Power and the Left
I’m going to belatedly respond to TAS comments regular and sometime blogger in his own right Freddie’s crie de coeur for a more seriously left-wing voice in the blogosphere.
A great many points have been made already, so let me content myself with these few:
The left that Freddie appears to have nostalgia for is the 1930s-era left, influenced by Marxist ideas and anchored first and foremost in support for trade unionism. (Or, possibly, he’s nostalgia for an even earlier, pre-World War I left; I’m not entirely sure.) The point is, this left has been gone for a very long time. In both the United States and Western Europe, the major trade unions became part of the political establishment by the 1950s. And in the Soviet sphere, a nominally proletarian ruling party became a self-evidently imperial bureaucracy.
That’s why the New Left went in a very different direction from the Old Left. The 1960s were a heyday of managerial liberalism in America. But the New Left was opposed to that liberal establishment – for a wide variety of reasons, but substantially because of a deep distrust of power as such. The obvious madness of the Cultural Revolution in China could be admired in many quarters, and the primary reason was that this was a revolution that could not be institutionalized into an establishment, a revolution against authority as such.
If you look at the energy on the radical left today, it’s still derivative primarily of the New Left of the 1970s, not the Old Left of the 1930s. It’s animated by a distrust of power rather than a desire to seize power on behalf of the powerless. The folks who protest the WTO or who vote for the Greens don’t want government to nationalize industry for the benefit of the working class. They want to weaken industry. They don’t want a strong government to serve as a balance against global corporate power. They want corporate power broken.
As I said before in a different context, radical critiques can be extremely useful. But they are critiques, not programs in their own right. And I think that explains part of what Freddie observes about the nature of the commentariat.
For a young member of the commentariat, a big part of the appeal is going to be feeling like one is in the arena – having an influence on events through one’s commentary. The powerful radical thinkers on the left – folks like Noam Chomsky – are not especially useful for this, because they are not advancing a program for taking and using power, but rather opposition to power as such. And if one is going to have influence from a position of opposition to power, one is much more likely to be effective as a vituperative liberal like Glenn Greenwald, whose most powerful attacks involve bringing a liberal political order face to face with its most egregious violations of its own purported ideals.
Guys like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias are the proper heirs to the confident managerial liberals of the 1960s establishment. They want to see a strong government serve as a check on massive corporate power. They want to build a “great society.” They’ve internalized the 1970s-era criticisms of right-wing-liberals toward that managerial state – a preference for market mechanisms over command-and-control solutions, danger of regulatory capture and self-dealing by managers, etc. – but with a view to making that state work better.
And Barack Obama is cut from similar cloth. It’s worth meditating a bit on Obama’s career, because he started out as somebody asking questions not dissimilar to those Freddie is, implicitly, asking. Obama’s orientation, throughout his life, has been toward power: how does it work, how can it be captured, how can it be wielded. Alinsky’s whole body of work revolves around this question: how to organize the powerless so they can acquire power and wield it on their own behalf. And Obama’s initial political experience was working for an IAF affiliate organization.
He was not, in other words, a New Leftist of the sort I described above, critical of power as such. But what he appears to have learned from his IAF experience is that organizing is insufficient. The amount of power to be had by organizing poor housing project tenants was insufficient to even achieve much for those tenants, to say nothing of actually changing the distribution of power within society as a whole. So he set out to join the managerial state, in the hopes of making that state work better. But, of course, once you join the managerial state, you must operate according to that state’s rules and assumptions.
If Freddie objects to the specifics of, say, Matt Yglesias’s policy preferences, but accepts his overall political orientation – a progressive liberal who wants to make the managerial state work better – then there’s really no reason for strong language. But what I think he objects to is Matt’s comfort with the managerial state as such. In which case, I have to ask: is Freddie a New Leftist or an Old Leftist? Does he object to the managerial state because it is simply another wielder of overweening power, inevitably serving the interests of the dominant class? If so, he shouldn’t be surprised that the liberal commentariat doesn’t see it that way, nor should he expect them to change. But I think there’s plenty of room on the internet for thoroughgoing radical critiques of the sort he might prefer.
