But there is no Left and no Right. Those are abstractions according to which we choose to divide individuals.
Here’s how I would describe things:
- Economic elites really care about preserving their privileges.
- Elected officials really care about reducing the risk of losing office.
- The culture war – for both nominal Left and Right, is an extremely effective way of serving the interests of both economic elites and elected officials.
Why? Because the culture war turns politics into a question of identity, of tribalism, and hence narrows the effective choice in elections. We no longer vote for the person who better represents our interests, but for the person who talks our talk, sees the world the way we do, is one of us. That contest is a cheap and easy one for politicians of any stripe to enter – and, usually, an easy one to win. It sorts the overwhelming majority of the population into easy-to-count-on camps who will not demand that politicians do anything for them, because they’re too afraid the hated “other team” might get into power.
And it’s a good basis for politics from the perspective of economic elites. If the battle between Left and Right is fundamentally over social questions like abortion and gay marriage, then it is not fundamentally over questions like who is making a killing off of government policies and who is getting screwed. Economic elites may lean to one or the other side on any cultural question (they can be found on both sides), but they can maintain their privileges no matter which side wins any particular battle. So whoever they want to win, that’s the ground on which they want the battle to be fought. (Read on.)
Exactly. Maybe I shouldn't be so schocked to read it; it might be more a sign of my being out of touch with what's being written about in other circles, but this is a drum I've been beating now for years, and I've been unaware that anyone else is beating on it.
Recently I wrote:
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.
And so, as Adolph Reed points out, left (really liberal) politics becomes more about whether already affluent meritocrats who are gays, women, and people of color are hitting the glass ceiling in corporate America rather than whether working women of color have enough money to feed their kids. It's not that liberals don't care about they second; it's just that the first is more important, and they will elect Democrats who are good on the first even if they are non-committal or just bad on the second because they are so-called fiscally conservative Democrats, which is code for their being Neoliberal.
Millman again:
The evidence is overwhelming that winning this or that election doesn’t determine the shape of the culture – and in a healthy political culture the parties are going to take turns holding power fairly regularly anyway. A strategy to change the culture by always voting Republican or always voting Democrat is guaranteed not only not to change the culture, but to throw away the chance of your vote affecting anything else. Which is one reason why I am not primarily motivated by social issues, as compared with issues of war and peace, the general welfare, and good governance.
I don't agree completely here, because this kind of moderate good sense is inadequate to the enormity of what we are dealing with now. The problem lies in that voting for either Democrats or Republicans makes no difference regarding issues of war and peace, the general welfare and good governance, because our elected officials are tools of the Deep State. And that doesn't change until there's a real ground-up movement to put people in office who will put their cultural differences aside to push back against that hidden, deep power, which is a threat to us all no matter what our cultural values.