When I spotted this article on my feed, I went to the New York Magazine original, because I prefer to cite from the original. Alas! the original is hidden behind a paywall, but it doesn’t matter, since MSN is providing it for free!
The Democratic Party Is Wasting Its Grassroots Energy
Opinion by Sam Adler-Bell | Sunday, April 24, 2022
Sam Adler-Bell, from his Twitter biography.
When I was young, my activist friends and I would often speak of something we called the movement. “This will be good for the movement,” we’d say.” Or, “They do good movement work.” He was a “movement lawyer”; she, “an artist dedicated to the movement.” I assumed this expression referred to something real: international socialism, maybe, or the trade unionism. I wasn’t sure. Surely, I thought, there must be a movement out there to which we all belonged, and to whose future victory our meager efforts — as environmentalists, labor organizers, anti-war activists — were contributing. But that wasn’t so. Later, I realized the term was more like an incantation, the expression of a wish that all this various activism might one day coalesce into something worthy of the name. For the time being, “the movement” was a linguistic gesture with no referent, a half-ironic shibboleth with which we signaled our belonging and our willingness to nurture each other’s precious illusions and beliefs. Playfully we toasted “to the movement,” unsure whether our cheeks reddened out of shame at our cynicism or our sincerity.
I’m reminded of these episodes when I contemplate the sorry state of the Democratic Party. No doubt, the Democrats’ gruesome midterm prospects are, as the social scientists say, overdetermined. Midterms tend to punish the president’s party anyway, and basically every other input is bad: Biden is unpopular, inflation soars, and Putin’s war has pushed food and fuel prices even higher. It’s a bad hand, and none of the plausible last-ditch, Manchin-approved policy interventions or executive orders seem like aces.
But surveying the landscape from a few hundred feet higher, another striking deficit looms into view: There appears almost no grassroots energy or urgency of any kind on the Democratic side. After four years of fever-pitched marching and movement-building by anti-Trump resistors, antifascists, Democratic Socialists, and Black Lives Matter militants, the sudden quiet from the country’s left flank has been deafening. Where, I find myself asking, is the movement?
By contrast, the conservative grassroots are ablaze. The parents, pundits, and propagandists behind the “critical race theory” crackdown, and now, the moral panic over LGBTQ educators, have been startlingly successful — not only at creating media spectacles, but at recruiting activists, electing school board members, and passing laws. Anti-abortion measures, meanwhile, sweep the country in anticipation of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade. And, all along, one-term president Trump has defied political gravity, attracting crowds to his rallies and playing de facto party boss from his spray-tan Tammany Hall in Palm Beach. The right, in other words, is on the march. The left is nonexistent.
Could it possibly be that the left had nothing other than hatred for Donald Trump? Their policy was never more than Get Trump, to the point that it devolved into Trump Derangement Syndrome.
A couple paragraphs further down:
Democratic efforts to capture the energies of the 2020 BLM uprisings were similarly demoralizing for all involved. Mayors made fitful, largely self-defeating gestures at constraining their police forces, while party leaders gave a pathetic half-hug to the movement and tip-toed around its politically inconvenient slogan. The abolitionist critique — that the problem is not merely police departments, but a social order that requires them — was then metabolized by elite liberalism into a surfeit of yard signs, nonprofit donations, and various Robin DiAngeloisms of the board room. (Not to mention a $6 million house for a few of the BLM movement’s most savvy self-promoters.)
While it’s true that I concentrate most heavily on Philadelphia, 2021, the year after the evil reich-wing President Trump left office, and as all sweetness-and-light Joe Biden moved into the White House, the homicide rates skyrocketed, setting new records in Philly and jumping dramatically in other major cities, cities which have been controlled by the Democrats for decades. Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office when Harry Truman was President! The effects of the ‘defund the police’ attempts were huge increases in violent crime. While newspapers like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer kept their reporting on such to a minimum, the more visually oriented television news media put the stories in front of viewers, and in most places residents get their news from television, not the paper.
Mr Adler-Bell’s seeming throw-away line that the problem is “a social order that requires” police departments is wholly naïve”: he seems to think if there are no police and no laws, everything will be peaches but the cream, that there will be no violence and no theft.
