Let's stop acting surprised.

We're not really shocked, are we?, by instances of deceit, incompetence, greed and arrogance in the corridors of power?

Those of us who are convinced that civil liberties, free expression, free inquiry and democratic deliberation are the cornerstones of American society know quite well that lots of things are not as they should be. We know that, somehow, these essential principles and practices must be preserved, repaired and/or improved. We realize that we must continue to take these things seriously, remind one another of their importance and significance, and teach subsequent generations to preserve all that is best about the American project in republican self-governance.

We were, all of us, horrified by the self-righteous barbarity and callous disregard for the rule of law promoted, clandestinely (and then not-so-clandestinely), by former Vice President Cheney. We were dismayed to learn that various United States agencies had spied on American citizens, tortured prisoners of war (using methods borrowed from 1950s Communist China) and fabricated intelligence as a pretext for waging war. We thought the eleventh-hour first Bank Bailout, under Bush, was a bald-faced exercise in theft—that it revealed, to our dismay, the extent to which the American political system has become a fully owned subsidiary of powerful financial interests and an elite stratum of wealthy investors. And we thought that the second Bank Bailout, under Obama's watch, confirmed our suspicions about the current impotence of American democracy. To be sure, I'm not referring to its impotence in practice: we already knew all about that. No, what was confirmed was the impotence of American democracy as an idea.

So why do we act shocked when we encounter leaked footage of American soldiers in Afghanistan firing missiles at unarmed civilians? Why so surprised when Obama sells off—faster than Bush would even have dared—the American education system to a bunch of glorified loan sharks? Why are we taken off-guard when the Supreme Court overturns hundreds of centuries-old laws regulating the political spending of multinational corporations, on the basis of the notion—so argues the Court—that such laws restrict the (previously non-existent) Constitutional right of corporations to free speech?

I don't think that we are surprised by these things. I think that we are pretending to be surprised. I'm guessing that there are two (2) ways in which we pretend to be surprised, which coexist in varying degrees in any particular instance:

i. The first way in which we act surprised.
We want to be surprised by these things. Therefore, we either convince ourselves that we are surprised, or we act surprised in a semi-conscious attempt to simulate, for our own comfort, the feeling of being surprised. Or we act surprised out of sheer habit. In any of these cases—whatever our level of consciousness of our actions—we are motivated by a desire for comfort.

Why is the feeling of surprise comforting to us? Because surprise registers the phenomenon to which we are responding as something that is—as it were—beyond the pale. It's a psychological defense mechanism. We want so desperately to believe that everyone else values our Constitutional protections and civil liberties as much as we do. To us, this stuff is basic common sense, and it shatters our faith in humanity to recognize the truth: there are a substantial numbers of American citizens who would gladly give away their liberties in exchange for an illusory feeling of safety or security.

This brings us to:

ii. The second way in which we act surprised.
We hope that by expressing our outrage and shock in the face of the erosion of American civil liberties, we might be able to shock the aforementioned cadre of American citizens—a cadre that is in most other respects as heterogeneous as can be—out of its complacency and docility.

In other words, we like to believe that we are walking, talking George Orwells. That, if we talk frequently and loudly enough about how disgusted we are with our country's seemingly inexorable drift toward fear-mongering, surveillance state, that we will manage eventually to make them see the light!

The mistake we're making in this second instance is about as obvious as can be: do we really think that we can out-fear-monger the professional political-corporate-media fear-mongers?? I think this is a difficulty that faces those of us in the post-Baby Boom generations who believe that the only way in which our democracy can be repaired is through a reinvigorated civil discourse. At present, American political rhetoric is—like American political thought—beyond its moment of crisis. It is in a state of extreme fragmentation.

All I'm saying is, let's start admitting that we all know this. Let's stop acting surprised.

A lion in lion's clothing: Why Rand Paul's primary victory is a good thing.

I shall attempt to elucidate my view of the results of the recent Republican primary in Kentucky. It's a view that apparently is deemed to be heterodox—if not heretical—among chatterers in progressive-left circles. Specifically, I think that—despite increasingly ugly, politically motivated deviations—Rand Paul is as close to a principled libertarian as we're likely to see as a contender for national office, and that his victory in Kentucky’s May 19 Republican primary for the US Senate is a good thing.

I don't hold this view for political/strategic/operational reasons—i.e.: because Paul's ascendancy might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general, or something like that (partly because, in fact, I'm sick of all the DP hacks)—but, rather, because Rand Paul seems for the most part to be an actual libertarian in the mold of his father, Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. I mean the dude's named after Ayn Rand, for god's sake.

