The Need For a Values Conversation From The Left

My most recent Substack is about how conservatives have abandoned their "values" talk from the 90s, and why the left needs to pick it up. This nation worships wealth and the wealthy in ways causing us drastic harm. So many of us yearn for deeper meaning beyond getting and spending. We need to talk more about thar.

My friends who are Christian leftists have reacted positively to what I wrote here. At the same time, I fear that values conversations on the left that do exist are getting ghettoized into particular religious contexts. That really needs to be fixed. 

What The Left Can Learn From Macron

I've rarely seen a newly elected world leader hit the ground running the way Emmanuel Macron has. It is especially impressive considering how divided the French electorate was in the first stage of voting. I've sensed a lot of jealousy about this on the Left in this country, but I think there is a lot that the Left can learn from his success.

We are apparently in an era where the old political elites are endangered. Hence the likes of Trump, Duterte, and Macron rising to prominence. While the term "populism" has been bandied about, that's hardly a fit description for Macron's political mode. The current wave favors those, populist or not, who offer an outside alternative to the dominant political order. The French Left had to look on an gnash their teeth while the technocratic Macron and the fascist Le Pen had the second round to themselves.

The Left in America should pay heed. The Democrats could easily be outflanked in the next election by a billionaire with Macron's technocratic bent. Mark Zuckerberg has thrown his hat in, and I wonder if Bloomberg will think about it as well. Now that the parties are at their weakest point since the early 19th century, the path to power may well lie outside of them. I could see the few remaining moderate Republicans joining independents and moderate Democrats to support a candidate like this against Trump. The Left needs to be prepared to be proactive against a candidate like this.

Another thing to be learned has been Macron's stance with Trump. Yes that handshake moment was full of masculine bullshit, but it has electrified the world because Macron treated a bully the only way that works: by hitting back at them harder. It works even better in public, since it is there that the bully is humiliated and often paralyzed by that humiliation. Contrast this with the behavior of folks like Bernie Sanders, who immediately started making noise about working with Trump on things like infrastructure after the election. He and many others failed a crucial test of how to deal with a bully like Trump. Macron has figured that out, and is reaping the reward. Maxine Waters is setting a similarly good example here in America.

I should say that I am not a fan of Macron's technocratic neoliberalism. However, I am a big fan of his vigor and courage. While the Left has a different ideology, it has a lot to learn from the way he performs symbolic politics.

Jon Stewart And The Left's New Pundits

Jon Stewart announced his impending retirement from The Daily Show this week, and I was quite surprised to see a lot of gloating from the professional/academic Left on Twitter.  In general his critics seemed to be blaming Stewart for the failures of the Left, whether it be because Stewart's cynical viewpoint encouraged 'anti-politics," or because he wasn't radical enough.

I find this all quite amusing, since Stewart is a comedian who hosts a show on basic cable.  Trying to blame him for the fact that the radical Left is mostly incapable of making a political argument without resorting to either academic jargon or to insufferable moral self-righteousness is pretty silly.  (I'm a pragmatic social democrat, just for the record.)  In terms of mainstream politics, the fact that the Democratic party is unable to get their base motivated in off-year elections has little or nothing to do with Stewart's show.  Yes, Stewart often used his "I'm just a comedian" defense as a way to deflect political criticism in ways that could be questionable, but that hardly merits the take-downs I've seen over the last week.

I see something deeper at work, something I've noticed more now that I am engaging more fully with Twitter.  There is a a growing Leftist punditocracy on that site, one that is desperately hoping to overtake the old one.  For that reason they usually save their biggest attacks not for conservatives, but for established liberals.  Just witness the firestorm of Schadenfreude over the changes at The New Republic.  Don't get me wrong, those liberals need to be held to account.  At the same time, however, the intensity and nature of the attacks often seems to come from a place of competition.  Stewart is the liberal voice with the greatest level of respect and biggest following in America today, so of course he's a target for the Left's new pundit class.  Take for instance Jamelle Bouie's piece in Slate.  I normally really like what he has to say, but this article takes Stewart to task for being a pundit.  What exactly is Bouie then?

