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.
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