Tomorrow's identity politics, today.
I fear turning this blog into a giant advertisement for The New Republic but (in addition to seeing that The Editors share my sentiments about the filibuster deal almost exactly), so long as they keep printing pieces by Chris Hayes, I probably won't be able to help it. Hayes has a review up of New York libertarian Steven Malanaga (of the Manhatten Institute)'s new book, The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today. It's a savvy and strangely heartening piece:
...But despite Malanaga's acid contempt for anyone he disagrees with (whom he never, by the way, actually takes the time to interview) he is onto something. There is a new kind of urban-progressive coalition that has won significant victories in the past decade or so, and The New New Left is useful largely because it lays out the rhetorical strategy that right-wingers are likely to use to try to defeat it.
Author and erstwhile Republican strategist Kevin Phillips has noted that liberalism fell into decline when it went from being perceived as representing the interest of the many against the interests of the few to representing the interests of the few over the interests of the many. The New Left's focus on identity politics and distrust of bourgeois virtues was deftly capitalized on by Nixon, whose "silent majority" rhetoric has provided the backbone for three decades of Republican critique of the left as representing the interests of the few: homosexuals, welfare queens, radical professors, limousine liberals, etc.
In labeling the broad coalition of unions, community organizations, and students "the New New Left," Malanga is trying to tar them with the same brush. But what's striking is that the groups he attacks are in some senses the exact opposite of the New Left. Instead of representing narrow ethnic or cultural concerns, they are attempting to stitch together large coalitions of poor, working- and middle-class people who share a common interest in higher wages, affordable health care, and a social safety net. Malanga admits as much himself when he notes that the living-wage campaign manual put together by ACORN "echoes the organization theories of legendary radical Saul Alinsky:" While Alinsky was a contemporary of the New Left, his vision, tactics, and methods were completely anathema to the hardcore New Left activists. He had no tolerance for culture wars or subversive freak shows. Instead he leaned on the most conservative institution imaginable, neighborhood churches, to build cross-racial coalitions of working class people to fight for their collective interests. Gale Cincotta, the late, great community leader in Chicago who spearheaded the national fight against banks redlining poor neighborhoods was exactly the kind of ethnic small-business owner (and registered Republican) who Malanga so admires.
...The political lesson here is that special interests are in the eye of the beholder: Malanga thinks that janitors who clean buildings for eight dollars an hour are a special interest, while I tend to think that middle-age white guys whose cushy sinecures at conservative think tanks nicely insulate them from the vicissitudes of the same free market they so fetishize are a special interest...
Hayes goes on to speculate that rightwing attempts to brand working people a "special interest" and activist governments as modern day Tammany Halls may in fact fail; that today's liberal-left class-based coalitions may in fact be broad enough, if not exactly strong enough, to resist being caricatured to a majority of Americans as either dillitantes or as the victims of dillitantes' (like, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's) unwanted philanthropic attentions. Looking to the current situation in California, Hayes concludes:
Thirty-seven years ago New Left student protestors clashed with working-class police officers at a time when the New Deal coalition was being ripped apart. If today's police officers are joining in solidarity with nurses, firefighters, and senior citizens against an anti-union Republican governor [Schwarzenegger], it shows just how far the left has come.
Of course, with the unionization rate down to about 8% in the U.S. and the AFL-CIO threatening in its leadership dispute to turn further away from Democratic politics, with the campaign finance regime such an unbelievable, unending mess, and with the blue states shrinking (relatively, at least), it's easy to be disheartened at national liberal prospects. But Hayes succeeded in cheering my up. His piece also remined me of this Mother Jones election postmortum by former paster and free-lance writer Garret Keizer, touching on some of the same ideas about what ails the left and what might save it (at the very least, there's a matching Saul Alinsky reference). Keizer writes:
The current liberal solution is slightly more subtle and perhaps more benign: a multicultural caste system in which people of all races, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations eat dinner at the same upscale restaurant (where I eat, too), while people of all races, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations eat dinner out of the garbage Dumpster out back. And the only thing more global than the menu is the crew scrubbing the pots.
Both [liberal and conservative] solutions are marked by a wily propensity to talk about any kind of conflict except class conflict. Having duly explored the polarities of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, we now distract ourselves by talking ad nauseam about Blue States and Red States, a construction that wants only a Dr. Seuss or a special edition of Dungeons & Dragons to achieve its final apotheosis in the realm of Whoozits and elves. The true enemy of progressivism is not the Red State Voter. The true enemy of progressivism is preciousness.
Of course, liberals are no worse than conservatives in skirting the politics of class. But conservatives have gained an edge on liberals in exploiting the surrogate politics of identity. In other words, they have succeeded in beating liberals at their own game. The winning strategy is based on two principles: First, the mastery of identity politics depends on gaining the allegiance of the largest possible minority (in the case of "born-again" Christians, about 42 percent of the country at last count). Second, the most committed minority is the one defined not by the "givens" of ethnicity or gender but by the "chosens" of common belief.
