After the Future

Tom Frank and Adolph Reed

Fascinating conversation transcribed here. There are many places to excerpt that reinforce themes I've been writing about, but I'll pick this one for today:

[Frank is in boldface, Reed in normal]

The labor movement. You said to reverse all this, it requires a “vibrant labor movement.” How on earth is that going to happen? Actually I’ve made this point to progressives and they don’t understand. They’re like, “What’s so special about labor?”They don’t particularly like labor. Culturally, it’s not them. They don’t really get it.

They like their workers when they’re brown and really abject and getting the shit beaten out of them but they don’t like them when they try to work through institutions to build power for themselves as a class. That’s one way to put it.

These are people on the left that I’m talking about.

That’s who I’m talking about too. That’s exactly who I’m talking about. It’s a few things. One of them is the cult of the most oppressed that I mentioned a while back. And as my dad used to say, “If oppression conferred heightened political consciousness, there would be a People’s Republic of Mississippi.”And the fact is all that oppression confers is oppression really. There’s that which connects with the cargo cult aspect that kind of fills the whole of…

Wait, stop for a second. Did you say, “The fallacy of the most oppressed?”Is that what you said?

Yeah.

So it’s like a logical fallacy?

Well, yeah in the sense that, I’ll tell you what happens. There’s a conflation of the moral imperative and the strategic imperative. In fact, it’s not even conflation, it’s substitution of moral imperative for a strategic imperative.

So what do you mean? We choose the one that our heart goes out to and imagine that they are the ones who have the answer?

Exactly. In a way, from an organizing standpoint, that often means that you’re stacking the deck against yourself or picking, choosing, to focus on the populations that have the least in the way of resources, the least in the way of institutional capacity.

"Sustitution of the moral imperative for the strategic imperative" That's a perfect way to describe the current fecklessness of the Left. It's hard to get morally outraged at abstractions, or to stay morally outraged long enough to do something substantive about something that morally outrages us. So we move from one moral outrage to another like moral outrage addicts. The result is that we react superficially to symptoms without mobilizing to deal with the root causes.

The "New Left", which is largely this identity-politics cultural sensibility, is the best thing that ever happened to the ressentiment-soaked, fringe right. The New Left's sensibility in its essence is opposed to the cultural sensibilities of poor and working class ethnic and racial minorities, whose rank and file tend to be culturally conservative. The New Left created the Reagan Democrat because New Left types essentially look down on anybody who doesn't share its politically more "evolved" and therefore "correct" views. So when the New Left sensibility came to dominate the Democratic Party in the 1970s, it drove people out who no longer felt at home there. And the sad thing is that while these Reagan Democrat types are not at all Tea Party types, they still too often will vote for the Tea Party candidate because what she says "feels" right to them in a way that the politically correct Democrat does not.

Earlier in the conversation they explain what we get as a result--nothing happens:

...You started talking about the left itself, and you say that they careen from this oppressed group to that one, from “one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of agency to another.”You nailed it there. But you need to tell us what you mean. That is fascinating.

Some peasants somewhere. The urban precariat. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

These are all real things though, right?

Well they’re real, but the problem is the fantasy of the spark. That there’s something about the purity of these oppressed people that has the power to condense the mass uprising. I’ve often compared it to the cargo cults.

Ouch!

Well that’s what it’s like. Frankly, what I’ve come to describe as the Internet fundraising left—Common Dreams, TruthOut, and all the rest of that stuff….

I probably get 10 solicitations a day.

Me too. Yeah. But I think the proliferation of that domain, no pun intended, has exacerbated this problem. Because there is always a crisis. There is always something that’s about to happen. I think, frankly, a lot of the demoralization and the fretting that followed in the wake of the UAW’s defeat in the Tennessee plant was the product of expectations that had been unreasonably stoked in advance. This was going to be the thing that reinvigorates the labor movement. It would be like the CIO going into the South. It would be like the Flint sit-down strike. It was a 1500 member bargaining unit in a rabidly anti-union state for God’s sake. So you would expect that the greater likelihood would be to lose, right? That’s what’s happened.

Why do we put our hopes in these magical constituencies?

I think there is a good reason and a bad reason. Well, no. There’s a nice reason and an ugly reason. The nice reason is that people see how desperate the circumstances are and they feel a sense of urgency and they want to have something happen that can begin to show signs of turning the tide. And when somebody says, “You know, we didn’t get into this overnight. We’re not going to get out of this overnight,”then people start to yell at them for being insensitive to the suffering and the urgency. The other side of the coin by that reasoning is they don’t want to do the organizing or they can’t figure out how to do it or their sense of how political change is made is so underdeveloped that they can’t conceptualize a strategic approach to politics. So it’s like the bearing witness stuff basically.

