I think I have you in mind! There’s a mentality of purity that’s really a problem when you’re trying to put together meaningful coalitions. Progressives have exerted tremendous influence over the past decade on the Democratic Party and on the national conversation in general - and all of that has both contributed to the climate of illiberalism and been deeply instrumental in Trump’s successes. There is a mindset underneath that and I humbly suggest that anybody of that mindset knock it off and participate in the much-more-pragmatic task of coalition-building.
Hard to argue with your final lines, given the last decade: "The left is incoherent and fanatical in its incoherence. It’s time for liberals to see that and to focus on being the group that’s actually trying to get things done."
The Gaurdian is the worst offender in this regard: they are completely dedicated to following the latest fashion of the American progressive left, like the good provincials they are
The Guardian is the only one that has a decent attention turned towards the environment but yeah, on politics and culture - Marina Hyde notwithstanding – it’s not wonkish, it’s wankerish on this account. I go to the FT for news-news if I really need want it
I read through The Guardian very quickly on my news skims. At this point The New York Times is really the only meaningful left-of-center newspaper. The Washington Post, Guardian, LA Times, etc, are very pale reflections of whatever the NYT is doing.
I think it's worse than this, as there are a multitude of cords out there. This piece by Ted Gioia enumerating many of the areas is worth reading. https://substack.com/@tedgioia/p-165359384
The loss of credibility in many disciplines is directly related to those who went to allegedly elite institutions and were hired as they were allegedly highly educated and have now moved into positions of influence. In too many cases they are more indoctrinated than educated and are now frequently enforcing their dogmatic views onto others. You see it in education, journalism, psychology, social "sciences", anthropology, medicine, law in addition to politics. They are everywhere. There is a dangerous loss of trust in so many of our institutions. Hannah Arendt warned of the consequence of nobody believing anything anymore.
While liberals have been focused on the dangers of the far right , they have been remiss on the growing intolerant authoritarianism of the far left. It may be better not to refer to them as the far left but just authoritarians .. Orwell was a staunch socialist and wrote Animal Farm as a warning to those he felt had gone too far and lost the thread. He was heavily criticized for giving ammunition to the enemy. We needed an Orwell early on in this process.
Somehow we need a collision of the center left and center right to realize they have more in common with each other than they do with the extremes of either party. I don't see Democrats recognizing this as they appear to have learned nothing from the last election. I changed my registration from Democrat to Independent as neither party has a place for me now. At 75 I've never seen it this bleak
Yep, that's right. What we're really going through is an epistemological crisis. As usual, Ted Gioia expresses it brilliantly. Martin Gurri nails the fundamental dynamics of it. The reaction of the establishment is just consistently to pretend that it's not happening and then to choke off discussion, which makes everything that much worse.
Sorry we can't make your silver years more pleasant!
I wrote about this issue from a rather different angle here. My thesis was the problem with the modern Left is the ideology is purely theoretical, unmoored to any real-world application. In contrast, the Left of a century ago was attached to an application. unionism. The Wobblies used Marxian concepts of a proletariat to pioneer the industrial union leading to things like the CIO. That people working in different industries with different ethnicities and cultures were part of the same tribe was a theoretical, not natural category.
Very interesting piece Mike. I should sign you up to write something for Persuasion. Yeah, that's definitely a lot of it. The 20th century left had one big idea, which was unions - and there's a lot to be said for that, but the labor movement lost its momentum some time ago. I've also never seen the left have a real answer to the problem of excess labor - people who aren't in unions but still need to work for a living. I suspect that a tremendous amount of the antipathy to the left (this goes back to the '70s or so) comes from the industrial unions being full-up and sending everybody who didn't have a union card out into the cold - and with the left being fully on the side of the unions.
Unions collapsed in the 1970's because of chronic labor surplus under which labor has no bargaining power. Unions work by focusing diffuse labor bargaining power into a strong force with whom capital needs to negotiate. In the absence of labor bargaining power there is nothing to focus and unions collapse. The relevant measure is strikes per year, which fell off a cliff after 1978.
