The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the "emerging Democratic majority" that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is a coalition that can win without a majority of white working-class voters, whether union members or not ... But it's also dangerous. A political coalition that doesn't need Joe the - fake - Plumber (John McCain's mascot of the white working class) can also afford to ignore the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class, the ones who earn $16 an hour, not $250,000 a year. It can afford to be unconcerned about the collapse of manufacturing jobs, casually reassuring us that more education is the answer to all economic woes. A party of professionals and young voters risks becoming a party that overlooks the core economic crisis - not the recession but the 40-year crisis - that is wiping out the American dream for millions of workers and communities that are never going to become meccas for foodies and Web designers.
This paragraph is profoundly wrong-headed, yet it derives a degree of credibility precisely because those it would criticize are wrong-headed in much the same way. Indeed, many folks at DKos-including Kos himself-very much do seem to interpret the "emerging Democratic majority" that way. As stated above, women and minorities are disproportionately working class. And as I've noted before, the Democrats are not losing the white working class-at least in terms of party identification. Rightwing populism-most recently in the form of Tea-Baggers, Birthers and Deathers-may hold some appeal for them, but its centered higher up the income scale, as these tables strongly suggest:
The problem, in short, is not with the party's composition: it's with how the political class organizes itself and seeks to lead those below, rather than listening to those it would lead.
Where Lind's analysis goes serious off-track is in the paragraph after the one quoted above, where he tacitly equates the progressive movements that emerged in the 60s and 70s with very political establishment that they largely battled against:
Looking back, we can see that the history of American liberalism since the Depression falls into two periods: the New Deal up until the 1970s, when industrial labor provided the muscle of the reform coalition, and the neoliberal period, when unions have been eclipsed in the alliance by the black civil rights movement and other social movements: consumerism, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights. Necessary and important as they are, there are two problems with these liberal social movements as the base of a progressive party.
In fact, both the unions and the "social movements" have been junior partners in the Democratic Party, despite representing the vast majority of the membership in terms of interests and values. This is what politics in America has always been like-two capitalist parties, one somewhat to the left of the other. The reformers have had moments of tremendous influence, but they have never called the shots over the long run. Yet at some level Lind acts as if they did-indeed, he even writes as if the social movements of today are one and the same as the neoliberals who constantly willing to sell them out. It's certainly true that neoliberalism is more directly hostile to labor. But that hardly makes it the same as environmentalists, feminists or civil rights activists. Indeed, what Lind is actually doing here is falling for a game of "let's you and him fight."
The reality is that long before the social movement emerged, the unions had begun moving significantly to the right. Although the history is almost never told this way, McCarthyism played no small role in this, as Communists, and even non-Commnist leftists were purged from union leadership at the time. First the CIO was intimidated, and repudiated its more militant leadership-leadership that had played an invaluable role in building its strength-then, in 1955, it merged with its old nemesis, the more elitist AFL, which ended up dominating the partnership.
In the 1960s, some of the old CIO unions played vital roles in supporting the Civil Rights Movements, but the federation as a whole was firmly aligned with imperialist foreign policy, working closely with the CIA overseas, and supporting business-friendly puppet unions against ones actually rooted in the working class, a position rationalized because of alleged communist influence in the latter. This was the logic that lead to unions supporting the Vietnam War, even as the vast majority of casualties were working class kids, and ultimately lead construction workers to becoming de facto foot soldiers for Nixon, attack anti-war protesters at almost the same time that Nixon was announcing his "Philadelphia Plan" to make construction unions the first to be subjected to affirmative action requirements.
In short, it was-as always-the elite manipulations that undermined the progressive orientation of labor, and made it less capable of working with the social movements that emerged in the 60s and 70s. Even so, there was far more overlap than Lind's account would lead anyone to believe. To this day, for example, female leadership in Fortune 500 companies is almost non-existent. But if one looks at the labor movement, one finds women leading national unions, locals, county federations, you name it. There is certainly not full gender equality, by any stretch, but union leadership is nothing like the old boys club that still pervades America's corporate leadership. This reality, however, does not fit into Lind's simplistic dichotomous thinking.
