Identity Politics, Intersectionality and #fixingcapitalism
I was watching the #WeAreTheLeft hashtag, and the angry backlash against it, with interest on Wednesday. While I generally feel that tone-policing is almost the same as thought-policing, I will say that I found the vitriol flowing in both directions to be just a little over the top. There is a real issue here which requires careful analysis.
Clearly there are at least two competing notions of what it means to be part of “The Left.”
The targets of the letter, broadly speaking, were white, progressive Bernie Sanders supporters who insist that capitalism and not racism is what people on “The Left” ought to be fighting against. According to these progressives, #WeAreTheLeft are not the left. They are merely “liberal” pawns at the behest of the evil capitalist puppet-masters. The rage against #WeAreTheLeft is very clearly animated by the belief that “The Left” is defined in opposition to capitalism.
While this is a real issue that requires careful analysis, I won’t pretend to be neutral about it. These posts are about #fixingcapitalism, not opposing, dismantling, or replacing capitalism with socialism or anything else. Anyone who defines their point of view in a way that is openly hostile to capitalism is obviously not on my team. I don’t mean to insult them but a firm critique of their perpective is surely in order.
This is a vision of politics that belongs in the 20th century where it began.
Socialists were on the left and capitalists were on the right. The capitalists were greedy money-grubbers and the socialists were enlightened good people who knew how to share. And racism was something that the wealthy capital elite invented as a ploy to divide the working class against itself. Therefore, racism will go away as soon as the evil capitalists have been removed from power.
This narrative has already proven itself unsuitable for the 21st century. The capitalists who once dominated the right, and the Republican party, have been overthrown by overt racists who reject capitalism. They want walls and tariffs, not immigration and trade. They want an activist government which explicitly advances the concerns of white people at the expense of others. And unlike the neoliberal right who preceded them, they have no commitment to any particular value system or policy apparatus. I beleive that they will simply do whatever, in their view, advances the cause of whiteness.
If this is an accurate characterization of the downfall of the conservative establishment, then I believe we finally have an answer to the 20th century question of capitalism and race. While capitalism may have been advanced by racism in certain instances, the overall effect of the capitalist ethos has been to suppress a vile racial animus which constantly writhes beneath the surface of respectable thought. It is the collapse of that ethos which has enabled our racist demons to run loose.
The alternative viewpoint, that people are suddenly acting out in racist ways because they are mad about their health insurance bills and student loans, is inconsistent with what we can now see as a multi-decade trend of rising institutional racism enabled by both political parties, our criminal justice system, our financial institutions, and many if not all ordinary corporations. We now know that racism is everywhere and that it doesn’t stop when the economy is booming.
I can understand why this is all very traumatic for the old left, who believed that racism was a minor issue as compared to the machinations of a puppet-mastering capital elite. They believed that capitalism was stifling our democracy, and that if democracy was working then people would obviously choose socialism, sharing, and higher taxes on the rich. The collapse of capitalism was supposed to lead us to a glorious promised land, a world without class or race. But now, capitalism is really coming apart and it isn’t because the capitalists have stifled democracy. It’s because democracy has won, and it has chosen racism over both capitalism and socialism.
We find ourselves looking towards a future which is neither glorious nor promising. The old left is not ready to recognize that they have been wrong about capitalism and democracy, but they can feel it. I can feel it in their excessively angsty response to #WeAreTheLeft.
If the new right is characterized by overt racism and opposition to capitalism, it is indeed worthy of opposition, even more so than the old right. But how can we oppose it by talking about the evils of capitalism, when the people we are opposing do not believe in capitalism in the first place? The old left is mourning the loss of the old right. They missed the opportunity to defeat neoliberalism by identifying its flaws and correcting them, because they were caught up in the ancient Marxist narrative which claims that capitalism must collapse on its own; of its “internal contradictions.” Therefore there was no need invest in studying modern capitalism. In fact, it is a staple belief on the left that knowing and speaking the language of finance is a signal of greed and poor character. When it comes to money, ignorance is a virtue. Now, neoliberalism has been defeated not by progressives or socialists, but by racists who have proven themselves far more capable than the old left. It must be embarrasing to the revolutionary ego but acting all butthurt isn’t going to accomplish anything.
My view is that socialist policies have always been lacking popular appeal and that it is because of their lack of financial sophistication.
