Saving the American Left

[Nono]

Bernard Chazelle summarizes my own views very nicely indeed in this article:
Saving the American Left: The Case for a New Progressive Creed

(...) The success of neoliberalism is owed, like much else in American history, to race and inflation. The civil rights movement's heroic victories triggered a white backlash that, stirred up by the stagflation of the 70s, designated welfare as its whipping boy. While the left fell apart under the strain of its own failures and the pressure of the New Right, the Dems' axis of opportunism closed ranks with dyed-in-the-wool backlashers to excise the term “underclass” from the political discourse and replace it with the racial codeword “responsibility.” The collective benefit of pulling people out of poverty (more on this later) gave way to the moral hazard of unearned assistance to the poor. By this brilliant maneuver, the state was off the hook. Thus shorn of social purpose, the sole objective of the economy was now to create the conditions for a bigger economy. This self-referential absurdity worked out well for some. At their prodding, politicians on both sides of the aisle wrapped the neolib agenda in cotton candy (“I feel your pain”) and sold it to the public as an inclusive doctrine (“rising tides lift all boats”). While the media peddled ad nauseam the seductive narrative that unfettered growth will cure all ills, the public intellectuals played their customary herding role as guardians of the norm. Lobby-driven campaign financing did the rest. Neoliberalism became the new dogma, the pensée unique. The dogma tolerates social conflicts insofar as they remain orthogonal to the economic fault lines. Multiculturalism and identity politics are tolerable but class concerns are ruled out of order. Affirmative action and Roe v. Wade are fine but prenatal care and maternity leaves are “fiscally imprudent.” While globalized trade has benefited many countries, the ultra-rigid neoliberal policies pushed by the United States and the international institutions it controls have had nasty consequences: per-capita income for nearly half of the world's countries was lower in 2000 than it was a decade earlier. Yet even a reasoned critique of the current economic order is seldom allowed into the dominant discourse. It's not censorship; it's gatekeeping. And it works. The withering scorn heaped upon a fine “European” centrist like Kucinich is indicative of the intolerance for any deviation from the orthodoxy. (...) [After the fall of the Berlin Wall] ... while busy mastering the fine art of the concession speech, Democrats swatted away all attempts at rebuilding a movement. To this day, their triangulating appetite for compromise remains voracious and they rarely flinch from flinching. (...) Consider the Revolutionary motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” A good measure of a left-wing belief system is how tightly it keeps the three threads together. Take away the last one and your creed is soulless; remove the first two and it is toothless. Fraternity (for lack of a less sexist term) arbitrates between liberty and equality: it speaks to the why and the how; they speak to the what. (...) A just society favors the disadvantaged because that would be our most likely preference, regardless of ideology, were we to join that society with no prior knowledge of our social status. In other words, behind a “veil of ignorance,” we would choose an allocation of resources that would make the worst possible outcome for us the least disadvantageous. Targeting the worst outcome and not, say, the best (as in playing the lottery) serves an obvious egalitarian purpose. Up to a point. The preferential clause is not inconsistent with the view that rising tides lift all boats. In fact, it may accommodate arbitrarily large inequalities as long as the poor do not get poorer. This may have the adverse effect of undermining social cohesion while increasing overall wealth. In that regard, equality of opportunity serves as a necessary corrective—though social harmony is not its primary justification: fair access to liberties is. (...) Poverty in America has many causes: insufficient national wealth is not one of them. (...) “My country, right or wrong,” said Carl Schurz, echoing Decatur. After that fateful utterance, the word patriot was destined to join the select company of pedophile and macaca in the stink bomb arsenal of language. So it is with my nose firmly held that I vocally question the patriotism of those who care more about winning Fallujah than losing New Orleans. The most humiliating national shaming in recent American history, Katrina, registers barely a blip in a presidential campaign: a portrait of the patriot as an ostrich? Americans can love their country or they can turn a blind eye to poverty and segregation: they cannot do both. Patriotic citizenship is the commitment to a society that grants all of its members the means to belong. It is an affirmation of solidarity. Its motivation is the virtuous, idealized pride in an honorable society. It is also a sublimated form of self-interest: violent crime and poverty are, indeed, correlated. Most of all, it is the awareness that shame taints pride and that, despite their tenuous relation, (b) trumps or demeans (a): -- (a) The US is the world's richest nation; (b) the US outranks only Mexico in child poverty among OECD countries. -- (a) America's GDP per capita is 11 times higher than Sri Lanka's; (b) life expectancy for African-American men is 3 years shorter than for males in Sri Lanka. -- (a) African-Americans have been the force behind this country's most influential musical genres; (b) one third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives. -- (a) The US scoops up more Nobel prizes in medicine than any nation on earth; (b) 18,000 Americans will die this year for lack of health insurance. (...)

[Anmon]

America has always been the land of differing extremes, thats how it became so great.

[Nono]

And that's how, today, it's going straight down the tubes.