Rand Paul is a lion in lion's clothing, and that's a good thing. What do I mean by this? Well, let me explain. Remember George W. Bush's pre-2000 promises to the effect that he embodied something called "compassionate conservatism"? That's an example of being a lion in lamb's clothing.

See the difference? (And here's an interesting bit of reporting on the unrelated question of where the phrase "compassionate conservatism" comes from.)

Now, before we get into all sorts of metaphysical stuff about lions lying down with lambs, let me just admit up front that my metaphor/comparison doesn't really make sense, once you start thinking about it. So heed this warning and...well, don't. But, anyway.

Give me the Pauls any day. For one thing, it will make for a much better debate. I believe that the US could only benefit from an increased focus upon the tenets of libertarianism. Beyond even its potential impact upon the framing of political discussion, there is a side to libertarianism that should by no means seem to liberals to be entirely unpalatable. For example: what’s wrong with cutting back on the functions of government that exist in practice exclusively to serve the interests of big corporations? While Paul's textbook libertarianism generally causes him to oppose the placing of limitations upon the expenditures of private corporations, his consistent and clearly voiced opposition to our country's reigning, incestuous public-private oligarchy is right on.

From yesterday's Huffington Post:

For all the blaring headlines that Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has attracted for his remarks on the Civil Rights Act and his views on government interference in private enterprise, there is a strand of his libertarianism that -- on occasion -- can be alluring to progressives.

Mainly this is when the discussion turns to foreign policy matters and the Kentucky GOP candidate's skepticism with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his opposition to the Patriot Act.

Occasionally, however, Paul's domestic politics have a bit of post-ideological resonance. And during a Monday appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, that element of his candidacy was briefly on display. Asked a question about campaign finance reform, Paul offered the traditionally conservative denouncement of laws that curb the amount of money spent during an election. But from there he offered a proposal that would be of similar (if not greater) scope and reach.

"What I would do is that for every federal contract, if you sign a federal contract and we pay you, the taxpayer pays you a million dollars, I would put a clause in the contract that you voluntarily accept that you won't lobby or give contributions," he said, "because I think it galls the American people that taxpayer money is paid to contractors who take that taxpayer money and immediately lobby for more money."

This type of proposal would seemingly leave good government officials smiling. That it came from the belle of the Tea Party ball makes it all the more powerful -- not because of its unexpectedness (the Tea Party movement is quite clearly wary of the influence of lobbyists), but because Paul is symbolic for many of the future of the GOP.

Now, the question of whether and to whom Paul symbolizes the future of the GOP is open to debate, to say the least. But, isn't his stance on lobbying and government contracts absolutely correct?

Certainly it would be better if such a challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we’re talking about. And I believe that the anti-oligarchic, anti-Fed, pro-personal privacy, anti-torture/surveillance and pro-transparency aspects of the philosophies of Father and Son Paul should be commended by left-progressives. We can still criticize the Pauls for their stances on many other subjects about which we disagree.

I feel the need to point all of this out because of the somewhat hysterical responses of some purportedly left-progressive-types to the Rand Paul phenomenon. I mean, sure, his performance on the Rachel Maddow show was ham-fisted, but, the idea that his take on the Civil Rights Act makes him a racist is really just too much. Those of us who are serious about wanting to improve political discourse should not be demonizing someone for showing intellectual honesty, however impolitic it might be for him to do so. In fact, the more straightforward and lacking in spin his stance, the greater the duty of the left opposition to express its disagreement straightforwardly.

Rand Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act can be—and are—wrong without being racist. This is the kind of debate we should be taking seriously. It's the mainstream Republicans who aren't worth the time and effort, who will misrepresent themselves to get elected and hold onto power. The notion that Rand Paul is somehow worse than the average "machine"-Republican candidate is absolute balderdash.

To the extent to which the likes of middle-aged pseudo-leftists like The Nation's obnoxious Katha Pollitt (May 22) continue to set the terms of what counts as political debate in progressive circles, we'll never get beyond the intellectual bankruptcy and gridlock of the Culture Wars and the 1960s. I'm sorry, but Baby Boomers like Pollitt just get fatter and more full of shit with each passing day.