It was clear that an inflation monster had been created, which required another 150 basis points of tightening (on top of the 1300) to finally slay. Doing so resulted in the creation of a “permanent recession” with unemployment remaining above NAIRU (average 8%) for seven years until the start of 1987...Maintaining high unemployment over most of the 1980’s not only destroyed Labor, it also permitted low inflation to co-exist with large deficits arising from massive tax cuts on the wealthy, which was a key plank of “Reaganomics.” As Dick Cheney would later put it, “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.” The theoretical justification for this policy was something called “supply-side economics”, which appears to be a conservative-friendly rebranding of Nixon’s Keynesianism. According to my cultural evolution model (link 3) the evisceration of Labor and reduction in top tax produced the shift from SC to SP business culture and their respective political manifestations as The New Deal and Neoliberal Orders.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a similar call to action in his 1947 book The Vital Center. He referred to the problem people as doughfaces and wailers “This split goes to the very heart of the liberal predicament. Where the doer is determined to do what he can to save free society, the wailer, by rejecting practical responsibility, serves the purpose of those who wish free society to fail.” Further on, “life, in short, is not a form of political soap opera: it is sometimes more complicated than one would gather from the liberal weeklies.”
I think that Schlesinger’s warning still has resonance. The extremists need to be jettisoned. Good essay.
Very interesting. I don't know that book. Thanks Guy! Yes, I like the idea of a militant center. That seems to be what worked in France. I don't know if it's so impossible for the US to generate an equivalent of the Renaissance Party.
I have for a long time considered myself a bleeding-heart moderate. Schlesinger is a little dated insofar as he deals primarily with totalitarianism and the Cold War, but his temperament suits me. I love his Age of Jackson, which everyone should read, particularly Democrats. I think that this is one of your better essays, although I would like to know more about your observations on the East.
Thanks Evets. Yeah, essentially. As fas as I can tell, the progressive movement overlaps pretty perfectly on the New Left, which overlaps in turn on people who would have been various kinds of soft Marxists (fellow travelers, etc) in the early part of the 20th century.
The "progressive left" is merely liberalism taken to one extreme.
On the far right of liberalism you have neoliberals and free market fundies who would rather have capitalists and capitalism in charge of everything than any form of democracy. Basically this comes down to protecting the absolute rights of the sovereign individual to do whatever he wants with money.
On the far left of liberalism you have progressives who prefer a government that protects the right of anyone to fuck anything wearing anything and restricts the right to say mean things about anyone related to their sexuality or their race in order to protect the absolute right of each and every sovereign individual to be and do whatever they want without experiencing friction from anyone else.
And then you have the "classical liberals" who whine about all the things that capitalism has destroyed and stand firmly in the path of anyone who would try to do away with capitalism.
And this is where the left comes in.
American political vocabulary, where Obama the Drone King is a socialist and Hillary Clinton giving BJs to Wall Street is "the radical left", is a species of idiocy.
No wonder Donald Trump is your leader and Marjorie Taylor Greene your intellectual guiding light.
I'm on the left and have the great fortune of not being American.
These days I find a certain species of American conservative, mainly Catholics as it happens, to have less of the taint of liberalism than most of the right and all of the so-called American left.
I highly recommend reading Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History
"It’s like watching somebody slowly drowning and, instead of trying to save themselves, focusing on drowning with dignity." Wow, what an apt description of how I'M feeling these days...
Calling the Jacobin "reactionary" shows that Sam doesn't know what the word means. And calling for more centrism is tone-deaf. That's what led us here.
Sam's use of the word "reactionary" is obviously ironic, as he explains in the sentence that follows: "There is the revealed wisdom as it emerged somewhere between the sans-culottes and the Communards and the sole real political obligation is to honor that sensibility."
And could you please explain how centrism led us here?
Thanks for getting my back Mary Jane. I was using 'reactionary' ironically - I mean that the left has become deeply attached to these totemic moments in the distant past. I assume, "Boating by Mail," that by "centrism" you mean HRC and Biden and this very milquetoast, brittle coalition-of-the-right-thinking that turned out to be no match for Trump?
The institutional corruption of the left-of-centre party (and of the right-of-centre party, of course) doesn't exactly bode well for the left's insistence on using the state to accomplish their aims. I understand that people have an affection for Bernie, but do they really believe that he would have been a kind of anti-Trump motivating the nation to live up to their higher selves?
I'm not sure where the liberals end and the left begins. I've heard some pretty crazy crap from people I would consider pretty normal Dems. (i.e. My Mother, a successful retired federal bureaucrat. Masters degree, etc. She believes every act of violence in Minneapolis in 2020 was done by neo-nazis in disguise. She has literally told me this. She has also said she's literally frightened when in Trump voting states.)
I'm talking in terms of pure voting numbers. Assuming everyone to the left of Robert Reich is cut off, isn't that a huge number of Democratic voters? If the play is to pull moderates currently non voting or voting for the other side,to replace them, I'm honestly not sure the numbers will work.
Hi Amos, yeah these are good questions. And please do keep in mind that my 'job' is to fulminate, not to develop actual-winning strategies.
