What next, you ask?
A cliffhanger.
Well, answering what next always starts with considering what has been, which often meanders into wondering what might have been?.
I, like so many, have been thinking about The Crash of 2008 as the moment when Democrats—and government writ large—lost the confidence of their post-Depression core constituencies.
I think, for example, what kind of world would we live in today if 2008 government bailouts had been forcefully and meaningfully directed at keeping folks in their homes instead of keeping oligarchs in their C-Suites?
Then, my wondering mind wanders its way back a decade.
What if Bill Clinton hadn’t buddied up with Phil Gramm to torpedo Glass-Steagall? Then there’d’ve been no Crash in the first place, yeah?
Or more broadly, what if Clinton had used his potent charm and rhetoric to move the Democratic Party to the left instead of to the middle? Most notably, what if the Clintons had resisted instead of embraced free trade?
Would we live in a less chaotic 2024?Counterfactualizing, though, is a bit like fever-dreaming, isn’t it?
Anyway, I kinda subscribe to a structuralist view of history - a view which pretty much obliterates the urge to indulge in counterfactuals: trends are gonna trend, tides are gonna roll, storms are gonna surge. Politicians and movements, all they really do is set their sails to the winds, surf the waves, get carried away by the currents.
I kinda doubt the Obama team coulda mustered the Congressional support needed to direct massive bailouts to the middle class instead of to the Oligarchs. I mean, Congress is and always has been a subsidiary of Corporate America, and as long as we live within market-based political economies, I don’t see that ever changing in a lasting and meaningful way. Wealth will always find a way to exert disproportionate power. It may get sent to its corner from time-to-time by this or that political movement or even revolution, but it will always come back.
A more leftist Clinton (bruised from the collapse of his health care reform push) likely woulda lost the ‘96 election. A usually dour President Dole woulda gleefully signed Gramm-Leach and NAFTA.
Still, in the end, even a more centrist or politically pragmatic Democratic Party more earnestly fights for economic underdogs than any version of the Republican Party we have ever seen, including the Trumpian populist version, which is so callous in its misdirection, so dystopian, half the electorate is left wondering good God almighty have we been beamed into Severance Season 2?
So, then, why, why oh why can’t Democrats capture the hearts and minds of the poor and the working, the black and the brown anymore?
The murder of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and internet trolls and liars are significant and attractive places to begin the investigation. Yes, we are certainly getting out- propaganda’d.
But I don’t think that’s it. I haven’t done the measuring, but I am guessing the number of hard right media transmitters and trolls more or less equals the number of hard left trumpeters.
There is something more seductive about the hard right message itself.
What if the answer is that poor and middle classes are inherently right wing, such that sustaining effective progressive coalitions is a gargantuan lift that’s only possible during a perfect storm of historical events?
Something like, maybe, idunno, I’m just spitballin’ here, say:
a Great Depression + a World War + the rise of a Rival Nuclear Superpower?
My favorite post-election analysis so far actually was recorded a couple of days before the election:
Historian Gary Gerstle argues that the FDR’s economic reforms would not have survived the post WW2 election cycles had not the Soviet Union’s project of international confiscation made the New Deal seem like a better deal to capitalists than the alternative.
And here’s the rub, the New Deal was only leftist economic reform, not social reform, the proof is in the redlining.
Roosevelt won critical New Deal support from Southern Democrats only by promising not to @#$% with Jim Crow.
Fast forward now to the mythic 50’s: the first cracks in the Eisenhowerian consensus appear when cries for civil rights and counterculturalism, and later anti-war and anti-colonialism, gained louder voice within the progressive movement.
Gerstle points to the alienation blue collar workers experience as the civil rights and Vietnam protests of the 60’s consume American streets. Goldwater, Buckley and the Chicago School are right there to exploit the rift. Goldwater of course stumbles, but Nixon and Reagan pick up the mantle, adeptly convincing workers to trade in their Union Cards for Silent Majority Secret Handshakes.
The question is, why was it so easy? Sure, it has been a near century long reversion, if you count the New Deal as the pinnacle of economic progressivism. But I think the point I may be heading for is the holistic big tent leftist coalition we imagine has never, ever really existed. The New Deal Left advanced economic progressivism only by turning its back on social progressivism. When the Democratic Party expanded its mandate to include the multitude of forms of extra-economic oppression, the right had the crack it needed to insert its pry-bar.
Goldwater, Buckley, Friedman, Nixon, Reagan, and ultimately Clinton pried and the coalition cracked and ultimately crumbled.
Interestingly, I heard a post-election Ezra Klein asserting that Obama pushed Democratic economic policy and rhetoric back leftwards, significantly, and that significant leftward policy movement has continued with 2016 Hillary Clinton, 2020 Biden, and now Kamala Harris. At the same time, the Democratic Party continues to hemorrhage non-college-educated voters.
How is that even possible?
The answer of course, is fear.
What I mean is: from the moment humans shifted from hunting and gathering to planting and irrigating, it should have been immediately apparent to any poor farmer living under the shadow of her priest- king’s ziggurat, the only logical form of warfare is class warfare.
But despite the occasional, or perhaps even the frequent, poor soldier’s grumbling about having to charge that hill so that the rich stay rich, the soldiers keep charging those hills.
Why is it so easy for the oligarchs to get that soldier to charge that hill? Why is it so easy for Trump to get the poor to vote for him?
Because we are a fear-based species. Psychologically, spiritually, we have never evolved from those hunting and gathering days when there might be a saber-tooth tiger waiting to hunt us where we gathered, when there may come a winter so harsh and long our provisions don’t hold out.
Fear is our default mode. Hope, empathy, co-operation we extend when we are at our best, and even then, only to those who are in the tribe, or who, at least, don’t appear threatening (read: otherly).
You say, bullshit. There are gazillions of examples of human heroism, sacrifice, compassion, cooperation.
Sure. But think how hard we celebrate those moments. Why the celebration? Because these are not the norm.
Leftist policy and politics are aspirational. What progressivism aims for is a world where we don’t celebrate heroism, sacrifice, compassion, and cooperation in the same way we now don’t praise someone for not running a red-light and killing someone. Progressivism advocates for a world where these are just the norm. Good messaging and smart public policy won’t bring us to that world; only evolution of the human spirit will.
Rightist policy and politics are cynical and to a large extent realistic, the messaging always fear-inciting, demonizing, tribalist - way more in sync with the human animal as it has thus far evolved.
You bristle. No, that’s not how humans are. Humans are inherently good.
Well, I agree that humans are inherently good. What I am saying is that good genes go down like fainting goats the moment the fear genes are bugled to attention.
There are so many proofs of this reality, lemme just throw out three:
negative campaigning always beats civil campaigns. Like, always. Always, always, always.
you kinda like shit-talking co-workers at the water cooler, don’t you?
see the 1914 collapse of the Second Socialist International—when the brothers of The Brotherhood traded picket lines for war trenches faster than you could say “God save the king.”
Kind of a grim prognosis, eh? Oligarchs always find ways to convince just enough of a coalition of workers that it is other workers, not oligarchs, who are the enemy. Ergo, oligarchs always win.
Classic, ever-reliable, divide and conquer.
Well, not all grim. I do think that the human spirit has been evolving over the ages. Imagining that one day hope and compassion will overtake fear as the primary engines of our soul is not a fever dream. It’s happening. A little painfully slow, but, happening.
Okay! So, in the meantime, what next, then?
In a word: cooperatives.
Roll credits.
Tune in next time when:
Localism joins forces with globalism!
Power distortions are resolved with neither violence nor constitutional reform!
and Huey Newton, Murray Bookchin and Emiliano Zapata return from the dead!