The post has an interesting take on the millennial left.
The gulf between liberalism and Old Left ideas — socialist ideas — has only grown since the 1930s. Unlike liberals, who emerged from the 1960s prioritizing the political freedoms associated with individual rights, the socialist left has posited that most people — the working class — remain effectively powerless if capitalists control work, wages and welfare. In their view, the left’s mission — the reason for its existence — ought to be expanding the idea of political freedom to include economic freedom. This historical distinction between liberalism and socialism has resurfaced with the millennial left.
snip
The 1930s left critiqued the limits of New Deal reforms. Some Old Leftists wanted workers to have complete autonomy in their workplaces. Still others, inspired by Soviet Russia, wanted the working class to control the state and command the economy. Many leftists did not go that far, yet at the very least wanted what they called “industrial democracy” — a political and economic system accountable to the needs and desires of the industrial working class. New Deal liberals, who seemed to prefer technocratic tinkering, were considered barriers to such a left-wing vision of America.
The Guardian highlights the “dirt bad left”. Das Mondne in the other thread linked to an article in the New Republic about this.
Here is the Guardian’s take:
It’s the feeling that the new liberal agenda resulted in a whole generation of young Americans being shafted, locked into a gig economy, loaded down with student debt and no access to healthcare. A reaction has been building against Democrat politicians of the 90s who tried to make a compromise with corporate capitalism and then defined liberalism around cultural issues of diversity, immigration, women’s rights and so on, while riding along with the shafting of the working class.“In a recent edition, Jezz In My Pants, Chapo hosts cited the success of Jeremy Corbyn’s social democratic platform in the UK as proof of the potency of “dirtbag” politics. “It’s the beginnings, or the contours, of something else, like a shaft of light.
I have bolded part of this because it expresses the core beliefs of the young I encountered on the Sanders campaign.
In general Sanders is not taken seriously with establishment DC types. You can even see that in Booman’s reaction in his thread on neo-liberalism.
In this he badly misreads the contours of the generational politics on the left of center all over the world.
I will admit I am surprised at how much legs this has on twitter. Jacobin Magazine opines
We’re running downfield with government jobs for all, free college, and Medicare for All while the liberal intelligentsia haughtily flies the banner of: “Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages” — the party’s proposed motto for the 2018 elections. While the socialist and Berniecrat left takes it for granted that all Americans unconditionally deserve the good life, the Democrats want to see your resume first.
Bernie Sanders isn’t the most popular politician in the country because Americans have suddenly become socialists. He’s beloved and trusted because he’s the first person on the national stage to speak to the mass discontent of our oligarchical times. The first person to burst into the elite zone of detachment and shout, “The building’s on fire.” The liberal intelligentsia in the Discourse, however, just sees a bull in their china shop
I’m not sure which I dislike more, generational “analysis” or the label “dirtbag left”.
It’s certainly not only young people who are being shafted, and plenty of us boomers would love to hear more discussion of class and economics from the Democrats.
[I also dislike paywalls, and was not able to read the entire article.]
I am sure that sort of hypermasculine talk, which is reminiscent of Trump’s acolytes saying that he wanted his opponents to “bow to him” will go real far. I’m sure they don’t care, nor do some on this blog. A bunch of bully boys barking out orders. Doesn’t sound like a left that I would have wanted anything to do with back when I was young, nor one I would want to have anything to do with now.
A fuller quote is
A Confucian might say, something is always leading, “oppressing”. What will we have going far the other way?
The collapse of parenting: Why it’s time for parents to grow up
There’s a huge difference between what we as adults need to do when we are responsible for children and what we do when taking on leadership roles in which we supervise and work with other autonomous adults. I’d prefer not to confuse the two. And again, I don’t have any interest in bowing my knee to any particular party or faction. I will gladly work with groups and organizations that are aligned with my priorities, but I have no interest in being bullied into toeing some party line because someone said so. Saw enough of that crap as a young activist enough to find anarchism almost appealing. If it comes down to dealing with that again at this stage in my life, I am perfectly comfortable staying home, not supporting their causes or candidates.
