Category Archives: revitalizing the left

Bernie Sanders runs on the 1948 Democratic Party Platform

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One gap between liberals and conservatives is their sense of the direction the country has recently taken. Each side perceives a nation that has abandoned valuable principles that were prevalent in the past. Sometimes, both sides’ perceptions are exaggerated. For instance, gross government spending has neither soared as a result of Obama and other recent spendthrift lefties, nor has it plummeted due to neoliberal budget-cutters. It looks fairly similar from decade to decade. (The upper trend includes entitlements and interest payments; the lower is limited to direct government spending.)

But there is an important way in which the progressives’ perception is valid. Ideas that are now embraced mainly by Occupy protesters and the Sanders campaign were once so mainstream that they provided the basic planks of the 1948 Democratic Party Platform. I quote from that document (italics added):

  • We shall enact comprehensive housing legislation, including provisions for slum clearance and low-rent housing projects initiated by local agencies. This nation is shamed by the failure of the Republican 80th Congress to pass the vitally needed general housing legislation as recommended by the President. Adequate housing will end the need for rent control. Until then, it must be continued.
  • We advocate such legislation as is desirable to establish a just body of rules to assure free and effective collective bargaining, to determine, in the public interest, the rights of employees and employers, to reduce to a minimum their conflict of interests, and to enable unions to keep their membership free from communistic influences.
  • We favor the extension of the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act as recommended by President Truman, and the adoption of a minimum wage of at least 75 cents an hour [$7.42 in 2015 dollars] in place of the present obsolete and inadequate minimum of 40 cents an hour.
  • We favor the extension of the Social Security program established under Democratic leadership, to provide additional protection against the hazards of old age, disability, disease or death. We believe that this program should include: Increases in old-age and survivors’ insurance benefits by at least 50 percent, and reduction of the eligibility age for women from 65 to 60 years; extension of old-age and survivors’ and unemployment insurance to all workers not now covered; insurance against loss of earnings on account of illness or disability; improved public assistance for the needy.
  • We favor the enactment of a national health program far [sic] expanded medical research, medical education, and hospitals and clinics.
  • We will continue our efforts to expand maternal care, improve the health of the nation’s children, and reduce juvenile delinquency.
  • We approve the purposes of the Mental Health Act and we favor such appropriations as may be necessary to make it effective.
  • We advocate federal aid for education administered by and under the control of the states. We vigorously support the authorization, which was so shockingly ignored by the Republican 80th Congress, for the appropriation of $300 million [almost $3 billion today] as a beginning of Federal aid to the states to assist them in meeting the present educational needs. We insist upon the right of every American child to obtain a good education.
  • We pledge an intensive enforcement of the antitrust laws, with adequate appropriations. … We advocate the strengthening of existing antitrust laws by closing the gaps which experience has shown have been used to promote concentration of economic power.
  • We support the right of free enterprise and the right of all persons to work together in co-operatives and other democratic associations for the purpose of carrying out any proper business operations free from any arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions.
  • The Democratic Party commits itself to continuing its efforts to eradicate all racial, religious and economic discrimination. … We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.
  • We recommend to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women.

To be fair, the platform also diverges in some respects from contemporary progressive thinking. The environmental policies are mostly about supporting big projects that will extract more power and natural resources from public lands. That was Midcentury Modern progressivism, which lost its appeal in the 1960s. The platform is very positive about the Farm Bill, which may still receive Democratic Party support today but is unpopular among progressive activists. And the platform calls for tax cuts, albeit focused on lower-income Americans and as a response to post-War defense cuts.

Overall, the 1948 Platform seems left of the contemporary Democratic Party. It is, however, true that some important proposals of the 1948 platform were enacted by 1972, and today’s mainstream Democrats tend to want to protect those policies. In that sense, the mainstream Democratic Party is arguably the most conservative force in the country today (and I mean that respectfully). Its goal is to preserve what was constructed from 1932-1968. Meanwhile, Senator Sanders can be pretty accurately described as someone who wants to check the unchecked boxes on Harry Truman’s 1948 to-do list.

See also: Wyoming has moved right, the country has not moved left; Edmund Burke would vote Democratic; and the left has become Burkean.

#Blacklivesmatter and Sen. Sanders: social democracy and identity politics

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(Winston-Salem) Last weekend, #BlackLivesMatter activists disrupted a forum with Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders at Netroots Nation. An objection to Gov. O’Malley was that he oversaw the State of Maryland while it incarcerated many thousands of young Black people. That was a pretty standard case of holding a leader accountable for his performance, and the governor’s response was terrible.

