Why the American Left failed, and what can we learn from it.

[Rennadrel]

I thought this was an interesting read. The article focuses on this from a Canadian angle, but it's something that would be applicable in most western nations.

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2017/08/1...n-Left-Failed/

Charlottesville didn’t come out of nowhere. The violence we saw this weekend was an aftershock of the U.S. school integration battles of the 1950s, the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960s, and the white terrorism of Timothy McVeigh in the 1990s. In theory, the American left won those struggles against the far right; in practice, it settled for an armed truce.

This is a good time to reconsider the thoughts of Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, who 20 years ago published this book: an insightful analysis arguing that the American left abandoned its working-class base and cleared the way for the far right to offer workers an alternative. After the 2016 election, some passages from his book appeared on Twitter and were endlessly passed along:

"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

“At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots....

“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Rorty was clearly a prophet, and we should remember that ever since the Old Testament prophets have been policy wonks; their grim warnings describe predictable consequences of bad policy. Still, it’s striking how much more he predicted than just the coming of Trump.

Rorty argues that American socialism was a potent force a century ago, grounded in the optimistic national pride of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Socialism might have become even stronger after the First World War, but the Russian Revolution offered a fatal attraction for the impatient. The American left broke up in a schism as momentous as Protestant and Catholic Christianity or Sunni and Shia Islam. National pride was out; international communism now set the terms of debate.

Rorty’s parents first chose communism, but returned to the anti-communist left soon after his birth in 1931. He grew up, therefore, in an ignored splinter party while the communists got all the attention (and most of the blacklisting and jailings).

In the 20 years after the Second World War, the trade unions were purged of their communist members, and often taken over by crooks and gangsters. Old-fashioned American socialists, with CIA funding, supported the Cold War and promoted a kind of cultural leftism that ignored the workers.

But unionized workers made a lot of money in those 20 years, enough to buy their own homes and send their kids to college in a rapidly expanding post-secondary system. Long before Justin Trudeau started talking about “people working hard to enter the middle class,” American and Canadian workers’ children were moving into that class. They had a rare chance for social mobility — careers in teaching and other professions.

From agents to spectators

And here Rorty makes a crucial point: by the mid-1970s, the left had been astutely steered from active “agents” of change to passive “spectators” of the triumph of the right. Instead of organizing, the left was content with criticizing.

Vietnam, Rorty rightly observes, was the turning point. The old left was exhausted; a new young left forced the U.S. to abandon the Vietnamese adventure. But the anti-war marchers were college students, not workers. When they marched past construction sites, the patriotic hardhats booed them and they booed back.

Rorty thinks stopping Vietnam saved the U.S., but the long-haired leftists of the 1960s became the young faculty and middle managers of the 1970s. Their interests were no longer those of their working-class parents. Meanwhile the hardhats voted for Reagan and the crippling of the unions that had made them strong.

The academic left, Rorty says, didn’t completely abandon the fight. But emphasis shifted from the political left to the cultural left. Workers had long been the objects of concern. Now the left’s concern was for minorities of all kinds — racial, ethnic and eventually sexual.

This amounted to desertion of the workers, and when free trade took away American jobs, it met only feeble resistance from the cultural left. “Globalism” now seemed as inevitable as communism once seemed. The workers who lost their jobs went into history’s ash can.

Foreseeing the ‘cosmopolitans’

Rorty was no fan of globalism; he was too much of a nationalist. In another eerie foreshadowing of Trump, he warned about the rise of a “cosmopolitan upper class,” entrepreneurs with no real roots in the U.S., much less in the working class. This “overclass” was served, he said, by “cultural cosmopolitanism,” the professors and managers who enjoyed comfortable lives serving the overclass while promoting racial, ethnic and gender equality and ignoring the workers.

In describing this process, Rorty makes a useful distinction. Selfishness, he says, causes the oppression of classes; sadism causes the oppression of minorities. The cultural left has fought for half a century against the sadists (of all classes and ethnicities), and scored some real victories. The sadistic right wing squawks about “political correctness,” but the term simply means showing respect for kinds of people the right wing would rather bully.

But the cultural left has abandoned the workers to the selfish right wing, which now owns most of the world’s wealth. The workers themselves often despise minorities (immigrants, Muslims, gays, First Nations) like their hardhat fathers, and no one’s willing to teach them better; no wonder Trump and his Republicans won so many of their votes.

The cultural left has brought a lot of people out of some suffocating closets, and that’s a worthwhile achievement. But it’s pointless if minority workers are still underpaid, and immigrant workers can’t find housing, and work itself is as rare on First Nations reserves as drinkable water.