By contrast, Robert Scheer's May 19 take on the Pauls and libertarianism I find to be coherent and useful. It is, in fact, the article to which—in the wake of Paul's stumble on the Maddow show—Pollitt's shrill statement is apparently aiming to respond. Still better is Scheer's May 26 follow-up, in which he gets down to what should be the business at hand for those of us on the progressive/left:

Where I agree with [Rand Paul] is that with freedom comes responsibility, and when the financial conglomerates abused their freedom, they, and not the victims they swindled, should have borne the consequences. Instead, they were saved by the taxpayers from their near-death experience, reaping enormous profits and bonuses while the fundamentals of the world economy they almost destroyed remain rotten, as attested by the high rates of housing foreclosures and unemployment and the tens of millions of newly poor dependent on government food handouts.

But the poor will not find much more than food crumbs from a federal government that, thanks to another one of [President Bill] Clinton’s “reforms,” ended the federal obligation to deal with the welfare of the impoverished. Yes, Clinton, not either Paul, father Ron or son. It was Clinton who campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” and as a result the federal obligation to end poverty, once fervently embraced by even Richard Nixon, was abandoned.

Concern for the poor was devolved to the state governments, and they in turn are in no mood to honor the injunction of all of the world’s great religions that we be judged by how we treat the least among us. That would be poor children, and it is unconscionable that state governments across the nation are cutting programs as elemental as the child care required when you force single mothers to work.

“Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers” ran the headline in the New York Times on Sunday over a story detailing how in a dozen states there are now sharp cuts in child care for the poor who find jobs, and how there are now long lists of kids needing child care while their mothers work at low-paying jobs at places like Wal-Mart. In Arizona, there is a waiting list of 11,000 kids eligible for child care. That is what passes for success in the welfare reform saga, with mothers forced off the rolls into a workplace bereft of promised child care that the cash-strapped states no longer wish to supply.

Hear, hear. For those of us who believe that what this country desperately needs is a genuine left-populism, shouldn't we be asking: Why don't we hear Democrats articulating a similarly robust critique of ongoing—and grotesquely antidemocratic—lobbying practices?

And, more to the point: instead of playing the politics of personality (and...even ickier..."character"), let's respond to Paul's views on the evils of the welfare state with real arguments. All around us, on the local, national and international levels, we can point to massive, moral, social and practical crises directly attributable to laissez faire economics and neoliberal governance. As Scheer argues, the hullabaloo about Rand Paul is nothing but a cheap distraction from the real questions:

How in the hell can humankind be expected to survive and prosper without a social safety net to protect them against the vicissitudes of a globalized and unregulated market economy? Without such a safety net, how can Western societies ever hope to fulfill their constitutional (little c and big) aspirations of freedom, justice and equality?

And, finally: If the Democratic Party can't be counted upon to take these questions at all seriously, who can?

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

House 'Audit the Fed' bill persists, teeth intact.

From Politico:

The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

[...]

The House Financial Services Committee will vote on approving the underlying bill after Thanksgiving recess.

This is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about when I call for a tactical alliance of left and right in the interest of advancing populist measures.

True, I oppose the extreme laissez faire economic philosophy of Paul and the libertarian tendency. He favors a system with severe restrictions upon the regulation and oversight of markets. By contrast, I favor a social democratic model that protects ordinary people against the inescapable perils of market activity.

But so what? The fact is that left- and right-populism share the interest of instituting democratic checks against powerful, and currently insular and unaccountable, monetary policy-making agencies. As the poet said: in politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it has always been this way. I don't have to want to play cribbage with someone in order to share some or many of his political interests.

"Pro-sex feminism" as a paradigm for a left-populist moral consensus.

Girldrive
An article in the Chicago Reader discusses a new book that offers a fresh approach to understanding salient commonalities and contradictions in contemporary American feminism. Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism is a travelogue that compiles the testimony and experiences of feminists (not necessarily self-identified as such) across the 'lower 48' states of varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic profiles. Kind of an interesting idea in itself. But what interests me most about the project is the identity of one of its young co-authors and the overarching political project that is implicit in much of her work.

It should be said that the story of the book's creation -- at once inspiring and tragic -- is as complicated and worthy of attention as its content. I won't dwell on it here except to mention that what's tragic is that co-author Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life before the book was completed and that more can be learned about this by reading the article in the Reader.

Aronowitz: Nona Willis and father Stanley
The other co-author is Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is the daughter of two intellectuals, both of whom were prominent figures in the American Left in the 60s and 70s. For many years, I have admired the scholarship of her father, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, particularly for his politically engaged work in the sociology of education and his pioneering inquiries into the sociology of the workplace.

