Mainstream
liberalism and its champions are part of the barren, bleak cultural
and intellectual terrain left by decades of right-wing ascendency and
left-wing retreat.
Discarding
New Deal liberalism and its goal of guaranteeing minimal living
standards, a measure of social warfare, and some class mobility,
liberalism accepted the supremacy of the market and its blessing of
the inevitability of inequality. The new gospel of liberalism
announces that economic growth and market forces will provide for all
if government only “incentivizes” the private sector. This
ideology was embraced by the New Democrats who won the Democratic
party during and after the Reagan years.
At
the same time, the social base of the Democratic Party shifted, in
the post-Watergate era, away from poor and working class voters, its
traditional base through most of the twentieth century, toward
professionals and middle strata in urban centers and suburban
bedroom communities. Issues that troubled this increasingly dominant
and influential segment pushed aside the New Deal and Great Society
concerns: housing and de facto
segregation, public education and educational inequality,
institutional racism and sexism, deeply rooted poverty and its
consequent social dysfunctions, jobs, union representation, health
care, public assets and services, etc.
In
place of these concerns, liberals and the Democratic Party emphasize
obstacles that may obstruct the full realization of the “American
Dream.” The liberal agenda today addresses “glass ceilings,”
lifestyle choices, and other issues that impact the safety, security,
and freedom of the middle and upper-middle strata. Those falling
below these markers are offered second-class schools, second-class
health care, second-class neighborhoods, and second-class services.
Modern liberals have shrewdly obscured this shift by creating an
artificial class-- the “middle class”-- that purports to include
hospital workers, food service workers, and sweatshop workers in the
same class with doctors, lawyers, and financial managers. For those
left out of this broad, meaningless class, the Democratic Party
offers the fruits of volunteerism and charitable giving as expressed
in its 2012 platform.
It
is, therefore, no surprise that there is a growing distance between
liberals and the Democratic Party, on one side, and the vast majority
of US working and poor people who have been battered and made
insecure by the economic crisis that came to a head in 2008. The 2016
primary elections and the rise of both Bernie Sanders and Donald
Trump demonstrate this divide, though mainstream liberals are
dismissive of both.
A
recent column by long-time The Nation
columnist, Katha Pollitt (Why Didn’t
Bernie Get Me, May 23-30, 2016)
illustrates this widening division. It must be said that Pollitt is a
long-standing liberal and one who, in the past, often supported the
Old Democrats over the new breed. She concedes as much in a February
column revisiting her past electoral choices. But as with other
liberal pundits, the causes of the past do not fuel the passions of
the present.
In
an election year that has brought out the pitchforks and has seen
insurgents take aim at the heart of the establishment of both
political parties, Pollitt is oddly remote from the contests. In the
opening paragraph of her commentary, she confesses “...I neglected
to read the instructions on my absentee ballot, which clearly stated
that it had to be post marked [by?] the day before the actual
primary, and thus missed my chance to vote...” Apparently the
stakes in the primary were not of any great consequence to Pollitt,
at least not enough to focus her attention on casting a vote.
She
goes on to explain why Bernie Sanders didn’t get the vote that she
didn’t cast. First and foremost, Senator Sanders suffers from the
affliction claimed of all those seeking to redirect the Democratic
Party: a lack of “electability.” It’s truly a wonder how
pundits can always diagnose this affliction in candidates that they
do not like. It’s particularly a wonder with Bernie Sanders, who
appears to be more “electable” against the likely Republican
candidate than Hillary Clinton in virtually every poll taken.
But
polls mean nothing, when your gut tells you something different.
Especially if you warm up a tasteless stew of age-contempt,
Red-baiting and fear-mongering: “I just don’t believe Americans
are ready for a 74-year-old self-described socialist with a long
far-left CV who would raise their taxes by quite a lot. By the time
the Republicans get a hold of him, he’d be the love child of Rosa
Luxemburg and the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then it’s hello,
President Trump.”
I’m
sure this snide remark would get an amused titter at liberal cocktail
parties.
But
for Pollitt, the real complaint is lack of a commitment to women’s
rights. At the same time, she acknowledges that Sanders supports a
“laundry list” of “causes dear to the heart of… feminists.”
Further, she notes that Sanders “has a good voting record on those
issues in Congress.”
So
where lie his failings of commitment?
“There
were all those little tells,” she says. Pollitt’s “tells” are
those slights and nuances for which academic liberals have coined the
term “micro-offenses.” Though Senator Sanders’ record is
unimpeachable, Pollitt is skeptical of his heart. Because his word
choice may have been, on occasion, questionable, because his staff
may be gender and racially unbalanced, because some of his supporters
may be brutish males, Pollitt can’t be sure of his sincerity.
This,
coupled with a large dose of Trump-dread, denied Bernie Sanders the
vote that Katha Pollitt forgot to cast, despite the fact that “...
in important ways his politics are closer to mine [Katha Pollitt’s]
than Hillary Clinton’s are, and his campaign for the White House is
inspiring.”
This
is liberalism without a soul, a personal politics that calculates
“micro-offenses” with the same weight as the life-and-death
issues that millions of poor and working class women and men face
daily.
Katha
Pollitt and other liberals, including Bernie Sanders, could further
demonstrate that their commitment to women’s rights transcends a
narrow, parochial vision or political opportunism by standing with
others-- women and men-- against the coup in Brazil that stripped the
country’s first woman President, Dilma Vana Rousseff of her
position. A cabal of men organized this coup-- no doubt with US
encouragement-- to deny her the term of service which she earned in
the last elections. This outrage has yet to draw the attention of the
US liberal mainstream.
Likewise,
the vindictive indictment of Christina Kirchner, the ex-president of
Argentina, on trumped-up charges has been largely met with
indifference on the part of US liberals and feminists.
Where
are you, Katha Pollitt and Bernie Sanders?
Zoltan
Zigedy