More than we would like to admit, Homo Sapiens is a hierarchical species. That is how we have the Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, also Hitler, Putin, Trump, and financial food chains.
Be it in Kumbaya language, centrist liberals assume big authority in social matters. And they seek to impose quite much. Evidently, over half of people do not wish to accept that authority.
Luckily, leadership comes in more than one grade. Liberals should recognize well, how does their leadership really rate.
I am well aware that there are multiple leadership styles. How are you categorizing the apparent leadership style that you think I resonate with or that liberals as you characterize them resonate with based on the schematic to which you linked? You made a pretty bold claim about specific style (a presume based on this schematic) that somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of the population has rejected it. What is your source for data? Has this source gone through rigorous peer review and been replicated? In other words, you are making a very broad claim with as of yet little to justify it. I am making admittedly a much narrower claim that a particular approach made by some podcasters is a turnoff for me, and I tried to express why. And I already have an inkling of what my daughters think of those podcasters. Wasn’t positive. Remember – these folks would have to persuade a lot of folks outside their bubble that their approach is effective. They are going to have to persuade others outside their bubble to support candidates who use their prescribed approach. I am one of those people outside their bubble and found the ick factor quite high, and given my enjoyment of contemporary horror films, I have a pretty high tolerance for a lot many would find unpleasant. At this point, I don’t see these podcasters having much of a future beyond cashing in on their 15 minutes. If a subset of Democratic leaning folks want to follow them, all I can say is good luck with that. I’ll hold out for something better.
That data source is stuff of high level (and expensive) training for management, entrepreneurship, personal development. There are scientific references: see Cook-Greuter among “More scholarly works” over there, plus Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Jean Piaget, Clare Graves, eventually Abraham Maslow; and their own gurus William Tolbert, Dudley Lynch.
On a grand scheme, modern liberals are followers – perhaps not of personalities or Bible, but of certain principles, institutions. Apart from Obama and younger Bill Clinton, liberals hardly register or communicate on a congruent, embodied, visceral level of leadership. Hillary (and even Obama) were lackeys of financial “authorities”, clearly. In comparison, GOP is more like godfathers for those interests.
The old Progressives and New Dealers were actually leading society with new ideas and acts. Sanders and Corbyn only show, how inferior is the modern competition of liberal leaders to the old school.
Persuasion by itself is not leadership either. Initial discomfort might be better than unperturbed “interest”. Comfort rarely leads to real results. Trump chumps see a future in dirtybags.
I’m not sure one can neatly tie ideology to particular leadership styles nor to propensity to lead in general or follow in general. I’m guessing the folks at Liberty Blitzkreig have their own agenda in pushing their particular narrative, but they don’t strike me as one of the more trustworthy places to get info (at best they have a rep for being biased). The guy running it has an opinion. Great for him. I’ll look elsewhere, thank you.
For a philosophical view on leadership (in a very broad sense) and more, I just put up an article.
This might help you out with the use of dirt bag left.
Personally, I don’t like gratuitous vulgarity and rudeness and diaper jokes. But if that’s what it takes to reach an audience of budding lefties, I’m not going to gripe about it. “Dirtbag left” for millenials and DFHs for oldsters.
I agree with the Paywall. I am not a Post subscriber – I was under the number of free articles for the month I guess. In any event my apologies relative to that.
I do believe the politics of this generation are different from those that proceeded it, and worth discussing.
By-pass paywall: How to use …
thanks Oui, i have to remember that.
Chapo has it right — the Clintonites captured and took over the Democratic Party. Carter was the dress rehearsal which was a miserable failure.
