And a year later: Why government bashing is so easy

Government bashing: it's easy, it works, and conservatives fall back on it all the time.

Here are the most basic reasons why it is so effective:

1) Given that our political system is set up to slow down legislation (to ensure it is well thought out), it is extremely easy for a politician to claim the government is ineffective, then prove their point by preventing anything from getting done. It does not carry any political risks, especially for Senators who still have the option to anonymously filibuster through the "secret hold", and it is virtually impossible to counter. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to argue that government can be effective (despite current problems with it), then take power and prove your point, even if you didn't have an entire party built around the notion that the government is incompetent opposing you.

2) There is also a long history of sexy, radical groups resisting authoritative governments. American culture has been opposed to the idea of an authoritarian government since its beginnings, then there have always been rumblings against government from moderate and extreme factions on either side of the political spectrum. Countless films, TV shows, and novels (entirely fictional or marginally based on history) draw on this radical aura by showing underground revolutionary groups taking on large, impersonal, and cruel governments. When is the last time you rented a movie about a powerful government quashing a dangerous rebellion? Everyone likes an underdog. Unfortunately, in our case, the "underdog" has been in power on and off for several decades, but this doesn't stop them from trying to claim the freedom-fighter, underground sex appeal. As for progressives, who are often tempted by left-wing discourses of resistance to the state and state violence (police!), at times it is important to remember the saying by Confucious,"I hate those who mistake insubordination for courage" (XVII, 24).

3) This point is related to the last, but still distinct: American culture has a deeply ingrained individualism, which parts of the left embrace (think DIY movements). Our ideal of self-sufficiency is omnipresent in every genre of literature, whether Jack Kerouac or Benjamin Franklin. We have been brought up to worship strong people who take care of themselves, perhaps incidentally saving the town or their family in the bargain, but we do not have a tradition of literature dedicated to people who struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to overcome the obstacles presented to them by their environment.

This last is the most important, I think, since it allows conservatives to trigger deep emotions. Even Americans who find themselves facing dire adversity are reluctant to admit they need help. Nobody wants to be a beggar, nobody wants to accept charity, nobody wants to admit that they cannot live up to the rugged individualism our culture venerates. I know this from personal experience: my father is an agricultural worker (i.e. he does manual work on a farm he does not own). He has faced many situations where he could have used the help of a lawyer, a union, a government official, or even just a trustworthy friend; he has received unemployment benefits and probably ought to have benefited from better labor laws placing restrictions on work hours, workplace safety, and minimum wage. But time and again I have seen him resist other people trying to push him to fight for a fair deal, always saying something like "I'm fine. I don't need anyone's help. You don't need to worry about me." Even when he doesn't say anything, I can see he is deeply uncomfortable with other people discussing or even thinking about his professional situation, because he is proud of his work and doesn't want others to think he isn't a successful person. Perfectly understandable: he may not have a great retirement plan, but he does what he loves doing and he has a happy family life. If we weren't so obsessed with equating financial and personal success, we would see many of the people who might benefit from a more just economic system rightly consider themselves successful people.

For decades now progressives have let the right redefine welfare programs and the social security net in terms of government handouts. We need to push now to change the terms we use, to stress the idea of justice and ensuring a fair economic system for all. From our perspective, welfare is not charity, and it's not handouts: it's an attempt to level the playing field so that everyone gets a fair deal. Fairness is something Americans do understand—the idea of playing against a stacked deck is anathema to us; it's something we'd be willing to fight for.

I recommend reading Faulkner's "The Tall Men", which is a 9 page story about Southerners who stubbornly refuse any government aid or controls. As a metaphor for the plight of the southern poor, the head of the family has a traumatic leg wound but repeatedly refuses anesthetic and stresses that he claims full responsibility for the situation. His family also struggles with the New Deal and the government's attempts to control cotton prices by paying farmers not to produce. More than anything, I think this story shows the dire need for progressives to acknowledge and respect the fierce pride and independence of Americans and find new ways to approach the concept of government involvement in the economy that do not present themselves as charity or as a restriction on freedom. Instead of the New Deal, we need to stress the Fair Deal. What does that mean: everyone deserves health care, job security, recognition for the hard work they do (i.e. a living wage) and the obstacles they have had to overcome in their lives.