What's been becoming clear to me is that liberals and the left have drastically different theories of political ethics. Liberalism is rooted in individual autonomy and then principles of reciprocity that extend throughout the society. (John Rawls is the theoretician of this and Alexandre Lefebvre lays it out nicely in a recent book.) The left is always a bit incoherent but what it does is to posit the world of perfect justice and equality and then work backwards from there - and the path to getting there inevitably involves either some great heroic surge of collective action or a centralized government that is going to impose a theoretically pure state and magically not take any extra power for itself. So I'm not Robbie Mook over here looking at my spreadsheet of likely voters, but I would say that liberal politicians kind of need to keep those categories in mind - to always be speaking the language of agency, and of available means to achieve tangible ends, as opposed to getting excited about arcs of history and that sort of thing. Keep it tight, never get sucked into the left's little melodramas, and force the left to suck it up and vote for liberals because there will never be viable left-wing candidates, is the winning strategy. It's not wildly far off what the Dems try to do, but the Clintons got drawn into some fairly left-wing ideas of reforming health care, and then Obama kept tacking left rhetorically at different moments in his presidency, and Biden/Harris got dragged down by never fully separating themselves from 'abolish the police' or some of the more extreme trans positions - and they lost the most consequential election in American history by pandering to people who would have voted for them anyway. - Sam
Basically, if I understand you correctly (if I mischaracterize please let me know!), you think that the Dems can pivot to "liberal" (or to the center or however you want to chracterize it) and not lose the left. Or at least retain enough of it. The left may not like it but they won't disappear for the most part. I don't think thats crazy.
I think the choke point there is primaries. That the left could rally around a single candidate and push out more sane politicians. I don't think this is a crazy fear, it's happened! And given my thesis that a lot of previously normal Dems have moved left (i.e. my mother) it seems especially possible. If I ran for office as a Dem with my 90's DLC type positions I'd be pretty worried about it. Over time, with many Dem politicians doing it, it would have an effect. But it would be a battle that I'm not sure I trust politicians to fight. Hope Im wrong!
Understanding the difference between Utopianism and scientific socialism actually clears this up quite simply. I agree that the state ‘whithering away’ is the weakest park of Marxist theory, which Marx himself would probably own up to. However, someone reading this piece might come away with the idea that it was socialists, and not centrists democrats, who’ve monopolized power on tbe ‘left’ since the 60s. I’m sure Sam knows this is the case. Why he pretends it’s otherwise is less clear.
Saying humans aren’t capable of collective action is ridiculous. All of human society is predicated on it. There are other ways to order society than the current one. From a cursory glance, it seems like many people are begging for literally anything else.
This reading of history is so skewed that I suspect it’s just bait. I guess it is, and I’m taking it. Don’t worry, I’m sure the dog will catch its tail one day.
Putting the word "scientific" in front of your preferred political ideology doesn't actually change the facts on the ground. Even if it were true that the left has always been shut out of power in the US (as if power isn't multifaceted), large swathes of the world were ruled by communists and socialists until the 90s, so we actually have a lot of data about the empirical consequences of socialism.
Claiming that all of human society is predicated on collective action ignores what Smith (a much better scientist than Marx) wrote back in 1776: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." This is not to say that political change isn't possible, but those trying to bring about lasting beneficial change should reckon with how people actually are and not how scientific socialists think they should be.
Scientific socialism is actually the theory that the socialized conditions of labor (i.e. large factories) amidst exploitation is what leads to class struggle and revolution. It is a reframing of Smith, not a refutation. Generosity or moralism has nothing to do with it. You might actually look into this instead of firing from the hip. ‘Empirically’ Marxist theory bears out with remarkable consistency.
If you want to talk about the history here, you might as well include the imperial wars that have been desperately fought to prevent any communist society anywhere from succeeding, the defeat of the nazis by the Soviets, the unprecedented defeat of global poverty by China. These societies have major flaws, of course, but at least they, unlike Smith, didn’t require the existence of a deity to make sense of their theories.
If we stick with China - the socialist revolution there preceded industrialisation, not the other way around. And poverty was only reduced after free market reforms and inclusion in the global economy.
Thanks for the comment. This isn't bait! I mean this very seriously. Yes, the 'withering away of the state' is the weakest part of Marxist theory, but it's a pretty important part of the theory, doncha think? If you have some kind of centralized power that's going to preside over redistribution of wealth and then is magically going to dissolve, it would be nice to have some mechanism of action by which it would dissolve, wouldn't it? I feel like anybody living under Stalinism or Maoism would have wished that Marx had spent more time on that section of the theory as opposed to doing another equation on absolute surplus-value.