Since, in my limited understanding, issues of economic disparities and social class have played so central a role in Aronowitz's scholarship (as opposed to stuff like identity politics), it was with some surprise that I discovered that he was married to the late Ellen Willis, the feminist writer and critic. Willis was opposed to the puritanical stances that sometimes emanate from feminist circles, and is associated with what has been called "pro-sex feminism."

Ellen Willis and "pro-sex feminism"
The meaning of "pro-sex feminism" can be discerned through the following quotation from an article that Willis contributed to the Village Voice in 1981 (titled "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?"):

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. [...]

My god, that observation was prescient. I bet feminists in 1981 could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the ascendancy of theocracy under Bush and Cheney; even today the courting of religionists is common practice among politicians of every political stripe. And despite the fact that "feminism" is no longer the salient assignation that it was in the early eighties, the din of anti-(hetero)sexuality/anti-sex rhetoric can still be detected in a percentage of feminism's present-day manifestations. Willis categorized the practitioners within the feminist tendency of what she called "sexual conservatism" into two groups: (1) the monogamists and (2) the separatists:

These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. [...]

I don't care who you are and what your attitude toward feminism is (if you're like me, you support feminism and might even be a feminist, but you basically almost never think about it and tend to devote more attention to certain sets of systemic injustices that are preventing human and political emancipation along lines of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity), the above passage is really well written and thought-provoking and makes you wonder: why aren't people writing stuff like that these days? Is it partly because "alternative weeklies" like the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader are now owned by evil, corpora-financial interests?

A de facto feminism that is already out there, waiting to be described
Anyway, it's encouraging to see that Ellen Willis's corpus of feminist writings, including especially her "pro-sex" stance, have informed the work in the burgeoning career of her daughter. Nona Willis Aronowitz is still (very, for a journalist about whom I'm bothering so much as to blog) young, and the jury's still out on whether she'll become a writer of the talent and insight of her mother.

What's most encouraging is that she already understands the tidbit of wisdom that I believe to be indispensable to a future for the American Left: it must get the hell out of American's self-styled, middle class-bohemian echo chamber and start giving a voice to the people who are getting screwed worst of all in this country: poor people, both whites and minorities and both from the inner-city and the Great Plains. Nona Willis Aronowitz is spot-on when it comes to the necessity of this outreach. Behold the following quote from the Reader article:

[...] "Feminism, [says Aronowitz] for me, is women owning up to realities of sexism—but feminism as identity is less important than realizing those things and having gendered consciousness [sic].

[...] "Some of the most badass feminists we met were raised in conservative families or oppressive communities. I couldn't believe the urgency of women working in Fargo and Louisiana, the Bible Belt and Austin—they were way more passionate than a lot of women in big cities with big feminist communities."

These subjects—clinic defenders, Chicana activists, community organizers, and other women helping women on the ground—inspired Aronowitz and Bernstein to change their tack. The book's initial outline had been somewhat autobiographical, but as they put more miles between them and Chicago, they realized the stories that needed to be told weren't necessarily their own. "These women don't have a chance to be heard," says Aronowitz. "It started to feel urgent to let them speak for themselves."

Toward a Left-populism
What I find most compelling about Aronowitz's characterization of the project of her book is that it stands as a paradigm for precisely the program of left-populist thought and activism that stands the best chance preserving the foundations of civil liberties, self-governance and checks-and-balances enshrined in the Constitution.

To my mind, a Left that is premised upon a project of democratic emancipation cannot sustain itself -- and if not in the United States, with its vital republican constitution and traditions, then where? -- without being willing and able to take the form of a no-bullshit, intelligent Left-populism.

It is way too easy for the Left to fall into the same habits of the past thirty or forty (or more) years -- among them: defeatism, self-pity, pedantry, the fetishization of 'expertise', the fetishization of credentials, excessive intellectual and moral balkanization, regionalism, etc. --, but to pursue such a course would mean ceding all of our political autonomy (not just existing, but potential) to the reigning plutocracy (and a succession of future real- and potential-plutocratic [re-]configurations).

A Left-populist moral consensus cannot be prudish, because real people aren't prudish
We have to start, just as Aronowitz and Bernstein did, with the people who are already out there doing it. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that a Left-populist moral consensus can only emerge around themes that that everyday people really do care about. Not an imagined version of morally upright, pious, unselfconscious 'everyday people': that's bullshit and pandering and a lie.

It's easy to know what people care about, because even if they don't always come out and say what it is, they do, inevitably and frequently, talk about it.