A transaction tax to fund free college might sound great to an 18-year-old high-school senior, or even a highly-indebted young professional, but everyone with even one dollar in a 401k is going to reject it once they see that transaction taxes are always paid by the investor. It would be a wealth transfer from old people to young people. This a basic fact of how markets work that the left would understand if they had invested any effort in learning about modern capitalism. In every argument, it seems that raising taxes, normally on the rich, is the goal of the old left. But it’s extremely hard to build support for tax increases. At a very deep level, people recognize that taxing one group to provide benefits for another is not how things are supposed to work. In China and Europe they do it by suppressing democracy in the extreme. In the US we enjoy greater freedom due to our superior financial infrastructure and our relative lack of constraints around fiscal policy. What conservatives think is a weakness is actually our greatest strength.
Only a small minority of today’s leftists are aware of the fact that taxes do not serve to fund government spending. (This includes the intersectional left.) And to my great chagrin, even the ones who have experienced this crucial insight continue to argue for the necessity of taxation as a mechanism of reward and punishment. They think we have to tax capitalism just because. To me it looks like they are doing it to seem cool around the socialists. But socialism isn’t cool and money doesn’t grow on rich people. That’s my point.
But the old left’s obsession with taxation as a vehicle for reward and punishment isn’t their only problem.
To make matters worse, old leftists are not reliable supporters of the welfare state either.
Many explicitly model their own vision of government after neoliberalism, choosing the language of “limited” or “small” government. Sometimes they call themselves anarchists or even “left libertarians.” They make a fetish of decentralization and distributed decision-making, in much the same way as “state’s rights” advocates. But like the neoliberals before them, they must accept the existence of government in order to become relevant in policy debates. So they find themselves supporting causes such as universal basic income and helicopter money. Ideas which attempt to reduce the state to a token issuer. By issuing money to citizens for free, these policies would deprive the public sector of the opportunity to expand its offerings.
Part of the problem with capitalism is indeed that people don’t have enough money on their balance sheets. But another problem is that our public service sectors have grown weak and sclerotic. They no longer have the resources to guarantee a state-of-the-art education to every citizen. Teaching careers no longer attract enough of our best and brightest young people. The police are insufficiently trained for the situations they encounter, with awful consequences. Our veterans are suffering for lack of care. I believe that “free money” policies including interest-payments on government debt and basic-income (or welfare) payments result in eventual inflation as the state is deprived of the asset-base it needs to protect all of the wealth created by the private sector. The right way to create money in the private sector is with government jobs that strengthen the public sector.
The intersectional left and the mainstream of the Democratic party are the only ones resisting this devastating rollback of services.
The old left has been patiently waiting for capitalism to collapse of its internal contradictions while millions of women and their families suffer from insufficient access to abortion and other reproductive health services. They refuse to lift a finger until the Democrats reject NAFTA and TPP, which happens to be another policy position they share with the new right.
For my part, I have been a critic of the neoliberal approach to globalization since the Battle of Seattle in 1999. But I also spent six years in trenches of Wall Street before, during and after the GFC, which is why I feel that I understand the workings of real capitalism better than the old left. Now I am strongly for globalization and global free trade. But it needs to be designed according to a sound accounting logic. At the moment, it is not well understood that a country running a persistent trade deficit needs a persistent government spending deficit of the same amount just to keep up with the leakage of financial assets. That’s before considering growth which is ideally higher in a multinational trading scenario. Globalized capitalism requires currency issuers to fund their governments and their private sectors with bigger deficits. But it also requires bigger, better, and stronger institutions both public and private. Mine is not a vision of small government, small-scale capitalism, or decentralization.
It is a vision of a new era of great institutions. They need to be better funded, better managed, more transparent and far more ethical than the old institutions. But make no mistake. They will be big and they will be powerful enough to protect all of planet Earth. I know that sounds scary to a lot of people but it is not as scary as the alternative which is a world where no one has the ability nor the willingness to keep us safe.
An additional point of commonality between the new right and the old left is the opposition to identity politics. I will never be able to understand the argument against identity politics again. Human beings exist in overlapping communities defined by common concerns. I am a heterosexual white male programmer with a wicked case of Crohn’s disease. The first four features of my identity are all advantageous in the society in which I live. But the fifth one puts me at a relatively rare disadvantage. I used to never talk about it because I didn’t want it to be part of my “identity.” I didn’t want to participate in support groups or fundraising or anything like that. I didn’t want to be one of those people whinging in public about their parochial wants and worries. I didn’t people to think I was sick. But why was that?
