Neera Tanden from Center for American Progress at the White House, 2014. Photo Photo Courtesy of: Faye Evans, ATI.
Ideas do not float free of the people who hold them, and the abandonment of class has a sociological shape. The center of gravity of American progressive politics has shifted from the working class to the college-educated professional. The activists, staffers, donors, writers, and increasingly the voters who set the tone of the movement are drawn from a stratum secure enough to treat economic survival as a solved problem. For this group, politics can become what it cannot be for the precarious: a matter of values, expression, and culture rather than of rent, wages, and health.
This is a quiet betrayal of the tradition, because the democratic socialism of Harrington and Debs was rooted in, and accountable to, the people whose labor it sought to dignify. Dorothy Day did not theorize poverty from a distance; she lived among the poor in the houses of hospitality she founded. The point was not charity but solidarity, the insistence that the movement and the people it served were not two different things. When the movement’s personnel no longer share the condition of those they represent, the accountability snaps, and the agenda drifts toward the preoccupations of the comfortable.
The drift shows up in priorities. A professionalized left fluent in the vocabulary of the seminar room will reliably elevate questions of language, representation, and symbolic recognition, because those are the questions its members feel most acutely. The same left is strikingly quiet about union density, which has fallen to roughly a tenth of the workforce, because rebuilding labor power requires patient organizing among people the professional class rarely encounters. The issues that photograph well in a fundraising appeal crowd out the issues that would actually shift the balance of economic power.
Thomas Frank captured one face of this in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, asking why working people vote against their economic interest. But the deeper question runs the other way: why has the party of the left given them so little economic reason to vote for it? When a movement led by the credentialed offers the working class culture war on one side and means tested technocracy on the other, it should not be surprised when the working class drifts away. The professional left often reads that drift as evidence of false consciousness, which only confirms the distance.
There is a tone that comes with this capture, a moralism that treats political disagreement as a deficiency of enlightenment. The well educated activist, certain of positions arrived at among similar people, can mistake the work of persuasion for the work of correction. This is poison for a mass movement. Bernstein grounded socialism in an ethical imperative to treat every person with respect, an inheritance from the French Revolution’s promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Respect means meeting people as equals to be persuaded, not as pupils to be enlightened.
Consider how this capture reshapes the very form of left organization. The classic instruments of working class power, the union local and the mass party, were schools of solidarity in which people who were not alike learned to act together out of shared interest. The characteristic instruments of the professional left, the advocacy nonprofit and the issue campaign, are something else: staffed by graduates, funded by foundations and wealthy donors, and accountable upward to their funders rather than downward to a membership.
The shift in form is a shift in power. A movement that depends on donors will, however unconsciously, trim its ambitions to what donors will tolerate, and the one ambition no major donor will fund is the redistribution of their own power. So the structural demands quietly fall away, and what remains is the safely symbolic and the narrowly technocratic. The tradition built institutions that the working class owned; the new new left builds institutions that own the working class’s voice.
None of this is a brief against educated people in politics; the tradition is full of them, Harrington among them. It is a brief against a movement whose social base has narrowed to a single comfortable stratum and whose agenda has narrowed with it. The remedy is not to expel the professionals but to re anchor the movement in the working class majority, to make the labor organizer as central as the communications director. Until the left’s center of gravity moves back toward the people it claims to serve, it will keep mistaking the concerns of the few for the cause of the many.
This is the second of five essays on the state of the Left in the USA.
The post What’s Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Schultz.