because they shared attitudes toward democracy, the rule of law and the New Deal. The differences between Irish and WASP, between the Midwest and the South, between white and black were simply less important than their shared opposition to fascism, which is saying something. Supporting Britain, which shared somewhat similar traditions of representative government, was easy enough, but ultimately the war wasn’t about helping Britain, it was about protecting America’s vital strategic interests and her ideals.
However, in Canada the situation was different. The unifying values were not strong enough to bridge the nationalist divisions. The coherence and unity of the US war effort was lacking in Canada, which was in such of state of crisis over conscription that the Prime Minister feared civil war and the ultimate annexation of Canada by the US. The only group in Canada that whole-heartedly supported the war effort were those that “identified with the British Empire,” a minority. So Canada was fighting a war based on the dubious strategy of “helping” Britain, rather than protecting its own interests—or attempting to save civilization from fascism.
Do progressives today resemble the US in World War II, or Canada?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944
Was it the false fond notion that the problem with capitalism is unethical capitalists?
I have written about this in “A Greater Power,” but the problem with capitalism is….capitalism. Capitalism depends upon a particular form of socialization, in which large numbers of workers and managers learn to see every decision and every event in economic terms. If all the banks and factories and markets disappeared, and all the money evaporated, people who were socialized to capitalism would re-create the system using blue jay feathers as money. Indeed they could not do otherwise—any alternative would be literally unthinkable for them.
But this socialization blinds us to any other consideration, including even the value of human life. This blindness leads to unethical—tragic—actions, of which capitalist socialization is the cause. Unethical people don’t stroll in and take over capitalist enterprises; if capitalism needs people to behave unethically, it will train them to do so, and train them so well they won’t even see how dreadful their own actions are.
And the idea that the problem with capitalism is an ethical problem is truly a fatal error, because this idea is extended into every other question as well. Once social and political issues are seen as primarily ethical, then the difference between progressives and (say) centrists is seen as the difference between the pure and the impure, when in fact progress seldom happens without a good working relationship between Left and Center.
And of course this mistake only aggravates the problem with identity politics. Identity movements emphasize differences. What difference could be more dramatic than an ethical difference, between good and evil? So we end up in a Manichaean hall of mirrors, seeing extreme evil everywhere, and never questioning our own purity.
There’s plenty of evil in capitalism without falsifying its source or the role individuals play in it.
Was it the idea that with the right ideology, governing would be a detail?
Let’s take a simple, close-to-home example (at least for me): the effort to pass single-payer healthcare in Colorado in 2016. This was an effort staffed almost entirely by Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Here’s an excellent rundown of the issues, by Dylan Mathews of Vox:
As good as this article is, I need to add some details on the funding side. The Colorado income tax is a flat tax calculated from your taxable federal income. So it’s only as progressive as the federal tax is. Proponents of amendment 69 took a mostly-flat tax system and made it worse. The impact on middle-income self-employed people was a particularly hard sell, because the self-employed were on the hook for the entire 10% payroll tax. Even if you had no insurance and wanted badly for single-payer to pass, the initial shock of the tax increases might have been too much for your family budget.
And the impact on Medicaid recipients (who currently pay nothing) was impossible to justify, in my mind. They too were subject to the payroll tax. Why didn’t they get an exemption? Since this was structured as an amendment to the state constitution, there was no easy way to correct that mistake.
Also, amendment 69 super-ceded Obamacare at the state level, which meant they assumed that all the funds previously going to Obamacare would be diverted to the state healthcare system. There was no indication that this was legal or that Congress or the President would agree. This was a “then a miracle occurs” sort of funding provision.
There was absolutely no effort to make the funding side more progressive, or to introduce new sources of revenue (a fracking tax, for example, would have been an easy sell).
The tricky questions of limiting costs—particularly payments to providers—and of funding for abortions were mostly ignored.
There was of course no effort to involve the Democratic Party in the drafting of this proposal. The Sanders people in Colorado apparently now view themselves as another identity group. Some of their mistakes were rookie errors, but you don’t learn from those if you view your natural teachers as your enemies. Fortunately, some of the people involved (not all) seem to have learned that working with the Center is not only a vital tactic, but that centrists have something useful to add to the discussion. Centrists, like old-fashioned conservatives, still retain the valuable ability to add up a column of numbers correctly and to sometimes understand the implications of the sum.
The story of amendment 69 is an almost textbook case for how to fail as a progressive movement. Colorado could use a better health-care system, but some good has already been done, particularly in reducing the number of uninsured, by Obamacare. Might we perhaps build on that partial success? No, of course not, because it isn’t “single-payer.” That’s the answer. But Medicaid is single-payer, and the majority of the people in Obamacare are covered by the Medicaid expansion.
So Obamacare does contain a significant single-payer component.
As the Vox article hints, a better approach might have been to create a public option available to individuals and to employers within the Obamacare structure. This would probably have involved additional funding, and it might have required a lawsuit—but not as much funding or as many lawsuits as amendment 69 would have needed.
To govern means to prioritize and to communicate. To prioritize means (a) to be conscious of your values and (b) to have a strong reality principal. To communicate means (a) to listen with empathy and (b) to allow grace to flow into your words.
And in a democracy, every citizen governs.
I personally did not vote for amendment 69. It was a complex issue, but one argument was this: Obamacare is doing some measurable amount of good in Colorado, and to divert those funds into the amendment 69 system would probably do less good. That was a consideration of governing, and not of ideology.