I find Dunkelman to be very persuasive on these dynamics within the left in the '60s/'70s. The left in a very dramatic way made itself over into an obstructionist force. There were certainly understandable reasons for this - opposing Vietnam, etc - but activist approach forced its way into politics at all sorts of levels, maybe the local levels above all. It suddenly became extraordinarily difficult to do things in the fact of various kinds of activism and community opposition, and, essentially, the builders just gave up at some point. Things like grassroots left-wing groups keeping Amazon from putting new headquarters in Queens is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It wasn't anybody 'in power' but these small grassroots groups put spanners in the works for deals costing billions of dollars that would have vastly supported New York City's economy. You can multiply an episode like that by the thousands.
Appreciate the comment, Sam. Yes, I do think that it is a serious and unresolved issue in Marxism on what to do after the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is maybe too much to say in a comment thread, but these are a few points I'd like to add:
- I actually don't think at all that 'anyone' (meaning everyone) under Stalinism and Maoism regretted those revolutions. There are clear and well documented flaws in both societies, but the U.S. is absolutely inundated with anti-communist propaganda to this day that affects our thinking. The simple fact is that living conditions for average people absolutely improved in both the U.S.S.R and China under communism. In the case of China, they also managed to get out of a system of colonial domination that they'd suffered under for a century. Not to mention the fact that European style social democracy (and the diet version in the U.S.) would not exist if it weren't for the threat of communism and the need to placate organized labor in the inter/post war period.
- I think we have a big point of agreement on the need for political groups to seize power and that merely obstructing it is a bad strategy. I would argue that supply side economics is not actually a solution, but neither is the 'new left' brand of activism. For me, equality stems first from political economy.
- The amazon factory in Queens is not some unambiguous good thing. I'd argue it's, in fact, bad.
- The reason I thought your article was bait was largely because you described Robert Reich as a leftist when no leftist worth their salt would accept this. It's also rather ironic that you inveigh against the boring/humorless left while aligning with centrism that isn't, let's say, the most creative form of politics.
"It assumes a form of collective action and then a centralized entity which will act benevolently in accordance with the ‘general will,’ but collective action is never really achievable — human beings are too tangled for that — and it is beyond naive to imagine that any centralized entity, given unrestricted power, will act with perfect benevolence."
What utter nonsense. No one thinks a federal government is going to act with perfect benevolence. But that does not mean collective actions has no impact, no matter how tangled human beings are. And of course unrestricted power would be a problem in any democratic version of governance.
Almost the entire argument is a strawman fallacy. Any sweeping article about "the left" that doesn't mention Bernie Sanders, the leading figure of the popular left for the past decade, is fixated on a strawman left.
The Liberals who crushed this popular left, barely, are responsible for both of Trump's elections, and also for that of the genocidal Liberal Biden.
The left gives us so much: social security, medicare, medicaid, shorter workweek, safety regulations, and countless environmental and human rights laws and protections, implemented and active on an ongoing basis.
The left gives countless social goods and services, and the left constantly defends all this, and the left attempts to give so much more, as the right-wing and establishment Liberals attempt to tear much of it down and block the way forward.
And the progressive popular left is the only way to end the current civil war by way of a unifying social revolution.
And in fact, the progressive populist left is strong enough that this may well happen.
Thinking along parallel lines lately I was struck by the conflict between actual democratic practice, voting and sovereignty and the Marxist governance ideals .The conflict is intractable. Earth may be smaller now that we have carpeted almost the entire planet with digital communication capability, but its places and spaces and the people that occupy them on its surface still matter and deserve some status. Ultimately the Left doesn’t want it that way. As you noted, they prefer the laughably naive ‘model’ of benevolent rule by the leaders of class consciousness, as if the ascension of one ruling cohort over another could transform human nature and compel evil to make nice for the sake of the common good. Somehow that seems like a helluva stretch.
Yeah, I just feel like the left has no theory of action and never has and never will. If you read Rousseau, it's a real problem in his texts - and that issue just never goes away.
There is much to disagree on, but: It would be actually great if the liberals would stop pretending to be leftists caring for society. If they would go and pursue their individualistic ideology on some other playground (please take Jacobin along while you move on) it would be a win-win situation. So after all I shall endorse this ;-)
I think I have you in mind! There’s a mentality of purity that’s really a problem when you’re trying to put together meaningful coalitions. Progressives have exerted tremendous influence over the past decade on the Democratic Party and on the national conversation in general - and all of that has both contributed to the climate of illiberalism and been deeply instrumental in Trump’s successes. There is a mindset underneath that and I humbly suggest that anybody of that mindset knock it off and participate in the much-more-pragmatic task of coalition-building.