The left was once an identity of that sort, and its common belief was a classless society in which no identity trumped that of a human being. Its common belief was that a condition of equality and solidarity was the destiny of humankind. There is no language that the left needs to recover so badly as it needs to recover that faith. This does not mean that the left should not engage the racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmentally inept futurism to which the left itself has not always been immune. It does mean that a truly progressive agenda has to consist of something more radical than reminding the minimum-wage custodian to sort the recyclables when he takes out the trash or the Latina housemaid to dust Che's portrait when she does the den. It might mean that we have to relinquish more of our disposable income in order to reduce the numbers of disposable people. It might mean something as radical as saying so.
I think Keizer is right that "preciousness" is the left's biggest problem -- though I'm less certain that Keizer himself completely avoids it (his article, though, is perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of an otherwise dreary election post-mortem period, and worth reading, several times over.) But he tangentially touches on a very important point: in the second half of the twentieth century, liberals and progressives in fact achieved their greatest successes in non-class-based -- those "surregate" identity -- conflicts. Though the battles aren't (and never will be) "won", Blacks, women, Hispanics, homosexuals have all made and continue to make huge strides in the second half of the 20th and early 21st Century, whether politically, socially or economically. As Keizer points out, the Democratic Party is a truly multiethnic organization, and a look at Bush's cabinet suggests that the political right, radical as it might be, yearns to be similarly diverse. Thanks to broadly-defined liberal, and often overtly Democratic, efforts, racism, though it continues to exist in America (as it does everywhere) is formally taboo (even demagogery aimed at Arab Muslems, in the post-911 world, could be much worse than it could have been and likely would have been ha 911 occurred twenty years ago.)
Over the same period, though, as it was winning civil rights battles, the left failed miserably in its other two struggles: the class struggle and the peace struggle. And that's largely because these were the issues that split -- and continue to split -- the various liberal factions in America. The New Left failed to halt the Vietnam War and arguably cost the ambivolent Democrats two presidential elections in the process (three if you count the Vietnam overtones of the most recent one). Since 1972, liberals and progressives failed to win the War on Poverty or to provide a sufficient counterveiling force to Reaganite I've-got-mine politics, which Bush brought back with a vengeance after old-school "liberals" like Bob Dole failed to get the job done for the GOP. Real wage growth at the bottom has been stagnant since the early 1970s (the final three years of the 90s being the single bright exception). Political corruption, privatization, corporatization continues apace. Self-styled progressives, liberals and neoliberals still fight among themselves, each with its own relatively distinct intellectual tradition over the past 30 years. And, most recently, progressive agitation had no noticable impact on the public taste for a war with Iraq (although the interminability of the occupation certainly has).
In a sense, getting the upper hand in the culture-identity wars -- against institutional racism, against blatant economic bigottry -- meant, or ended up, forfeiting the class war, something that progressives and New Left types blame, with some justification, on liberals and neoliberals (though, of course, the neoliberal argument is that, in avoiding tradtional liberal paternalism, it advances a truer version of equality without libertarian distain for engrained social responsibility). But the result is much how Keizer describes it -- a harshly unequal, vibrantly diverse culture. When explaining inequality and the underclass, it isn't Blacks, per se. It is "some" Blacks (and some Whites). It isn't even single mothers. It is "some" (actually "most") single mothers. The "welfare queen" might have been black in the public imagination, but she wasn't meant to invoke the archtypical Black. No mainstream political figure would suggest such a thing. Of course, creating the society in which no meanstream political figure would say such a thing was a great progressive victory, perhaps the greatest of the post-WWII era. But it had a dark side: it failed to check, and in some cases even encouraged, the marginalization and creeping popular contempt for the multiethnic poor, the rainbow of economic losers. And it provided the intellectual argument that -- along with foils like Ehrenreich -- gives guys like Malanaga all the ammo they need for their respectable, non-racist libertarian arguments against intrusive, paternalistic government.
And its in this vein that Hayes' article offers some much-needed hope. The civil rights crusade united the left and drove the Dixiecrats into the Republican camp. The civil rights crusaders included not just the New Leftists but liberals and even conservative or "New" Democrats. Jimmy Carter, Joe Lieberman and Al From all cut their teeth on the civil rights movement, but none of them is exactly known as a proponent of a "classless society". But now guys like Lieberman and From are flailing too; all factions of the American left desperately need a new struggle -- something broader than abortion rights. And as big, emcompassing struggles go, the struggle for economic equality looks much more promising for liberals than the struggle for peace (particularly post-911), despite Americans' well-known faith in their own mobility and the American and corporate international press' aversion to anything that sounds like class warfare. How exactly to make the arguments is a whole other ballgame and the devil in the details. But the feasiblity of the essential arguments might be greater, the libertarian right's counter-arguments weaker, and the broadness of the identity coaltion closer to critical mass, than we, in despair, tend to think.
