In a recent Jacobin article, Ben Burgis argued that if Biden somehow loses the Presidential election to Trump, the US Left should blame him for timidity and not voters for stupidity. The article is refreshing on two fronts, but symptomatic of a restricted understanding of political motivation long typical of the Marxist and broader left.
First, the good: the argument is practical and free of the academic ultra-leftism that too often characterizes socialist approaches to “bourgeois democracy.” For better of for worse, “bourgeois” democracy is all that we have got. It is vastly superior to the known alternatives, because it does not pre-determine how the political space for mobilization that it opens can be used. Different parties can be created, candidates chosen, and policy options pursued that can make real differences in real people’s lives.
Second, it avoids the supercilious contempt for working class Trump voters that one sometimes hears from liberals. Burgis reminds readers of the slogan Clinton supporters chanted after Trump’s victory” “if Hilary had won, we would all be at brunch right now.” But they forgot to add: probably being served by people who voted for Trump because you treated them like shit in the restaurant. Recall Hilary herself and her global dismissal of Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables. Some working class Trump voters might express deplorable positions, but to reduce their politics to some sort of character defect is antithetical to the political engagement with them that the broad left needs to undertake.
Political engagement begins from trying to understand where people are coming from. If one is going to understand where people are coming from, one must inquire of the routes they have traveled to reach their current position. Isn’t that what a historical materialism should examine? If people adopt anti-immigrant positions, is that because they are inveterate racists? Or is their attitude shaped by the fact that they occupy precarious jobs and are worried that they will lose them to more desperate workers willing to work for even less than the nothing that they are being paid? Or are they are concerned that scare space and meager public services on which they rely, and for which they pay taxes, will be given to newcomers free of charge, and they do not see the fairness in that arrangement? Scolding, hectoring, and lecturing does not address those concerns nor will it change peoples’ minds. Quite likely, it will harden their positions and their heart.
Which brings me to a worry that is analogous to the worry I expressed in the previous post. I wondered about the role that ambivalence plays in causing social problems. While I broadly agreed with Marx’s confidence that human history creates the conditions for the solution to the problems that it causes, I wondered about why every major social revolution causes new problems. Could part of the explanation be that there will always be people who start out wanting to solve problems and end up wanting to seize power, because the drive for power and dominance is real (although not equally present in everyone). And could that drive for power not itself be an expression of an even deeper drive, a perverse need that some feel to wreck things– not so much Freud’s death drive but Schopenhauer’s and Spinoza’s contention that stability is boring and people sometimes just choose conflict. “Unsettled souls” George Santayana argued (but I cannot remember exactly where) “prefer unhappiness.”
Unsettled souls prefer unhappiness and insulted souls prefer spite: could there not be an element of spite at work in the souls of Trump voters? “Think I’m a deplorable, do you? Fuck you and your oat milk latte!” Spite contains an element of the irrational (working class voters who think a megalomanical billionaire is going to protect them from global market forces are not thinking clearly about who will best serve their economic interests), but also affords a degree of emotional satisfaction. When one acts out of spite one might ultimately hurt oneself more than others, but the action feels good because it restores the person’s self-respect. Axel Honneth did not have Trump voters in mind when he argued that political movements cannot be understood in socio-economic terms alone but must also be interpreted as demands for recognition. As self-undermining as it will prove to be on the socio-economic plane, voting for a candidate who speaks the language of the street and who openly skewers arrogant blowhards who do not disguise their contempt for those without Ivy League degrees satisfies a genuine need to be heard.
Systematic disrespect generates legitimate demands for recognition from people who are the objects of disdain. When these demands are made from a position of relative powerlessness against supercilious people who parade their principles as morally mandatory, the spite-effect comes into full force. How else to explain the intense antipathy towards the “Squad” of left-wing Democrats from a large segment of working-class voters whose socio-economic future will ultimately depend upon the implementation of policies like the Green New Deal? Yes, on-line anonymity increases the likelihood of obnoxious verbal abuse, but there has to be something more at work than fear of change, ignorance of one’s real interests, and the opportunity to vent spleen on-line.
Historical materialism has tended to ignore the function of emotions in political choice but it cannot afford to do so. The patrician air of some on the US liberal Left who turn their noses up at working class Trump voters only further the alienation of those voters from the Democratic Party and make it more rather than less likely that Trump will be reelected. This arrogance is noticeably and refreshingly absent from Cornell West’s campaign, but given the structure of the American electoral system he has no chance of winning. No one can accuse of West of ignoring the realities of American racism, but he does not attribute it to some essential character flaw inherent in white Trump voters, but tries to understand it as an effect of the way in which social and economic forces are internalized in a political context where blue collar working class concerns are ignored.
