Dirtbags, pragmatists and the fate of the left

dave a.
dave a.
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read
Source: cnn.com

There is considerable disagreement among potential democrat voters as to what the American left should look like in 10 years. Recently, a slew of articles in mainstream publications have taken aim at the far left, social democratic contingent. The primary complaint lobbed at the so called “dirtbag” or “brocialist” left is something like this: your politics amounts to vulgar insults and dreams of power; you have no patience for the painful labor of political persuasion and compromise that actually gets things done. In response, leftists tend to sneer at the center-left as a bunch of neoliberal technocrats. Some leftists wholeheartedly agree with their detractors: they do advocate for a politics of power and dominance. These leftists, in agreement with a good deal of marxist and post-marxist thought, believe that all politics reduces to power and dominance relationships. You need power to implement an agenda, they argue, so let’s get us some power.

But how to acquire power remains the elusive question. Center-left liberals typically argue that the solution is some kind of dialogue or discourse with undecided voters. Quite often, the “dialogue” amounts to a rather one-sided attempt by center-left experts to convince rural voters that they vote against their interests. Many leftists roll their eyes at this “discourse,” as they believe that there is no convincing the oppressor or rubes under the sway of the oppressor’s ideology. Rather, the goal of politics is to turn out enough of the oppressed to win elections and simply override the interests of the ruling or capitalist class.

Now, democrats have really struggled to win elections since 2010 or so, and it has gotten to the point that even narrow losses in special elections feel like moral victories. Whatever democrats have been doing, it is not working tremendously well.

Source: thenation.com

Leftists are probably correct: as an election year strategy, discourse is pretty ineffective. There is a mounting body of evidence from social psychology that people have a tendency to emotionally jump to moral conclusions and defend those conclusions with all sorts of post hoc rationalizations. What this means is that most people settle on a conclusion that feels intuitive to them and then come up with an argument for it after the fact. If this is even remotely accurate, then presenting people with rational arguments will rarely sway them from their dearly held convictions, at least in the short term.

But people surely do change their convictions over time. Just because people tend to rationalize their convictions does not mean that they are completely incapable of changing them. Attitudes do change on economic and social issues. There is no other way to explain how quickly attitudes have shifted on issues ranging from gay marriage to single payer. Rational arguments probably play some role in getting people to change their convictions. It just takes people awhile to internalize these arguments, because properly reflecting on and re-ordering one’s beliefs takes time, especially if it requires one to defect from popular opinions held by one’s friends or family. So while “discourse” may demonstrate little payoff in the short term, it would seem unwise to simply discard it altogether.

No one will deny that the leftists core strategy, “organizing,” is important to gaining political victories. But organizing alone only works if you’ve got the numbers. If you truly believe that convincing undecideds is a nonstarter, you better hope you can piece together a slightly bigger team than your opponent. After Obama’s win, this seemed like a plausible strategy moving forward. All democrats had to do was turn out the new “coalition of the ascendant” and they would easily win elections and push through their agenda.

Source: bloomberg.com

With a big enough coalition, democrats could probably boot republicans out of power. But both the center and far left appear to be engaged in a contest to demonstrate who can more effectively repulse potential voters. Many on the center-left have become a new moral majority: an urbane managerial-professional class of scolds who take great pleasure in lecturing people for what they eat, how they talk, how they dress, where they work, what decisions they make in life, what they believe, what they buy, what music they listen to, what jokes they find funny, etc. etc.

Leftists like to paint themselves as a diverse group of personalities linked primarily by an interest in class politics. This is only partially true. Some on the far left also enforce a narrow set of informal social norms. Leftist humor tends to be cynical, snarky, cruel, offensive and often confusingly irreverent. Many leftists tend to speak in stark moral absolutes that would leave most Americans bewildered or offended (for an example, take a look at weird twitter’s response to John McCain’s yes vote on the recent motion to proceed).

Organizing will work only if people want to join your coalition. People only want to join your coalition if they feel like they can fit in and basically get along with other members of the coalition (without feeling too judged or ridiculed). The more you organize your movement around a simple, appealing platform, the more people will feel they can easily get along. The more you rigorously enforce cliquey social norms, whether norms of academic intersectionality or cruel and aloof irony, the more people will feel out of place and stay home.

But the problem is not merely strategic. Leftists and the the center-left disagree about what the democrat’s platform should look like. One typical story is that center-leftists are pragmatists who favor incremental steps and compromise while leftists are hopeless idealists who want an immediate transition to a European style social democracy. Another story is that the center-left favors identity politics while leftists favor class politics. Neither of these quite hit the mark.

What democrats have not done a great job of is deciding on strategic concessions. Center-leftists will gladly go out on a limb to back controversial measures, such as repealing the hyde amendment, but when it comes to relatively popular measures, such as increasing medicaid or greatly upping the minimum wage, out come the charts and economic theory on why the American public is not ready for such radical change (the fact that Hillary Clinton added increasing the minimum wage and free college to her platform is a testament to the growing influence of leftists in the democrat party).

But neither are leftists keen on compromising and making pragmatic concessions, both of which are ridiculed relentlessly in leftist circles. This makes assembling a broad coalition rather difficult. Leftists tend to think this can be overcome by taking their economic message to the working class. As I have argued elsewhere, I do not think that will be sufficient.

Source: americansocialists.org

I think if the democrats can settle on a few strategic concessions, tone down the in-group signalling and work on an appealing platform, they can again see great success. If I had to take a guess at a successful platform, I would say they should foreground instituting single payer, protecting the environment, raising the minimum wage and defending the civil rights of African Americans. They should probably cede some ground on (not) enforcing immigration law, tone-policing, implementing new gun-control measures and prosecuting those who wish to claim religious exemptions. I’m not sure whether free university is a winner, but certainly free post-secondary education would be popular. These suggestions are hopelessly clouded by my own biases, but I think this is a discussion democrats need to have. If they cannot make strategic concessions to meet undecided voters and those who don’t follow politics too closely where they are at, they will continue to lose.

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