Here's a perfect example: sex. It's really easy to tell that human beings care about and think about sex because they talk about it all the time.

Karl Rove wanted everybody to think that there's this unimaginably enormous population of far-Right Christian religionists that constituted the largest and most monolithic voting block in the history of the universe. And for a long time, he succeeded. But, before long, everyone came to realize that it was actually a bunch of smoke-and-mirrors. And eventually, that becomes replaced with another bunch of smoke-and-mirrors -- the birther-movement, the tea-bagger movement, the neo-Nazi resurgence, etc., etc.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is this: I'm as put-off by the smoke-and-mirrors shows as anyone else. But the response of the Left should not be to call for bans on smoke-and-mirrors shows, to denounce entire red-state populations on the basis of such spectacles, or to mount opposing smoke-and-mirrors production numbers!

It should be to call it what it is, to say: what a bunch of fucking loonies and point out how they are a playing perfectly into an ongoing succession of time-wasting distractions that muddy political discourses in our current landscape of consolidated media and micro-commerce. If a Left-populist movement puts real effort into doing precisely this, if it insists continually upon exploding mythologies rather than perpetuating them, it will make friends, not enemies out in the American countryside as well as deep in the American cityscape.

What say you?

Links: Is Obama finally getting his populist on?

Obama, the Trust-Buster? Obama and congressional Democrats taking on the Insurance Industry? And insisting upon a 'public option'? [DownWithTyrrany]

All of this, plus Obama and the Democrats slashing executive pay for acceptors of TARP money? [The Washington Post]

Contrary to what Washington DC chattering-class idiots might contend, a Democratic, Obama-led Populist Turn is a good thing!!

The Populist Left / The Paranoid Right

In recent posts, I've discussed the idea of authoritarian populism, an idea popularized by the sociologist Stuart Hall to describe the rise of Margaret Thatcher in early 1980s England. I argued that the resentment-fueled rhetoric of the current Republican Party could be seen as an updated species of authoritarian populism.

But forget about all that.

I think that a recent op-ed by Thomas Frank nails it. What the GOP has been up to, he observes, is not really populism at all but paranoia. It's the John Birch Society gone mainstream....

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.

I was not always a fan. [...] I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners.

As the historian himself admitted, "in America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements." Why bother with it, then?

How times have changed! Hofstadter's beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style.

The essential element of this mindset, Hofstadter explained, was its predilection for conspiracy theory—for understanding history as a theater in which sinister figures control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and secretly in the direction of communism.

Back in Hofstadter's day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents' motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state's motive for colluding in it, or the courts' motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today's circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In "The Paranoid Style," Hofstadter wrote, "Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system."

Conspiracy-mindedness isn't just for fringe political groups anymore; it makes for riveting entertainment. And it is all around us today, a disorder with an entire industry to act as its enabler. [...]

Frank goes on to cite recent examples of this phenomenon, from Glenn Beck's fake news show to a truly bizarre essay penned by Michelle Malkin. These examples always include (1) alarmingly hysterical conspiracy theories and (2) a self-persecution complex, accompanied by massive amounts of self-pity.

What the hell's going on, anyway?

Although Frank's piece isn't about progressive political strategy, I believe that Frank's formulation (or, rather, his appropriation of Hofstadter) might provide a rhetorical framework with which to strengthen the project of Left-populism.

The conundrum that I had been perceiving in all of the Angry Right-Teabagger stuff had not been limited to the damage that violent, racist innuendo and intellectual dishonesty threatens to inflict upon civil discourse. What had been worrying me most of all had been the fact that it appeared that the Deranged Right was -- albeit disingenuously -- threatening to dominate populist-inflected discourse in this country.

But why cede that ground to a bunch of hacks, liars and -- as Frank notes -- producers of mass entertainment?

Glenn Beck doesn't represent a twisted, authoritarian version of populism: He represents many vile, stupid and wrongheaded things. Not one of them has anything to do with populism.

Politics & ideas? Economic self-interest & authoritarian populism.

The relation of politics to ideas has always been complicated. But the conceit of this post will be that there's something to be learned by exploring it.

Politics and ideas: the Right
For example: Ideas are, in an important sense, anathema to the climate within which the current American conservatism prevails. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that during the decades prior to the election of Barack Obama, ideas had a twofold significance in em the Republicans to seize/maintain and use political power.