Hard to argue with your final lines, given the last decade: "The left is incoherent and fanatical in its incoherence. It’s time for liberals to see that and to focus on being the group that’s actually trying to get things done."
The Gaurdian is the worst offender in this regard: they are completely dedicated to following the latest fashion of the American progressive left, like the good provincials they are
The Guardian is the only one that has a decent attention turned towards the environment but yeah, on politics and culture - Marina Hyde notwithstanding – it’s not wonkish, it’s wankerish on this account. I go to the FT for news-news if I really need want it
I read through The Guardian very quickly on my news skims. At this point The New York Times is really the only meaningful left-of-center newspaper. The Washington Post, Guardian, LA Times, etc, are very pale reflections of whatever the NYT is doing.
I think it's worse than this, as there are a multitude of cords out there. This piece by Ted Gioia enumerating many of the areas is worth reading. https://substack.com/@tedgioia/p-165359384
The loss of credibility in many disciplines is directly related to those who went to allegedly elite institutions and were hired as they were allegedly highly educated and have now moved into positions of influence. In too many cases they are more indoctrinated than educated and are now frequently enforcing their dogmatic views onto others. You see it in education, journalism, psychology, social "sciences", anthropology, medicine, law in addition to politics. They are everywhere. There is a dangerous loss of trust in so many of our institutions. Hannah Arendt warned of the consequence of nobody believing anything anymore.
While liberals have been focused on the dangers of the far right , they have been remiss on the growing intolerant authoritarianism of the far left. It may be better not to refer to them as the far left but just authoritarians .. Orwell was a staunch socialist and wrote Animal Farm as a warning to those he felt had gone too far and lost the thread. He was heavily criticized for giving ammunition to the enemy. We needed an Orwell early on in this process.
Somehow we need a collision of the center left and center right to realize they have more in common with each other than they do with the extremes of either party. I don't see Democrats recognizing this as they appear to have learned nothing from the last election. I changed my registration from Democrat to Independent as neither party has a place for me now. At 75 I've never seen it this bleak
Yep, that's right. What we're really going through is an epistemological crisis. As usual, Ted Gioia expresses it brilliantly. Martin Gurri nails the fundamental dynamics of it. The reaction of the establishment is just consistently to pretend that it's not happening and then to choke off discussion, which makes everything that much worse.
Sorry we can't make your silver years more pleasant!
I wrote about this issue from a rather different angle here. My thesis was the problem with the modern Left is the ideology is purely theoretical, unmoored to any real-world application. In contrast, the Left of a century ago was attached to an application. unionism. The Wobblies used Marxian concepts of a proletariat to pioneer the industrial union leading to things like the CIO. That people working in different industries with different ethnicities and cultures were part of the same tribe was a theoretical, not natural category.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-abstract-versus-the-real-in-left
Very interesting piece Mike. I should sign you up to write something for Persuasion. Yeah, that's definitely a lot of it. The 20th century left had one big idea, which was unions - and there's a lot to be said for that, but the labor movement lost its momentum some time ago. I've also never seen the left have a real answer to the problem of excess labor - people who aren't in unions but still need to work for a living. I suspect that a tremendous amount of the antipathy to the left (this goes back to the '70s or so) comes from the industrial unions being full-up and sending everybody who didn't have a union card out into the cold - and with the left being fully on the side of the unions.
Thanks!
Unions collapsed in the 1970's because of chronic labor surplus under which labor has no bargaining power. Unions work by focusing diffuse labor bargaining power into a strong force with whom capital needs to negotiate. In the absence of labor bargaining power there is nothing to focus and unions collapse. The relevant measure is strikes per year, which fell off a cliff after 1978.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb123fd7a-15a2-4f69-9fca-af620b9412c1_598x241.gif
I write (see link 2):
It was clear that an inflation monster had been created, which required another 150 basis points of tightening (on top of the 1300) to finally slay. Doing so resulted in the creation of a “permanent recession” with unemployment remaining above NAIRU (average 8%) for seven years until the start of 1987...Maintaining high unemployment over most of the 1980’s not only destroyed Labor, it also permitted low inflation to co-exist with large deficits arising from massive tax cuts on the wealthy, which was a key plank of “Reaganomics.” As Dick Cheney would later put it, “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.” The theoretical justification for this policy was something called “supply-side economics”, which appears to be a conservative-friendly rebranding of Nixon’s Keynesianism. According to my cultural evolution model (link 3) the evisceration of Labor and reduction in top tax produced the shift from SC to SP business culture and their respective political manifestations as The New Deal and Neoliberal Orders.
link 2:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell#:~:text=It%20was%20clear,start%20of%201987%2C
link 3
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a similar call to action in his 1947 book The Vital Center. He referred to the problem people as doughfaces and wailers “This split goes to the very heart of the liberal predicament. Where the doer is determined to do what he can to save free society, the wailer, by rejecting practical responsibility, serves the purpose of those who wish free society to fail.” Further on, “life, in short, is not a form of political soap opera: it is sometimes more complicated than one would gather from the liberal weeklies.”