...But despite Malanaga's acid contempt for anyone he disagrees with (whom he never, by the way, actually takes the time to interview) he is onto something. There is a new kind of urban-progressive coalition that has won significant victories in the past decade or so, and The New New Left is useful largely because it lays out the rhetorical strategy that right-wingers are likely to use to try to defeat it.
Author and erstwhile Republican strategist Kevin Phillips has noted that liberalism fell into decline when it went from being perceived as representing the interest of the many against the interests of the few to representing the interests of the few over the interests of the many. The New Left's focus on identity politics and distrust of bourgeois virtues was deftly capitalized on by Nixon, whose "silent majority" rhetoric has provided the backbone for three decades of Republican critique of the left as representing the interests of the few: homosexuals, welfare queens, radical professors, limousine liberals, etc.
In labeling the broad coalition of unions, community organizations, and students "the New New Left," Malanga is trying to tar them with the same brush. But what's striking is that the groups he attacks are in some senses the exact opposite of the New Left. Instead of representing narrow ethnic or cultural concerns, they are attempting to stitch together large coalitions of poor, working- and middle-class people who share a common interest in higher wages, affordable health care, and a social safety net. Malanga admits as much himself when he notes that the living-wage campaign manual put together by ACORN "echoes the organization theories of legendary radical Saul Alinsky:" While Alinsky was a contemporary of the New Left, his vision, tactics, and methods were completely anathema to the hardcore New Left activists. He had no tolerance for culture wars or subversive freak shows. Instead he leaned on the most conservative institution imaginable, neighborhood churches, to build cross-racial coalitions of working class people to fight for their collective interests. Gale Cincotta, the late, great community leader in Chicago who spearheaded the national fight against banks redlining poor neighborhoods was exactly the kind of ethnic small-business owner (and registered Republican) who Malanga so admires.
...The political lesson here is that special interests are in the eye of the beholder: Malanga thinks that janitors who clean buildings for eight dollars an hour are a special interest, while I tend to think that middle-age white guys whose cushy sinecures at conservative think tanks nicely insulate them from the vicissitudes of the same free market they so fetishize are a special interest...
Hayes goes on to speculate that rightwing attempts to brand working people a "special interest" and activist governments as modern day Tammany Halls may in fact fail; that today's liberal-left class-based coalitions may in fact be broad enough, if not exactly strong enough, to resist being caricatured to a majority of Americans as either dillitantes or as the victims of dillitantes' (like, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's) unwanted philanthropic attentions. Looking to the current situation in California, Hayes concludes:
Thirty-seven years ago New Left student protestors clashed with working-class police officers at a time when the New Deal coalition was being ripped apart. If today's police officers are joining in solidarity with nurses, firefighters, and senior citizens against an anti-union Republican governor [Schwarzenegger], it shows just how far the left has come.
Of course, with the unionization rate down to about 8% in the U.S. and the AFL-CIO threatening in its leadership dispute to turn further away from Democratic politics, with the campaign finance regime such an unbelievable, unending mess, and with the blue states shrinking (relatively, at least), it's easy to be disheartened at national liberal prospects. But Hayes succeeded in cheering my up. His piece also remined me of this Mother Jones election postmortum by former paster and free-lance writer Garret Keizer, touching on some of the same ideas about what ails the left and what might save it (at the very least, there's a matching Saul Alinsky reference). Keizer writes:
The current liberal solution is slightly more subtle and perhaps more benign: a multicultural caste system in which people of all races, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations eat dinner at the same upscale restaurant (where I eat, too), while people of all races, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations eat dinner out of the garbage Dumpster out back. And the only thing more global than the menu is the crew scrubbing the pots.
Both [liberal and conservative] solutions are marked by a wily propensity to talk about any kind of conflict except class conflict. Having duly explored the polarities of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, we now distract ourselves by talking ad nauseam about Blue States and Red States, a construction that wants only a Dr. Seuss or a special edition of Dungeons & Dragons to achieve its final apotheosis in the realm of Whoozits and elves. The true enemy of progressivism is not the Red State Voter. The true enemy of progressivism is preciousness.
Of course, liberals are no worse than conservatives in skirting the politics of class. But conservatives have gained an edge on liberals in exploiting the surrogate politics of identity. In other words, they have succeeded in beating liberals at their own game. The winning strategy is based on two principles: First, the mastery of identity politics depends on gaining the allegiance of the largest possible minority (in the case of "born-again" Christians, about 42 percent of the country at last count). Second, the most committed minority is the one defined not by the "givens" of ethnicity or gender but by the "chosens" of common belief.