To be sure, at least half of this significance was ancillary to how, why and for whom the so-called 'conservative movement' of the 1980s, 90s and 00s was built. The GOP seized/maintained power through the application of brainpower to such tactical/operational processes as propaganda, demographic analysis and the procurement and allocation of material resources. Simultaneously, the ideas developed by various big brains/think tank types connected to the 'movement' as to how best to use this power were every bit as oriented toward strategic considerations -- how to maintain power -- as toward articulating philosophical/political 'principles'.

For the most part, this coterie of ideologically warped eggheads agreed that this political power could best be put to use by dismantling government itself (see: Messrs. Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Ambramoff, et al.).

This GOP ambition to dismantle government did not extend, naturellement, to such elements of the public-sector as military and "intelligence" infrastructure. Although, of course, 'outsourcing' these functions -- to mercenaries to fight our wars and to 'specialists' to torture our 'enemy combatants' -- is by now established practice, thanks to Messrs. Rumsfeld & Cheney, et al.

Politics and ideas: the Left
By contrast, no left/progressive politics can exist or have any hope of success without ideas.

To be sure, ideas don't do the trick in and of themselves, and the Right knows this. That's why it has tried, and not without success, to milk every last drop of potential from the 'left-leaning, soulless egghead/expert' cliché. (Although, for some time now, its effectiveness is showing definite signs of strain.)

Allow me to illustrate. One of the biggest and looniest lies that extreme-neoconservative shills like the neo-McCarthyite former/longtime Communist and Black Panther David Horowitz have tried to propagate is that notion that the American professoriat -- as with, of course, 'the mainstream media, the arts, and the employees of public libraries(!) -- is overwhelmingly left-wing in its orientation and that its aim is to indoctrinate defenseless undergraduates, the progeny of unsuspecting, good, decent, law-abiding American families.

Would that that were the case!

For one thing, it's self-evident that this notion is a big, stinking lie (and a febrile one, at that), so ludicrous that it doesn't even merit refutation. However, setting aside the fact that it is categorically untrue -- self-evidently, and empirically -- I believe that there is a more important point to be made as regards the internal logic of what the lie intends to imply. Namely, we might ask: Could the professoriat -- irrespective of the direction in which its politics trend -- really wield the kind of seismic influence over the nation's populace that Horowitz wants to believe it does?

The answer: To the extent to which the academy (and the same applies to the arts, or the press, or what have you) has provided a safe refuge to progressive/left -- even 'liberal' -- ideas over the past decades, then surely this fact has diminished the capacity of these ideas to engage people rather than the other way around. Academia is not called 'the ivory tower' primary in order to evoke architecture. To the extent to which the Left has been hiding out there, it has hampered the flourishing of left-wing ideas. It has probably prevented many good ideas even from entering the public sphere, to say nothing of capturing the public's political imagination.

(Think of things that once existed in the public sphere that have by now retreated for safe harbor in the academic sphere: poetry, visual art, Lacrosse, etc. Do these things appear to be enjoying widespread influence? Can you name more living poets than you can count on one hand? Thus: Academia is the place where once-vital ideas, practices and traditions go to die long, painful deaths.)

Resentment is not an idea
Now, of course, the corollary I have just proposed doubles as a straightforward description of why right-wing political hacks like Horowitz bother proffering these self-evidently idiotic assertions in the first place. When it comes to the Horowitzes of the world: It's not what they're saying, it's what they're talking about.

In other words, since Horowitz and Company are not men of ideas, but rather, merely corporately-funded propagandists for far-Right interests (who previously had been well-funded propagandists for the most militant and radical causes of the far-Left), it is most appropriate to assess their utterances on the basis of how these utterances function and not on the basis of what or how these utterances might 'mean'. Their meaning is their function.

As Crib From This has noted on previous occasions, the vast majority of the intellectual energies among the hired brains of the Reagan Revolution, of the Gingrich Revolution, of the Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror, of Sarah Palin's Wardrobe and beyond have been expended in pursuit of tactical positioning, not -- as had been at least partly the case in its early years -- in the service of real ideas.

Authoritarian populism
This brings us to the issue that has prompted my little excursus: that of authoritarian populism.

A coinage -- I think -- of the sociologist and Marxist Stuart Hall, authoritarian populism refers to the now-familiar methods by which conservative political forces forge, nurture and/or manufacture political support -- and often sizable majorities -- by, in part, slyly embedding Rightist/ultra-capitalist/neoliberal ideology into the "common sense" of everyday life.