That’s a fascinating term. So they want to bear witness. I think another word for what you’re describing is, they’re “fans.”

When being a fan means I'm politically correct and sexy according the cause of the moment celebrated by the tastemakers on the cultural left. What about dealing with the underlying structural problems? Too much work. It's like school, man. It's got to come from the crotch. 

Adolph Reed on the Moyers Show

 

This runs about twenty minutes, and I think it's worth watching, but I'll excerpt two segments that are key:

BILL MOYERS: You say "the left." Liberals, especially, are tied to the narrow strategy of electing at whatever cost, whatever Democrat is running. But, you know, Democrats won four of the last six presidential elections. Something's working for them.

ADOLPH REED: What exactly have we gotten out of the fact that they've won?

BILL MOYERS: Winning is not enough, you're saying.

ADOLPH REED: No.

I mean here's an illustration of the limits of it. President Obama in the speech he gave a couple weeks ago, the ballyhooed speech where he mentioned the word "inequality" a couple times.

He leaves the podium in effect and goes straight to try to, you know, strong arm his own party to support fast track for Trans Pacific Partnership.

So, I mean, what we've got is, like, a bipartisan neoliberalism, right, that's at the center of gravity of the American government. And to be clear, what I mean by neoliberalism is that, it's two things.

It's a free market, utopian ideology. And it's a concrete program for intensified upward redistribution. And when the two objectives conflict, I mean, guess which one gets put -- on the shelf? But both parties are fundamentally committed to this. And at this point, and I think we've seen this much more clearly since the 2008 election, the principal difference between Democrats and Republicans is the choice between a neoliberal party that is progressive on multicultural and diversity issues, and a neoliberal party that's reactionary and horrible on those same issues.

But where the vast majority of Americans live our lives and feel our anxieties about present and future and insecurity is not about the multicultural issues over which there's so there's so much fight. In the very realm of the neoliberal economic issues to which both parties are, in fact, committed.

BILL MOYERS: So, I hear you saying, Adolph, that while social and cultural factors are important to us, economic issues are the fundamental existential questions. And that the neo-liberal parties, both of them, devoted to promoting the interests of multinational companies and capitalism don't care what you think about cultural and social issues, as long as they control the process by which nothing interferes with markets.

ADOLPH REED: I think that's quite succinct.

Indeed. And that's why types like Joan Walsh might get excited about the prospect of Hillary getting elected because they are first and foremost tribal Democrats who accept that symbolic victories like getting a black or a woman into the White House is substantive rather than symbolic progress. Sure, these tribal Democrats want all the things that Adolph Reed wants, too. I'm sure they think Elizabeth Warren is great. But economic justice issues are not their first priority; identity politics issues are more important.

And priorities matter because if the economic issues are secondary to cultural or tribal issues, too much cover is provided to Neoliberal Democrats who are politically correct on the cultural issues, and the Neoliberal agenda goes unchallenged in the Democratic Party. The Elizabeth Warrens are powerless as long as Neoliberals dominate the values frame of elite policymakers, and until being a Neoliberal carries the same stigma as being a homophobe, the Democrats will continue to be useless on economic justice issues.

If Liberal Dems who think of themselves as populists saw economic justice issues as their first priority, they would be looking to build coalitions with Main Streeters who are culturally conservative, but who are angry because they are hurting economically. These Main Streeters turn to the Tea Party instead, not because they are so racist or homophobic, but because the Democrats simply don't represent their interests either culturally or economically. They do not provide a political channel for their anxiety and anger, not even a little bit.  

Near the end of the interview Reed, an African American, makes a similar point:

ADOLPH REED: . . . I admit that this is kind of treading maybe, into troublesome water, but among the reasons that I know Obama's type so well is, you know, I've been teaching at elite institutions for more than 30 years.

And that means that I've taught his cohort that came through Yale actually at the time that he [Obama] was at, you know, Columbia and Harvard. And I recall an incident in a seminar in, you know, black American political thought with a young woman who was a senior who said something in the class. And I just blurted out that it seems, that the burden of what she said seemed to be that the whole purpose of this Civil Rights Movement was to make it possible for people like her to go to Yale and then to go to work in investment banking.

