Posted on March
20, 2017 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Zack Beauchamp has written an
important though bad piece in Vox, titled “No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to
right-wing populism”. Beauchamp’s piece is important because liberal icon
Paul Krugman, in his bullshit-in-a-china-shop way, immediately leveraged it into an open assault on universal
benefits like Medicare for All (and also, implicitly, Social Security[1]).
Beauchamp’s piece is bad, aside from its policy implications, because it
contains major misstatements, major errors of interpretation, and because it
both begins and ends with a straw man attack on Bernie Sanders that seriously
distorts his views. I’m going to begin with a brief discussion of identity
politics, because that will set the context for how Beauchamp strawmanned
Sanders.
Justice and Identity Politics
Adolph Reed, in a well-known
article, formulates the difficulties of achieving justice through
identity politics as follows:
[R]ace politics is not an
alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the
left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a
political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated
as unassailable nature [TINA]. An integral element of that moral economy is
displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist
class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity [for
example, perceived skin color] that sort us into groups supposedly defined by
what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following
Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a
society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be
just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were
women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.
It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more
unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates
for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the
ruling class.
Indeed. Can such a society be
just? After all, Reed describes the workings of an oligarchy. Can an oligarchy
be just? I
argue no:
So, if we ask an identitarian
whether shipping the Rust Belt’s jobs off to China was fair — the moral of the
story — the answer we get is: “That depends. If the private equity firms that
did it were 12% black, 12% Latino, and half women, then yes.” And that really
is the answer that the Clintonites give. And, to this day, they believe it’s a
winning one.
Now, readers who are on the
Twitter — the liberal and/or left parts of it, anyhow — will remember that
after the Clinton debacle on November 8, 2016, an enormous and very messy battle immediately broke out,
expressed in crude terms as “identity politics” versus “class politics”
(shorthand: “economics”), and in more humane terms as what the relationship
between class and identity might be, and how to express it. The more vulgar
sort of liberal Clintonite would argue — still argues — that economics plays,
and should play, no role in the construction of identity; the more vulgar left
Sanders supporter, in a move reminiscent of the crude base/superstructure model
of the 30s, would argue identity is a mere function of economics. In terms of
party leadership, the issue was settled when the left’s candidate, Ellison, was
ritually sacrificed by the liberal establishment, but the battle, perhaps
attenuated to a heated discussion, necessarily continues today, wherever
politics is practiced seriously. With this as context, let’s turn to Beauchamp.
Beauchamp Strawmans Sanders
Here’s Beauchamp’s lead:
On November 20, less than two
weeks after Donald Trump’s upset win, Bernie Sanders strode onto a stage at
Boston’s Berklee Performance Center to give the sold-out audience his thoughts
on what had gone so disastrously wrong for the Democratic Party.
Sanders had a simple answer.
Democrats, he said, needed to field candidates who would unapologetically
promise that they would be willing “to stand up with
the working class of this country and … take
on big-money interests.”
Democrats, in other words,
would only be able to defeat Trump and others like him if they adopted an
anti-corporate, unabashedly left-wing policy agenda. The answer to Trump’s
right-wing populism, Sanders argued, was for the left to develop a populism of
its own.
Well, I went and looked at
what Sanders said. (The complete video of the Sanders speech is at the Boston
Globe: “You can now watch Bernie Sanders’s full Boston speech on
identity politics and the progressive movement.”) Boston Magazine sets the scene: “An audience member asked
if Bernie Sanders, her hero, had any tips for realizing her dream of becoming
the second Latina ever elected to the Senate. ‘Let me respond to the question
in a way that you may not be happy with,’ Sanders said.” Here’s a partial video, with a transcript (slightly cleaned
up) that gives the complete context of Sanders remarks. I have helpfully
underlined the portion that Beauchamp quoted, so you can see what he omitted:
[SANDERS] It goes without
saying, that as we fight to end all forms of discrimination, as we fight to
bring more and more women into the political process, Latinos, African
Americans, Native Americans – all of that is enormously important, and count me
in as somebody who wants to see that happen. But it is not good enough for
somebody to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I
have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up
with the working class of this country and is going to take on big-money interests. And one of the
struggles that we’re going to have right now, lay it on the table in the
Democratic Party, is that it’s not good enough for me to say, well, we have x
number of African Americans over here, we have y number of Latinos, we have z
number of women, we are a diverse party, a diverse nation. Not good enough! We
need that diversity, that goes without saying, that is accepted. Right now
we’ve made some progress in getting into politics. I think we’ve got 20 women
in the Senate now, we need 50 women in the Senate. We need more African
Americans. But here is my point – and this is where there’s going to be a
division within the Democratic Party – it is not good enough for somebody to
say, “I’m a woman, vote for me.” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a
woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies,
to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel companies…In other words, one of the
struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we
go beyond identity politics. I think it’s a step forward in America if you have
an African American CEO of some major corporation. But you know what? If that
guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country and exploiting his
workers, it doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot if he’s black or white or
Latino.