Faulkner's "The Tall Men" literaturesave2.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/william-faulkner-the-tall-men.pdf

Barack Obama's Poll Numbers

Barack Obama's approval ratings... They don't tell us that much. The most obvious reason is that this an unprecedented period in American history. We are settling into what looks like a long-term period of anemic economic growth. The general population is frustrated, scared, and angry. We all want to see drastic action, and voters on the right and on the left have strong opinions on what needs to be done, but they are totally at odds with each other. Barack Obama, who has played a fairly moderate position economically, has very low approval ratings when it comes to his handling of the economy. What these numbers don't show you, however, is why people disapprove. Some data suggests the more recent polls reflect disappointment on the left with his conciliatory approach to the debt ceiling negotiations. Many of the people saying they disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy will still end up voting for him.

Similarly, when it comes to Obama's overall approval ratings, he's not doing so well. But when we consider that many of the people expressing displeasure with Obama wish he had taken a much more progressive stance, the picture becomes much more complicated. If Obama's approval rating is around 43%, and his disapproval rating is around 50-51%, what part of the 51% wishes he had taken a more progressive stance and will still vote for him if the other option is someone more conservative?

I know this isn't a revelation, but it really bothers me that major news sources report on Obama's struggling poll numbers without mentioning that a candidate doesn't need 50%+ approval ratings to win an election, especially when the other candidates are faring even worse, which is the case with Obama's rivals.

If someone had asked me in a poll whether I approved of Obama or not, I would have said no--even back in 2008. I've never approved of his handling of the economy, because he has never come out to make a strong case for curbing even the worst excesses of the free market. But I still voted for him and will probably do so again, because American politics, with its first past the post elections and two-party system, is extremely cynical: voters do not choose the candidate they love, but the candidate they don't hate. Especially on the left, whose electorate is heavy on minorities and economically struggling people, this cynicism can lead to widespread disaffection and voter apathy. More than anything else, then, I think voter apathy is going to decide the 2012 elections. Given progressive's disheartened mood right now, that is much more cause for worry than Obama's low approval ratings.

The republicans have a strategy of never airing their dirty laundry. If you read Fox News, you'll notice that issues or political events that might create divisions in the party are regularly downplayed or passed over. A large portion of the left is very angry, and a lot of this ire has been heaped on Barack Obama, and very publicly so. While I fully understand the frustrations, I also never expected Barack Obama to be a hardcore progressive, so I'm not disappointed in the least. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about his second term, but I am far more appalled at the obstructionist tactics of the right and their extremely caustic anti-government rhetoric. Like most of the progressives out their, I recognize that Obama is limited by his political circumstances and by his frankly moderate conservative pro-market values, but isn't it obvious that the real danger is the Republicans? Most people out there don't follow the news that well and don't really even know what the GOP has been up to: blocking appointments, using a record number of filibusters, and refusing to compromise at all. I'm not very happy with Obama, but we've got much bigger fish to fry educating the public about how the GOP has been poisoning the political process.

The GOP knows it doesn't have to put forth an actual program, ideas on, for example, what to replace the health care bill with. All they have to do is stoke anger with Barack Obama and assure people that they are the cure-all. Of course this is cynical, but the left has to get more realistic: we don't have to make people love Obama, we just have to make them understand what the GOP is really up to. Tomorrow I'll turn to that topic to talk about government-bashing and why it works so well for the GOP.

Republican strategies: that new candidate smell

Many of us now look back on the 2008 elections and the widespread disaffection with George W. Bush and the GOP as a naïve period of burgeoning progressive hopes, quickly throttled in the cradle, because, somehow, the party of Iraq, of Guantanomo Bay, of huge deficits, and disastrous fiscal policy was able to reposition itself totally in Americans' minds.

Really, this repositioning began before the 2008 election results came in. Think about it, John McCain, who was a rogue, independent thinking Republican won the nomination: the GOP rank and file, as well as their strategists, realized that they had to escape the toxic image of G.W. Bush by seeking a "maverick." Then, to much greater effect, John McCain brought a total outsider to federal politics on as vice president, Sarah Palin. Since Sarah Palin's success, the GOP has been introducing a flood of new faces and has rechristened part of itself the Tea Party.


If you have ever studied marketing, what's going on is fairly transparent. For example, after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP station owners began seriously organizing and pushing for BP to go back to the Amoco brand in the US, because their sales had plunged on account of BP's tarnished image.