The left was once an identity of that sort, and its common belief was a classless society in which no identity trumped that of a human being. Its common belief was that a condition of equality and solidarity was the destiny of humankind. There is no language that the left needs to recover so badly as it needs to recover that faith. This does not mean that the left should not engage the racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmentally inept futurism to which the left itself has not always been immune. It does mean that a truly progressive agenda has to consist of something more radical than reminding the minimum-wage custodian to sort the recyclables when he takes out the trash or the Latina housemaid to dust Che's portrait when she does the den. It might mean that we have to relinquish more of our disposable income in order to reduce the numbers of disposable people. It might mean something as radical as saying so.
I think Keizer is right that "preciousness" is the left's biggest problem -- though I'm less certain that Keizer himself completely avoids it (his article, though, is perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of an otherwise dreary election post-mortem period, and worth reading, several times over.) But he tangentially touches on a very important point: in the second half of the twentieth century, liberals and progressives in fact achieved their greatest successes in non-class-based -- those "surregate" identity -- conflicts. Though the battles aren't (and never will be) "won", Blacks, women, Hispanics, homosexuals have all made and continue to make huge strides in the second half of the 20th and early 21st Century, whether politically, socially or economically. As Keizer points out, the Democratic Party is a truly multiethnic organization, and a look at Bush's cabinet suggests that the political right, radical as it might be, yearns to be similarly diverse. Thanks to broadly-defined liberal, and often overtly Democratic, efforts, racism, though it continues to exist in America (as it does everywhere) is formally taboo (even demagogery aimed at Arab Muslems, in the post-911 world, could be much worse than it could have been and likely would have been ha 911 occurred twenty years ago.)
Over the same period, though, as it was winning civil rights battles, the left failed miserably in its other two struggles: the class struggle and the peace struggle. And that's largely because these were the issues that split -- and continue to split -- the various liberal factions in America. The New Left failed to halt the Vietnam War and arguably cost the ambivolent Democrats two presidential elections in the process (three if you count the Vietnam overtones of the most recent one). Since 1972, liberals and progressives failed to win the War on Poverty or to provide a sufficient counterveiling force to Reaganite I've-got-mine politics, which Bush brought back with a vengeance after old-school "liberals" like Bob Dole failed to get the job done for the GOP. Real wage growth at the bottom has been stagnant since the early 1970s (the final three years of the 90s being the single bright exception). Political corruption, privatization, corporatization continues apace. Self-styled progressives, liberals and neoliberals still fight among themselves, each with its own relatively distinct intellectual tradition over the past 30 years. And, most recently, progressive agitation had no noticable impact on the public taste for a war with Iraq (although the interminability of the occupation certainly has).
In a sense, getting the upper hand in the culture-identity wars -- against institutional racism, against blatant economic bigottry -- meant, or ended up, forfeiting the class war, something that progressives and New Left types blame, with some justification, on liberals and neoliberals (though, of course, the neoliberal argument is that, in avoiding tradtional liberal paternalism, it advances a truer version of equality without libertarian distain for engrained social responsibility). But the result is much how Keizer describes it -- a harshly unequal, vibrantly diverse culture. When explaining inequality and the underclass, it isn't Blacks, per se. It is "some" Blacks (and some Whites). It isn't even single mothers. It is "some" (actually "most") single mothers. The "welfare queen" might have been black in the public imagination, but she wasn't meant to invoke the archtypical Black. No mainstream political figure would suggest such a thing. Of course, creating the society in which no meanstream political figure would say such a thing was a great progressive victory, perhaps the greatest of the post-WWII era. But it had a dark side: it failed to check, and in some cases even encouraged, the marginalization and creeping popular contempt for the multiethnic poor, the rainbow of economic losers. And it provided the intellectual argument that -- along with foils like Ehrenreich -- gives guys like Malanaga all the ammo they need for their respectable, non-racist libertarian arguments against intrusive, paternalistic government.
And its in this vein that Hayes' article offers some much-needed hope. The civil rights crusade united the left and drove the Dixiecrats into the Republican camp. The civil rights crusaders included not just the New Leftists but liberals and even conservative or "New" Democrats. Jimmy Carter, Joe Lieberman and Al From all cut their teeth on the civil rights movement, but none of them is exactly known as a proponent of a "classless society". But now guys like Lieberman and From are flailing too; all factions of the American left desperately need a new struggle -- something broader than abortion rights. And as big, emcompassing struggles go, the struggle for economic equality looks much more promising for liberals than the struggle for peace (particularly post-911), despite Americans' well-known faith in their own mobility and the American and corporate international press' aversion to anything that sounds like class warfare. How exactly to make the arguments is a whole other ballgame and the devil in the details. But the feasiblity of the essential arguments might be greater, the libertarian right's counter-arguments weaker, and the broadness of the identity coaltion closer to critical mass, than we, in despair, tend to think.
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