If, on the other hand, he’s something of an Old Left nostalgist, then the question is: who out there in the real world is advancing a program for the 21st century that mirrors the goals of the Old Left, to seize and wield power on behalf of the people?
I think that your analysis is somewhat off-target. The thrust of Freddie’s critique seems to be with the marginalization of working class economic concerns and the internalization of neoliberal economics, not power as such.
— arbitrista · Jan 20, 06:39 PM · #
Called to the carpet as I have been, I hope to answer some of your larger questions at L’Hote, and, if you take a look, you may find that I have already gone some way towards doing that.
One thing that I will say is that I think that (to a degree but not entirely) this response is, similar to Tim Lee’s and Erik Kain’s, accepting the premises of my complaint but denying the analytic consequences of those premises. Which is fine, but getting people around on the legitimacy of the premises is a big part of my project in the first place.
— Freddie · Jan 20, 06:53 PM · #
I wouldn’t add to what Tyler Cowen wrote, nor to what you did, but to get down in the weeds a bit:
It’s hard to talk about left/labor like we ``used’‘ to in part because there’s a distinction between private sector and public sector unions. Many people (like myself) think the decline of the former has bad consequences, but the latter are loathsome. And it’s not obvious that support of public sector unios is really a “left” concept (God knows they seem to check government power pretty well, although they do make it cost more). But realistically the public sector labor movement is where you have to talk about unions right now.
Furthermore I think that it’s a bit misleading to try to say, there’s no real left left, but there’s a real right right. I remember the rise of Limbaugh in the late 80’s/early 90’s well. At that time I think even in the right he was seen as something of a fringe buffoon. You’d hear this guy in bars when you went drinking and the guys shouting encouragement would happily concede that he was a bozo who didn’t know what he was talking about, but for reasons I couldn’t fathom they dug him. OK. But the neolibs sort of deliberately used him and Liddy and so on as strawmen, voices of the Right, and tht strengthened their hands a lot. Somethign similar is going on with Palin now. The point is I think there’s a hard right wherever there’s a Clinton left because I think the two sort of feed on each other and that pattern’s been around a long while, whereas I think the middle-right prefers to elevate wacky celebrity types (that being easier, for one thing), so there isn’t a comparable relationship to Chomsky.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 20, 07:02 PM · #
The second paragraph of the Kid’s comment—the bit about how the center-left elevates the hard right, while the hard right elevates “wacky celebrity types“—is a great point, and one I haven’t seen Freddie respond to at his place (yet).
— Nick Baumann · Jan 20, 08:16 PM · #
Although Millman’s response to the deBoer post is thoughtful and perceptive, I think he misrepresents the New Left somewhat — particularly Noam Chomsky:
http://innocentsmithjournal.com/2011/01/20/what-noam-chomsky-actually-says-about-power/
— Innocent Smith · Jan 20, 08:33 PM · #
I’m not exactly sure what Freddie himself wants, but one obvious weak spot in contemporary public policy discourse is a lack of concern for the American working class. For example, how much attention did Thomas Geoghegan’s recent book on the economic success of the highly unionized German economy, “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?”, receive? Fifty years ago, Geoghegan, a labor union lawyer, would have been a leading intellectual of the Democratic Party, but today he’s a marginal figure. I gave his book a highly favorable review in VDARE.com, but who else paid much attention to it?
— Steve Sailer · Jan 20, 09:12 PM · #
One obvious change over the generations is that journalism has become a much more respectable profession, with the class origins of media figures rising significantly. In turn, journalists have become much more obsessed with policing the boundaries of respectability (or, to use the term of the recent rage-driven establishment media nervous breakdown: “civility”). As we saw with all the hate-filled “Climate of Hate” diatribes by the most respectable pundits, to many in the media, the working class (broadly defined) represents The Other, the object of atavistic fear and loathing.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 20, 09:40 PM · #
To start I’d take an acknowledgment that the American working class matters and that the decline in their compensation and quality of job is a loss of human welfare that absolutely deserves to be taken seriously.
— Freddie · Jan 20, 11:56 PM · #
Well said.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 21, 12:06 AM · #
Steve,
I want to restrict immigration just as much as you do, but saying nice things about Geoghegan I have to ask you “whose side are you on”? Wink, wink!
