left disunity, left "losing its way" and other tales and stories we tell ourselves
the need to complicate rather than simplify left strategy and pitfalls
This post is going to be rather short. I plan on writing on this topic of left strategy and the stories we tell ourselves more extensively down the road. Also, worth mentioning, but an earlier draft of this got deleted, so this is round two, and I’m working through some frustrations having to repeat myself again.
Regardless, thank you for reading this and following the substack.
Another thing I want to mention is I like a lot of what Thomas Frank has to say, both in his interviews and in his written work. I obviously agree with his critiques about the Democrat party (it being a neoliberal party divorced from its modern roots in the New Deal era), and I also think his writing style, dynamic and engaging, is a style that other left writers should learn from, and try and adapt to their own.
That being said, I do think that some points raised by Frank in a recent interview, which echo some of what I’ve been hearing from other left-wing podcasts and writers, are not exactly always true, nor points that speak to the reality of the left. I will go through these points now.
Point 1: The Left Is Not The Democrat Party
It is true that in the U.S., if there is a left, it would reside somewhere within Democrat party politics. However, there’s sometimes this tendency among some critics, Frank included, to conflate the left with the Democrat party. The Democrat party, if anything, has always been a coalition of various interests, including some elements of the left, but in the past four decades, mostly business, some liberal, some progressive, and people who are partisans. Overall, when Frank and others critique the left, they usually mean the Democrat party.
Point 2: Neoliberalism didn’t simply emerge because the left gave up on economic policy
To some degree, there is truth to the fact that elements of the left, such as parts of the New Left did start to distance themselves from bread and butter economic issues, and from labor unions, which was a grave mistake. One must acknowledge this in order to build a more effective left politics in the near future, that always, labor unions and economic power must be included.
Yet, to always suggest that the rise of the neoliberal era had more to do with choices than error is always misleading.
As discussed by Mike Davis and even more liberal historians such as Nelson Lichenstein, in the postwar era, the labor unions themselves also went down a road of depending extremely heavily on the Democratic party for reforms, etc. By the post-WWII era, you had leftwing organizers and communists and radicals being purged by labor unions as a way of appealing to Truman and the Democrats, who were extremely anti-communist. The communists themselves were naive in having ceased developing their own independent constituency, allowing their supporters to be melted into the general Democrat party pool of supporters.
Such steps would narrow what many rank and file wanted, which was no longer about overthrowing capitalism. This allowed capitalists to still own the means of production, however limited it had become. And of course, the most extreme among them, like the Koch brothers, desired more profit and would use their power over the economy, their resources, to build a counter to the New Deal and Great Society.
Most importantly, with communists and leftwing radicals having been purged, trade unions themselves had ceased building bridges between white workers and nonwhite workers in ways that would challenge the social order itself. This meant that when the fight to end formal Jim Crow spread into the north and west, many white workers, including those who’d become part of the vaunted middle class, expressed hatred and selfishness, which pro-Vietnam War democrats could exploit, and later, Republicans such as Reagan.
It wasn’t simply the case that the left “lost its way”.
Point 3: The Left is not growing because it pushes people away, and even then, organizing is more than just avoiding issues.
This is something that people like Ben Burgis raise. To some degree, there are factions of the left that do behave in a way that is very much counterproductive. I’ve come across such people mainly online, people who will lecture you (sometimes it’s a white person lecturing me about racism). This does exist.
However, the way that some people present this issue as the main problem is a bit much. As someone who’s organized in DSA and as part of my labor union, and who has written about and researched on issues of labor and left strategy, the bigger problem isn’t somehow “ideological purity”, as Frank would suggest, but rather, a lack of presence in peoples’ lives.
The DSA, and some other groups, have grown, but we’re still at a severe disadvantage in terms of presence nationally. Some of this is built into the system. Under capitalism, those with the most resources can grow their influence and power, and those of us on the left, since we’re typically people seeking a better world, and usually, are people marginalized by the existing one, lack such resources to expand as easily, or to punch above our weight, as rightwing groups do because they have a fundamentalist billionaire behind them.
The DSA, in fact, has lost members over time, which is also due to the fact that its core members are people, even if they’re white collar, who are overwhelmed by economic crises and immediate economic needs to constantly be volunteering their time.
Furthermore, and this is important, there is a need for ideological purity, for ordinary people to be challenged too, for the movement to grow.
Yes, one shouldn’t condemn someone who doesn’t know everything but if you look at successful movements of the past, from the labor movements in the 1930s to the civil rights movement of the late 1950s, there were efforts to bring people along, and together, but also, leftwing leaders who were willing to educate and challenge people too. To make people realize that the existing political order was terrible but that something else could replace it, and provide more.
King’s own political evolution and the reason why he’s so heralded now is because he took stances on issues that were seen as divisive but he understood them as necessary to deal with for the movement as a whole to survive. His speech on supporting the Vietnamese independence movement against the U.S. is a prime example of this. It pushed people away but it was important to state since it also brought others in, and it was strategically necessary.
On a more personal level, movements need to give people chances to learn but there are moments when also, people have to be challenged on their biases too. I’ve seen this need in my time organizing, with different groups of color holding biases of one another that would eventually cause some friction and help fragment efforts in dealing with critical issues. Similarly, on such “issues” like pronouns, there were times when people didn’t know what to say, and no one was shamed. But it was also important to create a space where people understood pronouns because guess what? Segments of the working class might feel more included when we do so.
Point 4: The Left Doesn’t Care About Building Power
This one I agree with when it comes to a critique by Frank and others. I do not think it's deliberate, as in some on the left don’t want power. I think there is that strand but when you look at groups like the DSA, you see a collection of good people trying to shift policy. Overall, DSA chapters are interested in mutual aid, labor unions, healthcare, and immigration.
Still, it doesn't go further in developing its own power, such as developing a pro-socialist constituency. The same goes for other interest-groups that are far less interested in total societal change.
This is where I think the left has lost the plot, having been wandering in the political wilderness for some time now. But still, to build that power will require some “ideological purity”, some development of political consciousness (people need to recognize the objective need for socialism to replace capitalism in the long term), and wading in the waters of debate and sometimes, fighting (verbally) between people.
It will require more of us to shift away from the narratives that are shared over social media and the podcasting world, and parts of the NGO universe.