Seen in the light of Rorty’s critique of the left, the last 20 years make a kind of horrible sense. The overclass has continued to amass most of the world’s wealth, with the eager help of the merely rich. Minority rights have improved, but economic inequality has grown worse.

Now a few astute racists and reactionaries have seized on the situation Rorty described, and exploited the workers on behalf of Trump and the overclass. They have cynically stolen the left’s old skepticism about globalism and free trade and made it a pillar of the new right wing.

The moral for Canada is pretty clear. The Canadian left has also largely deserted the workers while supporting minorities. The Liberals pretend there is no working class, only hard-working folks trying to escape it. The Conservatives’ scare themes, like hijabs and “barbaric cultural practices,” distract attention from workers’ real problems.

Canada’s left should focus instead on creating an educated, resilient working class — of all ethnicities and genders — that can demand its fair share of the nation’s wealth and respect. Richard Rorty’s book is a useful primer for anyone who wants to embark on helping create such a class.

The TL;dr of this story is that the American left basically had a schism and went from being an ideology that supported the workers of the baby boomer generation and those prior to being an ideology all about minorities. In doing so, by alienating the workers, the American left forced the workers into the far right ideology because conservative politics in America, especially with the advent of Trump, has put the focus back on American jobs and workers, and taken it away from the identity politics of the Democrats.

[WskyDK]

It could have been summed up as "people care far less about social issues when they're concerned about food on their plate."

If someone at the DNC took a look at Maslow's heirarchy of needs, they could have seen it coming.

[Sky High]

It couldn't possibly be the case that the message was all there for middle America and minorities but the person delivering the message decided to make it about petty issues and was as appealing as a corpse warmed over. No! Perish the thought!

[WskyDK]

They didn't fail, they got more votes than the opponent.

And that is even after the opponent tried to appeal to white supremacists and other deplorables.
The right now regrets it. They will lose all support in 2018.

If only the volume of votes mattered.

[Elegiac]

The TL;dr of this story is that the American left basically had a schism and went from being an ideology that supported the workers of the baby boomer generation and those prior to being an ideology all about minorities. In doing so, by alienating the workers, the American left forced the workers into the far right ideology because conservative politics in America, especially with the advent of Trump, has put the focus back on American jobs and workers, and taken it away from the identity politics of the Democrats.

There are some very salient points, particularly about how it is difficult for progressive parties of any stripe to reconcile traditional working class votes with socially progressive ideologies; see the Australian Labor Party. But it's not an impossible thing, it just requires a certain knack at political marketing which the Democrats clearly do not have.

But blaming "the left" for leaving American workers behind? No. The Democrats have consistently espoused policies beneficial to the working class in the form of higher wages, union protections, and retraining initiatives. The problem is that the rest of society, particularly the economy, has moved past the age of where low-tech manufacturing is a profitable sector much less a viable career path; the future is in the service and technology industries, and the Democrats recognise that. Hence why retraining was such a big part of Hillary's platform.

Aforementioned workers, though, don't want that. They don't want service jobs, or retraining assistance, or to have to move to where the jobs are. They want to remain in their small town and be able to rock up to a factory earning 40,000 a year with benefits, with no prior experience or training.

What does a rational politician forwarding workable policies have to offer such people?

[Rennadrel]

They didn't fail, they got more votes than the opponent.

And that is even after the opponent tried to appeal to white supremacists and other deplorables.
The right now regrets it. They will lose all support in 2018.

Well, they failed in the sense that they branched away from the ideology of putting American's, especially American workers, first. They were the primary voters of the Democrats, but as their unions started getting destroyed by Reagan and industries continually savaged by globalism, the American worker is a ghost of what it once was.

[baskev]

It could have been summed up as "people care far less about social issues when they're concerned about food on their plate."

If someone at the DNC took a look at Maslow's heirarchy of needs, they could have seen it coming.

Yup. Perfectly put.
That is why i am looking forward to 2018 and 2020....Because the faith they had in the right has also been shattered. It turns out the right is as bad ( and some of the right republicans) are worse then the lefty democrats .

All the right has done for them is lie, cancel programs like ARC. Take away more rights and more jobs...and previous the worker class only had to care about food on their plate. Now the also need to look out for their health and their jobs, and their schools, and their freedoms.

[bewbew]

The assumption that "the right wing has most of the wealth" is ridiculous, when we are paraded with billionaires virtue signaling about some kind of "social justice" (that is to be done with other's people moneys, through taxes, not their own).

It also assumes that the "common people" don't like "minorities" just because they're uneducated. I don't like muslins exactly because I know what they're up to, not the other way around. I don't like gay pride celebrations because most of them are using tax payer money when Police takes 30 minutes to get here if you call them, or if you have a really bad road accident the ambulance might not even freaking SHOW. UP.