On a more serious note, taken from Tom’s website:
“In 1979, Tom moved to Chicago, where he joined the law firm headed by the man who would become his mentor, the legendary Leon Despres, who for many decades was among Chicago’s most prominent reformers and progressive voices. At Despres, Schwartz and Geoghegan, Tom has filed suits in a wide variety of public interest, labor, and employment law cases. He has successfully represented countless individuals who were discriminated against in the workplace due to their race, sex, disability, age or sexual orientation, and he has sued employers who violated sexual harassment laws and the Family and Medical Leave Act. He has also filed lawsuits to enforce child labor laws, expand voting rights, crack down on the payday loan industry, and require public health measures to stop the spread of tuberculosis among the homeless.”
I’m sure many (most?) of those lawsuits have done a lot of good for society [cough, cough].
More seriously, even though I’m willing to entertain heretical ideas about immigration, I just can’t take the rest of the Old Left seriously — trade unions, protectionism, etc. German growth and prosperity owes a lot to the unique circumstances that West Germany found itself in after WWII. After union with the East, we can see that the German model is already slowing down and having a harder time providing the supposedly good life to everyone (and don’t get me or Theo Sarrazin started about the Turks).
Anyway, the question of how to help the American working class should start with a more basic question — what is the problem with the American working class? My discussion topcis would include marriage, culture, immigration, etc. I doubt Freddie would even consider the topics and so he’ll just continue to pound the table and yell “unions”. Meanwhile, millions of cars are being built by working class men in non-union states in the south and if those men value hard-work, save their money, get married, go to church on Sunday, etc. and do everything we expect someone who is brought up with decent values to do, they’ll do just fine in today’s economy — in fact, I’d argue they’ll do better than their German counterparts because they’ll enjoy cheap consumer goods that are unavailable to their European brothers and sisters (this is sort of the Will Wilkinson argument). We just need our government to hold up their end of the bargain and maintain law and order and public services — tough to do with an underclass of third-world laborers on top of our native underclass of African-Americans.
— Jeff Singer · Jan 21, 12:28 AM · #
We live in George Grant’s world as well as Francis Fukuyama’s in the following sense: the only meaningful opposition to capitalism is conservative or reactionary. It is easy enough to oppose capitalism on the ground that as a result of its subversive and out-of-control dynamics, everything solid melts into air. It is absurd to oppose it on the grounds that it fetters the development of the forces of production.
We can be conservatives — upholding some existing institution (possibly even biological humanity) against the trinity of individualism-science-markets. We can be reactionaries, deciding it is all too late anyway. Or we can be libertarians and decide the future’s so bright we have to wear shades.
At the same time, it does not seem that any viable political coalition can be based on being consistently conservative or consistently libertarian.
The trade union and a public norm of lifelong marriage both seem doomed, but no one is really going to defend or oppose them both (except for intellectual circles as politically irrelevant as the reactionaries who refuse political engagement on principle).
— Pithlord · Jan 21, 01:04 AM · #
In fact while I think Cowen and others have amply demonstrated why the de Boer thesis is mistaken in the general sense, I also think that the (less interesting) job of pointing out why it’s nuts down in the weeds can still be fleshed out a lot, and I think Sailer’s commentary points to one set of issues having to o with labor.
Note first that I think the whole post is nuts because it works within a left/right framework that largely doesn’t describe how opinion works and is framed — never did but does less and less. Policy preferences seem to exist among many axes now. Oddly I think Freddie would concede exactly that enthusiastically but nonetheless a false left/right vocabulary pervades his post. Now, there is a Democrat/Republican split and that’s something else, but lots of self-described liberals (like me) would never think of calling themselves Democrats, and anyway that dynamic works very differently: sometime during the Clinton administration the Democrats ceased being interested in the very poor and became the party of stealing from the rich and giving to the middle class, and I can do without that(*). But to the extent a lot of widely-read ``left’‘ bloggers are in fact Democratic partisans (I’d argue that most are — certainly Klein — and similarly most ``right’‘ bloggers are more accurately Republicans), then I think deBoer is tripped up right off by the sample size: there aren’t a lot of ``left’‘ bloggers out there, and all he’s seeing is that the Democrats have moved away from a focus on poverty/blue-collar labor.