As far as I know, BP isn't planning on going back to the Amoco name in the US. That was probably a smart decision, because such a switch can only work in the short-term, just as long as people remain confused about who is behind the Amoco brand. Given the outrage over the oil spill and the media attention to BP's response, the switch to Amoco would probably have received a lot of negative media coverage. Folks would see through it, and the BP image would be tarnished even more as they'd look like sleaze bags trying to pull a fast one on the American public. Read more about the possible rebranding of BP in the USA.

The GOP has a similar problem. The GOP brand is still toxic–witness that Bush is not making any appearances and approval of Congressional Republicans' is still lower than Congressional Democrats'. To respond, they've tried to mimic the Sarah Palin effect again and again by introducing a flood of new candidates who have never appeared on the national level before and rebranding them "Tea Party" candidates.

But just as the BP switch to Amoco would only work short-term, until people realized BP was still behind the Amoco name, candidates like Sarah Palin can only be successful until people get used to them and learn what they stand for. New candidates benefit from a sort of honeymoon period, in which they are relatively unknown and can position themselves as rebels to capture Americans' disaffection with the much-maligned political "establishment". However, that new candidate smell doesn't last long. A candidate cannot position themselves as above the fray for very long. By now Sarah Palin has lost most of her appeal, because people are used to her, they've seen her make many gaffes, they've seen her descend into the nasty back-and-forths we associate with national-level politics, and they realize that she basically stands for all the same things that the GOP stood for. Whereas at first the media covered all of Sarah Palin's minor appearances and Twitter posts, now those stories don't sell as well and she gets far less coverage. Her poll numbers are also collapsing.

The same thing is happening with the Tea Party. At first, it's approval ratings were fairly good and it got a lot of media attention, because it was a new force in a time when voters were frustrated with the options open to them. Soon, however, as people learned what the Tea Party stood for–hard-line Republican ideas–they began to lose interest. The Tea Party's approval ratings have slowly collapsed, and new research has shown that "the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today."

Enter the upcoming 2012 elections. Have you noticed how all the potential Republican presidential candidates put off making their intentions clear? In many of the early debates and campaign events, the media was almost more concerned with who did not attend than who showed up and what they said. Perhaps this is because GOP candidates realize they don't have a chance of winning the election if voters actually know who they are and what they stand for. On the other hand, if they pull a Sarah Palin, jumping onto the national scene at the very last second, voters might be confused and frustrated with the other candidates enough that the fresh GOP meat could cherry pick a win. So, don't be surprised to see something along those lines: a totally unknown figure popping up relatively shortly before the primary. It's no secret that GOP voters are not happy with their current candidates and are still looking for someone new.

Addendum 1
The GOP/Tea Party does not monopolize the "new candidate smell" strategy. Obviously, Barack Obama benefited from being relatively unknown, and he faces the same issues the Tea Party faces. As people have gotten used to him, they realize he is not the perfect candidate they had initially thought. Part of his trouble in the polls stems from this.

Addendum 2
Have you grown tired of vacillating between the GOP and Tea Party labels when referring to right-wing politicians and voters? Have you wondered if it is okay to lump them all together under the GOP moniker? Have you struggled to determine which representatives are solid Tea Partiers, which are solid Republicans, or whether we should refer to all of them as members of the GOP/Tea Party?

This labeling confusion is evidence that most of us still don't have a clear idea of what the Tea Party stands for. The Tea Party claims to be a thorn in the side of the establishment republicans, but really their positions are just based on hardline Republican values, so most of us still associate them with the GOP. Personally, I think this wishy-washy back-and-forth between the Tea Party and the Republican labels adds to voters' confusion and benefits the right, since they don't really want people to know what they stand for. They just want to benefit from the Tea Party's rebel image as long as people will let them get away with it. So, I think we should stop saying the "GOP/Tea Party," or whatever work-around is currently working for you, and just say the GOP.

Republican Strategies: Ancient History

I am going to be out of town and unconnected this weekend, but here is a quick post to hold you over until Monday.

When Barack Obama took over the presidency, he faced an economic crisis and a precarious international situation with two seemingly endless wars and dwindling American prestige and moral authority in the world.

Democrats, including Obama, rightfully sought to place a good bit of the blame on George W. Bush's administration, for failing to adequately regulate the financial markets, for a dramatic rise in the country's debt, and for at least one frivolous and terribly costly war.