The new pundits want the place of the old pundits, pure and simple.  That desire is transparent.  From a careerist standpoint I guess that makes sense, but the whole thing has made me less and less interested in what the rising pundit class thinks.  It's been especially difficult to go on Twitter and in the Leftist blogosphere and see people trying to tear others down for their own benefit, and pass it off as truth telling.  Blogger Freddie DeBoer is a case in point.  (I only mention him by name because he trolled this blog once upon a time.)  He seems to have it in for the other prominent Left folks on Twitter (which he mostly steers clear of), based on his long blog posts attacking Adam Kotsko and Jeet Heer by name in rather insulting and misleading terms.

I'll stop there to avoid committing the same sin of character assassination.

While people on the Left are expending all their energy dumping on the liberal figure who's had the most effective cultural influence in my lifetime, the Right is busy raising close to a billion dollars for the Koch brothers.  Maybe, just maybe, a late night talk show host's lack of ideological purity isn't the biggest issue that the Left is facing these days.

Giuliani, De Blasio, And Why Elections Matter

For someone who blogs, I took my sweet time joining Twitter.  Once I realized that some things I wrote were being discussed there, I decided to jump in, and have stayed in because it is usually the best way for me to keep up on the public discourses left out of the mainstream media.  It's also been good for connecting with what's going on in the world of the activist Left, something I had lost track with after leaving academia.

This has also been a little frustrating because of some of the tropes people I actually like have been engaging in recently.  I would often see protest movements denounced as ineffective, and elections as meaningless.  While I understand the limits of what peaceful protest can do (as someone who protested the coming war in Iraq in 2003), I also know what they can truly accomplish (as someone who engaged in protests and walkouts that led to a teaching assistant union.)  The attacks on protests seemed to be a kind of knee-jerk anti-liberalism just as annoying as that emanating from conservative circles.  Since the major protests have started in the wake of the Garner and Brown travesties, I have not been hearing much about their usefulness from those Lefty quarters, and with good reason.

The same goes for Left critiques of electoral politics.  Don't get me wrong, I barely have any love for the Democrats, and I think the two parties have a lot in common when it comes to complicity in maintaing inequality.  However, I have never been so invested in Leftist ideology to claim that elections somehow don't matter.  If you need proof that elections really do matter, and that there are real, fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats, take the case of the mayor of New York.  Bill de Blasio has fought to end the stop and frisk practice and in the wake of the Garner ruling has been openly sympathetic with protestors.  One gets the sense that he will fight to bring some real change out of this.

 Compare this to the recent, noxious pronunciations of Rudy Giuliani, who has essentially blamed the death of Garner and other black men at the hands of the police on the canards of black "dysfunction" and "black on black crime."  Lest we forget, Guiliani was twice elected mayor of New York City.  It is easy to imagine the reaction to the Garner case and ensuing protests if he were mayor today.  The NYPD would be out in full military regalia, batons cracking, tear gas launching, and pepper spray blasting in the faces of protestors.  Imagine too if someone like Ed Koch, who played a role in vilifying the innocent Central Park Five and exploiting white racial fears, were mayor again.  Based on Mayor Bloomberg's constant defense of stop and frisk and police aggression, we certainly know how he would respond to the situation.  Just ask the Occupy protestors.

The fact that de Blasio is mayor today, and that these men aren't, is truly important and significant.  It's a sign that progressives need to put resources into the local and and municipal level, where a small amount of resources can go a long way, and can certainly help reign in our out of control police departments.  Elections matter, elections have consequences, and elections have to bring change, it's just that the right people have to be elected.  If more women and men of de Blasio's stripe get voted into public office, I see a lot of good that can happen, and a lot that will be ignored or shut down if they don't.