When you have really life or death situations at hand, wasting money with "Celebrating diversity" is ridiculous.

[Deleted]

The left has failed. So has the right. Perhaps it's time for the United States to look towards a bit more complex of a political system, rather than "left and right" and "liberal and conservative"? Clearly it's an unintelligent dichotomy and a dumb, simplistic system that doesn't represent anyone, and does - not - work.

[Grimbold21]

Christ, you Americans and your bloody Left & Right nonsense....

[Elegiac]

The left has failed. So has the right. Perhaps it's time for the United States to look towards a bit more complex of a political system, rather than "left and right" and "liberal and conservative"? Clearly it's an unintelligent dichotomy and a dumb, simplistic system that doesn't represent anyone, and does - not - work.

The left/right spectrum is a perfectly fine system of political classification, point in fact.

The issue is that America's political system tends to encourage a fairly rigid bipartisanism. Which is not a fault in either of the major parties.

[Very Tired]

It probably would have been a great help to Hillary if she had come out and said "White people aren't that bad'.

That was Trump's main appeal when he said he was running for 'the forgotten men and woman'. He sided with the majority and won in the few states that mattered.

[BuckSparkles]

Indeed. It's a shame because it's not like the core left ideology is that "whites are bad" but their messaging just can't get past, "X vs White Men".

So at some point all those people are just going to think, "Well obviously the democrats don't care about me, and Trump does." which is patently false, but that was the message over and over.

Pretty sure the rubbish about white privilege is the left trying to shame you for the color of your skin. New age racism.

Also affirmative action trying to give an upper hand to minorities purely due to their skin color, which is also racism in a politically correct way.

[Very Tired]

Indeed. It's a shame because it's not like the core left ideology is that "whites are bad" but their messaging just can't get past, "X vs White Men".

So at some point all those people are just going to think, "Well obviously the democrats don't care about me, and Trump does." which is patently false, but that was the message over and over.

When the left pedal things like Affirmative Action that would basically boil down to whites being legally discriminated against, and with such large support that revolves around the idea that white people should be ashamed of themselves, they start to get that idea.

I've tried to cover this in the other threads, but Affirmative Action will just end up causing them more problems than they think it's going to solve. Society isn't a simple cause and effect with predictable outcomes. Stuff like that is going to have a major backlash.

[BuckSparkles]

When the left pedal things like Affirmative Action that would basically boil down to whites being legally discriminated against, and with such large support that revolves around the idea that white people should be ashamed of themselves, they start to get that idea.

I've tried to cover this in the other threads, but Affirmative Action will just end up causing them more problems than they think it's going to solve. Society isn't a simple cause and effect with predictable outcomes. Stuff like that is going to have a major backlash.

It also doesn't help that groups and folks responsible for things like affirmative action simply double down on it and basically say anybody who doesn't agree with them are uneducated racists, which in turn would create more resentment and anger.

[Deleted]

The left/right spectrum is a perfectly fine system of political classification

Well, no, it's not at all. But, agree to disagree.

[Marakesh]

There are so many flawed assumptions here.

First, he throws out the left won the civil rights battles. Nonsense, Johnson's 63 civil rights act was cribbed from earlier Republican efforts in the late 50's and relied almost entirely on Republicans for passage. Unions were powerful in the 50's because America had most of the factories left standing after WWII, businesses needed workers in them more than workers needed a job, and not due to any golden age of socialism. White terrorism of Timothy McVie? He was one guy, last I heard, most years outside of the OKC bombing and 9/11, its the eco terrorists quietly racking up the body count. Not sure how one guy, no matter how effective he was in his 15 minutes of fame, defines anything, but it is telling that this gets spun into a victory over Republicans. Meanwhile, liberals took no responsibility for the Scalise shooting, what antifa has been up to, that the Unibomber was a regular at "mainstream" environmental conferences, or that behind the "Red Scare" we had their communist buddies giving Stalin the bomb and much more.

What it really boils down to is the base assumption of "our" righteousness vs the bad guys on the other side, and if that's the only way you know how to see the world you aren't likely to be able to correct your bad ideas or sell them to the public. That's your biggest flaw right there.

[Wyrt]

By left you mean the right wing democrats? Because the democrats haven't been actual left since the Cold War since anything remotely left of center was labeled as literally communism.

[A dot Ham]

Indeed. It's a shame because it's not like the core left ideology is that "whites are bad" but their messaging just can't get past, "X vs White Men".

So at some point all those people are just going to think, "Well obviously the democrats don't care about me, and Trump does." which is patently false, but that was the message over and over.

And vice versa... yes absolutely.

[gyrados]

im just curious why label yourself as either left or right just be you dont be a label