Rhetorically, what I’d like to say is that “While the GOP sells a past that never was, the Democrats sell a future that will never be.” But that’s not the case.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, are living in the past. They have a slight edge, in that the past they are living in – Selma in 1965 – is real. But like the aging high school baseball star, they see everything through the lens of the One Big Game, of the time years ago when they stood at the plate swung away and hit one over the fence.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to explain what the Democrats are doing is that they desperately want to see everything as Selma in 1965, and they are constantly looking for a Bull Connors to stand up against. Why? As a way of establishing their courage and moral stature. Courage because they stood against the forces of ignorance and brutality – and even more important, against our own forces of ignorance and brutality. And moral stature came because they did the right thing in the face of difficult odds and prevailed.
The problem is that governing the country is not the same as marching on Selma. The necessary compromises, the inevitable comfort with the levers of power means that those who once marched from the Sierra Maestra now sit comfortably in corner offices.
And absent an organizing principle, other than Selma, keeping those corner offices becomes the critical feature. I told a story a while ago over at Armed Liberal, it’s a very small local one, but to anyone who has watched Democratic politics in the DLC era, it will sound very familiar:
In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.
Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors … Leopold’s Records (“Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free”) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.
Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.
The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??
The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.
Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.
They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.
Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.
Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the “mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm” (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?
But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.
And the fantasy that allowed them to do this – that blinded them to what they were really doing, and pulled them away from what they professed to believe – was one that had them at the head of the march in Selma on Bloody Sunday, standing arm in arm with Dr. King.
The left and the hard left especially were in the lead of the anti-racism movement in America. However, anti-racism was always a tactical effort.
The core was always and still is (for the time being) economic redistribution. In fact economic redistribution was at the heart of the left’s anti-racism efforts. Political equality was only a first step.
The redistributionists are leading the reparations movement.
So the core of the current left is still socialism.
BTW nice turn of phrase for your opening.
Aside from the poor governance effects of unstintingly imagining a perpetual Selma, there is one other seminal problem it creates, which in turn leads to ancillary issues: While there are racial problems today, they are not of the Selma vintage. Treating them as if they were, and then conjuring Bull Connors in U of Michigan admissions, high crime rates among Afro-Americans, Chicago nightclub fires etc. etc. etc., misaddresses the problem and frustrates solutions. It elevates Al Sharpton to national prominence and gets Jesse Jackson laid, but it relegates people like Floyd Flake to local dealings. It is most destructive for the Black community, whose young are instilled with an unalterable sense of vicitmhood, though I imagine it embitters other folks, particulalry those (like myself) born long after Selma.
The irony here is that the continual desire to identify with suffering and oppression in order to justify a privileged position that marks the current Democratic Left now is exactly what started the New Left in the 1960s.
Following Paul Berman’s essay, the New Leftists were raised on their parent’s stories of repression, suffering, and resistance and were refused leadership roles by the left because they had not suffered.
So the New Left, raised in comfortable and affluent urban and suburban settings, set out to find oppressed and suffering people to identify with, since they themselves had suffered embarrisingly little repression.
And they found them in Selma. And in Cuba. And in Vietnam. And in Central America. But the concern of the Democratic Left, the old New Left, was never solely for these people, but also for themselves. And so it remains today.
A friend of mine, reflecting on why the anti-war movement was such a complete failure, said it all. “Most people,” he reflected, “were in it to feel better about themselves.” Exactly.
Actually, I’d differ slightly with Lancer, in my view, Selma and the subsequent actions – the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society – was the triumph of the Old Left here in the U.S.
The New Left grew up in the shadow of those great achievements.
And for those who doubt they were achievements, remeber that in the early 1960’s rural American children had hunger diseases. Today they have obesity diseases…not good, but a damn site better.
A.L.
Good stuff, but when you say “Democrats,” I would have said “Left Wing” — in my mind, a lot of Democrats don’t belong in the left wing, anti-war, pro-let’s-go-have-a-protest-crowd. (If you ever saw the movie P.C.U. these were the folks protesting something different every day.)
The DLC crowd headed by Clinton was in part a reaction against those attitudes, one that would be comfortable with compromising and governing from the center-left.
Also, your story about the bike shop doesn’t have to be read as a cold-hearted sell-out. The fact is that every society, even a liberal student mini-society, has to allocate limited resources. They had a decision to make — keep “spending” $50,000 on allowing a bike co-op or spend it on other student causes.
C.P.P. – I think you’re right about the Democrats, in that an increasing part of FDR’s party has been up for grabs (hence the success of the GOP); this isn’t news at this point. The DLC was, in part a reaction.
But what’s been traded away is a core ideology – a justification – for the Party, or rather one that is consistent with the large body of voters needed to keep them in power.
My issue with the UC Berkeley story was that the elected officials there did what elected officials tend to do – they undermined their explicit objectives – in order to support their implicit objectives (stay in power). Principled elected officials are capable of doing both…and in fact, I believe that the voting public wuld respond well to that.
A.L.
Did any of you see this week’s cover of Time? Why They Don’t Make Democrats Like They Used To. Unfortunately, I don’t think they even begin to answer that question. More time is spent on giving advice to struggling candidates than asking where all the leaders have gone.
Yeah, just saw it in the orthopod’s office today…will possibly comment tomorrow (off to see The Matrix)…
A.L.