But at one point, whether it started in the campaign or in the first months of Obama's presidency, we started to see republicans respond to these critiques of Bush with something to the effect of, "Always dwelling on the past... democrats are trying to blame everything on Bush, but the American people want us to focus on solving the issues of the present."

Unfortunately, for the most part it seems like this has been an effective strategy: democrats are mentioning Bush a lot less, and when they do it does not resonate the way it used to. Incidentally, a lot of the electorate has turned to even more conservative politicians than the Hispanophone compassionate conservative Texan--Rick Perry is direct proof that the GOP thinks Bush is ancient history for most Americans.

They are aided in their strategy by the number of major events that have occurred since 2008: The recession, the health care debate, the rise of the Tea Party, the BP oil spill, the 2010 elections, Citizen's United, the budget debates, the debt-ceiling catastrophe, and now what is either an unsettled market or a second recession. All of these important political news stories are competing for brain space, and consequently, even though Bush was president up to January 2009, it feels like he was president in the 80s.

It also helps that Bush has kept an unusually low profile for a former president.

In conclusion, the name "Bush" has already lost much of its evocative power and negative connotation. This is bad news for Americans, because so many of the issues we are dealing with today really do stem from his policies: some of the greatest wastes of our blood, treasure, and international clout were carried out on Bush's watch. He took the thriving economy and a surplus he inherited from Clinton and turned it into the Great Recession and a huge debt crisis through totally unnecessary policies, like tax cuts for the wealthy, the Iraq War, and a cavalier attitude towards regularing the financial markets. If we are no longer even allowed to look three years into the past for the sources of our problems, well... you know the cliché, those who ignore history are bound to elect Rick Perry!

Republican strategies: macro-style campaigns render “gotcha” moments and fact checks obsolete

You may have noticed that, since 2008, Republican and Tea Party politicians and candidates have become increasingly brazen, saying things that are far from politically correct and wading into icky terrain with regards to the facts. In this post, I give my take on their new communications strategy and why it’s working so well for conservative politicians.

Before Rick Perry announced his campaign for president yesterday, one of his strategists said something very interesting about their new approach to campaigning. Here’s a quote from a Huffington Post article about this new strategy:

“it was clear from Carney's words and demeanor that he believes the small, but symbolic mishaps that have traditionally sapped candidates of momentum and strength in the past -- John McCain's temper, George W. Bush's DUI, Sarah Palin's reading habits, George H.W. Bush's befuddlement at a grocery store scanner and many others -- are no longer potent. Perry called it the "old playbook" of "gotcha" stories.

The new playbook, he said, "hasn't been written yet."

"In a micro-election, all those attacks may or may not work," Carney said. But 2012, he said, will be a "macro-election."”

What Perry is hinting at is that, in today’s elections, small slip-ups and “technicalities” get drowned out by the millions of dollars spent on advertising getting out the broader messages that resonate with people's emotions. 

Just a few years ago, in 2006, gotcha moments still mattered: George Allen famously referred to an Indian-American as a “macaca.” Some analysts say the fallout tipped the election in his opponent’s favor. Allen’s presidential ambitions (he was a potential favorite at the time) were another casualty. Today this might have had much less impact, perhaps none at all.

For example, yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was being heckled for saying “corporations are people.” If Perry’s strategists are right, the news cycle will soon leave this incident in the dust and it won’t play even a minor role in Romney’s campaign.

In my eyes, a more insidious manifestation of the macro-campaign is that candidates regularly get away with saying things that connect emotionally with people through prejudice or gut feeling, but are factually inaccurate.

For example, the recent Wisconsin recall elections were objectively centered on public sector workers’ right to collective bargaining, which Gov. Scott Walker and the state GOP representatives were trying to eliminate. Republicans, however, regularly said the election was about forcing public servants to accept cuts in their pay and in their benefits. Although the public workers’ unions accepted the cuts long ago and their protests and recall efforts made no effort to reverse them, the GOP’s message is simpler and resonates more with an electorate that has grown resentful of what they perceive to be special treatment of public sector workers when compared with the private sector’s big layoffs and pay cuts. In the end, for a lot of people, it doesn’t matter that the unions did not resist these particular budget cut: many voters have grown accustomed to associating unions with hardheaded resistance to changes in pensions and pay and will assume that they resisted these particular cuts as well.

[This Washing Post blog entry talks about one of the more blatant efforts to make it look like public workers were resisting the cuts.]