I think that Schlesinger’s warning still has resonance. The extremists need to be jettisoned. Good essay.
Very interesting. I don't know that book. Thanks Guy! Yes, I like the idea of a militant center. That seems to be what worked in France. I don't know if it's so impossible for the US to generate an equivalent of the Renaissance Party.
I have for a long time considered myself a bleeding-heart moderate. Schlesinger is a little dated insofar as he deals primarily with totalitarianism and the Cold War, but his temperament suits me. I love his Age of Jackson, which everyone should read, particularly Democrats. I think that this is one of your better essays, although I would like to know more about your observations on the East.
Good piece. I wonder if you see all who now call themselves ‘progressive’ as part of the Left.
Thanks Evets. Yeah, essentially. As fas as I can tell, the progressive movement overlaps pretty perfectly on the New Left, which overlaps in turn on people who would have been various kinds of soft Marxists (fellow travelers, etc) in the early part of the 20th century.
The "progressive left" is merely liberalism taken to one extreme.
On the far right of liberalism you have neoliberals and free market fundies who would rather have capitalists and capitalism in charge of everything than any form of democracy. Basically this comes down to protecting the absolute rights of the sovereign individual to do whatever he wants with money.
On the far left of liberalism you have progressives who prefer a government that protects the right of anyone to fuck anything wearing anything and restricts the right to say mean things about anyone related to their sexuality or their race in order to protect the absolute right of each and every sovereign individual to be and do whatever they want without experiencing friction from anyone else.
And then you have the "classical liberals" who whine about all the things that capitalism has destroyed and stand firmly in the path of anyone who would try to do away with capitalism.
And this is where the left comes in.
American political vocabulary, where Obama the Drone King is a socialist and Hillary Clinton giving BJs to Wall Street is "the radical left", is a species of idiocy.
No wonder Donald Trump is your leader and Marjorie Taylor Greene your intellectual guiding light.
Haha, that's pretty funny. So which side are you on lol? I guess you're anti-liberal?
I'm on the left and have the great fortune of not being American.
These days I find a certain species of American conservative, mainly Catholics as it happens, to have less of the taint of liberalism than most of the right and all of the so-called American left.
I highly recommend reading Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History
"It’s like watching somebody slowly drowning and, instead of trying to save themselves, focusing on drowning with dignity." Wow, what an apt description of how I'M feeling these days...
Lol. Thanks Leslie. I thought the Chris Hedges piece you sent really nailed it.
Calling the Jacobin "reactionary" shows that Sam doesn't know what the word means. And calling for more centrism is tone-deaf. That's what led us here.
Sam's use of the word "reactionary" is obviously ironic, as he explains in the sentence that follows: "There is the revealed wisdom as it emerged somewhere between the sans-culottes and the Communards and the sole real political obligation is to honor that sensibility."
And could you please explain how centrism led us here?
Thanks for getting my back Mary Jane. I was using 'reactionary' ironically - I mean that the left has become deeply attached to these totemic moments in the distant past. I assume, "Boating by Mail," that by "centrism" you mean HRC and Biden and this very milquetoast, brittle coalition-of-the-right-thinking that turned out to be no match for Trump?
The institutional corruption of the left-of-centre party (and of the right-of-centre party, of course) doesn't exactly bode well for the left's insistence on using the state to accomplish their aims. I understand that people have an affection for Bernie, but do they really believe that he would have been a kind of anti-Trump motivating the nation to live up to their higher selves?
I'm not sure where the liberals end and the left begins. I've heard some pretty crazy crap from people I would consider pretty normal Dems. (i.e. My Mother, a successful retired federal bureaucrat. Masters degree, etc. She believes every act of violence in Minneapolis in 2020 was done by neo-nazis in disguise. She has literally told me this. She has also said she's literally frightened when in Trump voting states.)
I'm talking in terms of pure voting numbers. Assuming everyone to the left of Robert Reich is cut off, isn't that a huge number of Democratic voters? If the play is to pull moderates currently non voting or voting for the other side,to replace them, I'm honestly not sure the numbers will work.
Hi Amos, yeah these are good questions. And please do keep in mind that my 'job' is to fulminate, not to develop actual-winning strategies.