It was because I was beholden to the same narrative about individuality and identity as other white male progressives.
More recently, I have discovered that including my illness as part of my public and private identity is a perennial source of insight. It’s actually the only device through which I can attempt to understand the challenges faced by other people who didn’t score four of the most advantageous identity features. I do not know what it is like to be denied access to the bathroom that corresponds to my gender identity. But I do know what it is like to be worried about accessing the bathroom.
Participating in online support groups helped me to discover that marijuana really was therapeutic for my illness. It also help me to appreciate how privileged I am to have safe, legal access to it, and to realize that contributing to the normalization of medical marijuana (and marijuana in general) is a moral imperative for someone like me.
The closest I have ever been to oppressed is when I couldn’t quit my job to go launch my startup because I was unable to buy health insurance due to my pre-existing condition. After I finally did quit, the multi-year fight over the constitutionality of the ACA cost me no small amount of sleep, since I would have been forced to wind up my startup and seek employment in another big corporation if the Obama administration had lost.
Socialist Bernie Sanders has always been a tepid supporter of the ACA because it isn’t “revolutionary” enough for him. But it was revolutionary for me because it made it possible to launch a new career. During the campaign he put out an eight-page outline of his healthcare plan with no specifics about care and a laundry list of tax increases which were alleged to “pay for it.” He claimed he would tax capital gains at ordinary income rates and would close all of the corporate tax loopholes in his effort to fix healthcare without increasing the deficit. This proposal would have pit the entire corporate world and the investor class directly against people like me. It also would have failed to achieve its goals because tax collection is not the factor constraining healthcare provision. Taxes don’t fund spending. So when Hillary said his plan would force us to “start over again with a contentious debate. I want us to defend and build on the Affordable Care Act and improve it”, she won, even though she doesn’t get the point about taxes either.
I do not want another contentious debate over whether I have the right to purchase the means of survival. I also do not want to risk having someone in the White House who might persecute me over my medicine. But seeing Sanders supporters on twitter accusing women of “voting with their vaginas” sends me into a quiet rage. In this election I’m voting with my oh-so-fragile rectum and it happens to agree with the vaginas. There is no campaign to prevent men from getting their insurance to pay for penis pills, pumps, implants, vasectomies or circumcision. Everyone is part of a specialized group that requires specialized services. My needs are more specialized and more expensive than most which makes me the natural ally of the vaginas in their quest against the hordes of stupid penises.
Everyone has an identity which guides their concerns and their desire for specific changes to policy and services. That especially includes healthy straight white male professionals. Railing against identity politics is indistinguishable from railing against services for everyone who doesn’t fit into that lucky set. And the approach used, angrily insisting that other people need to stop talking about their identities before any serious discussion can begin, reminds me of the way economists and their pundits used to talk about inequality and class when the issue was raised by non-economists, which was to denounce the person talking about inequality and to insist that there was nothing to say about the subject. In the old days, discussing inequality would lead to being called a socialist, back when “socialist” was a significant slur. Economist Robert Lucas famously claimed:
Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.
But it turned out that inequality and class were real things that we should have been studying all along. The genuinely poisonous tendency is the one which causes us to ignore and deny our observations when they contradict the bedtime stories we tell ourselves about how the world works.
The notions of identity and intersectionality are similar to inequality in that the Very Serious People will insist that they don’t matter in increasingly irritable tones, until one day, the truth becomes too obvious to ignore.
In the same way that economists are beginning to claim that they have been interested in inequality all along, the Very Serious Progressives will all deny having been in the group of people who said that identity shouldn’t matter in politics. Most analytics people, and I am one, would say that in general, more data is better. In this case, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that race (more generally “identity”), in addition to class, is an extremely relevant factor in macroeconomic analysis and therefore as part of #fixingcapitalism. We don’t necessarily know, or need to know, which factor, between race or class, is more relevant in predicting and producing outcomes. What we do need is more information about identity, and how it shapes those outcomes. Listening to people who feel that they are being marginalized is absolutely essential to this information gathering process.
And it is essential to the larger goal of building better institutions which are cabable of operating in a way that maximizes freedom, fairness and prosperity for all human beings.