So, republicans are relying on most people not paying close attention to political news and not spending much effort digging into the issues. They tell people what they expect to hear and what is most convenient for the GOP, whether it is true or not. As a result, democrats spend half of their energy just trying to redress the fallacies before getting to the real issues at hand. The republicans, on the other hand, stoke populist angers by hitting their electorate’s emotional chords—at the expense of the truth.

Other examples include John McCain’s claim that Phoenix was the city with the second most number of kidnappings in the world, implying this was tied to illegal immigration, or Michelle Bachmann and other republican politicians and media voices preposterously claiming that President Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million a day. In the past, both of these claims would have led to “gotcha” moments. Journalists would have criticized the perpetrators and the electorate’s perception of the GOP would be adversely affected. Instead, many news outlets went along with the stories, doing almost no fact checking of the GOP leaders, and have still failed to issue retractions. If you look them up now, you will still find many articles that present these obvious fallacies as the truth—you will have to dig to find the fact checks proving they are incorrect. As a result, many people still don’t know these claims have absolutely no basis in fact.

Let me give a personal example of how this strategy can play out. After the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, conservative politicians and media began to report that the Obama administration had refused to repeal the Jones Act, which prevents foreign vessels from entering US waters. The complaint was that the Obama administration was turning away loads of foreign boats that had offered to help in the clean up.

My grandparents, staunch conservatives, watch Fox News regularly and heard this. They complained about it to my brother, who is a moderate, fairly well informed liberal. My brother believed them. After all, what reason did he have to doubt my grandparents? And he came to me complaining about the Jones Act and the Obama administration.

When my brother told me Obama had refused to allow foreign ships to help clean up the BP oil spill, I was stunned—I had no idea what to say or how to reply. I couldn’t counter the erroneous claim, because I had never heard this claim before, because I didn’t watch Fox News, because I had never even heard the issue raised in other media sources.

Fox News and the GOP strategists are relying on two things: first, that republican and democratic voters will not mix and many of their distortions will go unchallenged, and second, that if someone who listens to them repeats their falsehoods to a staunch progressive like myself, said progressive will not be able to challenge the distortion, because they have never even heard the issue raised.

The GOP’s new strategy, then, is to say whatever is most convenient, never apologize (i.e. show weakness) if they propagated a falsehood, and rely on the apathy of voters who will never dig a little deeper.

After the above incident, I did some easy internet searches and found that factcheck.org had investigated the matter and concluded that the Obama administration had in fact issued many exceptions to the Jones Act to the foreign ships the administration’s experts declared were needed. The officials did end up turning away some ships, because they received such an outpouring of offers to aid in the cleanup that there were many redundant services offered. Not only were the offers redundant, many of them came with a price attached or would have involved chemical techniques the US government does not approve. Finally, and most importantly, the government was actually worried there would be too many ships in the oil spill area getting in each other’s way and hampering the broader effort to clean up the oil spill. But that story is a lot harder to tell than “Obama blocks foreign ships from helping in the Gulf cleanup!!!!”

Turns out the people talking about the repeal of the Jones Act, notably a GOP rep from Hawaii, had a history of opposing the Act, because it helps local shipping unions throughout the US. The real aim was not to facilitate the clean-up, but to cripple unions.

Still, to this day, if you do a search on this you will see the factcheck.org analysis and then a slew of right-wing talk show hosts, politicians, and internet publications sounding off against the Obama administration for “hampering the clean efforts to protect cushy union jobs” and the like. No retractions, no apologies, they just steamroll right past what might be an image-tarnishing revelation for them. (Read factcheck.org's analysis of the Jones Act "controversy.")

The last part of this new media strategy is to spew so much absurdity into the airwaves that we can’t isolate any of the individual fallacies for long enough to call attention to the way they are distorting reality and using people’s gut emotions for their political agenda. Seriously, after all the “birther” nonsense or the “death panel” fiasco, what media outlet is going to get caught up in calling out something so minor as an erroneous claim that the Obama administration and unions were hampering clean up efforts in the Gulf, or that Phoenix is not actually the city with the second most kidnappings in the world, or that Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million.

