Today’s PSA: One of the easiest ways to convey that you didn’t pay a lick of attention in physics class is when you call extreme-magnitude forces “g-forces”. The thing is, “g” isn’t a type of force, it’s just a unit corresponding to the force of gravity felt at sea level on Earth.
Secret Congress strikes again this week, this time with a bill on sexual harassment.
Ruy Teixeira is having trouble processing the left again. It’s not that I don’t agree with a lot of his broad strokes, and maybe I’m just too biased as a leftie myself, but I often feel like he’s overstating his case. Then again, I’m not as plugged-in on the day-to-day goings-on within the party.
Anyways, I wonder if “the reason why the Left is not seizing its moment to kill neoliberalism dead” (which is what he’s asking about) is not rooted in a sort of symmetry with the way the race-class-narrative has worked for the Right. That is to say, the Left never cared about killing neoliberalism, and only really saw it as a way to castigate the establishment for its ideological heresy. This is in parallel to the way that the Right’s base has repeatedly been revealed to care more about social politics than tax cuts and deficits.
The contrast, then, also lies in attitudes about social politics. The classic race-class narrative holds that social politics have been the way the Right’s elites controlled their base. But this is definitely not what’s going on with the Left! The Left’s elites generally actually agree with their base on social politics, they’re just pragmatic enough to recognize that the Democratic Party is stuck between an ideological rock and an electoral hard place1. The Right’s elites even used to share this attitude on things like immigration, but were long ago forced by their own propaganda machine to capitulate to their base.
This is confusing even me here, so to be clear, what I’m saying is that Teixeira’s mistake is not understanding that the Left really only cared about social politics.
To zoom back out, though, symmetry often speaks to broader causes than mere intraparty dynamics. The nationalization of media and therefore electoral politics, the extremifying selection effect of the primary system, the extremifying effect of the filibuster-abuse-induced backlog of policy progress, unresolved issues from the incomplete Civil Rights Movement, and probably a couple other factors are at play here.
So, while I’m sure that it’s cathartic to Teixeira to keep laying into the Left, I’m not convinced mere argumentation will do much to win his point. The actual work he’s doing — building institutions on the Left that can impose message-discipline and offer a credible alternative vision of internal dissent for people to rally around — is probably far more important. It’s what the Right used to be able to do, but sadly boxed itself out of as it shifted to relying on propaganda2.
Even worse, the Left’s elites were stuck with a coalition for which some form of social politics (good or bad) has been a necessary glue. You don’t get dozens of disparate interest/minority groups to stay in a coalition for long without telling each and every one of them that they’re a special contributor to the cause.
Sadly, I think that what started out as a fairly universalist version of that glue, deteriorated over time as progress kept being stymied. You can only tell your immigration activists, or your police reform activists, or your LGBT activists, “Wait your turn til next time!” for so many years before they get sick of hearing it, and that sickness eventually turned into an ideological ferment that characterizes (fairly or not) all opposition to it as rooted in White supremacy.
Which makes me wonder what the country would look like if the filibuster had died in 1964 or shortly thereafter. With fewer veto points gumming up the works, demand for progress probably gets a fairer shot and doesn’t ferment as bad as it has, and the GOP’s electoral incentives never spoil either.
Which is why the Never Trumpers never stood a chance: Their battle was lost before it ever started.