The reason why 1960s leftists weren’t associated with economic matters was because socialism was humming along nicely at that time. Medicare/Medicaid and the highest ever minimum wage. The New Deal legislation was bedrock and as such was viewed as nearly impregnable by the GOP — they tried and mostly gave up. One reason that socialism was humming along was because Congressional Democrats were New Dealers. (Recall that Nixon signed the EPA legislation and the ERA.) There big screw-up subsequent to FDR was their failure to repeal Taft-Hartley, but union membership (mostly public employees) was still growing at that time.
Income and wealth inequality were continuing to shrink through the 1960s.
Neo-lib Dems are essentially Rockefeller Republicans, but the GOP wasn’t about to nominate one for POTUS. (Republican women in the ’60s/70s supported equal rights for women and reproductive freedom.) Like Rockefeller they’re not even good on social issues — DOMA, federal crime bill. And we poor sucker FDR Democrats couldn’t imagine that Democrats would take away the economic gains and security of the New Deal.
It sold/sells best with those that had no personal memory of increasing income, job security and advancement, modest student loans, banking and stock market stability, etc. AND as the changes were gradual, they mostly got the old good stuff with a bit more of a pinch than what they imagined the Boomers experienced.
One way it began to fall apart was that those old New Dealers didn’t know how to pitch “equal pay for equal work” as a matter of fairness and equity; so, it became compartmentalized with women and minorities pushing it and the easy to predict backlash, exploited by the GOP, kicked in.
Perhaps the left in the 1960s had too singular it’s focus on ending the Vietnam War and removing cultural and legal barriers for women and minorities, but those were pressing issues. Economic issues were totally ignored, there was the United Farm Workers boycott and the left was engaged in. In the 1970s, discrimination lawsuits kicked open doors previously locked to women and minorities. (I was a beneficiary of one lawsuit and have always been thankful for it.)
The WaPo thesis is superficial. ’60s/’70s leftists that haven’t aged into conservatism was a faction that was easily responsive to Sanders. Even if Sanders is relatively milquetoast left, it was better than the nothing we’ve heard for decades.
Everything you say about the causes of the fall of the New Dealers is true, but I think there is one major additional factor – the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the New Deal era started dying in the late 70s (partly due to stagflation), it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that accelerated it.
Yay, we beat the Russkies and proved our system is better, so we no longer need to pretend that we care about the poor. Since Russia had centralized ownership and failed, all public ownership is wrong and everything needs to be privatized (never mind that pure unfettered unregulated capitalism also failed, about 50 years earlier). And we no longer need to care about producing anything – if somebody comes up with an illegal way to make money by pushing paper/bits around without actually producing anything, we should deregulate and legalize it.
Disagree. Keep in mind that we’re discussing 1960s leftists and the claim that socialism/economic policies were absent from that cohort.
The USSR was a reference point for 1930s US leftists in part because it was the only existing grand experiment in Marx’s proposition. It wasn’t faring well but the real facts weren’t known at that time. What was known is that Hitler/Nazism was wiping out German communists; so, US leftists did get on the right side of that battle.
After WWII the USSR wasn’t a reference point for leftists. Many experiments in socialism and communism developed. In western European countries, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Australia, and Chile, to cite a few major ones. Those were the new reference points and contrary to official US foreign policy. As well as contemporary domestic thinkers/writers such as the socialist Micheal Harrington and C. Wright Mills, although socialism had been a presence in the US for decades by then. We can add MLK, Jr. to the list, but he fell out of favor with AAs when he expanded his critique to include all workers. A key difference between the 1930s and 1960s is that white men were doing okay by the 1960s. Thus the economic inequalities became compartmentalized by status.
That fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the collapse of the USSR, in part due to trying to keep up with the Cold War economic sink. However, as it went up in the middle period of the war (1961), it also came down after deregulation and financialization were very much with us. Wage stagnation (beginning about 1973 and there was no increase in the minimum wage during Reagan’s terms), Farm Aid, and the first major bank collapse and the collapse of the S&L industry were evident in the 1980s. While farmers were going broke (a factor in the 1980 election and Carter paid dearly for his major flub), corporations and Wall Street survived (and earned high rewards) by managing through bankruptcy. Also recall that Milken and the other Wall St crooks was a feature of the 1980s. Ordinary people got by in that phase of wage stagnation by the new prevalence of consumer credit.