Hall's formulation draws from the thought of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that, in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, the dominant class established and maintained political control over the working class not only through the use and threatened use of conventional force, but through hegemony: the systems of socialization, the ingrained assumptions, the modes of valuation, etc. that imbue a society and serve to legitimate status quo power relations. Hegemony refers to the processes by which ideology does its real work.

Of particular relevance to Hall's thesis is that Gramsci's concept of hegemony might go part of the way toward explaining how exploited populations can be manipulated into voting against their own economic interests. (Follow this hyperlink for a decent primer on Gramsci and hegemony [with particular emphasis upon Gramsci's significance to educational theory].)

The age of Reagan and Thatcher
Hall's discussion of authoritarian populism emerged from a series of frenzied conversations conducted among leftists and liberals in the United Kingdom wherein Hall and his comrades watched in stunned horror as Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party rose to power in a seeming popular groundswell. To make matters worse, the Labour Party was starting to get routed and the once-steadfast support of the working class seemed to be slipping.

Soon afterward, Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, with significant assistance from the Democratic Party's disillusioned, blue-collar base ("Reagan Democrats.")

Despite the parallel developments between the United Kingdom and her former upstart-colonies, it is important to remember that England's working class, in contrast to that of the United States, actually had a fairly strong tradition of a political consciousness. Whereas the relationship that had developed between the Democratic Party and American workers, beginning with FDR, had resembled a longstanding yet typical political transaction based upon mutual benefit, English workers were organized and had secured many welfare state protections through collective demand.

So: along came this woman Thatcher, who promised to undermine all of the reforms and protections that this class had fought so hard to obtain. And she swept into power in the midst of what was ostensibly a populist groundswell! How could this be?

Enter: authoritarian populism. Here's Hall's assessment of Thatcherism's populist flair, against which he juxtaposed the ineptitude of the Left's tactics, attitude and rhetoric. It's striking how similar his characterization is to those that emerged fairly recently within the American Left, particularly in the wake of the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry [boldface added by the present blogger]:

Horrendously, the Right has been far more successful in recent years than the Left in connecting with some of these popular movements and trends in civil society. Of course, they have connected with them in their own populist way. The intention of the radical Right, which has been most penetrative, has not been the conversion of masses to the religion of the market and unemployment. Rather, it has been the subtle capacity to identify the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance. Thatcherism has been remarkably successful at moving the counters around so as to forge a connection between the popular aspiration for greater freedom from constraining powers and the market definition of freedom. It has created a chain of equivalences between the reaction against state bureaucracy, so deeply inscribed in the Fabian version of social democracy, and the quite different passion for self-sufficiency, self-help and rampant individualism. But, like all ideological and political interventions — which is what Thatcherism is — these connections are neither 'natural' nor necessary. They represent an attempt to inflect and expropriate and absorb what are often democratic currents into free market channels. We have suggested already how and why in the earlier period the market came to be a popular mass experience. The Right, after all, has no hang-ups about making money and stimulating the instinct for money making as the driving force of society. In simple terms, that is what the capitalist system is. So to address itself to isolating and developing the competitive side of that contradictory experience was an obvious and natural way for the radical Right to align itself with popular aspirations or, to put it another way, make itself populist. This is one feature of the wider phenomenon we have seen in this decade of the Right showing itself once again capable of recuperating itself, renewing itself, taking on the challenge of the social democratic consensus and eroding its basis, and learning once again to address the people in accents which seem to groove more naturally with life as they live and experience it. This is the naturalisation of the Right which has proven the real changed ground on which the Left in the 1980s has been forced to operate. It is part of the Right project to turn the tide on every front — in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations. Its project, in short, is to become hegemonic, to address the common experience, to speak to and for 'the nation'.  [Stuart Hall, "The Culture Gap," originally published in Marxism Today, January 1984. Click here to access the entire article in .pdf format.]

Sound familiar?

Thomas Frank on American politics in the mid-00's
Although the parallel breaks down in some important respects, perhaps the most famous contemporary point of reference that comes to mind with respect to the relation between culture (and the "Culture Wars," a term that Hall at times used specifically in describing Thatcherism) and political "common sense" is Thomas Frank's influential What's the Matter with Kansas? (now also a film, directed by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston).

Here's an excerpt of Frank's book -- published in 2004 -- that recalls aspects of Hall's 1986 assessment of UK politics, but which then takes the conversation into new territory, elements of which I have rendered in boldface.