What's been becoming clear to me is that liberals and the left have drastically different theories of political ethics. Liberalism is rooted in individual autonomy and then principles of reciprocity that extend throughout the society. (John Rawls is the theoretician of this and Alexandre Lefebvre lays it out nicely in a recent book.) The left is always a bit incoherent but what it does is to posit the world of perfect justice and equality and then work backwards from there - and the path to getting there inevitably involves either some great heroic surge of collective action or a centralized government that is going to impose a theoretically pure state and magically not take any extra power for itself. So I'm not Robbie Mook over here looking at my spreadsheet of likely voters, but I would say that liberal politicians kind of need to keep those categories in mind - to always be speaking the language of agency, and of available means to achieve tangible ends, as opposed to getting excited about arcs of history and that sort of thing. Keep it tight, never get sucked into the left's little melodramas, and force the left to suck it up and vote for liberals because there will never be viable left-wing candidates, is the winning strategy. It's not wildly far off what the Dems try to do, but the Clintons got drawn into some fairly left-wing ideas of reforming health care, and then Obama kept tacking left rhetorically at different moments in his presidency, and Biden/Harris got dragged down by never fully separating themselves from 'abolish the police' or some of the more extreme trans positions - and they lost the most consequential election in American history by pandering to people who would have voted for them anyway. - Sam
Basically, if I understand you correctly (if I mischaracterize please let me know!), you think that the Dems can pivot to "liberal" (or to the center or however you want to chracterize it) and not lose the left. Or at least retain enough of it. The left may not like it but they won't disappear for the most part. I don't think thats crazy.
I think the choke point there is primaries. That the left could rally around a single candidate and push out more sane politicians. I don't think this is a crazy fear, it's happened! And given my thesis that a lot of previously normal Dems have moved left (i.e. my mother) it seems especially possible. If I ran for office as a Dem with my 90's DLC type positions I'd be pretty worried about it. Over time, with many Dem politicians doing it, it would have an effect. But it would be a battle that I'm not sure I trust politicians to fight. Hope Im wrong!
Understanding the difference between Utopianism and scientific socialism actually clears this up quite simply. I agree that the state ‘whithering away’ is the weakest park of Marxist theory, which Marx himself would probably own up to. However, someone reading this piece might come away with the idea that it was socialists, and not centrists democrats, who’ve monopolized power on tbe ‘left’ since the 60s. I’m sure Sam knows this is the case. Why he pretends it’s otherwise is less clear.
Saying humans aren’t capable of collective action is ridiculous. All of human society is predicated on it. There are other ways to order society than the current one. From a cursory glance, it seems like many people are begging for literally anything else.
This reading of history is so skewed that I suspect it’s just bait. I guess it is, and I’m taking it. Don’t worry, I’m sure the dog will catch its tail one day.
Putting the word "scientific" in front of your preferred political ideology doesn't actually change the facts on the ground. Even if it were true that the left has always been shut out of power in the US (as if power isn't multifaceted), large swathes of the world were ruled by communists and socialists until the 90s, so we actually have a lot of data about the empirical consequences of socialism.
Claiming that all of human society is predicated on collective action ignores what Smith (a much better scientist than Marx) wrote back in 1776: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." This is not to say that political change isn't possible, but those trying to bring about lasting beneficial change should reckon with how people actually are and not how scientific socialists think they should be.
Scientific socialism is actually the theory that the socialized conditions of labor (i.e. large factories) amidst exploitation is what leads to class struggle and revolution. It is a reframing of Smith, not a refutation. Generosity or moralism has nothing to do with it. You might actually look into this instead of firing from the hip. ‘Empirically’ Marxist theory bears out with remarkable consistency.
If you want to talk about the history here, you might as well include the imperial wars that have been desperately fought to prevent any communist society anywhere from succeeding, the defeat of the nazis by the Soviets, the unprecedented defeat of global poverty by China. These societies have major flaws, of course, but at least they, unlike Smith, didn’t require the existence of a deity to make sense of their theories.
If we stick with China - the socialist revolution there preceded industrialisation, not the other way around. And poverty was only reduced after free market reforms and inclusion in the global economy.
Hi Robbie,
Thanks for the comment. This isn't bait! I mean this very seriously. Yes, the 'withering away of the state' is the weakest part of Marxist theory, but it's a pretty important part of the theory, doncha think? If you have some kind of centralized power that's going to preside over redistribution of wealth and then is magically going to dissolve, it would be nice to have some mechanism of action by which it would dissolve, wouldn't it? I feel like anybody living under Stalinism or Maoism would have wished that Marx had spent more time on that section of the theory as opposed to doing another equation on absolute surplus-value.
