Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”
An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.
I agree with everything Robin lays out in this essay. Even though I doubt he would agree with much of what I say in my Crisis of the Liberal Order posts last month, I think the argument he makes here supports what I argued there--and the crux of it is in the last two paragraphs excerpted above.
"An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have", but not only that, he is confronting a very powerful revanchist social movement that the Republican Party does have. The real question is if Biden were to have a social movement "to use", what would it look like? I think that given Robin's Marxist presuppositions, he sees it as workers--what he calls "subordinates"--uniting. I think that it would be great if unions make a comeback to play a more robust role in pushing back against the hegemony of technocapitalism, but it's not likely to succeed because of the way the culture wars currently dominate the political sphere.
The existing union rank and file is culturally divided. Your average union fireman or autoworker is more likely to be a Trump support as not. Marx would call this false consciousness, and it well may be. But that doesn't change the fact that it is the biggest obstacle to Robin's hope for a a broad social movement that would support a progressive agenda. You have to address the underlying causes for the false consciousness, and that's extremely difficult to do under any circumstances, but far more difficult in the current climate of distrust and disinformation. And besides, a blue-collar distrust of Democratic Party has been well earned.
The Democrats lost the blue-collar rank-and-file for lots of reasons, but among the most important are Clinton's Neoliberal selling them out coupled with how blue-collars have come to feel increasingly uncomfortable by the secular utilitarianism that shapes the Democratic party ethos. A secular utilitarianism coupled with identity politics is all the Left has to work with these days, and it's not selling on Main Street. Well, the Dems also have the antipathy of many, but not all, people of color to Republican whiteness. Not a lot to work with that might inspire the kind of broad social movement Robin is hoping for.
I've been arguing for years that people like Robin and others on the cultural Left do not take seriously how cultural issues are undermining their ability to achieve anything important in other areas--like wealth distribution and climate change. And now add to that a most urgent need to address structural constitutional problems concerning whose votes count or don't. The most important political objective now should not be getting Biden's BBB passed, but addressing some of these structural issues before it's too late. If they can get BBB done before Christmas, fine--but the agenda for the new year should be to pull out all the stops to prevent gerrymandering and state and local election boards from insuring Republican minority rule for the next generation--if not longer.
I agree with Robin that in the long term a truly progressive agenda must be supported by a shift in the culture, which is another way of saying that an independent social movement with broad cultural appeal must emerge. Right now it's hard to see how, where, or when such a movement might arise, but if it does, I doubt it will look like what Corey Robin or Freddie de Boer imagine. Steve Bannon's populist nationalism has a better chance of capturing more of the working class than anything being proposed on the Left. So the more important issue in the short run is to prevent the slow-motion right-wing coup unfolding before our eyes, and that requires getting this voting legislation passed. Nothing else really matters.