So back to labor. It’s much discussed that within the Republican coaliton there’s religious-social cons and neocons and business cons and Ron Paulites and the fracture lines between them are taboo subjects for them, places where all you get is a quick party-line and we waltz away from the subject as fast as possible. Well, I’d argue that the Democratic coalition is still more fractured and has been since the Clinton years, and the fault lines there are particularly dense around ``labor,’‘ so all that happens when you bring it up in Democratic circles is, people spit out the line that they’d like more union power, and drive on real fast.
There are fault lines there because those middle class blue collar union workers — yeah, let’s help ‘em and all, rah workers, but they also happen to kind of suck. They like a certain Jack Murtha-esque kind of Democrat and their hardass shop stewards can be organized to fight the Democratic ``ground war’‘ but those people form a lot of the Republican base! These are mostly not people who can tell Rachmaninoff from Brahms or who know who Nina Totenberg is, these are people who are suspicious of Ivy League liberals and Hollywood, these are part of the large majority of Americans who think evolution is suspect. In fact I’ve generally felt like the association of Democrats with blue-collar unions is a holdover, much as Democratic control of the South was, basically held in place by history and by the strong Democratic association with white-collar public sector unions (which, as I mentioned, are loathsome): someday soon it’ll be the Republicans out there championing the UAW.
And those blue-collar union interests really do lie at the fault lines. As Mickey Kaus points out (and, there’s a recognizably New Democrat voice: I disagree with much of his politics but he is very recognizably of the strain of Democrat that was in the ascendant in the early ’90s — but I think there are fewer Kaus-types out there blogging than there are far-left-libs or whatever we call ‘em, even though there’s a hell of a lot more sympathy for Kaus-like positions in the general populace, how come deBoer isn’t bitching about that?), blue-collar labor’s interests collide with those of poor immigrants. At the low end, immigrants compete for jobs and depress their wages. So there’s an intra-coalition tension there and the relationship between the union movement and immigration has been, at the leadership level, complex and ever changing (and at the rank-and-file level they may plain not like immigration).
There’s another intra-coalition tension — or a few of them — on internationalism. Freddie tells us that “the American working class matters and that the decline in their compensation and quality of job is a loss of human welfare that absolutely deserves to be taken seriously.” But remove the one word, “American,” and the blue-collar (and recently the white-collar) unions become a problem: look at the masses of workers in Korea and India and China and realize that nothing has done as much to help the human welfare of the working class in recent history, as the breaking of the unions forced to compete with the world’s pool of labor. We’ve met our brother workers, Joe, and lots of ‘em will do much better by screwing us.
There are even intra-working-class-American tension. Jason Furman did a wonderful job explicating the way the rise of Wal-Mart did and does much to help impoverished America, and yet that rise has been in some measure dependent on strict anti-union policy. Meanwhile in an irrevocably globalized world, we really are concerned for our manufacturing and heavy industry and are more sympathetic to cost-cutting, even on the backs of workers, than we would otherwise have been.
The point isn’t to rehash right-wing anti-union rhetoric as to point out that within the Democratic coalition, multiple deep rifts all join up around labor. The likely long term-solution is that the unions will get jettisoned from the coalition as Democrats find more ground support from some other source — Wall Street or immigrant groups or whatever — and then deBoer will get a burst of his labor blogging as the two different coalitions knock themselves out trying to get the hammer-slinger vote, and then they’ll find a home over with the social cons and it’ll go away again.
(*)In fact, fuck the middle class. Those whiners will be OK. The rich need them to buy more shit. I will hereby vote for any candidate, however objectionable, who makes “Fuck the middle class” his/her slogan. Think about it, Ms. Palin. Plus you have this thing going on, and it could only synergize.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 21, 02:27 AM · #
Pith,
As a provincial American, I have to admit I hadn’t heard of Mr. Grant until you mentioned him. La Wik says, “The subjects of his books, essays, public lectures, and radio addresses (many on CBC Radio in Canada) quite frequently combined philosophy, religion, and political thought. Grant strongly critiqued what he believed were the worst facets of modernity, namely unbridled technological advancement and a loss of moral foundations to guide humanity. He defined ‘philosophy’ as the search for the “purpose and meaning and unity of life”.6 What he proposed in place of the modern spirit was a synthesis of Christian and Platonic thought which embodied contemplation of the ‘good’.”