Was it a lack of history, of storytelling?
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed she tells of modern American poverty, circa 2000. It detailed her three-month odyssey of living on minimum wage jobs. The implied history, the lost Golden Age, was her parents’ middle-class life in Butte, Montana. Ehrenreich was born in 1941, so this was the late-forties and fifties. She talked about how her parents were able to live comfortably on working-class jobs. Piano lessons, trips to the library, Sunday dinners, all that.
In her description, she never once mentions the historical struggle that led to that comfortable existence—and she was born in 1941. The phrase “New Deal” never occurs in her book, and neither does “FDR.” She never mentions the Earned Income Credit, which materially helped the working poor, passed during Clinton’s first term. (She also never mentions Black Like Me, from which she borrowed the conceit for her book.)
The lack of any information in this book about Ehrenreich’s grandparents’ lives, of the early lives of her parents, is jarring. Once upon a time, everything was wonderful, the world glistened like dewdrop, and then NAFTA happened—appears to be all the historical backdrop deemed necessary for her readers.
It’s like Ralph Nader wrote a history book and borrowed Stalin’s airbrush to eliminate the incorrect elements of recent American history.
So it’s not exactly a “lack of history” but more a falsification by selective omission, at least in some cases.
In left-ish circles, if I bring up the idea that we need a better sense of our movement’s history, a woman will sometimes say, “what about her-story?” which, since I’ve heard that before, irritates me, and I want to say something cutting in response.
But I keep silent, and persist.
When I was growing up, everyone had a story that related to FDR, the Great Depression, and World War II—and at the policy level, that meant socialist and anti-fascist measures. My mother, for instance, who was in high school during World War II, told the story about the day she came home from school. No one was at home; both her parents were working in war industries. She was 16, and after a snack, she started doing her homework in the dining room. The electricity went off and a green light filled the house. This was Oklahoma, and she laid down on the floor, waiting to die. She heard the tornado tearing up houses nearby, but then the sound receded. After a short while, the radio came back on, announcing that FDR had died.
My father, who was older, remembered that business conditions and farm prices declined after the 1929 stock market crash, but that the situation seemed retrievable. So in the spring of 1930 they planted their crops, mostly cotton, and expanded their dairy cattle operation. My father was nearly 12, but of course he was a hardened farm hand by then, like most boys his age in that Texas county. They watched the price of cotton decline all summer long. When the cotton crop ripened, my father said, “It wasn’t worth picking, but we picked it anyway.” They were homeless in a matter of weeks. Three years later, he went to an army base, lied about his age and joined up. Three years after that, his term of enlistment over, he joined the CCC because it paid $30 a month, $3 more than being in the army. He believed FDR was a great man.
No one today tells these stories about the sixties and seventies, but it’s not for lack of material. Even the Occupy movement seems like a dream now.
There is, I believe, a specific reason for the Left’s current a-historical stance, and I’ll illustrate with a little story.
In 1970, when Nixon invaded Cambodia, there were massive protests all over the country—not just in Washington or New York. This was a new development—people were pouring out of their homes and demonstrating in their own cities. There was a distinct feeling that the situation had gotten much more serious and out-of-control.
In Austin, Texas, anti-war organizers applied for a permit to demonstrate. The city officials brought in the state, since Austin is the state capitol. The governor referred the issue to the Texas Rangers, an organization with a legendary history and not a lot of expertise in negotiation.
The Rangers said, you can’t march.
The anti-war protestors said, we’re marching.
The Rangers said, if you march, we will shoot to kill.
We are marching, was the response.
At some point the governor got involved again. He turned the issue over to the Texas Highway Patrol, which negotiated the route and timing and so on to everyone’s satisfaction.
The march began. There were 50,000 marchers in a town of barely 100,000 people. The march was on a weekday, down Congress Avenue, the main street south of the state capitol. There had been no real anti-war protests involving more than a thousand or so people anywhere in the state up to that time.
Congress Avenue was six lanes wide and the protestors filled it up, curb to curb, like a river. At first the marchers were fairly silent. People in office buildings pushed toward the windows. Construction workers stopped to watch. People along the sidewalk stood still.
Suddenly aware of being watched, the marchers began to shout to the workers, “Join us! Join us!” The route was lined with big buildings, and the sound reverberated, rattling the windows.
It took a minute or two for the workers to absorb what they were being asked to do. Then, like lights coming on, their hands lifted, flashing peace signs to the marchers. The construction workers grinned at each other like bad boys in school, and they too flashed the peace sign to the demonstrators.
I believe that part of the reason this story, and others like it, don’t get told today is because the true history of progressive movements is configured around moments of transcendent unity, around the moment when you cry out “Join us!”, the moment when you ask strangers to become your brothers and sisters. The New Deal, World War II (which was a war against fascism), the Civil Rights movement, the first Earth Day, the hippie movement, Obama’s election, the Occupy Movement, the Women’s March and the upwelling of resistance to Trump.
And that is not the history of identity movements. Identity movements do have their place, but they cannot, by their nature, unite great numbers of people at decisive moments.
And when you cry out “Join us!” then you imply that if your listener walks toward you and takes up the cause, then it becomes their cause as much as yours, and they are equal partners in the future. No identity movement can make that promise.
The Socialist Investor 