A few points. First, you can
see how Sanders’ X, Y, Z trope directly reproduces Reed’s thinking on identity
politics (and Reed’s views on justice, as well). Second, Sanders is intervening
very directly in the left/liberal battle over identity politics alluded to
above. Third, it’s disingenuous of Beachamp to characterize what Sanders is saying
as a “simple answer”; anybody who follows these issues knows they’re complex,
personally and politically. Sanders knows that, too, since he prefaces his
answer with “you may not be happy with.” Finally, Beauchamp rips Sanders’ words
from their context to construct his “populism” straw man; what Sanders is
advocating at Berklee isn’t “populism” — whatever that means, and Beauchamp
never defines it — but a form of (working) class politics that includes and
transcends (Hegel might say “subsumes”) identity politics; both/and, not
either/or. Which makes perfect sense, because you have to approach people from
where they are and how they see themselves, no? Anyhow, if strawmanning and
taking out of context don’t bother you, read on!
Beauchamp and the History of Social
Democracy
Beauchamp presents the
following chart (which I have helpfully annotated in red):
Based on that chart, he asks
the following question:
The chart [above], from the
London School of Economics’ Simon Hix and the University of London’s Giacomo
Benedetto, show how those [social democratic] parties have done in elections in
18 Western European countries between 1945 and 2016. This creates a puzzle: Why
did voters who by and large benefit from social democracy turn against the
parties that most strongly support it?
Beauchamp, of course, assumes
that the social democratic parties pursued the same policies in the 1945-2016
period. But that’s simply not so:
During the inflationary crisis
of the 1970s, elite policymakers in Western Europe came to the conclusion that
it was no longer possible for the welfare state to operate as it had since
1945. Their project thereafter has been twofold: to convince the public that
their diagnosis is right, and to enact (what they consider) necessary
neoliberal reforms by any means necessary.
In other words, there’s an
inflection point in the mid-70s — I’ve helpfully added the red line marked (1)
to the rawther flat curve in Beauchamp’s chart to show it — where the
neoliberal dispensation began, just as in the United States. The answer to
Beauchamp’s question “Why did voters who by and large benefit from social
democracy turn against the parties that most strongly support it?” is that the
parties stopped supporting it, even though the voters supported it, there as
here. There is no puzzle at all.
Beauchamp and European
Immigration
Based on the same chart,
Beauchamp also urges:
So it’s not that European
social democrats failed to sell their economic message, or that economic
redistribution became unpopular. It’s that economic issues receded in
importance at the same time as Europe was experiencing a massive, unprecedented
wave of nonwhite, non-Christian immigration.
That, in turn, brought some of
the most politically potent nonmaterial issues — race, identity, and
nationalism — to the forefront of Western voters’ mind [sic].
However, again, Beauchamp
leaves out an inflection point — the red line marked (2) shows it — that being
the great Crash of 2008, followed by the imposition of years of austerity and
grinding unemployment, continuing crises, crapification of services, suicides,
etc. Are we really to believe that the European social democrats sold “their
economic message” successfully during after 2008? And are we really to believe
that “politically potent nonmaterial issues” are not affected by material
(economic) issues? And are we really to believe that the material conditions of
austerity didn’t affect “Western voters’ minds?” Glenn Greenwald writes:
[E]conomic suffering and
xenophobia/racism are not mutually exclusive. The opposite is true: The former
fuels the latter, as sustained economic misery makes people more receptive to
tribalistic scapegoating. That’s precisely why plutocratic policies that
deprive huge portions of the population of basic opportunity and hope are so
dangerous. Claiming that supporters of Brexit or Trump or Corbyn or Sanders or
anti-establishment European parties on the left and right are motivated only by
hatred but not genuine economic suffering and political oppression is a
transparent tactic for exonerating status quo institutions and evading
responsibility for doing anything about their core corruption.
Indeed.
Conclusion
Beauchamp concludes, and no,
I’m not making this up, this is really his last sentence:
If Democrats really want to
stop right-wing populists like Trump, they need a strategy that blunts the true
drivers of their appeal — and that means focusing on more than economics.
Leave aside the vacuity — what
on earth can “more than economics” possibly be, other than vague handwaving? —
and go back to what Sanders really said. “Focusing on more than economics” is
exactly what Sanders wants to do. SMH.
NOTES
[1] At this point, we remember
this story from David Sirota, from November 2, 2016: “Hillary Clinton Economic Team Planned Secret Meeting With Wall
Street Mogul Pushing To Shift Retiree Savings To Financial Firms.” In other
words, the Democrat Establishment has never surrendered the idea of a
Grand Bargain, and so whatever their first priority may be, it’s not
economic justice. As I keep saying, election 2016 has been wonderfully
clarifying.
