The abstract versus the real in left politics

The Left became ungrounded with the absence of popular interest in tangible reforms.

Judis and Teixeira’s new book Where have all the Democrats gone? argues that Democrats drive away working-class voters of all races by their stands on social/cultural issues and climate change that appeal to young urban professionals, but not to working class people. In his review of their book, Michael Kazin echos the author’s concerns: “If they fail to win those voters back, Democrats will not become a majority party again.”

Kazin then describes how Judis and Teixeira claim the Democrats’ image has been crafted within a “closed universe of discourse” in which more extreme voices hold sway. If Democrats were to focus on liberal economics, they could win elections even in places like Idaho.

Kazin shares the authors’ nostalgia for New Deal but notes that the New Deal Democratic party included factions that had fundamental disagreements. He argues that most Southern Democrats opposed unions but stuck by Franklin Roosevelt because they supported many other New Deal policies. Kazin seems to be implying that conservative Southern Democrats posed a possible hindrance to the success of the New Deal and needed to be kept on board. Focusing on just the non-Southern seats in Congress, Democrats controlled the “Northern House” for 8 of the first ten years of Roosevelt era, and the “Northern Senate” for the entire period. Had all the Southern states voted for the Republican candidates in the 1932, 1936 and 1940 elections, Roosevelt would still have won. So, it seems the Southern support was not critical to the New Deal successes, most of which happened in the first six years of Roosevelt’s rule when Democrats were dominant outside of the South. As I mentioned in last week’s post, for the two years (1939-40) when Democrats did not control the Northern House, the New Dealers were unable to continue their reforms because Southern Democrats allied with Republicans to block it. Before that they couldn’t do this, which is why there was a New Deal in the first place.

Kazin argues that Liberals and radicals need one another, pointing out that “Every reform era in the twentieth century was preceded and/or propelled by a spurt of “unrealistic” left-wing thought and action,” providing examples such as radical trade unionists and the Populists prior to mainstream progressivism espoused by the New Dealers, or how “Martin Luther King, Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) pressed Lyndon Johnson to initiate the programs of the Great Society.”

I think Kazin makes an error here, a common one I see in analyses of why Democrats have been unsuccessful at building another reform coalition like the New Dealers did. They all tend to proceed by giving a political history and trying to explain how and why these things happened in terms of the development of ideas. The distinction is not between moderates and radicals, but between the real and the abstract. I recall discussions of politics and life in general with my lab technician Dan many years ago. Dan would refer to some issues, like getting laid off, are “a real thing,” while others like school prayer were not.

Building off of this I note that the radical movements Kazin refers to were a combination of a campaign trying to achieve a real thing and an abstract theoretical element that guided selection of campaign demands and strategies. For example, Kazin’s radical trade unionists (socialist-labor movement in my terminology) consisted of labor unions who sought higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions (real things) with theoretical justification derived from the economic philosophy of Marx and Engels (an abstract ideology). The Populists were both farmers seeking an inflationary policy that made the value of their output rise relative to their debt, ensuring they remain solvent (a real thing) coupled with leaders seeking to preserve an idealized agrarian way of life (abstract).

When these movements achieved success, their real components became a faction in the Democratic party establishment, while their abstract component continued on, seeking some other pragmatic arena in which to take shape. Populist abstractionism is manifest today in MAGA, an ill-defined worldview that means whatever adherents want it to mean. After the success of the Labor movement, the socialists associated with it (Old Left) were gradually replaced by a New Left, some of whom attached themselves to the Black Civil Rights movement. This movement was about real things like banning lynching and ending Jim Crow with leadership provided by both religious leaders (Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC) and secular organizers (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC). Leftists who had grown out of the Old Left were present in the ranks of the SCLC, while the SNCC would adopt a Black Power ideology obtained from the Black Panthers, whose ideology was a synthesis of Marxism and Black Nationalism inspired by figures like Malcolm X, inheritor of a black conservative tradition dating back to Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. During the last Creedal Passion Period (CPP). Ideas from the Left and (Black) Right were mixed to form new disciplines like Black Studies. Leftwing concepts pulled from the Marxian Frankfurt philosophical school could be combined with conservative Black Nationalist traditions to produce new abstractions (e.g. critical race theory) that could replace the Old Left ideas discredited by the success of the capitalist New Deal and failure of Soviet socialism. Those doing this theoretical work were informed by the historical experience of marginalized groups in an oppressive society (all real things), but use of Marxian concepts and professional class standpoint drove them astray.

After the end of the 1970’s CPP most of these new abstract ideologies went into hibernation and have sprung forth in the current CPP. Unlike their predecessors they have been unattached to movements reflecting real things. The reason, it seems to me, is the original version of these abstract theories arose in response to “real thing” problems and alongside movements of the people affected by them to propose solutions. For example. the young Marx was greatly influenced by the Chartist movement of his own day. Chartists sought suffrage rights for working class men so they could vote for reforms that would improve their lives, which was a real thing like the issues championed by the American civil rights movement of the next century. And the developments in Marxian thought later in the 19^th century were made in the context of efforts to achieve real things for industrial workers. But the post-civil rights critical and identity theories have all developed in the absence of a pragmatic program that deals with real things. The beginnings of critical race theory were in abstract legal theories coming out the experience of litigation of civil rights cases. An analogy springs to mind. Today’s progressive ideology is to the older ideology as basic science is to applied science. I spent my career in applied science, working to improve processes, solve process problems, and introduce new products into the industrial operation where I worked. I used theories obtained from basic science in this endeavor. Similarly, the socialists involved in the 19th century labor movement were trying to apply the ideas they got from Marx and others to the problem of how to secure a better life for all workers and not just those who already possessed some market power (such as the skilled workers in the American Federation of Labor).

