Dear American Left: Forget 2012, Try To Save 2020

By Steve Hynd

Yup, this is yet another post asking where the Left in America goes now and what it should do next. There's going to be a lot of posts like it across the blogosphere over the next two years - and there should be. Not because it'll help in 2012, we're even more screwed then than the centrist Whig-Dems we've hitched our cart to, but because it'll help in 2020. It's going to take a decade to dig the Left out of its hole.

Firstly, I want to endorse everything Chris Hedges says in the post John linked earlier. Read the whole thing but John abstracts the key graf:

�The left has nowhere to go,� Nader said. �Obama knows it. The corporate Democrats know it. There will be criticism by the left of Obama this year and then next year they will all close ranks and say �Do you want Mitt Romney? Do you want Sarah Palin? Do you want Newt Gingrich?� It�s very predictable. There will be a year of criticism and then it will all be muted. They don�t understand that even if they do not have any place to go, they ought to fake it. They should fake going somewhere else or staying home to increase the receptivity to their demands. But because they do not make any demands, they are complicit with corporate power.

That's something close to what we've been saying regularly here at Newshoggers for some time now and you can bet our incoming links from Dem-shill A-list bloggers have dropped dramatically because of it. Although I'd personally leave out the "to increase the receptivity to their demands" bit since there's no way the Dem-Whigs will ever give the Left more than a fraction of what it wants. The only way we'll get what we want is to create a new and true Labor Movement with its own party from the dregs and ruin the Dems have made of what was once strong. That is what will take the decade to 2020 and why it's already too late to save 2012.

The beginning, as my friend Bob Morris notes, is to reafirm our belief in the moral superiority of social justice. Any Labor Movement must first and foremost campaign on the clear difference between the conservative "I'm alright, Jack" position and the Labor credo that "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs". The Democratic Party has clearly and unambivalently eschewed that maxim of the Left - in their cave on healthcare, on education, on unemployment benefits, on tax cuts for the rich - and no longer deserves our support at a deep moral level. As British philosopher Angie Hobbs puts it: "A government that doesn't look at equal access to basic healthcare and education can't be fair [because without them] you can't have equal access to opportunity".

And arising from that basic moral credo, we on the Left must stop playing silly buggers by pandering to baser instincts with politics based around such immoral claims as "foreigners stealing our jobs" or "America is exceptional". Neither fits with that baseline belief of the Left: that fairness means equal access to opportunity.

Instead, we must again begin talking about Positive Freedoms. The Right only acknowledges negative freedoms, "a lack of coercion or intrusion from government in the lives of citizens...a lack of intervention from outsiders in the life of the country" but as Julian Baggini wrote in 2004:

Negative freedom is vitally important. But the left has always recognised another form of liberty: positive freedom. This is the practical ability to actually make choices and live your life in the way you want. The problem is that negative freedom alone doesn't guarantee this. If you have no opportunities in life, the fact that the government isn't interfering with your business is small consolation...Freedom only becomes real if people are empowered to make choices for themselves, and they may need the help of others to do so.

Positive freedom, therefore, has a social dimension that negative freedom lacks. For positive freedom to be maximised, you need the presence of others and a supportive state. For negative freedom, all you need is yourself and the absence of coercion. How to balance the two forms of freedom is one of the most fundamental political choices we face.

In other words, you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can't even afford boots. Here's where Bob Morris' call that "class analysis needs to be restored as a major idea for the left" comes in. The Right has made it their task to play the middle and working classes off against themselves with their "I'm alright, Jack" selfishness. The Left needs to push back and point out that while you've been comparing yourself to the Joneses next door, the rich have made off with all the loot. The language of Class War needs to be on the table.

But positive freedoms, empowering others to make choices for themselves, cannot be done at gunpoint. The Left should preserve its opposition to neo-liberal theories of armed humanitarian intervention and to neo-conservative theories of spreading democracy by shock and awe, yet the Left also has to go further in articulating its own foreign policy. Here I'd like to endorse Robert Farley's call for more in-depth, nitty-gritty policy work from Left analysts on FP and national security (although I suspect he'll wish I hadn't). As Farley writes:

I do understand the temptation to wall ourselves off from these arguments; since key progressive goals on both the budget and on foreign policy are not likely to be met in the near or medium term, it can seem like a waste to put arguments on them together.  Moreover, participation in the discussion runs the risk of legitimating outcomes that we don�t approve of.  My answer is twofold.  First, the US defense budget (and broader US foreign policy) is more malleable than we often think.  We�re only twenty years removed from a very substantial downsizing of the American military establishment, and we may well be entering political conditions that will allow similar reductions.  Second, the people who currently make defense policy don�t give a damn about whether they�re legitimated or not.  Being the �left� voice on defense policy is good for Michael O�Hanlon, and represents a great situation for the Heritage Foundation.  Strategic boycott only makes sense if those boycotted care about being delegitimized, and in this case they don�t.  Analysts, institutions, and politicians tend to respond to the arguments they see, rather than those that they don�t.  Progressives have been excluded from even informal discussions of most questions of military doctrine and technology, but have also made themselves absent from those discussions .

The lesson here is very straightforward.

If the American Left wishes to save itself by the end of the decade, it must cease to think of itself as a pressure group clamped parastically onto the flank of the centrist-right Democratic party and begin to see itself instead as a nascent political party in its own right - one that is preparing for government.