I find Dunkelman to be very persuasive on these dynamics within the left in the '60s/'70s. The left in a very dramatic way made itself over into an obstructionist force. There were certainly understandable reasons for this - opposing Vietnam, etc - but activist approach forced its way into politics at all sorts of levels, maybe the local levels above all. It suddenly became extraordinarily difficult to do things in the fact of various kinds of activism and community opposition, and, essentially, the builders just gave up at some point. Things like grassroots left-wing groups keeping Amazon from putting new headquarters in Queens is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It wasn't anybody 'in power' but these small grassroots groups put spanners in the works for deals costing billions of dollars that would have vastly supported New York City's economy. You can multiply an episode like that by the thousands.
- Sam
Appreciate the comment, Sam. Yes, I do think that it is a serious and unresolved issue in Marxism on what to do after the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is maybe too much to say in a comment thread, but these are a few points I'd like to add:
- I actually don't think at all that 'anyone' (meaning everyone) under Stalinism and Maoism regretted those revolutions. There are clear and well documented flaws in both societies, but the U.S. is absolutely inundated with anti-communist propaganda to this day that affects our thinking. The simple fact is that living conditions for average people absolutely improved in both the U.S.S.R and China under communism. In the case of China, they also managed to get out of a system of colonial domination that they'd suffered under for a century. Not to mention the fact that European style social democracy (and the diet version in the U.S.) would not exist if it weren't for the threat of communism and the need to placate organized labor in the inter/post war period.
- I think we have a big point of agreement on the need for political groups to seize power and that merely obstructing it is a bad strategy. I would argue that supply side economics is not actually a solution, but neither is the 'new left' brand of activism. For me, equality stems first from political economy.
- The amazon factory in Queens is not some unambiguous good thing. I'd argue it's, in fact, bad.
- The reason I thought your article was bait was largely because you described Robert Reich as a leftist when no leftist worth their salt would accept this. It's also rather ironic that you inveigh against the boring/humorless left while aligning with centrism that isn't, let's say, the most creative form of politics.
"It assumes a form of collective action and then a centralized entity which will act benevolently in accordance with the ‘general will,’ but collective action is never really achievable — human beings are too tangled for that — and it is beyond naive to imagine that any centralized entity, given unrestricted power, will act with perfect benevolence."
What utter nonsense. No one thinks a federal government is going to act with perfect benevolence. But that does not mean collective actions has no impact, no matter how tangled human beings are. And of course unrestricted power would be a problem in any democratic version of governance.
Almost the entire argument is a strawman fallacy. Any sweeping article about "the left" that doesn't mention Bernie Sanders, the leading figure of the popular left for the past decade, is fixated on a strawman left.
The Liberals who crushed this popular left, barely, are responsible for both of Trump's elections, and also for that of the genocidal Liberal Biden.
The left gives us so much: social security, medicare, medicaid, shorter workweek, safety regulations, and countless environmental and human rights laws and protections, implemented and active on an ongoing basis.
The left gives countless social goods and services, and the left constantly defends all this, and the left attempts to give so much more, as the right-wing and establishment Liberals attempt to tear much of it down and block the way forward.
And the progressive popular left is the only way to end the current civil war by way of a unifying social revolution.
And in fact, the progressive populist left is strong enough that this may well happen.
Thinking along parallel lines lately I was struck by the conflict between actual democratic practice, voting and sovereignty and the Marxist governance ideals .The conflict is intractable. Earth may be smaller now that we have carpeted almost the entire planet with digital communication capability, but its places and spaces and the people that occupy them on its surface still matter and deserve some status. Ultimately the Left doesn’t want it that way. As you noted, they prefer the laughably naive ‘model’ of benevolent rule by the leaders of class consciousness, as if the ascension of one ruling cohort over another could transform human nature and compel evil to make nice for the sake of the common good. Somehow that seems like a helluva stretch.
Yeah, I just feel like the left has no theory of action and never has and never will. If you read Rousseau, it's a real problem in his texts - and that issue just never goes away.
Rude.
Yes, but there's a certain self-sanctification that the left has that I'm really sick of - and deserves to be called out.
There is much to disagree on, but: It would be actually great if the liberals would stop pretending to be leftists caring for society. If they would go and pursue their individualistic ideology on some other playground (please take Jacobin along while you move on) it would be a win-win situation. So after all I shall endorse this ;-)
Haha! What a complicated way to get to an endorsement but I'll take it!
It‘s a bit unfair to be charming even in disagreement, but I’ll take it, too.