The critique of Sen. Sanders was more interesting, and I would love to see a real dialogue between the activists and Sanders–rather than what sounds like a dismissive response on his part. Without wanting to stereotype any individual, I would propose that Sanders and #Blacklivesmatter represent two wings of the American left that are genuinely different and that need more conversation. (See also “Why doesn’t Bernie Sanders talk about race” and “#BernieSoBlack: Why progressives are fighting about Bernie Sanders and race,” both in Vox.)

Consider two simplified ideological positions. One can be called classical social democracy. It holds that the root cause of social injustice is the economic and political power of capital, referring to the companies and individuals who control large economic investments. They represent a small slice of the population. The Occupy Movement asserted that the economic oppressors were 1% of Americans; and while that claim rested on some recent data about wealth distributions in the US, it has always been the case that capitalists are outnumbered by something like 99-to-1.

The classical democratic socialist view is that other problems follow from the power of concentrated capital. For instance, as I have argued, a situation like police violence in Ferguson, MO can be interpreted as a result of massive deindustrialization (the loss of hundreds of thousands of unionized blue-collar jobs in that region), which rendered young men without college degrees very economically weak, which has enabled violent abuse. So—argues the classical democratic socialist—it should be everyone’s priority to reduce the economic and political power of big capital. That means financial reform, antitrust, tax reform, and campaign finance reform to get capital out of politics.

Dara Lind writes:

When my colleague Andrew Prokop profiled Sanders last year, he pointed out astutely that Sanders’s career has been ‘laser-focused on checking the power of the wealthy above all else.’ Sanders believes in racial equality, sure, but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality. To him, focusing on racial issues first is merely treating the symptom, not the disease.

Meanwhile, the political strategy of classic democratic socialists is to build very broad solidarity. Ninety-nine percent of us are not big capitalists, so we are in basically the same boat and should not allow ourselves to be divided. For instance, police officers are blue-collar or lower-income white-collar unionized state employees who need to be brought into the same coalition with unemployed youth.

The second view—I struggle to name it fairly—takes seriously many other sources of power, privilege, and domination. According to this view, we are not divided between the 99% and the 1%, but into a rainbow of racial/ethnic groups, genders, sexual identities, etc. Oppression is manifold and complex, and often “intersectional” in the sense that race, gender, sexual orientation, and class can overlap. Although it may be valuable to reform capital markets, that is neither sufficient nor the central concern. Power must be confronted directly in all of its forms and settings.

I suspect that neither Senator Sanders nor the #Blacklivesmatter activists at Netroots Nation would want to be placed simply in one of those two boxes. Every serious person develops more complex views in the course of struggling with difficult realities. But these are two general tendencies and they do explain, for instance, why the demographics of an #Occupy gathering or a Bernie Sanders rally are so different from the demographics of a #Blacklivesmatter protest.

For my part: I am not a democratic socialist, for two reasons. First, I am somewhat more enthusiastic about markets, individual economic liberties, and pluralism than a classical (statist) socialist would be. Secondly, I am somewhat persuaded by the second position summarized above and do not believe that concentrated capital is our only problem.

But I do worry a lot about concentrated, unregulated capital and doubt that much can be accomplished on other fronts if we don’t address that. I observe that concerns about race, gender, and sexual orientation have produced scattered victories over the past 30 years, not only in national politics (e.g., marriage equality) but also within institutions like corporations and universities. Meanwhile, the traditional democratic socialist agenda has been in steady retreat for the same 30 years, sometimes verging on a disorganized rout. National and global policies are more neoliberal and less economically egalitarian than at any time since the 1920s.

Younger people on the left typically have a lot to say about issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. They have diagnoses, solutions, heroes, and movements they can join. But most struggle for comparable ideas about reforming the global political economy, if they think about that at all. Despite the terrible injustices that motivate movements like #Blacklivesmatter, there is some sense of momentum toward policy changes, such as sentencing reform. We see nothing comparable when it comes to global capital markets. Thus I am glad to see the voices of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren resonating with at least some Americans.

I wish Sanders had taken the #Blacklivesmatter protesters seriously, because they deserve that, and the progressive movement needs their support to win. Yet I’d prefer that Sanders stuck to his position in a respectful debate, so that his side of the argument would convey. He is not going to be president; his contribution may be to put a different diagnosis and solutions on the table. The last thing I’d do is to silence #Blacklivesmatter protesters, but I wish that they and the Senator could have a substantive debate, in which both sides laid out some of these genuine points of disagreement.

how our two-party system frustrates political innovation

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I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.