That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from the working-class districts and the downmarket churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as you deplore their political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and – more important – the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters – their traditional base – the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Now, here's the part with respect to which, in my opinion, Frank's prescience is being revealed before our eyes in the political events and Democratic electoral/political gains of Obama's 2009:

Such Democrats [Bill Clinton, the DLC, et al.] look at a situation like present-day Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like super-affluent Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

Has this very demographic shift not been cited as one of the chief components of Obama's victory? The Loony Right has stepped beyond the point of no return for many middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites in the Northwest, the Midwest, the West and even in key portions of the South. So what's the problem, we might ask? Frank decries the long term prospects of and, to be sure, the very point of a Democratic Party that severs its ties with economic populism:

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different than old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for – equality and economic security – will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we need them most.

Truer words have never been -- etc., etc. I mean, I'm with Frank on this: The lack of responsiveness on the part of either party to the needs of poor people -- from the victims of Katrina to the countless victims of predatory lending who are now being evicted from their homes -- is morally repellent. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Republican Party is chiefly to blame for this state of affairs. It is furthermore true that Obama has at least been addressing and acting to solve some of these problems -- far more so than it's possible to picture any Republican president doing.

Unfortunately, it's also true, as Frank has pointed out, that a sizable share of the blame for the dismantling of the few remaining traces of the welfare state, consumer protections, corporate/financial regulation in the wake of Reagan and Bush Sr. sits squarely on the shoulders of our former President William Jefferson Clinton.

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is the utter and final repudiation of their historical decision to remake themselves as the other pro-business party. By all rights the people of Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally speaking, however, that option is simply not available to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

What Frank might have mentioned here -- and which he'd be sure to mention somehow were he revisiting these thoughts given the ratcheting-up of this species of GOP rhetoric in the hands such Fr. Coughlin-epigones as Glenn Beck -- is race, which can never be far removed from any serious discussion of socioeconomic class in America. From Nixon's "silent majority," to propagandists from Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove, the GOP has relied upon unspoken -- and, indeed, often subconscious -- racial animus in the cobbling together of its majorities, particularly with respect to its 'South Strategy'.

Of course, in a way, what Frank found so alarming about the radicalization of the Republican Party in Kansas was precisely that its activism began increasingly to resemble that of the fanatics of the Deep South. (Frank discusses this fascinating observation, with particular reference to the politics of abortion, in the film version of What's the Matter with Kansas?). Paradoxically, at precisely the moment at which the Southern Strategy stopped working -- i.e.: at the moment of Obama's resounding victory -- the Republicans are no longer even bothering to couch their race-baiting rhetoric in "coded" terminology. I wonder what Frank makes of that?

In the meantime, let's rejoin Frank for the conclusion of his lecture, in which he almost seems to have anticipated Obama, specifically with respect to his belief in the necessity of a political movement.  Of course, the only kind of movement politics that he argues will work effectively in the long run is one that is focused upon economic populism:

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let them look at the record and see for themselves: Democrats are slightly more generous with Social Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than Republicans.

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

An even more telling demonstration of the importance of movements in framing people's perspectives can be found in the voting practices of union members. Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on – when they are union members, their politics shift to the left. This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders. Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics, inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern. Union voters are, in other words, the reverse image of the Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for economics but torments himself night and day with vague fears about "cultural decline."

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the broader population, accustomed to thinking of organizations as though they were consumer products, it is simply assumed that unions are declining because nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail executives, the news is understood the same way aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to the death.

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in Wichita, channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them enough in reality.

Like Hall, the indexes by which Frank traces the Republican Party's wholesale capture of the populist mantle are cultural and rhetorical. But, unlike Hall, Frank is not a Marxist. Not even a socialist. He dreams of a return to the left-populism that was -- throughout the vast majority of US history -- the norm for prairie states, Great Plains states and Midwestern states. It's true that even over the past thirty years, the Midwest never really became a GOP stronghold, and furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago that Kansas had a reasonably strong Democratic Party (it can still be strong, on the local level).

So...
I suppose my point is that I think that Frank -- and to some extent Hall -- are correct about the folly of any so-called Left that disregards economic populism and that disregards the economic needs of ordinary people, even (or perhaps especially) the ones who have been brainwashed by the Right through any of its innumerable channels of influence.

We have to (1) find a way to establish a greater, more cohesive and more sincere Left/populist presence that can put pressure on leaders in the Democratic Party or support Left third party candidates, and (2) stop letting cultural differences and even large differences of opinion on some cultural issues get in the way of establishing meaningful political solidarity. You don't have to be someone's bestest buddy in order to vote alongside him if and to the extent to which your and his economic interests coincide.