And the trouble is, at the moment, (when it comes to movement mobilization) the right is doing it better. Movements of the right are reaching deeper into communities, finding them in the places where they already gather, and strengthening the solidarity they already feel for one another — in many cases, channeling it toward cruelty. As Schlozman told me, “the great rediscovery” of people like Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis “is that parents know other parents, and right-wing parents know other right-wing parents, and they can talk to each other, and that is a great reservoir of connection to be politicized.”
Here’s where Mr Adler-Bell gets it way, way wrong. What he forgets is that parents are almost exclusively heterosexual, and while some are sympathetic to the homosexual rights movement, and even transgenderism, they almost exclusively support it for other people. Homosexuality or transgenderism is not something normal parents wish on their own children, because those things are prescriptions for a difficult life. Those with gender dysphoria are looking ahead to unnatural hormone treatments and surgical intervention which produces only a simulacrum of the opposite sex; it doesn’t turn males into real women, nor females into real men. Those who are homosexual are looking ahead to more difficulty in finding long-term mates, and the traditional expectations of middle-class life, a home with children in a suburban home just appear alien to many of them.
Then you get people like Will Thomas, the biologically male swimmer who has decided that he’s a woman named ‘Lia,’ going out and dominating women’s collegiate swimming, and demonstrating for the public at large to see that no, he isn’t really a woman. Even for very liberal parents, there may be a lot of support for Mr Thomas’ case, but it’s not something that they want for their own children!
The civic bonds on which Trumpism is built are often the inheritance of past injustice (as Gabriel Winant once provocatively put it, “Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel …”), but they are real. And while the right builds a movement, the Democrats attempt to call one into being — by giving more and more money to insular activist NGOs that speak an alienating language to people in places where they do not frequent, among people they do not already know.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, in publisher Lisa Hughes’ ‘ant-racist’ mode, has tamped down on reporting about the violence in the city, but the public know about it anyway. When Mr Adler-Bell complains about “whiteness”, he’s forgetting one important thing: white liberals are very much part of the white community, and in some of our very liberal but nevertheless internally racially segregated cities, those white liberals can see, just as well as we evil conservatives that much of the crime and violence in the cities is not all that big a problem in the white areas. Even the Inquirer has said that the key to reducing violence in the city is greater racial integration. “Whiteness,” it seems, has an actual value
The alternative — and you’ll be just shocked to hear me say this — is the only one that has ever worked. That is, the labor movement: a movement of the left that mobilizes and draws us together on the basis of our most basic associations and material interests. As Tammi and Marvin once put it, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.”
Here Mr Adler-Bell again misses the mark. The unionization movement has long been in decline in this country, because the nature of work has changed. We are, sad to say, no longer a nation of large industrial production, but one of financial, information technology and consumer service workers. It takes a whole day’s training to replace a clerk at Seven-Eleven, not the months or even years of training in some industrial jobs. Automobile companies, for example, no longer need trained welders, but people who can run the computers which run the welding robots.
The response to COVID-19 has exacerbated it: people working from home are difficult to unionize because they are largely setting their own working conditions.
But there’s something much more subtle happening that Mr Adler-Bell has missed. Retirement plans have gone from the defined pension benefits ideas — and I personally know of people who had really great company pension plans which all fell apart when the Pennsylvania steel industry collapsed — to individual contribution with company match 401(k) plans. 401(k) plans are great: you can take them with you if you change jobs, rolling them over to your new company’s plan, rolling them over into an individual retirement account, or sometimes just leaving them with your old company’s plan. But the key factor is that most of them make money by investing your retirement funds into stocks and bonds. All of a sudden, employers are no longer the enemy, but a company workers want to see prosper, because there’s no cutting off your own nose quite like wishing failure on a company in which you are invested! Employees and companies are no longer enemies, but partners.
401(k) plans have made us all capitalists!
Mr Adler-Bell does not like that at all! His writing “the Marxist in me” tells us that he is at least sympathetic with socialist goals, if it isn’t quite an admission that he is an out-and-out socialist, but 401(k) plans and frequent job switching and remote work are things which contribute to individualism among people, not socialism. I may have discussed my 401(k) investment options with co-workers, but my choices are mine and their choices are theirs. If my investments are out-performing one of my friends, I would tell him about it, and leave the choice up to him about whether to change his investment strategy, but those would still be individual choices, not some sort of union/worker solidarity.
Mr Adler-Bell seems stuck in the 1930s, when Walter Duranty was sending us glowing propaganda reports about that workers’ paradise, the Soviet Union. He dreams of a labor movement that never was, based on a vision of a society that doesn’t exist.