However, it did take a Democratic President to take the padded handcuffs off the financial industry and offshoring and outsourcing as well. (“Reinventing government” was outsourcing/privatization of government work. Didn’t save the government a dime, may have cost more, but owners made out well as workers earned less.) They do make a lot more money during the boom periods and the busts hurt them less than it does regular people. The current after the bust boom, at an extraordinary cost to the federal government, hasn’t and won’t trickle down. It also explains the 2014 and 2016 election outcomes. (Not the Republicans offer anything different other than social and economic regression to the nineteenth century.)
We did dodge Obama’s major assault, his “Grand Bargain.” In no small part because Republicans rejected anything Obama proposed, but economic leftists were out in force in opposing it. As they were over the TPP. Millenials get that these proposals are no good for them, but it’s older leftists that understand why and therefore, have not been silent. If 1960s economic leftists didn’t exist, nothing would have been heard from them.
Liberals, including the current institutional Democratic Party, many born in the opposition to the Vietnam War, embrace the Disneyfied version of MLK, Jr., feminism, and rainbow this or that flag. The non-financial cost of government — leaving plenty of money to line the pockets of the ‘defense’ industry and contractors and ‘wall street’ and multi-national corporations (so much overlap among those entities or factions that it’s broad brush to differentiate them.)
It’s all a big con job on the vast majority of the public.
Much more than just okay. This was probably the peak of blue collar real income and of industrial union power.
I know my real income peaked in 1973 (interestingly enough in the middle of my first government employment). Somewhere in the late ’80s, I read in IEEE Spectrum (print edition, of course) that most engineers’ real income peaked in 1973. We didn’t have to agonize over the decision to buy a new car or a tract house. And engineering unemployment was to laugh at. The Chicago Tribune had a thick Help Wanted section and most ads listed hourly pay and benefits, i.e. employers sought to attract employees instead of demanding that applicants beg for a job.
There was an aerospace engineering glut after NASA cut back (the downside of getting to the moon) in the early mid-seventies. For women and minorities just entering professional fields in the seventies, peak earnings were much later — too much ground to make up.* With some ups and downs (job changes), I flat-lined between 1983 and 1993, but from there it went up, but so too did my skill-set and experience level.
*Should add that I had a great boss in the late seventies/early eighties that really did everything he could to get my salary up to parity with the men. But there were restrictions or limitations wrt to grade level and salary ranges. That was still in the period when equal pay for equal work for women was newish. Closing what was probably a 30% gap to a 10% gap was an accomplishment for him and I’m sure he would have gotten it to zero if I hadn’t accepted a new assignment.
I never did have a job in my primary degree, Physics. Those NASA cuts and Reagan cuts really hurt physicists more than engineers as most physicists get their income from the government one way or another. There are very few in private industry, at least non-defense non-academic private industry. An article in Physics Today during the mid-80s said that most of my generation would never work in Physics and most were drifting into computer programming (as I did). Interestingly enough my first non-government was building FORTRAN simulations for International Harvester. I would have rather been building stellar simulations, but at least I had the background for simulating hydraulic systems. My bosses were well pleased with me. As IH began work on microprocessor control, they sent me to school at Intel. It really helps to understand both the controller and the system being controlled!
Speaking of which: December 2016 – Money, access complicate effort to restore Mission Control
Update: Kickstarter: Restore Historic Mission Control – Accept the Webster Challenge! Help restore this Apollo-era landmark. Maybe they should hold a few bake sales as well.
BTW — have you gotten around to renting/seeing Hidden Figures? While you’re at it, also get St. Vincent. Both are fun, entertaining, and forgivably sappy.