The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.

If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.

The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.

Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.

In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.

Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.

In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.

Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.

This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.

On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.

I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.

My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.

See also community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and “En EE UU, el populismo es bastante razonable.”

pay-for-success in government

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Let’s say you represent a program that would really save the government money as well as serving a social need. For instance, your program can cut the number of felonies, thereby saving $31,000 per person/per year in incarceration costs while reducing human suffering and injustice.

You’d like to ask the government for funds. You can’t get money from the executive branch at any level, because government budgets are committed to specific current activities, such as incarcerating a predicted number of inmates or fielding a certain number of police officers. Most agencies lack discretionary budgets for prevention, even if an investment would save them money later.

You could get funding from a legislative appropriation, but legislatures are not well set up to distinguish between truly effective preventive programs and those that just lobby well. In a crowded environment with tight budgets, your odds aren’t especially good.

You could offer the executive branch a contract that would commit the government to pay you from the savings that you actually achieve later on. They could measure the size of the savings using the most rigorous methods, such as random control groups. Then they could afford to pay you out of the savings in their planned budgets in future years.

But how can you operate your program until you deliver the savings and get paid? That apparent conundrum may have an answer: private third parties could invest in your program and get their money back–with a profit–once the government pays you for saving it money.

This is the pay-for-success model. Last week, we heard about it at a Tisch College panel with Jeffrey Liebman of the Harvard Kennedy School (the intellectual leader of this movement, who also provides technical support to governments); Molly Baldwin, Founder and CEO of Roca Inc., which has a pay-for-success contract to cut incarceration among highly at-risk young men in Massachusetts; Jeff Shumway of Social Finance, who sets up these deals; and Brian Bethune of the Tufts Economics Department and a Tisch College Faculty Fellow for 2015-16.

The evidence seemed compelling that Roca will save Massachusetts money while helping young men get on a better track. But I am a civic engagement/democratic participation guy, so I am supposed to ask, “Where are citizens in all of this?” I would say the following:

First, pay-for-success is value-neutral. It is an efficiency measure that could be used for a wide range of purposes. A dictatorship could use it to round up human rights protesters more effectively. Reducing incarceration in Massachusetts sounds much better than that, yet it could possibly legitimize the prison system. I don’t really agree with that critique, but I would acknowledge that any social intervention is a value choice. As such, it should be informed and reviewed by the public.

We already have the power to elect the high officials who preside over Massachusetts’ state government. But an election presents a binary choice (the Republican or the Democrat), which is a crude device for influencing subtle choices, such as whether to fund Roca, Inc. We can lobby and advocate on such matters, but there is an inevitable tendency for most advocates to be biased by self-interest or strong ideology. So we need more deliberative forms of civic engagement that get a wider range of people involved in making difficult value choices.

But increasing civic engagement seems fully compatible with using a pay-for-success model to get the government’s own job done. In fact, pay-for-success is wonderfully transparent. If citizens are asked to pay for 10,000 jail cells, we have no way of knowing how that will affect crime, safety, or fairness. But we can review the Roca, Inc. agreement and decide whether it offers what we want. And we don’t pay a dime unless it delivers.

A different question is how citizens should be involved in the programs themselves. I would hypothesize that in general, programs that produce good results have been designed and built through collaborations that involve the affected communities. Social policy is not like medicine, where chemical compounds that were invented in labs can cure (some) diseases in the real world. Social interventions operate in complex contexts with lots of conflicting values and interests, so they typically work only if they have been co-constructed. That is true, by the way, of Roca; Molly Baldwin emphasized that youth in the program have influenced its design.

Finally, if you want a robust democracy, one element has got to be a reasonably effective government that is capable of delivering what the people choose after due reflection. Eighty years after the New Deal, the US welfare state is not well designed for that purpose. It can’t, for example, make sensible investments in prevention. Even when it pays for activities that should have preventive effects (such as education), it doesn’t pay for success; it just funds the activities, some of which are ineffective. So I believe that pay-for-success is one step toward restoring confidence in government as the people’s instrument. Confidence is not an end in itself, but it is an important means to reengaging citizens in public life.

But see also: “qualms about a bond market for philanthropy”, “can nonprofits solve big problems?” and “innovation and civic engagement.”

