In each case the activist “base” seems to go through the same emotional cycle:
(1) anger at right-wing government precedesAt the time of writing, Britain has returned to (1) under David Cameron, although there are hints of (2); France is between (3) and (4) with François Hollande; and the U.S. has just decided (narrowly) not to convert (5) into (6) and hence (1). The most interesting phase is clearly (4): disgust at compromise. Why should the base find compromise disgusting? Everyone knows you can’t always get what you want—that may be disappointing, but it does not, on the face of it, seem disgusting. Yet that is precisely the point. What offends Leftists is the suspicion that their leaders are not actually compromising but triangulating. Compromise is something you do when you know your desired destination; triangulation, by contrast, is just negotiating to stay in power.
(2) hope in a new Left and
(3) election of a new government;
(4) disgust at that government’s compromises gives way to
(5) protest at betrayals, leading to
(6) refusal to vote which produces
(1) anger at right-wing government.
Yet it’s not as if the base itself has any kind of articulated vision of the good society. Take last year’s Occupy protests in America and beyond. “We are winning,” they cried. But what exactly were they trying to win? Whereas the Tea Party placed candidates into elected office, and forced others to bend to its will by orchestrating debates, rallies and pledges, Occupy renounced such ambitions from the start. Policies and politics are for dupes, it seemed to sneer: the old world is beyond saving. The idea, its leaders proclaimed, was to model a new direct democracy in which there are no leaders. But if the movement was itself the message, the message was hardly appealing: anyone who has endured student government knows that when everyone talks, nothing gets decided. And this indecision seemed all too convenient, as many pointed out, since it allowed the protesters to wash their hands of the responsibility that comes with concrete commitments.
It may have been unfair to expect detailed policies from the Occupiers. But the real critique was harder to answer: What, the critics asked, is your vision of the good life? And not just the good life in general, but the good life for us, here and now in the twenty-first century West? How does the model of tent-dwelling anarcho-democrats debating long into the night relate to the problem of contemporary inequality? It’s all well and good attacking corruption and cronyism, but inequality is also a function of globalization, which turns first-world countries into service economies that reward the educated and screw the rest. Viewed in this light, Occupy’s central slogan—“We are the 99%”—was as facile as they come; the editor of The Occupy Handbook actually bragged that “Occupy Wall Street has the rare distinction of being a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.” Like the Harvard lawyer at whose feet many of its participants had knelt three years earlier, Occupy managed to wrap itself in the aura of Che Guevara while offending nobody. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Obama and Occupy seem to represent the exhaustion of the Western Left in general. Yet the mood of cynicism, wry and weary, to which I, like so many, presently find myself tempted, can be as blinding as the most dizzying optimism. To dismiss 2008 as mere showbiz, or the Occupy movement as mere self-righteous escapism, would be to ignore the significance of the springs from which they drew: widespread dissatisfaction, even despair, at the status quo; and a yearning, however inarticulate or inchoate, for fundamental transformation. That this yearning has so readily found expression in vacuities points to its strength, not its weakness; if it is capable of sustaining us in empty illusions, at least for a time, that only goes to show how desperately we crave escape from the fetters of contemporary politics. And it is notable that in promising us relief, Obama and Occupy both pointed to the same kind of destination: setting their faces against self-seeking individualism, they spoke to us as individuals in search of self-transcendence. They spoke, that is, to our desire for community without collectivism, for a community forged from the ground up, by us ourselves, in a spirit of what the French Revolutionaries called “fraternity.” We are the change that we seek.
The problem was that neither Obama nor Occupy was able to give the idea of fraternity any real substance. For Obama, it seemed to imply campaign contributions; for Occupy, endless discussions. Neither could connect it to the imperatives of our changing economic climate or to the day-to-day decisions and actions that together constitute society. This, not their idealism, was their failing. If fraternity is to be more than a utopian fantasy or a pious palliative, it will need to find expression in an ethic that can be lived out in everyday life, in institutions that are within our grasp, in a vision of a future radically better than the present yet recognizably rooted in its conditions. (...)
But perhaps we need to rethink socialism. For what differentiates socialism from both left-liberalism and civic conservatism is, at bottom, its focus on the character of work, the day-to-day labor by which we produce both the world around us and, in the end, ourselves. And in and of itself this entails nothing about the state. Once socialism is distinguished from statism, it can also be liberated from it, both practically and theoretically. If we can find a non-statist mold into which to cast the core ideal of socialism, it might be possible for us to forge a politics of fraternity that is transformative without being utopian. And in this respect, I believe, our best guide might turn out to be a theorist described by Hayek himself as “a very wise man” and “a sort of socialist saint”—the inimitable R. H. Tawney (1880-1962).
by Jonny Thakkar, The Point | Read more:
Image: Pete Souza