Now I suspect someone didn’t do a very good job with this entry — this description just makes it seem like he’s a standard Neo-Scholastic philosopher, so maybe I’m missing something; but regardless, Grant seems like an interesting guy.
— Jeff Singer · Jan 21, 03:05 AM · #
. Or we can be libertarians and decide the future’s so bright we have to wear shades.
Here’s a big part of the issue. Neoliberalism is such a triumphalist discourse that it inevitably papers over those who fall through the cracks. There’s such a desperate desire to see the inevitable rise of the great capitalist utopia that the very real suffering of people whose material well being is disrupted by the changing economic climate. This makes it harder to address that suffering with the democratic process.
— Freddie · Jan 21, 03:38 AM · #
Thanks for the excellent comments. It’s always good to hear from Pithlord.
“Meanwhile, millions of cars are being built by working class men in non-union states in the south”
True, but most of those factories are there largely because of the Reagan Administration’s 1982 protectionist decision to impose import quotas on Japanese cars, a fact that seems almost completely forgotten today. Back in 1982, with my shiny new BA in Economics, I opposed this policy as violating the Theory of Free Trade.
Today, I dunno, it seems like it worked out pretty good. But the event seems largely to have been forgotten about because it doesn’t fit into conventional theoretical frameworks.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 21, 04:33 AM · #
It’s important to remember, too, that the threat of unionizing keeps non-union car factory wages high.
— Freddie · Jan 21, 04:42 AM · #
I think Freddies correct (I don’t want to say right). In the old days the left ideal was that everyone got a fair share of a NATION’s production. That devolved to the welfare state which basically means that everyone gets a baseline share of a nation’s production which is now in the process of devolving to…. what. Look on the front page of the times. People are trying to figure out how states can go bankrupt so that they can, in part, escape the commitments to employee pensions. Our taxes are much lower than they used to be and cutting medicare and social security is definitely on the table, though maybe hidden under a napkin out of site of the average citizen.
I think this is a conversation we definitely need to have. What kind of society do we want to live in? What do we want to pay for with our taxes. What kind of work do we want to do? We talk about government over-promising and how we can’t afford all this crap but what the true fact is, we can’t afford all this crap with the tax rates we now pay. We could pay more taxes and pay for the kind of medical care we seem to want (not me, but on average) or we could decide to share in the domination of the world and divert money we spend on the military to the medical care we seem to want. These are the kinds of conversations we need to have and they implicitly include the leftist ideal.
— cw · Jan 21, 06:03 AM · #
Just a factual correction m— Obama did’t work for an IAF affiliate, he worked for an afilliate of the Gamaliel Network, which has a similar model and orientation, but in institutionally completely separate.
— Ben · Jan 21, 01:13 PM · #
Leave it to Sailer to scuff up MY shiny (but old) BA in economics…
— Jeff Singer · Jan 21, 02:03 PM · #
I find this final question a bit puzzling. It wasn’t strictly in the twenty-first century, but wasn’t Al Gore’s slogan in his presidential bid, “For the people agianst the powerful”? And did he not propose to seize and wield power? A perfectly ordinary social democrat could easily describe the mission statement of his or her party as seizing and wielding power for the benefit of the working class. Mind you, so could lots of other people.
Sure, no insurrection is involved, but even Daniel DeLeon and Eugene Debs were happy to seize and wield power through elections.
Unlike Daniel DeLeon, this social democrat wouldn’t be talking about nationalizing all large industry. But is that really an important difference? Nationalizing all large industry just doesn’t help advance the interests of the proletariat — a fact recognized in practice by the Second International a hundred years ago and in theory fifty years ago.
— Pithlord · Jan 21, 09:51 PM · #
Of course, the issue is whose policies are really benefitting the people. But that brings you back to all the wonky, managerial stuff.