But the real story here is not that the right is regularly getting away with saying blatant lies. The real story is that, in the campaigns coming in 2012, the GOP’s explicit strategy is to steamroll past the facts, ignoring convenient “slip-ups," technicalities, and embarrassing gotcha moments, to strike the right tone and appeal to people’s gut emotions, and they will probably be highly successful. Witness the fact that, because I am writing about this new strategy, we are not considering a more important topic, such as the more fundamental disagreements between the right and the left on, for example, the allocation of government spending.

Being able to anticipate the right’s arguments will play an important role in whether the left is able to quickly address and move past the false issues and distortions. One way to do that is for us to keep one eye on Fox News and other right wing media sources and do some fact checking of our own when an argument sounds fishy. That way you won’t end up stammering like me when my brother first told me Obama was keeping foreign ships from helping the clean up effort in the gulf.

*Update: I recently had an exchange with a conservative in the comment section of the Huff Post in which he tried to blame the unemployed for being too lazy to get jobs. I made the point that they lost their jobs because the Bush administration failed to regulated the financial industry. To that, he responded with one of these bizarre arguments mentioned above, which caught me totally off guard: he said that, in 2003 the Bush administration tried to regulate Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac, but Barney Frank and the democrats stopped the effort, saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not in a crisis. After I got over my initial surprise, I did some fact checking: Fox News and right wing media sources have been spreading this argument to shift blame for the 2008 crisis onto the democrats. Barney Frank actually helped forge the legislation under question, and opposed it at the last moment, because the Bush administration and Congressional republicans added in last second changes that Frank and other democrats believed would make it harder for lower-income people to find housing. Fank did not encourage anyone else to vote against the bill and it passed the House despite his “no” vote. It was then shot down in the GOP-controlled Senate on the Bush administration’s orders. Read Barney Frank’s reply to the GOP’s rewriting of Congressional history. And this is factcheck.org's analysis of the back-and-forth claims.

If you’ve encountered a similar fallacious, distorting argument before, leave a comment describing the encounter and maybe I’ll feature the topic in a future post.

Second update: WOW, some people still don't believe that the kidnapping claim and Obama trip claim are erroneous and can't do an internet search to factcheck them on their own. Here's the links:

Phoenix kidnappings:
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/jun/28/john-mccain/mccain-says-phoenix-second-kidnapping-capital-worl/

Obama's India trip:
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/11/ask-factcheck-trip-to-mumbai/

3. Single-issue advocacy and the New Left

This is the third and final installment in my series on public perception of progressives.

Although most people in America have probably never heard of the New Left, all of us have certainly witnessed and experienced the major changes in progressive politics that it was instrumental in leading.

To give some very brief background, the New Left was a radical left-wing democratic (not Democratic) movement in the 1960s and 1970s that consisted of students, young intellectuals, and older intellectuals stumbling from the ruins of the American and British communists parties. After the USSR ordered the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and Khrushchev delivered his secret speech criticizing Stalin, many communists and sympathizers became disillusioned with the bureaucratic rigidity and authoritarianism of the USSR.

In the letter that popularized the term, “New Left” in 1960, C. Wright Mills wrote, “It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted.”

The New Left sought to capture, build, and direct the energy coming out of the collapse of European communism and direct it into a more humanistic, democratic form. In the same letter, C. Wright Mills wrote of his fears that political discourse was moving away from ideology and critique and towards a liberalism, whose “sophistication is one of tone rather than of ideas.” He added that, as the left-wing activists and intellectuals moved away from old-school Marxism they were abandoning any sort of coherent criticism of the capitalist system as a whole, consequently that “their power to outrage, their power to truly enlighten in a political way; their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation — all that is blunted or destroyed.”

Simply put, then, the New Left advocated a more distanced relationship with old-school Marxism and with the working class, whom they no longer saw as the primary motor of social, economic, and political reform. However, what they retained from the old Communist movements was the necessity for a critique of “the system” (it sounds like a parody of the 1960s, but these are Mills’ own words, not mine), whether that system was American-style capitalism or the Eastern Bloc’s impersonal bureaucratization.

Groups like Students for a Democratic Society, many feminist organizations, and the budding environmental movement took their impetus from this basic tenet of the New Left: the working class were no longer the core of left-wing politics, but a critique of “the system” was still necessary.

Although the move from Soviet-style communism to the anti-authoritarian, democratic, rainbow-flag New Left radicalism is perfectly understandable, it quickly revealed major shortcomings.