By the time the Berlin wall fell, November 1989, conservatism and neoliberalism were already ascendant. New Deal ideals as well as Sixties Revolution ideals were already denigrated and viewed as failures.
And politically, just look at this map of the 1988 election which was a full year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The gulf between liberalism and Old Left ideas — socialist ideas — has only grown since the 1930s.
A statement from the WaPo is way too general and the article offers too little to be thought provoking.
A research paper from the Harvard Kennedy School was published in August 2016 and is already outdated as the election of president Trump and the discussion in the EU on Brexit has already seen a backlash. The election in The Netherlands and France in 2017 is an indication.
○ Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash
The Chapo Trap House taps into political differences of an angry crowd, has the profile of a cult movement and is likely short lived.
In general Sanders is not taken seriously with establishment DC types. You can even see that in Booman’s reaction in his thread on neo-liberalism. In this he badly misreads the contours of the generational politics on the left of center all over the world.
Too optimistic and also too general. The European elections are quite local events with the domestic agenda and the leading politicians of the parties determining the outcome. In general terms of Brexit, Trump, Rutte and Macron referendum/election one can witness a strong undercurrent of anti-establishment feeling. There is very little substance offered as far as forward looking policy is concerned, the political discussion is mostly short term and immediate self-interest.
This is the trap offered by today’s media and quite often on reading blogs too.
The true long-term political battle is the attack on democracy itself from within the US itself by the GOP billionaires (Koch bros.) and the policy set out by James McGill Buchanon. The neo-con militaristic agenda is intact due to U.S. Congress and the complex of right-wing think tanks, the Pentagon, CIA and the whole IC. The president is a prisoner in the White House.
Authored by a “millennial” …
○ Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism | The Nation |
… in the 2016 primaries, Sanders won more votes from people under 30 than Clinton and Trump combined. Bernie pulled in
more than 2 million of us; Clinton and Trump trailed far behind, with approximately 770,000 and 830,000, respectively.
So, why did En Marche win big in the local elections when presumably there were options to his left (PS, etc.) on the ballot?
Surprisingly good Guardian OpEd by Ross Barkan Democratic donors still think they can anoint rising stars in the Hamptons
“Pragmatic” is another one of those words that people hear and respond favorably to because they project their own meaning onto it. Can’t get more “pragmatic” than Bill Clinton (Obama is a runner up on that one) and the translation is getting as little as possible for the public at large, and as much out of the GOP was needed to keep the large donors fat and happy. Millenials and leftists have caught onto this word game.
The article is a very good one – but wrong in one detail: Harris endorsed single payer last week.
If she endorses free college, she will have embraced a good chunk of the Sanders agenda.
Schumer endorsed Single Payer over the weekend.
Some progress.
I don’t need another phony pandering to get votes. I remember the EFCA and how once Democrats won office, they forgot all about it. No, they didn’t forget. They ran away like Trump running away from his promises.
She’s another like Clinton and Obama. They love whoever crosses their palm with silver or leaves a C-note on the dresser.
Have to agree with Voice on this one. Schumer and Harris are doing politics cafeteria style. Borrowing the form of whatever looks popular but the underlying substance doesn’t exist. Authenticity requires the substance which is one of the major reasons why Sanders has gained high approval ratings. (Same with Corbyn in the UK, but his form and substance is both wider and richer than Sanders’.)
K Harris came up, fast, through the San Francisco political establishment. I’m not at all sure where she stands on issues, but she’s very well connected and there was little chance of her saying anything to offend the East Coast wealthy.
Started in the Alameda DA’s office and then moved across the Bay to the SF DA’s office under Mayor Willie Brown (a key figure in the SF Democratic Party machine). Elected SF DA in 2003 and began getting good press write-ups in the state and that led to winning the CA AG office (succeeding Jerry Brown) in 2010.
Yeah – skepticism is certainly in order.
At least they claim to support it in theory – though one could draw a parallel to the GOP Senators who claim to be for repeal.
Still, at least a little movement. The first step in winning the argument is to actually make it.