The modern progressives have developed their ideas in the absence of any real-world applications. As I mentioned earlier, critical race theory developed in a legal context, which argues from philosophical and moral foundations rather than a materialist paradigm. Marxism, while materialist in origin, had been reworked into a cultural, discursive paradigm. Hence the new theory empowering progressive thought going forward would have no connection to the material reality of the lives of those it purported to represent.

They became like string theorists, whose theories proliferate because there is no way to evaluate them experimentally. In fact, progressives have generated applications by creating identities that can be fit into oppressor/oppressed roles in order to have subjects to which their theories can be applied. For example, African Americans whose disproportionately low presence in lucrative or prestigious occupations and institutions belong to a “historically underrepresented group” or HUG. Membership in a HUG functions as a disability, causing their underrepresentation among the successful through an uncharacterized mechanism called systemic racism. Reduction of standards for success for HUG members relative to others makes success more accessible to HUG members by overcoming systemic racism, similar to how ramps make public facilities more accessible to people in wheelchairs.

However, suppose the performance deficits defining HUG status are not caused by that status, but rather, to other factors that are correlated with HUG status? For example, black men are overrepresented among criminals and basketball players and under-represented in STEM fields. That racial genetics plays a role in this pattern is something I find hard to believe for reasons I previously explained. I think it’s likely because black men are more likely than others to have grown up in neighborhoods where playgrounds with basketball hoops were abundant and a Southern honor culture promoting personal violence and a culture discouraging academic achievement was prevalent. Only the racial genetics would apply to the son of a Nigerian American scientist. Should he have preferential access to elite colleges over other children of nonblack immigrants with the same or better test scores and other credentials?

Freddie DeBoer discusses people with disabilities as another one of these identity groups that have been shoehorned into an oppression dichotomy. DeBoer notes that theorists posit the existence of “a community of the disabled that does not exist.” To fit disabled people into their theory they need to show how disabled people are harmed (oppressed) by the larger society (oppressors). Doing this tends to privilege the stories of those whose condition is minimally disabling allowing them to focus on stigma (oppression) as the major problem to be addressed. Disabled people do suffer, and this is a real thing. But the cause is their disability (another real thing) which is not something that is caused by oppression. As DeBoer argues, disabled people need acknowledgements of the difficulties their disabilities provide them and accommodations to allow them to live the best life they can. As there is a limit to the accommodations society can provide, there is a need to restrict accommodations to those for whom a disability actually is a real thing, else everyone would claim it. DeBoer writes:

I’ve heard from at least a half-dozen college instructors who were teaching classes where a majority of the students had a diagnosis…that entitled them to special accommodation; sometimes, it’s been as much as three quarters of the students or more…so much accommodation leads to a discomfiting question about when accommodations for some students become an artificial disadvantage for others. If you’re one of a handful of students in an organic chemistry class who don’t get extra time on the test, and the kids who do are your competition for scarce slots in med school, wouldn’t that feel like injustice?

There is a new phenomenon of identities reflecting an internal specification that the external world is expected to acknowledge. Since no one has access to another’s mind, anyone can claim such an identity subject to the prevailing social dynamics. The most common example is gender identity. For example, some male convicts, seeking to avoid the harshness of life in a men’s prison, define themselves as women in order to be admitted to a women’s prison. In the past such a claim would be rejected as nonsense, but with the rise of trans ideology during the present CPP, such requests have been honored in a handful of cases.

Even when a real problem exists, the use of this identity-based analytical approach is ineffective at finding solutions. Consider the high risk of untimely death faced by many African Americans, who are eight times more likely to be murdered than other Americans. The proximate reason for this is because many more black people are at risk for becoming homicide victims due to where they live or with whom they associate. For example, many of those murdered are victims of mistaken identity or innocent bystanders of gang shootings. Looking like or just being in the same place as a homicide target puts one at risk of being killed. Only about 3% of black homicide victims are killed by police, yet the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement focused on police killings as its target for reform. This is hard to square with the greater threat posed by police to white and Latino persons at risk of being murdered: the fraction of white and Hispanic homicide victims that were killed by police is three times that for African American homicide victims.

The reason for this choice of target may be that police shootings fit better into the oppressor-v-oppressed identity model obtained from theories employed by modern progressives. In addition to raising $100 million in funding, a summary of BLM accomplishments lists eight examples, five of which involve consciousness raising of the fact that police kill unarmed black people. Other accomplishments are bringing attention to the problem of police brutality, spurring significant reforms and additional data collection efforts to get a better handle on the issue, which are real improvements. But, by focusing on a niche issue, black people killed by police, they ignored the much larger problem of the high risk of death faced by African Americans living in many communities across the US. If black lives snuffed out by homicide matter, why ignore the 97% not killed by police? Such narrow-focused movements like BLM cannot hope to accomplish the sort of real socioeconomic changes the Socialist-Labor or Progressive movements of a century ago achieved.

In summary, the disconnect between the analytical framework used by the modern left and the real causes of the material problems faced by those at the bottom that the Left traditionally represented is the central reason for its impotence.