First of all, whereas the New Left pushed a counter-culture critique of “the system,” it did not simultaneously theorize what it would do if it were to gain influence and take power. As a result, when many members of the New Left rose to positions of influence in the major cultural institutions and universities that they had so stringently attacked, they looked and felt like hypocrites. A lot of them deflated. Future radical movements should remember this and take heed: it’s not enough to just critique “power” and “the system” without developing a better model of social, economic, and political organization, because any radical movement that is organized and large enough will eventually find itself in the awkward position of having to replace (and, too often, to become) that which it critiqued.

Secondly, and perhaps most seriously, without the working class and a strong form of Marxist critique of capitalism to center them, the movements growing out of the New Left failed to develop a coherent theoretical system that could unite feminists, the LGBT community, and environmentalists, for example. And this remains a problem today: who can honestly tell me how gay rights activism is related to the environment and why the two movements ought to work together?

Finally, wouldn’t you agree with me that American politics are still very similar to the situation the New Left wanted to get out of, in which “smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted”?

If anything, the only change in this dynamic since the New Left is that there aren't even any disillusioned radicals around anymore. When the New Left’s cultural influence combined with the affluence of America and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, which for many people validated the free market, the result was the gradual fading of radical critiques of capitalism, including that of the New Left, in our political discourse. Let’s face it, manufacturing went abroad and the critique of capitalism, even a democratic, humanist critique, just doesn’t resonate as well in the suburban house of a middle class family as it did in factories. The people who favor capitalism are often the people capitalism favors.

The liberal mentality the New Left despised took hold of America as the left failed to develop an ideology to fuse the single-issue advocacy groups together.

It seems to me we’ve reached the time to reevaluate the New Left, taking from it it’s democratic tendencies and its support for civil rights, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism, and weaving these back into a strong critique of free markets’ tendency to boom and bust.

How does this relate to public perception of progressives in America? It’s very simple: poll after poll has shown that the majority of Americans support the core policies of the American left–letting taxes on the rich go back to their pre-Bush levels, creating jobs, and providing a cushion for the unemployed, for the elderly and the children living in poverty, a better health care system… And yet the American electorate is fleeing to the staunchest defenders of the free market, the contemporary “Do Nothings,” who will not enact any of the policies the American electorate wants… Why?

Without the core critique of capitalism binding us together, left-wing movements across the world were left confused and aimless after the 2008 recession. Of course we believe in more government involvement in the economy and some assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society, and of course most people agree with us, but how do we justify these policies to a country that has grown to believe the free market can do no wrong? Worse, how do left-wing leaders who’ve come to embrace capitalism justify these policies to themselves?

One way is to face the shrill calls of “socialist” and “extremist” head on, i.e. to put economic progressivism back at the core of left-wing politics, to elect leaders who are willing to make a strong case for reform/overhaul of the free market.

Sure we’re going to get labeled socialists, but if there were ever a time when the American people might reconsider socialism’s core tenets, that time is now. If we back down because we’re afraid to be associated with Marx and the critique of capitalism, we will miss a huge opportunity to address the fundamental problems of the free market that brought us to this stage. I fear we’ll never find a significant justification for massive interventions in the market, and, consequently, I fear we will end up abandoning millions (unemployment is at ~9% right now!) of people to suffer the worst excesses of the free market.

Mill’s essay at Marxists.org

http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm

2. Banding together: progressive demographics and the politics of marginalization

This is my second post in an ongoing series on public perception of the democrats and the misconception that the US is generally a right-leaning country.

In my last post I showed that, historically, consistently more Americans have identified with democrats than with republicans, yet republican talking-points still so often portray us as isolated left-wing radicals. Taking a closer look at the demographic makeup of the progressive voter base goes a long way to explaining why it is so easy for republicans to make us feel like marginalized extremists, disconnected from Mainstreet, mainstream America.

The left wing draws heavily on minorities and, despite the fact that, when African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and (some) Caucasian-Americans come together they form a strong coalition that almost always outnumbers the republicans, it’s very easy to make minorities feel like, well… minorities. Taking into account the underrepresentation of all minorities in politics and the history of political discrimination which they have faced, it is understandable that so many minorities translate the alienation they feel in their everyday lives into widespread disaffection with a political system that locks them out. Thus the transformative potential of a candidate like Barack Obama.

