Today In Morbid Symptoms*
Time to tee off on "liberal patriotism," as espoused by John Judis and Ruy Texeira (pronounced “roo-ey te-sheera”). The focus is an essay by Judis that has been making the rounds. He attempts to lay out the best direction for the presently directionless Democratic Party.
Judis and Texeira, with whom I have long been loosely acquainted, are fellow refugees from the New Left. Ruy and I overlapped at EPI. I will spare you the stories. I can't fault them for moving right over the course of their lives. I have done the same, though in Ruy's case the leap-frogging has become pronounced.
That aside, let the slamming commence. The first clue that something is amiss is JJ's characterization of the elevation of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton by the Democratic National Committee as success stories. At that point I wonder, what do these people think the purpose of the Democratic Party should be, aside from winning elections? It is not until later in the essay that we find an approving reference to "the party of the common man." That still leaves much to the imagination. (Their own choice of bromides for self-summary is here.)
These two and their website have been recently devoted to the premise that the Democrats are identified with sexual perversion, open borders, and anti-white racism, a.k.a. the "woke." This of course is also the principal attack line of the Right and foundational to fascist movements in Europe and Russia. There are repeated references to "extreme" positions attributed to Democrats, but evidently their chief flaw is not that they are wrong in some way, but that they cause Democrats to lose elections.
By my jaundiced lights, the core implication is for Democrats to lean towards LGBTQI bigotry, xenophobia, and racism. Morality aside, one has to ask why isn’t such a posture combined with traditional liberal economic positions embraced successfully by ambitious Democratic politicians, of whom there is no shortage? Why wasn’t Steny Hoyer the Speaker of the House, instead of Nancy Pelosi?
This game started with the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. Reagan’s landslide was attributed to excessive liberalism. That was the reaction every time Democrats lost a national election. It was enshrined in an organization known as the Democratic Leadership Council. It’s first champion was Bill Clinton.
My 1990s work at EPI was devoted to doing battle with the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. I used to point out that both EPI and PPI chose their names as deliberate efforts at camouflage. EPI was not exactly neutral, and PPI was hardly progressive by any normal political connotation.
Now instead of being too far left, the new boilerplate is that the party is too woke. In one sense this is progress: the economic proposals are more popular, or less the object of popular disdain. In another less positive sense, it is capitulation to a full spectrum of prejudice.
Actually, when you look a little closer, the underlying economics of the liberal patriots (as opposed to all the unpatriotic liberals) are not too liberal either. For instance, there is this bit: "They (wayward, potential Democratic voters--MBS) also suspect that Democratic economic initiatives are designed to benefit some segments of society at the expense of others."
I would venture to say THERE ARE NO ECONOMIC INITIATIVES THAT DO NOT BENEFIT SOME AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. To suggest an alternative framework, my premise is that the purpose of the Democratic Party is to devise and promote policies that improve the living standards and prospects of the vast majority of the population--the component, following Marx (with whom JJ and Texeira are familiar), whose well-being does not rest on accumulated wealth. Under capitalism, this usually entails types of public spending and regulation whose costs are exceeded by their benefits. It does not necessarily mean redistributive taxation.
If it’s not too cruel, we could point to a previous book by Judis and Texeira, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” published over twenty years ago. Prediction is hard! To take that seriously, along with the recent output, one has to ask why the effective trend of a Democratic majority was not recognized and exploited by the party establishment, which, at the very least, is motivated to attain political power.
I can’t say I have a better prescription than the liberal patriots. I am confident that surrender is not the path to victory.
*“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1930
RT and JJ do not understand that the Democratic Party has two left wings. One of them consists of smart politicians like AOC, Bernie, and Pramila Jayapal. The other consists of the America Worsters, reeking with intellectual acne and extreme self-righteousness. Conservative Dems should be embracing the first bunch of lefties, and ignoring the second. The smart left Democrats pose no threat to conservative Democrats. The full AOC/Bernie agenda is way in the future (if ever.) The realizable parts of the AOC/Bernie agenda are not far from the conservative D's agenda and are a damned sight more popular.
But the conservative Ds stupidly conflate AOC/Bernie with the zit crowd. Worse yet, they sometimes try to placate the zit crowd with awkward "woke" rhetoric, of the Nurse Ratched HR variety.
Oy vey!
I have known John and Ruy for over 50 years. At one point we were all members of NAM together. John was always on the social democratic side of that formation, a bit too far right for my tastes then but I always respected him. His rightward drift, for example, does not extend to viewing Bibi Netanyahu favorably or giving Israel a free pass. He has some integrity though why he’s still hanging around with Ruy baffles me.
Ruy is another story. At one point in the late seventies we were best buds. When first I met him, he was a crazed Maoist. He was a great rabble rouser. I can still remember him on the steps of the University of Michigan booming support for the great victory of the Vietnamese people over US Imperialism on the day the US pulled out of Vietnam. He then moved right rather dramatically over the years, first to NAM, then rather quickly to mainstream Democratic Party stuff. Then his Emerging Democratic Majority BS co-written with Judis and now to this liberal patriot nonsense which started when Joe Biden didn’t kick Bernie Sanders to the curb but instead embraced some of his ideas. What particularly rubs me the wrong way is his doing all this in “Marxist” accents that never acknowledge that the working class is not just a bunch of blue collar white guys. I suppose I learned this lesson by working in a factory for a dozen years that was half nonwhite. They missed out on that formative experience. I was always sad to see some Bernie Bros buying into Ruy’s crap after 2020.
I myself, like you, have moved to the right somewhat over the years, but not for the sake of my own career which I acknowledge is over. The old reds (probably younger than I am now) I used to hang out with when I was young in my union days used to say they no longer “expected to see socialism in their lifetime”. I feel a bit that way myself only that I can’t quite envision a route to a viable and competitive Democratic Party at this point, other than through GOP overreach somehow and I am resigned to that being the case. I am content to “await developments”.
This summer I visited the reading room of the British Museum where no less a revolutionary than Karl Marx himself holed up on a daily basis figuring out Kapital after the revolution of his youth failed. Regardless of what we think about his work product now (I, like you, have doubts) that general attitude exhibits an integrity that Ruy in particular lacks.