And she said unabashedly, "Well, yes, yes, and that's what I believe." And again, I didn't catch myself in time, so I just said to her, well, I wish somebody had told poor Viola Liuzzo, you know, before she left herself family in Michigan and got herself killed that that's what the punch line was going to be, because she might've stayed home to watch her kids grow up. And I think--

BILL MOYERS: This was the woman who on her own initiative went down during the civil rights struggle to Selma, Alabama, to join in the fight for voting rights and equality, and was murdered.

ADOLPH REED: Right, exactly. I'm not prepared to accept as my metric of the extent of racial justice or victories of the struggles for racial justice, the election of a single individual to high office or appointment of a black individual to be corporate CEO. My metric would have to do with things like access to healthcare--

BILL MOYERS: For everybody.

ADOLPH REED: For everybody, right? And this is something else, by the way--

BILL MOYERS: Not just a symbolic victory for one person?

ADOLPH REED: Right. Because the way politics has evolved since the 1980s is that what we get now is the symbolic victory for the single person instead of, right, you know, the redistributive agenda.

Until there is a shift  on the political left from cultural to economic priorities, nothing changes in the economic sphere. The cultural issues will resolve themselves over time. In twenty years the concerns of the cultural right will have become more fringe as the older, whiter Americans who have those concerns die out and as the people now in their twenties and younger start dominating public discourse. But the economic issues will not resolve themselves without the exertion of political will, because economic injustice is not a generational thing, and substantive change will be difficult as long as there are powerful entrenched interests who will resist it. And that resistance is not likely to come from twenty-somethings on the make, no matter what their color or gender, if they are like Reed's Yale student. If the basic values frame is still dominated by Neoliberalism and getting ahead in some Social Darwinist competition, we will still in twenty years be living a politics where our most signifcant victories will still be symbolic ones. 

See also this earlier piece I posted on Reed's Harpers article.

'Animal House' and the American Right

The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.

Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee. 

--Tom Frank

Tom Frank points to something that is at the heart of what confuses and ennervates the American Left, which is that its liberation project, insofar as it amounts merely a an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project.

The occasion for this piece in Salon is the recent passing of Harold Ramis, the creative mind behind Animal House, Caddyshack, and Ghostbusters, movies of the eighties that he argues are celebrations of Reaganism. The flippers off are not in the mold of Che and Angela Davis, but more in the mold of Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort. As Frank points out, Otter and Bluto's fraternity was modeled on one at Dartmouth that mainlines its alums to Wall Street. Isn't Scorcese's recent Wolf of Wall Street just Animal House for forty year olds? Isn't Kappa Beta Phi described in Kevin Roose's new book Young Money any different from Bluto's Delta Tau Ki.

Caddyshack pits the down-to-earth, wise-cracking, lovable Rodney Dangerfield character against the Ted Knight prig, the way The Howards of Virginia pit the Cary Grant character against Sir Cedric Hardwicke. It's a classic Hollywood trope--we are made to love the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the fascists who run the 'Establishment', only the Establishment in the 1970s and 80s was the New Deal Regulations Regime. The 'rules' were all the restrictions imposed on financial markets, you know rules like Glass Steagall. Glass Steagall is for squares. Who's the real American--Family Ties's Alex Keaton or his cluelessly bland, conventionally liberal parents? 

Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both want to crash old conventions. This has been the liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. And this is where it gets confusing, because so many on the political left are also on the cultural left, there is very little in their code that justifies restraint, and so it is hard for anyone on the Left to support a program in which restraint and discipline play a role. And so, at best, you get ineffectual things like Occupy or Jon Stewart's silly Rally to Restore Sanity.

The problem, of course, is that the hard right has no problem with discipline and restraint. It knows how to organize and get things done, and it has a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the feel-good, can't-we-just-get-along left cannot even begin to fathom. 

Remember the scene in Freaks and Geeks when Nick wants his garage band to get better to prove to his father he can have a career as a drummer so he won't have to go into the army. Well the rest of the freaks refuse to practice--they say it's too much like school. Daniel says to Nick something like, "It's Rock and Roll, man; it's supposed to come from the crotch. If you got any, you'd know that." And the band breaks up.

That scene for me is a metaphor for the American cultural/political Left. It's not just the bad boys like Daniel, it's the good girls like Lindsay, too. She aligns with the Freaks because she wants something "real", and the Freaks represent that because they are so, what . . .? Well, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so she rejects the path of discipline and restraint, a path with the right guidance that might lead her to realize a deeper kind of freedom and capacity. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.

And in the meanwhile the wolves circle. 

Judd Apatow is for the Millennials what Harold Ramis was for the Boomers--same old, same old Hollywood nihilsm with a happy face.