When you consider that the other group that regularly tends to vote democrat, women, has also faced intense discrimination and prejudices in their personal, professional, and civic lives, I think you begin to see why it is so easy for the right to make us feel isolated and marginalized: on some levels, it’s the truth! Even though women make up a slight majority of the general population, they are still severely marginalized and underrepresented politically. One of the more frightening aspects of the 2010 elections were that only 49% of women voted democrat and 48% voted republican. This probably has a lot to do with lack of voter enthusiasm on the left, but it's a dangerous trend nonetheless, especially given the republicans' new strategy of fielding fiery conservative women like Palin, O'Donnell, Haley, and Bachmann.

The last bastion of left-wing electoral power comes from the lower-income brackets, from all races, both men and women. Small wonder that they, too, feel shut out from a political system that does little to help them deal with the harsher realities of capitalism: unemployment, expensive health care, underfunded schools, abusive bureaucrats and police force… If you need concrete examples, I strongly suggest Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent article on the new face of poverty since 2008: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/nickel-and-dimed-2011-ver_b_922330.html.

The constituent parts of the progressive electorate face discrimination in their personal, professional, and civic lives. What the right has done is exploit our sense of alienation to make us think that our ideas, our movement, and our leaders are just as marginalized as we feel in our day-to-day lives, which is very far from the truth: when we band together, we form a strong plurality/majority of the electorate.

The right is relying on our diversity as an electorate to keep us from turning the tables on them. This has been a problem for the left throughout North America and Europe as left-wing organizers have struggled to help workers unite with immigrants, minorities, women, and most recently the LGBT community to realize that they have the same interests and must work together. Considering the many prejudices that already exist, it’s very easy to understand why it’s so much harder to unite this electorate than to split it up. It’s also something to be very proud of: despite coming from extremely diverse backgrounds, communities, and paths of life, all of these groups regularly come together under the large tent of progressive politics. 

It’s also comforting to think that progressives are making inroads in the fastest growing demographic: Hispanic-Americans.

Finally, some of the democratic electorate is made up of people like me. I’m a white male who votes progressive; I’m from a primarily white region, and I have lamentably few African-American and Hispanic-American friends. If this is your situation, chances are you really are an outspoken progressive voice in your community: Caucasians, especially Caucasian males, are the core of the right’s electorate. In fact, this trend is only becoming more pronounced, with the biggest GOP gains since 2008 coming from this demographic. Take a look:  

http://www.pollwatchdaily.com/2011/07/22/republicans-post-big-party-identification-gains-among-white-voters/

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/101109 (analysis of a Tea Partier)

[And this is wonderful essay a blogger at the Nation, Jamelle Bouie, explaining how the Southern Strategy is playing out today and how the trends amongst minorities and whites mentioned above, particularly in the south, are becoming more pronounced.]

Most members of the democratic Congress belong to this demographic—white males–and thus really are isolated, outspoken progressive voices… amongst other white males that is! If only our representatives were as diverse as our electorate!

Despite knowing these demographic trends, since the Iraq War I have felt very alienated by my community, and that sentiment has only increased since 2008. I’m sure that many of you, my readers, feel the same way: we were as relieved to see a democratic president then as we are horrified at how strange American politics are now. 

What we see in Washington DC: a very vocal conservative minority (controlling only one chamber of Congress) painting the larger progressive majority (controlling one chamber of Congress and the White House) as extremists, is mirrored in the greater population: a vocal conservative minority made up primarily of white males branding a larger, more diverse, progressive majority extremist.

But, if you’re like me, it’s not enough to just know more Americans are progressive than conservative, we want to meet those people and commiserate with them. Well, the solution is easy to point out and much more difficult to put into practice: we need to build communities of support that bridge differences in race, class, nationality and immigration status, and sexual-preference. Another way to meet more progressives is just to increase the number of ladies in your circle of friends, which is easier sad than done for a nerdy guy like me... Chances are, if we get out of our demographic bubbles, we’ll find there are a lot more progressives out there than we’d thought!

Tomorrow, in my last installment in this series, I’ll talk about the New Left, the fading of the working class foundation of progressive politics, and how this contributed to the fragmentation of progressive politics into various smaller single-issue advocacy groups.

PS The blacklisted, union-funded film, The Salt of the Earth, does a great job of showing how difficult it can be to get minorities (in this case Hispanics miners) to band together with women to win a labor dispute. This clip from another great film about a real strike, Matewan, shows the same difficulties, but between white and black coal miners. It sends shivers up my spine every time I watch it, enjoy: