Adolph Reed: The long, slow surrender of American liberals

[Anarcissie]

http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2014-February/249862.html
http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/

Harper's March 2014 issue
Nothing Left
The long, slow surrender of American liberals

By Adolph Reed Jr.

For nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in the
United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism
generated unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence
between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the
labor movement, most significantly within the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice in the Democratic Party of
the era, and at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944,
when FDR propounded what he called “a second Bill of Rights.” Among
these rights, Roosevelt proclaimed, were the right to a “useful and
remunerative job,” “adequate medical care,” and “adequate protection
from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”

The labor-left alliance remained a meaningful presence in American
politics through the 1960s. What have become known as the social
movements of the Sixties — civil rights activism, protests against the
Vietnam War, and a renewed women’s movement — were vitally linked to
that egalitarian left. Those movements drew institutional resources,
including organizing talents and committed activists, from that older
left and built on both the legislative and the ideological victories it
had won. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless
Republican juggernaut pressured those left of center to take a defensive
stance, focusing on the immediate goal of electing Democrats to stem or
slow the rightward tide. At the same time, business interests, in
concert with the Republican right and supported by an emerging wing of
neoliberal Democrats, set out to roll back as many as possible of the
social protections and regulations the left had won. As this
defensiveness overtook leftist interest groups, institutions, and
opinion leaders, it increasingly came to define left-wing journalistic
commentary and criticism. New editorial voices — for example, The
American Prospect — emerged to articulate the views of an intellectual
left that defined itself as liberal rather than radical. To be sure,
this shift was not absolute. Such publications as New Labor Forum, New
Politics, Science & Society, Monthly Review, and others maintained an
oppositional stance, and the Great Recession has encouraged new outlets
such as Jacobin and Endnotes. But the American left moved increasingly
toward the middle.

Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social activists
have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons
accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from
practical objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care
in the 1980s to celebrating appointments of individual women to public
office and challenging the corporate glass ceiling. Dominant figures in
the antiwar movement have long since accepted the framework of American
military interventionism. The movement for racial justice has shifted
its focus from inequality to “disparity,” while neatly evading any
critique of the structures that produce inequality.

The sources of this narrowing of social vision are complex. But its most
conspicuous expression is subordination to the agenda of a Democratic
Party whose center has moved steadily rightward since Ronald Reagan’s
presidency. Although it is typically defended in a language of political
practicality and sophistication, this shift requires, as the historian
Russell Jacoby notes, giving up “a belief that the future could
fundamentally surpass the present,” which traditionally has been an
essential foundation of leftist thought and practice. “Instead of
championing a radical idea of a new society,” Jacoby observes in The End
of Utopia, “the left ineluctably retreats to smaller ideas, seeking to
expand the options within the existing society.”

The atrophy of political imagination shows up in approaches to strategy
as well. In the absence of goals that require long-term organizing —
e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher education
and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income
security — the election cycle has come to exhaust the time horizon of
political action. Objectives that cannot be met within one or two
election cycles seem fanciful, as do any that do not comport with the
Democratic agenda. Even those who consider themselves to the Democrats’
left are infected with electoralitis. Each election now becomes a moment
of life-or-death urgency that precludes dissent or even reflection. For
liberals, there is only one option in an election year, and that is to
elect, at whatever cost, whichever Democrat is running. This modus
operandi has tethered what remains of the left to a Democratic Party
that has long since renounced its commitment to any sort of
redistributive vision and imposes a willed amnesia on political debate.
True, the last Democrat was really unsatisfying, but this one is better;
true, the last Republican didn’t bring destruction on the universe, but
this one certainly will. And, of course, each of the “pivotal” Supreme
Court justices is four years older than he or she was the last time.

Why does this tailing behind an increasingly right-of-center Democratic
Party persist in the absence of any apparent payoff? There has nearly
always been a qualifying excuse: Republicans control the White House;
they control Congress; they’re strong enough to block progressive
initiatives even if they don’t control either the executive or the
legislative branch. Thus have the faithful been able to take comfort in
the circular self-evidence of their conviction. Each undesirable act by
a Republican administration is eo ipso evidence that if the Democratic
candidate had won, things would have been much better. When Democrats
have been in office, the imagined omnipresent threat from the Republican
bugbear remains a fatal constraint on action and a pretext for
suppressing criticism from the left.

Exaggerating the differences between Democratic and Republican
candidates, moreover, encourages the retrospective sanitizing of
previous Democratic candidates and administrations. If only Al Gore had
been inaugurated after the 2000 election, the story goes, we might well
not have had the September 11 attacks and certainly would not have had
the Iraq War — as if it were unimaginable that the Republican reaction
to the attacks could have goaded him into precisely such an act. And
considering his bellicose stand on Iraq during the 2000 campaign, he
well might not have needed goading.

The stale proclamations of urgency are piled on top of the standard
jeremiads about the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade. The “filibuster-proof
Senate majority” was the gimmick that spruced up the 2008 election
cycle, conveniently suggesting strategic preparation for large policy
initiatives while deferring discussion of what precisely those
initiatives might be. It was an ideal diversion that gave wonks,
would-be wonks, and people who just watch too much cable-television news
something to chatter about and a rhetorical basis for feeling
“informed.” It was, however, built on the bogus premise that Democrat =
liberal.

Most telling, though, is the reinvention of the Clinton Administration
as a halcyon time of progressive success. Bill Clinton’s record
demonstrates, if anything, the extent of Reaganism’s victory in defining
the terms of political debate and the limits of political practice. A
recap of some of his administration’s greatest hits should suffice to
break through the social amnesia. Clinton ran partly on a pledge of
“ending welfare as we know it”; in office he both presided over the
termination of the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to provide
income support for the poor and effectively ended direct federal
provision of low-income housing. In both cases his approach was to
transfer federal subsidies — when not simply eliminating them — from
impoverished people to employers of low-wage labor, real estate
developers, and landlords. He signed into law repressive crime bills
that increased the number of federal capital offenses, flooded the
prisons, and upheld unjustified and racially discriminatory sentencing
disparities for crack and powder cocaine. He pushed NAFTA through over
strenuous objections from labor and many congressional Democrats. He
temporized on his campaign pledge to pursue labor-law reform that would
tilt the playing field back toward workers, until the Republican
takeover of Congress in 1995 gave him an excuse not to pursue it at all.
He undertook the privatization of Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing
Association, thereby fueling the student-debt crisis.

Notwithstanding his administration’s Orwellian folderol about
“reinventing government,” his commitment to deficit reduction led to,
among other things, extending privatization of the federal
meat-inspection program, which shifted responsibility to the meat
industry — a reinvention that must have pleased his former Arkansas
patron, Tyson Foods, and arguably has left its legacy in the sporadic
outbreaks and recalls that suggest deeper, endemic problems of food
safety in the United States. His approach to health-care reform, like
Barack Obama’s, was built around placating the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, and its failure only intensified the
blitzkrieg of for-profit medicine.

In foreign policy, he was no less inclined than Reagan or George H. W.
Bush to engage in military interventionism. Indeed, counting his portion
of the Somali operation, he conducted nearly as many discrete military
interventions as his two predecessors combined, and in four fewer years.
Moreover, the Clinton Administration initiated the “extraordinary
rendition” policy, under which the United States claims the right to
apprehend individuals without charges or public accounting so that they
can be imprisoned anywhere in the world (and which the Obama
Administration has explicitly refused to repudiate). Clinton also
increased American use of “privatized military services” — that is,
mercenaries.

The nostalgic mist that obscures this record is perfumed by evocations
of the Clinton prosperity. Much of that era’s apparent prosperity,
however, was hollow — the effects of first the tech bubble and then the
housing bubble. His administration was implicated in both, not least by
his signing the repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, which had
established a firewall between commercial and investment banking in
response to the speculative excesses that sparked the Great Depression.
And, as is the wont of bubbles, first one and then the other burst,
ushering in the worst economic crisis since the depression that had led
to the passage of Glass–Steagall in the first place. To be sure, the
Clinton Administration was not solely or even principally responsible
for those speculative bubbles and their collapse. The Republican
administrations that preceded and succeeded him were equally inclined to
do the bidding of the looters and sneak thieves of the financial sector.
Nevertheless, Clinton and the Wall Street cronies who ran his fiscal and
economic policy — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan — are
no less implicated than the Republicans in having brought about the
economic crisis that has lingered since 2008.

It is difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could have
been much more successful in advancing Reaganism’s agenda. Indeed,
Clinton made his predilections clear from the outset. “We’re Eisenhower
Republicans here,” he declared, albeit exasperatedly, shortly after his
1992 victory. “We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond
market. Isn’t that great?”

Taking into account the left’s disappearance into Democratic
neoliberalism helps explain how and why so many self-proclaimed leftists
or progressives — individuals, institutions, organizations, and
erstwhile avatars of leftist opinion such as The Nation — came to be
swept up in the extravagant rhetoric and expectations that have
surrounded the campaign, election, and presidency of Barack Obama.

Obama and his campaign did not dupe or simply co-opt unsuspecting
radicals. On the contrary, Obama has been clear all along that he is not
a leftist. Throughout his career he has studiously distanced himself
from radical politics. In his books and speeches he has frequently drawn
on stereotypical images of leftist dogmatism or folly. When not engaging
in rhetorically pretentious, jingoist oratory about the superiority of
American political and economic institutions, he has often chided the
left in gratuitous asides that seem intended mainly to reassure
conservative sensibilities of his judiciousness — rather as Booker T.
Washington used black chicken-stealing stereotypes to establish his bona
fides with segregationist audiences. This inclination to toss off casual
references to the left’s “excesses” or socialism’s “failure” has been a
defining element of Brand Obama and suggests that he is a new kind of
pragmatic progressive who is likely to bridge — or rise above — left and
right and appeal across ideological divisions. Assertions that Obama
possesses this singular ability contributed to the view that he was
electable and, once elected, capable of forging a new, visionary,
postpartisan consensus.

This feature of Brand Obama even suffused the enthusiasm of those who
identify as leftists, many of whom at this point would like to roll up
their past proclamations behind them. Here was a nominal progressive who
actually could win the presidency, clearing the electoral hurdle that
Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, and other protest candidates could not. Yet
few acknowledged the extent to which Obama’s broad appeal hinged on his
disavowals of left “excesses.” What kind of “progressive” pursues a
political strategy of distancing himself from the left by rehearsing
hackneyed conservative stereotypes? Even granting the
never-quite-demonstrated assertion that Obama is, in his heart of
hearts, committed to a progressive agenda (a trope familiar from the
Clinton Administration, we might recall), how would a coalition built on
reassuring conservatives not seriously constrain his administration?

The generalities with which Obama laid out his vision made it easy to
avoid such questions. His books are not substantive articulations of a
social program but performances in which his biographical narrative and
identity stands in for a vaguely transformational politics. Sometimes
this projection has been not so subtle. In an interview with the
journalist James Traub a year before the election, Obama averred: “I
think that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White
House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake
Victoria and has a sister who’s half Indonesian, married to a
Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better
sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be
right.”

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is little with which to disagree in
those books. They meant to produce precisely that effect. Matt Taibbi
characterized Obama’s political persona in early 2007 as

an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology,
geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can’t
run against him on issues because you can’t even find him on the
ideological spectrum. Obama’s “Man for all seasons” act is so perfect in
its particulars that just about anyone can find a bit of himself
somewhere in the candidate’s background, whether in his genes or his
upbringing. . . . [H]is strategy seems to be to appear as a sort of
ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical
energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view,
and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on
issues, he often does so reluctantly.

Taibbi described Obama’s political vision as “an amalgam of Kennedy,
Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the
middle of the middle.” Taibbi is by no means alone in this view; others
have been more sharply critical in drawing out its implications, even
during the heady moment of the 2008 campaign.

Nearer the liberal mainstream, Paul Krugman repeatedly demonstrated that
many of candidate Obama’s positions and political inclinations were not
only inconsistent with the hyperbolic rhetoric that surrounded the
campaign but were moreover not even especially liberal. When in a June
2008 issue of The Nation Naomi Klein expressed concern about Obama’s
profession of love for the free market and his selection of very
conventionally neoliberal economic advisers, Krugman responded rather
waspishly, “Look, Obama didn’t pose as a Nation-type progressive, then
turn on his allies after the race was won. Throughout the campaign he
was slightly less progressive than Hillary Clinton on domestic issues —
and more than slightly on health care. If people like Ms. Klein are
shocked, shocked that he isn’t the candidate of their fantasies, they
have nobody but themselves to blame.” As early as 2006, Ken Silverstein
noted in these pages that the rising star’s extensive corporate and
financial-sector connections suggested that his progressive supporters
should rein in their hopes. Larissa MacFarquhar, in a 2007 New Yorker
profile, also gave reason for restraint to those projecting
“transformative” expectations onto Obama. “In his view of history,” she
reports, “in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world
can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply
conservative. . . . Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything
in the past twenty years, he says ‘I’m probably more humble now about
the speed with which government programs can solve every problem.’ ”

These and other critics, skeptics, and voices of caution were largely
drowned out in the din of the faithful’s righteous fervor. Some in the
flock who purported to represent the campaign’s left flank, such as the
former SDS stalwart Carl Davidson and the professional white antiracist
Tim Wise, denounced Obama’s critics as out-of-touch, pie-in-the-sky
radicals who were missing the train of history because they preferred
instead to wallow in marginalization. This response is a generic mantra
of political opportunists. Some who called for climbing on the bandwagon
insisted that Obama was a secret progressive who would reveal his true
politics once elected. Others relied on the familiar claim that actively
supporting the campaign — as distinct from choosing to vote for him as
yet another lesser evil — would put progressives in a position to exert
leftward pressure on his administration.

Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments
made on the candidate’s behalf by their children. We were urged to
marvel at and take our cues from the already indulged upper-middle-class
Children of the Corn and their faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance.
And it was easy to understand why so many of them found Obama to be
absolutely new under the sun. To them he was. A twenty-five-year-old on
November 4, 2008, was a nine-year-old when Bill Clinton was first
elected, ten when he pushed NAFTA through Congress, thirteen when he
signed welfare “reform,” and sixteen when he signed the Financial
Services Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed Glass–Steagall.

Obama’s miraculous ability to inspire and engage the young replaced
specific content in his patter of Hope and Change. In the same way that
he and his supporters presented his life story as the embodiment of a
politics otherwise not clearly defined, the projection of inspired youth
substituted a narrative of identity — and a vague and ephemeral one at
that — for argument. Those in Obama’s thrall viewed his politics as
qualitatively different from Bill Clinton’s, even though the political
niche Obama had crafted for himself only deepened Clintonism. Of course,
perception of Obama’s difference from the Clintons and other Democratic
contenders past and present was bound up in his becoming the first black
president, the symbolic significance of which far outweighed the
candidate’s actual politics. Thus, for instance, the philosopher Slavoj
Žižek, usually not a faddish enthusiast, proclaimed just after the 2008
presidential election that

Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal
parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic
calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something
more. . . . Whatever our doubts, for that moment [of his election] each
of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity. .
. . Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of
signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. A sign in which the
memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition
reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for
future achievements.

Nevertheless, Obama could not have sold his signature “bipartisan”
transcendence so successfully to those who identify as leftists if
Clinton had not already moved the boundaries of liberalism far enough
rightward. Obama’s posture of judiciousness depends partly on the ritual
validation of bromides about “big government,” which he typically evokes
through resonant phrases rather than through affirmative argument that
might ring too dissonantly with his leftist constituents. He can finesse
the tension with allusions because Clinton, in his supposed “New
Covenant” from a “New Democrat,” had already severed the link between
Democratic liberalism and vigorous, principled commitment to the public
sector.

Obama also relies on nasty, victim-blaming stereotypes about black poor
people to convey tough-minded honesty about race and poverty. Clinton’s
division of the poor into those who “play by the rules” and those who
presumably do not, his recasting of the destruction of publicly provided
low-income housing and the forced displacement of poor people as “Moving
to Opportunity” and “HOPE,” and most of all his debacle of “welfare
reform” already had helped liberal Democrats to view behavior
modification of a defective population as the fundamental objective of
antipoverty policy. Indeed, even ersatz leftists such as Glenn
Greenwald, then of Salon.com, and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel
defended and rationalized Obama’s willingness to disparage black poor
people. Greenwald applauded the candidate for making what he somehow
imagined to be the “unorthodox” and “not politically safe” move of
showing himself courageous enough to beat up on this politically
powerless group. For her part, vanden Heuvel rationalized such moves as
his odious “Popeyes chicken” speech as reflective of a “generational
division” among black Americans, with Obama representing a younger
generation that values “personal responsibility.”* Perhaps, but it’s
noteworthy that Obama didn’t give the Popeyes speech to groups of
investment bankers.

* In a 2008 speech to a mostly African-American audience in the city of
Beaumont, Texas, Obama scolded his listeners about feeding junk food to
children: “Y’all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of
y’all you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know. That’s why
y’all laughing. . . . You can’t do that. Children have to have proper
nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school.”

Obama’s reflexive disposition to cater first to his right generally has
been taken in stride as political necessity or even applauded as
sagacious pragmatism. Defenses of Obama’s endorsements of the likes of
John Barrow, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, and the Republican
turncoat senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania over more liberal
Democrats rest on the assumption that Democrats can win only by
operating within a framework of political debate set by the right and
attempting to produce electoral majorities by triangulating
constituencies. At least since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, “serious”
Democratic candidates have insisted that, because appealing to the
right’s agenda is necessary to win, the responsible left must forgo
demands for specific policies or programs as quid pro quo for their
support. As its reaction to left criticism of his approach to
health-care reform illustrated, the Obama Administration defines as
“responsible” those who support it without criticism; those who do not
are by definition the “far left” and therefore dismissible. To complete
the dizzying ideological orbit, this limitation has been sold as
evidence of the importance of subordinating all other concrete political
objectives to the project of electing more Democrats, on the premise
that the more of them we elect, the greater the likelihood that a
majority will be amenable to embracing a leftist program.

Anticipation of jobs and “access” — the crack cocaine (or, more
realistically, powder cocaine) of the interest-group world — helps to
make this scam more alluring, especially among those who have nurtured
their aspirations in elite universities or the policy-wonk left or both.
Such aspirants can be among the most adamant in denouncing leftist
criticism of the Democrat of the moment as irresponsible and politically
immature.

But if the left is tied to a Democratic strategy that, at least since
the Clinton Administration, tries to win elections by absorbing much of
the right’s social vision and agenda, before long the notion of a
political left will have no meaning. For all intents and purposes, that
is what has occurred. If the right sets the terms of debate for the
Democrats, and the Democrats set the terms of debate for the left, then
what can it mean to be on the political left? The terms “left” and
“progressive” — and in practical usage the latter is only a milquetoast
version of the former — now signify a cultural sensibility rather than a
reasoned critique of the existing social order. Because only the right
proceeds from a clear, practical utopian vision, “left” has come to mean
little more than “not right.”

The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old
quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any
other. The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to
that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of
political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi
labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban “precariat”; green whatever;
the black/Latino/LGBT “community”; the grassroots, the netroots, and the
blogosphere; this season’s worthless Democrat; Occupy; a “Trotskyist”
software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It
lacks focus and stability; its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating
solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its reflex is to “send
messages” to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or
for the oppressed.

This dilettantish politics is partly the heritage of a generation of
defeat and marginalization, of decades without any possibility of
challenging power or influencing policy. So the left operates with no
learning curve and is therefore always vulnerable to the new enthusiasm.
It long ago lost the ability to move forward under its own steam. Far
from being avant-garde, the self-styled left in the United States seems
content to draw its inspiration, hopefulness, and confidence from
outside its own ranks, and lives only on the outer fringes of American
politics, as congeries of individuals in the interstices of more
mainstream institutions.

With the two parties converging in policy, the areas of fundamental
disagreement that separate them become too arcane and too remote from
most people’s experience to inspire any commitment, much less popular
action. Strategies and allegiances become mercurial and opportunistic,
and politics becomes ever more candidate-centered and driven by
worshipful exuberance about individuals or, more accurately, the
idealized and evanescent personae — the political holograms — their
packagers project.

As the “human cipher” Taibbi described, Obama is the pure product of
this hollowed-out politics. He is a triumph of image and identity over
content; indeed, he is the triumph of identity as content. Taibbi
misreads how race figures into Brand Obama. Obama is not “without” race;
he embodies it as an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from
history and social relations. Race is what Obama projects in place of an
ideology. His racial classification combines with a narrative of
self-presentation, including his past as a “community organizer,” to
convey a sensation of a politics, much as advertising presents a product
as the material expression of inchoate desire. This became the basis for
a faith in his virtue that largely insulated him from sharp criticism
from the left through the first five years of his presidency.
Proclamation that Obama’s election was, in Žižek’s terms, a “sign in
which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its
abolition reverberates” was also a call to suspend critical judgment, to
ascribe to the event a significance above whatever Obama stood for or
would do.

In fact, Obama was able to win the presidency only because the changes
his election supposedly signified had already taken place. His election,
after all, did not depend on disqualifying large chunks of the white
electorate. As things stand, his commitments to an imperialist foreign
policy and Wall Street have only more tightly sealed the American left’s
coffin by nailing it shut from the inside. Katrina vanden Heuvel pleads
for the president to accept criticism from a “principled left” that has
demonstrated its loyalty through unprincipled acquiescence to his
administration’s initiatives; in a 2010 letter, the president of the
AFL-CIO railed against the Deficit Commission as a front for attacking
Social Security while tactfully not mentioning that Obama appointed the
commission or ever linking him to any of the economic policies that
labor continues to protest; and there is even less of an antiwar
movement than there was under Bush, as Obama has expanded American
aggression and slaughter into Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows
where else.

Barack Obama has always been no more than an unexceptional neoliberal
Democrat with an exceptional knack for self-presentation persuasive to
those who want to believe, and with solid connections and considerable
good will from the corporate and financial sectors. From his successful
wooing of University of Chicago and Hyde Park liberals at the beginning
of his political career, his appeal has always been about the persona he
projects — the extent to which he encourages people to feel good about
their politics, the political future, and themselves through feeling
good about him — than about any concrete vision or political program he
has advanced. And that persona has always been bound up in and continues
to play off complex and contradictory representations of race in
American politics.

Particularly among those who stress the primary force of racism in
American life, Obama’s election called forth in the same breath
competing impulses — exultation in the triumphal moment and a caveat
that the triumph is not as definitive as it seems. Proponents of an
antiracist politics almost ritualistically express anxiety that Obama’s
presidency threatens to issue in premature proclamation of the
transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or conflict. It is and
will be possible to find as many expressions of that view as one might
wish, just as lunatic and more or less openly racist “birther” and Tea
Party tendencies have become part of the political landscape. An equal
longer-term danger, however, is the likelihood that we will find
ourselves with no critical politics other than a desiccated leftism
capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and
making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast
in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and
diversity. This is neoliberalism’s version of a left. Radicalism now
means only a very strong commitment to antidiscrimination, a point from
which Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it’s the path
Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.

Confusion and critical paralysis prompted by the racial imagery of
Obama’s election prevented even sophisticated intellectuals like Žižek
from concluding that Obama was only another Clintonite Democrat — no
more, no less. It is how Obama could be sold, even within the left, as a
hybrid of Martin Luther King Jr. and Neo from The Matrix. The triumph of
identity politics, condensed around the banal image of the civil rights
insurgency and its legacy as a unitary “black liberation movement,” is
what has enabled Obama successfully to present himself as the literal
embodiment of an otherwise vaporous progressive politics. In this sense
his election is most fundamentally an expression of the limits of the
left in the United States — its decline, demoralization, and collapse.

The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to
admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to
create one. This is a long-term effort, and one that requires grounding
in a vibrant labor movement. Labor may be weak or in decline, but that
means aiding in its rebuilding is the most serious task for the American
left. Pretending some other option exists is worse than useless. There
are no magical interventions, shortcuts, or technical fixes. We need to
reject the fantasy that some spark will ignite the People to move as a
mass. We must create a constituency for a left program — and that cannot
occur via MSNBC or blog posts or the New York Times. It requires
painstaking organization and building relationships with people outside
the Beltway and comfortable leftist groves. Finally, admitting our
absolute impotence can be politically liberating; acknowledging that as
a left we have no influence on who gets nominated or elected, or what
they do in office, should reduce the frenzied self-delusion that rivets
attention to the quadrennial, biennial, and now seemingly permanent
horse races. It is long past time for us to begin again to approach
leftist critique and strategy by determining what our social and
governmental priorities should be and focusing our attention on building
the kind of popular movement capable of realizing that vision. Obama and
his top aides punctuated that fact by making brutally apparent during
the 2008 campaign that no criticism from the left would have a place in
this regime of Hope and Change. The message could not be clearer.