Dave's Daily Dose 2/16/2022
Matt Yglesias has a strong take on the relationship between civil rights and popularism, and why the changed political environment changes the lesson we should draw from the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Not much to say except… just read it.
Just to re-iterate: Marx basically predicted social democracy, but he wasn’t advocating for vanguardism1 like is commonly assumed.
The Communists who later followed him basically jumped the gun: Their entire ideological project was about figuring out ways to speed up the transition that Marx predicted. As people who were already disaffected dissidents, it’s no surprise that their first impulse was “use violent vanguardist insurrection”.
Anyways, modern postwar European social democracy essentially delivered on Marx’s idea that capitalism would generate a massive underclass, who would demand democracy, and then democracy would allow them to vote themselves a socialist welfare state2. It’s a positive reframing of de Tocqueville’s barely-10-years-earlier warning that too much democracy would result in the poor expropriating their wealthy betters.
Marx today would look at the “Communists” and say, “Well of course they bungled it; they were impatient thugs who thought they could skip the democracy part.” And he’d probably turn right around and note that postwar Western Europe had mostly gotten it right, although he’d be surprised that capitalism had managed to coexist for so long with social democracy. He’d also be pretty interested in later theories that have explained how capitalism has thus far had a tendency to absorb every single significant challenge to it.The Weeds had a good rundown yesterday of the different theories behind why midterms go poorly for the President’s party, and it kind of ends up touching on how they apply to all elections, not just midterms.
It’s really important when we hear about things like mobilization, persuasion, backlash, and negative partisanship, to not get stuck in the same stupid trap of thinking of them each in isolation, or as the dominant mode of every single election. The truth is, they’re all valid electoral strategies.
IE, the idea that a small, enlightened minority can inspire a sleepy but oppressed majority to national revolution, use it to seize power, enact their utopian ideological agenda, and then be regarded as heroes (rather than merely new oppressors) in the final utopian state.
This is the true sense in which Marx meant the oft-maligned phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” — namely, that the proletariat would dictate terms to their capitalist oppressors.