Foucault and neoliberalism

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If you’re intellectually and ideologically eclectic, then you will find important ideas all over the map. It will not surprise you to learn that a person generally associated with the left has benefited from F.O. von Hayek or Gary Becker: leading libertarians. An excellent example is James C. Scott, who likes to call himself (I suspect partly for the frisson of it) “a crude Marxist,” but who has been deeply influenced by Hayek. Scott’s analysis of the high-modernist state is indispensable, however you choose to classify it.

On the other hand, if you’re a committed leftist intellectual, it may well come as a surprise to you that Michel Foucault read Hayek and Becker and said positive things about neoliberalism. That is the theme of Daniel Zamora’s forthcoming volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale. In the left magazine The Jacobin, Zamora presents it as puzzling and even potentially scandalous fact that Foucault should have showed “indulgence … toward neoliberalism.”

I do not know the relevant texts and statements by the late Foucault. But I think the affinity between Foucault’s style of critique and libertarianism is important although not very surprising, and I would understand it in the following contexts:

1. The “revolution” of May 1968 was led by activists and intellectuals who considered themselves Marxists and often especially favored Maoism. Yet their successful concrete demands were for greater individual freedom, especially vis-a-vis the state. They won a lower age of consent for sex (1974), abortion rights (1975), freedom of information (1978), and many other reforms traditionally recommended by classical liberals. They also reformed the state by reducing the power of the president, making elections more important, and strengthening NGOs. In Marxist terms, ’68 was a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian one. So it shouldn’t be shocking that perhaps the greatest political thinker of ’68 was a bourgeois liberal (of a kind).

2. The most evident social issue of 19th century Europe was the oppression of the industrial working class. But economic growth made countries like France pervasively affluent by 1968. Industrial jobs had shrunk while social welfare programs and unions had improved the everyday life of those who still had such jobs–to the point where they could reasonably look like a kind of elite. As Zamora perceptively argues in the Jacobin article, the contrast between organized blue-collar workers and various “excluded” populations (new immigrants and disadvantaged racial minorities, the disabled, the very poor) became a central concern. But the “excluded” were not in a position to seize the commanding heights of the economy, or even to win elections, as the proletariat might have been in 1910. They were especially likely to suffer at the hands of the welfare state in poor schools, prisons, clinics, and conscripted armies. The neoliberal solution–reducing barriers to their market participation–might look more attractive than the traditional social-democratic solution of enrolling them in welfare programs that were sites of surveillance and discipline.

2. Many of the great disasters of the 20th century were attributable to high-modernist states that sought to count and measure society in order to control it–sometimes in the interest of laudable goals, like equality. One of the worst such states was Mao’s China, but French intellectuals of 1968 romanticized that regime as some kind of participatory democracy. Their misconception about China gradually faded, and in any case, China became capitalist. More to the point, the left intellectuals of Foucault’s generation were already able to see that other high modernist states were disastrous. It was appropriate and natural for the left to turn away from statism. But once they opposed the state, why should they not become libertarians? As Zamora asks in a follow-up article, “How could we seriously think that discrediting state action in the social domain and abandoning the very idea of social ‘rights’ constitutes progress toward thinking ‘beyond the welfare state’? All it has done is allow the welfare state’s destruction, not a glimpse of something ‘beyond.'” (An alternative could be anarchism, but anarchism in practice often looks like neoliberalism.)

3. Foucault and his generation emphasized a whole range of oppressions and invidious uses of power that might not arise between a capitalist and a worker but rather between a man and a woman, a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, a doctor and a patient, a white person and an immigrant, and other such pairings. They were correct to recognize these problems. But once oppression is seen as multifarious and omnipresent, we no longer want the working class to rule through the state or unions. Individual expressive freedom and various kinds of diversity become high priorities.

Zamora writes:

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a ‘much less bureaucratic’ and ‘much less disciplinarian’ form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.

Foucault “seemed to imagine” this because, indeed, a lightly regulated market economy in an affluent society is less bureaucratic than a social welfare state and does generate autonomy and diversity. Perhaps a market system also reshapes the human psyche in problematic ways. And certainly it generates unequal wealth. But for the reasons stated above, unequal wealth no longer seemed to be the primary domestic economic problem in a country like France ca. 1968. And if markets subtly shape the soul, states do so more blatantly and more uniformly.

To be clear, I am not a libertarian; I want states and other strongly organized bodies to promote equity as well as freedom. Also, I recognize that many people with egalitarian instincts have absorbed libertarian ideas without abandoning the state. They have read Hayek as well as Marx and Foucault. But I think the left still is still wrestling with the realities that led Foucault to say nice things about neoliberalism in his last years.