— Pithlord · Jan 22, 04:27 PM · #
Three comments seem apposite here, in no particular order. Over the last fifty years, the cultural left has come to eclipse the economic left, while the opposite has happened on the right. While supporters of the national right to life organizations trooped to the polls and voted Republican for thirty-seven years with little or no effect on laws or social structures, the cultural left has demanded and got many of their agenda items passed into policy and law. Union leaders of the seventies and eighties at times made the mistake of disrespecting the cultural left, and I think that to some extent they and their members have paid for it.
This reflects an ongoing tension in movements for social change, which George Orwell captured very well in his essay on Charles Dickens: the tension between promoting individual ethics and changing social structures. Orwell wrote at a time when Marxist politics had reached their zenith and the full focus of the left lay in changing social structures using the force of the state. But in that same essay, Orwell presciently observe that “the sappers are at work”, and indeed the emergence of the anti-oppression movements in the sixties led to a politics focused on changing individual behaviour. This brought much of the emphasis on the left back to the call that Orwell discerned so clearly from Dickens, for individuals to behave decently.
Finally, the very nature of political and economic power has changed significantly in the world today as a result of technological changes. For example, the free software movement has all but eliminated rent-seeking in many important areas of computer software marketplace, particularly in the vital area of development tools. This raises the question: if the new technology and the new economy permit us to create informal sharing economies, to what extent does it make sense to transition away from more formal popular organizations and interventionist governments?
— John Spragge · Jan 22, 10:04 PM · #
Perhaps the simplest explanation for why people like leading young pundits like Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein aren’t very interested in the fate of the American working class is that family ties to the working class are much rarer today than just a generation or two ago among American Jews. Since high level public discourse in the U.S. tends to focus upon whatever our most intellectually dynamic and outspoken ethnicity finds interesting, and since younger American Jews don’t have many personal reasons for finding working class concerns very interesting anymore, the topic has largely disappeared.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 23, 06:32 AM · #
True, but most of those factories are there largely because of the Reagan Administration’s 1982 protectionist decision to impose import quotas on Japanese cars,
Why would protectionist policies drive a factory from Michigan to Alabama?
— jd · Jan 23, 08:27 PM · #
“Why would protectionist policies drive a factory from Michigan to Alabama?”
No, most of the Japanese factories built in America after 1982 were driven’t, they were greenfield start-up operations, typically in low-wage, anti-union, Scots-Irish parts of the country. But, they were in America.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 24, 03:03 AM · #
Whereas this thread is ostensibly about “power and the left,” and whereas to the left, everything is political, be it therefore resolved that the readers of The American Scene congratulate Rush Limbaugh on the defeat of President Obama in the NFL playoffs today.
(I presume Rush is still a big fan of the Steelers like he was in the early 90s.)
In recent years I’ve paid very little attention to NFL football, but I got interested in today’s games because of two Central Division teams going against each other, and because it was an old, historic rivalry at that.
— The Reticulator · Jan 24, 04:50 AM · #
No, most of the Japanese factories built in America after 1982 were driven’t, they were greenfield start-up operations, typically in low-wage, anti-union, Scots-Irish parts of the country. But, they were in America.
Yes, in fact, more auto worker jobs were “outsourced” to Alabama than anywhere else in the world.
— jd · Jan 24, 01:50 PM · #
I’m not sure it’s true that the subject of the white working class has been neglected in left coversation. It is true that much of that conversation has a subtext of “why won’t those dummies become reliable social democratic voters like their cousins in Europe?” But liberals love being self-critical, so they are happy to propose answers that blame themselves.
— Pithlord · Jan 24, 04:44 PM · #
You attached the adjective white, because doing so is provocative, but in fact it is the Hispanic and black middle and lower classes that are most affected by these phenomena.
— Freddie · Jan 24, 05:53 PM · #
No, I did so because the black and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Hispanic working class are reliable social-democratic voters, and so don’t raise the same problem from the perspective of centre-left electoral strategy.
— Pithlord · Jan 24, 08:07 PM · #
The GOP strategy has been to use immigration to crush private sector unions; the Democratic strategy has been to use immigration to elect a new nation. Both ploys seem likely to work.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 25, 10:02 AM · #