When large sections of the liberal left ignore those concerns or demonize them as a function of some inner essential racism they do not go away. They fester and fuel malign political movements. The January 6th rampage is a case in point. Since when does the Left regard existing state structures as sacrosanct, or extra-parliamentary action illegitimate? The problem was that the mobilization was in the service of a lie. Here is the philosophy professor in me talking: to challenge lies one must be willing to engage, patiently and respectfully. Respect does not mean making concessions to nonsense, but it does mean listening and addressing claim with counterclaim. Arguments go on as long as they need to go on until one side or the other is convinced. But as soon as one’s dialogue partner begins to indulge in ad hominem insults about the other person’s intelligence, the conversation will end and spiteful recriminations begin.
Political change cannot occur unless different people are willing to talk to one another. Just because someone owns a gun, listens to country music, and drives a pick-up does not mean that they are incapable of intelligent argument, if they are addressed as intelligent beings who have reasons for the lives they lead and the political choices they make. Likewise, laughing only at politically correct jokes, listening to Beyonce, and being vegan does not mean that you have the solution to all of life’s problems. But lecturing other people– who also have problems and face challenges and have to negotiate life day to day– as if one is the only person to have been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land will ensure one’s own relative political isolation from the majority in society.
Both the left and the right today share a tendency to grossly exaggerate the power of progressive movements. A Pew Research survey of over 10000 Americans in 2021 found that only 6% identified with the “progressive left” of the Democratic Party. This small group was majority White and well-educated. An earlier Pew Research survey found an unequivocal correlation between level of education and political perspective. While 31% of people surveyed who held a post-graduate degree identified as “consistently liberal” only 5 % of people with only high school degrees so identified. These results are consistent with Thomas Piketty’s findings in Capital and Ideology) that social democratic parties in Europe (and the left of the Democrats in the US) have lost all organic connection with the blue collar and service industry working class and have become parties of educated urban professionals. This alienation between workers in threatened manufacturing industries and service and precarious employment and the political parties which historically defended their interests is a direct cause of the success of the European far right and Trumpism in the US.
However, the perversity of these results also proves that the correlation between politics and material interests is real, but not mechanical. Working class voters persuaded by the Melonis and Trumps of the world think that they are voting their interests because successful far right politicians focus on the here and now, promising immediate solutions. Too much of the left is given to what we might call moralistic “symbolitics,” to searching for the magic mix of adjectives, an incantation which will magically arouse the masses to revolt. The symboliticians are too much given to catastrophizing about the future, to admonishing people for paying attention to their own lives when there is so much suffering elsewhere, and to inefficacious and sometimes mad acts of narcissistic self-immolation (literal and figural).
Judging from people’s behaviour across centuries, they agree with Oscar Wilde: socialism takes too many evenings. Only a relatively small minority of people have any sustained interest in being political activists (and few of those manifest it sustain it across their lifespan). Many working people cannot afford to worry–in the monetarily literal sense of ‘afford’ — about what the climate will be like in 2050, or about a ceasefire in Gaza, because they are broke, the rent is due tomorrow, and their kid is failing school. Enthusiasts are moved by one another’s slogans, but most people ignore images, slogans, and stunts that concern problems that they do not regard as their own. The right- seems to understand political psychology much more than the left: they recognize that most people simply try to go about their lives, prioritizing the near term over the long term, the local over the global, and the concrete over the abstract. Moreover, they know that those who have been disrespected relish the opportunity to laugh when the ego-balloons of hectoring know-it-alls are publicly burst. Schadenfreude.
I think the left ignores these psychological dimensions of political motivation at its considerable peril. If it wants to beat back the latest right-wing surge it should do what it has done when it has made the biggest political strides: propose policies that demonstrably serve working people’s interests and defend them in clear, everyday terms. A CNBC poll in 2019 showed broad bi-partisan support in the US for progressive policies that used public resources to improve living and working conditions. Obamacare still exists despite Trump’s attacks because the left focused their response on the universal value of being able to afford to go to the doctor when one is sick. In this case at least the usual tiresome fractal parade of identity-group particularisms was avoided.
Coming back home across the border, two very significant steps were just taken in Canada with the introduction of a national Pharmacare program and a national dental care program. The Liberal government would not have implemented these significant extensions of public health care unless the social democratic NDP pushed them. Their initial shape is inadequate to the full scope of social needs, and comes at a time when the Liberals are also allowing provinces to erode public health care by floating the Canada Health Act. But they are unarguably progressive steps in the right (socialist) direction.
Painful as it is to say, the Left does not need philosophers right now, it needs policy wonks. Concrete, immediately realizable policies that better satisfy shared material needs will be the key to winning and maintaining political power. Workers are not children. Grown adults can decide for themselves what is “appropriate” and what is “problematic.’ People will laugh at jokes they find funny and listen to music that moves them and resonates with their experience. People will eat what tastes good to them and take an interest in some people’s stories and not so much in others. There is no magic word that will convert people from concern with their own life to concern with the whole future of humanity. In order to achieve their practical goals, earnest activists must stop implying that unless people live their lives 24/7 in commitment to every worthy cause they are morally fallen. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht from St. Joan of the Stockyards, what matters most is not that we were good, but that we leave a good world.
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