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.