I'm typing about the recent mid-term USA elections because I think that what happened there is relevant for what's happening to leftists everywhere, including here in Toronto where right-wing populist Rob Ford defeated cynical liberal opportunist George Smitherman.
Here's Cathie From Canada before the election with a list of the accomplishments of the Obama-led Democratic majority. The thing is, I've never heard of a lot of these bills, and that's probably because all the big stuff (pro-insurance industry health care reform, hideous assaults on human rights, escalation of the war in Afghanistan, abandoning pro-union legislation, sidelining Elizabeth Warren, failing to regulate Wall Street, failure to help US-Americans to stay in their homes, siding with BP against the Gulf Coast, extending "don't ask, don't tell,") has drowned out these piecemeal, minor actions.
The conclusions to draw from the right-wing "victory" is that it isn't really a victory for them at all. They won because the centre and most people left of it, stayed home, rather than become active participants in their own abuse. Furthermore, the extreme right-wing lost, and helped to split the vote to enable the Democrats to keep the Senate.
But the reality is that progressives won. I disagree with the Pollyanna mentality of that article (the author imagines that Obama will now be able to work with his more solidly progressive legislative colleagues to truly fight for ordinary US-Americans and blah, blah, blah) but I do think the facts at hand represent the main point: That progressive Democrats stayed strong, and Rahm Emmanuel's "Blue-Dogs" failed miserably.
The sad fact is that Obama appears to be taking this minor drubbing entirely the wrong way and intends to veer even further rightward to appease the Repug majority, and, more importantly, his Wall Street masters.
I'll have more to say as to why the genuine left needs a better narrative and needs to distance itself from the "Third Way" drivel that prevailed in the 1990s and lingers on today. We have to understand some simple truths that reinforce our policy strengths and which will resonate with voters so that they don't have merely the incoherent, contradictory bullshit that spews from the mouths of the likes of Rob Ford or Jim Flaherty. Because working-class voters want economic stability more than anything and the helluvit is that we can give them that and more if we only have faith in ourselves and ditch the propaganda of the hegemonic cheerleaders of torture, war, and financial chaos.
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I watched some of the live midterm coverage webcast by Democracy Now! in conjunction with most of the other major U.S. progressive media. It was a neat technical accomplishment, and hopefully a sign of future fruitful collaboration, but it was also very disheartening. Not so much because of the results -- I think partisans of both major wings of the U.S. elite have selfish reasons to be exaggerating the extent and the significance of the right's victory -- but because of the ways that the commentators they had on were talking about it. These were big names in progressive circles in the U.S. -- names you recognize from reading The Nation and Common Dreams and even Z-Net. Some are meaningfully left in their politics, not just left-liberal. Yet it was so disheartening to hear them talk.
It took me awhile to figure out why. And what I came up with was that, with the partial exception of Michael Moore, all of them, even those whose explicit content was clearly left and not just liberal, talked about the elections in ways that made it clear that the forms of their political visions are held in such capture by the electoral ritual. Now, I'm no anarcho-puritan abstenionist -- we have to vote, and maybe even engage with electoral politics in more substantive ways than that under certain circumstances, even when we recognize that radical movements have to the basis of any fundamental change that happens. But we can't have our political vision grounded in the rhythms and the practicalities and the expectations of compromise of electoral politics. Even if we engage with all those things as necessary, we need to start from a place where we aren't grounding our hopes in an endless, pointless war of position between two parties which both hate us, but in the lives and needs of ordinary people. Moore has his problems -- his ego and his relentless taking up of space were certainly on display during the broadcast -- but he at least was very clear a good portion of the time about starting from the experiences of ordinary people, which in his case means working-class and poor families in Flint and elsewhere in Michigan.
Scott,
As you know, we disagree about the importance of the electoral process, but I agree that we have to speak to people swimming deep within the confines of the hegemonic culture in such a way as to convince them that their best interests are served by a left perspective and not by a right-wing populist perspective.
In my view, that will make it more likely that the parties that hate us will become more irrelevant, as voters consistently pick those who hate them least, or those who actually like them.
Check out the last link. There's a bit of worrisome pandering to xenophobia in there (in my reading of it anyway) but I think it's also a reality that people desperate to find a way to survive aren't particularly keen to have to compete with other people willing to accept less.
The hell of it is that we could easily afford to look after both the constituencies in question.
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