Lind goes even further off the track when he writes:
First, unlike unions, they are not membership organizations funded by dues from their members. They are mostly AstroTurf movements that depend on their funding and strategic direction on a handful of progressive foundations, and their leaders are appointed by donors and board members, not elected by followers. The work they do is valuable, but they cannot be substitutes for genuinely popular organizations.
Part of this accurate, part is not, and the conflation of the two is dangerously misleading. Many, if not most of the organizations Lind refers to are dues-funded membership organizations-though the dues are voluntary, and funding from other sources plays a much larger role than it does for unions. And calling them "AstroTurf movements" is nothing short of slander. Furthermore, particularly under the AFL influence, as labor moved away from acting like a social movement and toward acting like a service organization for its members, it was already moving away from being a "genuinely popular organization" as long ago as the 1950s.
This is not to say that Lind doesn't have an important point to make here. We definitely do need a resurgence of power grounded in "genuinely popular organizations". But the AFL-CIO circa 1965-1975 is no model of that. So if we want to help build that sort of power, we need to be very clear on that point.
Much of the rest of what Lind writes I agree with. Which only makes it more maddening that he gets things so muddled here. It's the next paragraph where he starts to get on track:
Second, the members of most of these nonprofit movements are drawn disproportionately from the white college-educated professional class; their self-assignment to one or another single-issue movement does not disguise the fact that they tend to belong to the same social elite. Like the progressivism of the 1900s, but unlike the labor movement and agrarian populism, the progressivism of the 2000s is a movement of haves motivated by pity for the have-littles and have-nots, rather than a movement of have-littles and have-nots motivated by self-interest.
But our own educationaction has written about this far more accurately and specifically than Lind seems capable of doing. Indeed, in the very next sentence Lind interjects a completely fact-free claim, that doesn't even do a thing to advance his argument:
And because they are, or believe themselves to be, motivated by philanthropy, the progressive haves are less interested in the economic struggles of the have-littles of the broad working class than in rescuing a far smaller number of have-nots from dire poverty.
Evidence, much?
And even those elite progressives who are concerned about the working class are motivated by noblesse oblige: "We're from Washington, and we're here to help!"
Now he's channeling Ronald Reagan! Remember, Lind was a GOP warrior until he got freaked out over Pat Robertson's "New World Order" conspiracism, and the refusal of other conservatives and Republicans to denounce Robertson. When he goes off like this, it's hard not to think that he's simply reverting to his 1980s self. Yes, there are serious problems with elite progressivism, and mass participation is one of the fundamental reasons why 1930s-style New Deal Liberalism was so much more robust and effective than 1900s-style Progressivism. But critiquing the latter in the language of 1980s reactionary faux populism has got to be the least promising "new way forward" I can possibly think of.
This is not about "politically correct" language. Let me perfectly clear, I a real kick, big time from stealing key phrases of GOP criminals. But Lind seems to get a visceral thrill from making these sorts of accusations, and that's really not helpful. For all the criticism we might have, for example, of how DC-based groups might make stupid endorsements-and we've seen plenty of examples of that-we should be very clear on drawing the line between the evil and the simply misguided. Again and again, Lind impresses me by putting his finger on some very deep problems, only to turn around accuse the wrong people of being evil, on the one hand, while excusing the wrong ones as simply misguided on the other. Here, his performance is much less egregious than it was last week, but the basic problematic pattern remains.
It's a shame, really, because he can be quite eloquent and accurate in saying things that need saying and too seldom said. Such as the following:
Is the future of American liberalism a politics of charity rather than a politics of solidarity? In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whether the relatively brief influence of labor unions in the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century was not an exception to the rule of elitism in American politics. You can write a narrative of American history in which, first, agrarian populism and 19th-century labor movements are crushed by repression and bloodshed by the 1900s. Then organized labor, after a brief, unforeseen period of influence from the 1930s to the 1960s, is crushed a second time by neoliberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, leaving an America in which the only significant conflicts are those within the economic elite. In such a political order, the only left that counts will be the left based on money rather than votes or members. Progressivism becomes a movement of the privileged and charitable who are interested in doing good to other Americans rather than with other Americans.
This is an excellent statement of what we need to move beyond and why. I deeply wish that Lind could stop shadow-boxing with the demons of his past, and spend all his time groving like he does in the passage just quoted. We could really use him like that. |
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