by Mark Gardner

The Free Press

"Joe Six-Pack" concerned about deforestation? How 'bout those Sonics, man? Hear the latest rap about JonBenet Ramsey's parents? What's going on here? Can a simple political message, backed by common sense and personal experience, cut through the hype, info-tainment, and spectacle, just as it had with the driver of that cab?

The Left: Fringe or Majority?
Mainstream wisdom has it that the left in America is a dying fringe, at odds with a public concerned with stock prices or the next blockbuster summer release. The left is portrayed as a motley collection of radical tree huggers trying to take us back to the Pleistocene, humorless feminists intent on killing babies and turning women into man-haters, and regulation addicts throttling the economy for ideological reasons.

But is the center really so right-wing, corporate, and complacent? Is the left so off-base that its judgments no longer reflect a plausible reality?

Hardly. First, while the left has in many ways lost its direction, there is little evidence that the average citizen supports the rightist agenda. Even in the heyday of the New Right in the 1980's, poll after poll in both America and Britain showed that citizens of both countries opposed most of the policies of the bellwether governments of Reagan and Thatcher. Yet these same people continued to vote for governments that systematically subverted their interests.

Why? The right gained and retained power because it wove a few threads of reality into a master whole that has come to dominate political communication. Conservatives rode inflation and fear over taxes and the erosion of traditional authority into power, and have remained there for the last quarter-century. Even when the right loses control of government, it still dominates much of the political agenda: witness NAFTA, and Clinton's welfare reform. The right bases its continued power on its mastery of an appeal to the viscera instead of to the heart, or to reason. The left, and indeed much of the center, has been defined out of this new political world.

The Left: Suffering From Brain-in-Mouth Disease
But the left itself is also to blame for allowing conservative elites to foment what political analyst William Greider calls "rancid populism." Mainstream liberals lost influence as they became concerned with placating an ima-gined conservative majority. Instead of modernizing their ideas, they watered them down. Liberals no longer have any self-confidence, and when in power exhaust themselves in the frenzy of bargaining away their own principles. Liberals have no idea of how to fight their way back into power, and lead tepid and incoherent campaigns-and governments-that leave the public more confused than ever.

At the same time, left-progressives weakened their own cause by becoming mired in the narrow arguments of single-issue politics, or an arcane politics of "political correctness" driven by academic theory. These two strains on the left arose as a pragmatic working class politics became superseded by a politics of ideals favored by a college-educated elite. The political mobilization of youth provided critical support to the movements that brought about the extension of civil rights, and the withdrawal from Vietnam. But as the great struggles subsided, much of the educated left abandoned mass for narrow politics.

"The right bases its continued power on its mastery of an appeal to the viscera instead of to the heart or to reason."

Single-issue politics, while effective in organizing support for policy change, can lead to a fixation on the technical language of science and statute at the expense of broader appeals. A few years ago, at the height of the "Spotted Owl Debate," I helped organize a small panel for Earth Day. A representative of a local environmental group was invited to speak on research showing that "Jobs vs. Owls" was a simplistic ploy by the timber industry to oppose both environmental preservation and the development of economic alternatives. Instead of taking a buzz-saw to timber propaganda, the environmentalist enlightened the audience on the crucial role of mycorrylzal fungi in the ancient forest ecosystem. This was not an uninteresting topic to the initiated, but any audience member concerned about workers' economic future would be likely to come away thinking environmentalists' solution to job loss was "let them eat mycorrylzal fungi."

At the same time, the more theoretical left increasingly stewed itself in its own intellectual juices. Competition between members of an upper middle class academic elite led to the heaping of abstraction upon abstraction. The political right greatly exaggerated the influence of the academic left, and was often wrong about the vacuity of its ideas (many of which are quite sophisticated). But there is little doubt that while the academic left was deconstructing the knowledge-power nexus, those who already had the lion's share of political and economic power were grabbing more of it.

Back to Basics
Only a return to basics can change things. The left needs to reconstruct, step by concrete step, a vision where decent values can prevail. It is necessary to declare a moratorium on ethereal rhetoric and liberal handwringing, and lay things on the line in a way that those who are not political junkies can understand. Supplanting the right's vision will require that the left compete with the right in interpreting political good and evil. As long as evil is defined as welfare mothers, "Big Labor," environmentalists, and gays, the right will win.

Those who abuse wealth and power are a much more worthy target. And the citizenry is ripe to turn its gaze upward, as evidenced by the effective career of the term "corporate welfare." Ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich let this phrase slip out in a speech on budgets a few years ago. The Wall Streeters in the Clinton administration quickly squelched the renegade secretary, but the fat cat was already out of the bag. The term corporate welfare helped illuminate routine fleecings that have escaped public scrutiny in our corporate-dominated political culture. And the transparent and raw exercise of corporate political power is getting people whopping mad. A billion dollar taxpayer subsidy for Boeing's merger with McDonnell-Douglas here; public millions to subsidize the denuding of Alaska's forests there; sports magnates blackmailing cities into footing the bill for sports stadiums everywhere.

The left must articulate the choices citizens face in the political arena: if you support the right, you'll get slightly lower government spending, the right to own an almost unlimited arsenal of personal firepower, restrictions on abortion, and the comfort of knowing that young single mothers and their children go to bed hungry at night. You might not get lower taxes unless you're quite wealthy, since conservatives work to shift the tax burden away from the wealthy before they worry about what you're paying. You'll also get dirtier air, chemically-laced water, the public coffers emptied for Aid For Dependent Corporations, executive salaries going through the roof while real wages and benefits stagnate, unsafe working conditions, and the erosion of individual (as opposed to corporate) rights.

You'll also have less freedom of choice. Freedom in a society dominated by markets is the freedom of 7-11, the freedom to buy a Big Gulp at 4 am on a Sunday night. This is hardly an adequate vision upon which to base a democracy. The market produces only what is profitable, nothing more. The market does not provide freedom from homelessness, nor from financial ruin after a health care crisis.

The left, by contrast, stands for choice: would you like to be able to choose to drive your car to work, or would you like to be compelled to do so because no efficient public transit system exists? Would you like to have the choice of spending your summer afternoon in the mall and also like to have the option of hiking in a public park? Without pressure from the left, public amenities and services we all take for granted shrink. Those that we still have will be "privatized," making them inaccessible to those without bundles of cash.

The left can win again if it says what it stands for: clean and safe products; decent pay and working conditions; freedom from discrimination in housing and employment; safe transportation, decent public education. Nothing radical about this.

[Home] [This Issue's Directory] [WFP Index] [WFP Back Issues] [E-Mail WFP]

---

Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.