Most of us, I imagine, are not consistent political optimists or pessimists. We instead react – and usually overreact – to the short-term political trends before us, unable to look beyond the next election cycle and its immediate impact on ourselves and our political movements. I remember, immediately after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, a particularly voluble conservative blogger arguing that it was time for conservatives to “curb stomp” the left, to secure the final victory over liberals and Democrats. Four years later, of course, a very different political revolution appeared to be at hand, and some progressives made the same kind of ill-considered predictions. Neither permanent political victory has come to pass, with Democrats enjoying structural advantages in presidential elections and Republicans making hay with a well-oiled electoral machine in Congressional elections. How long those conditions persist, who can say.
But partisan politics are only a part of the actual political conditions that dictate our lives. Politics, culture, and economics fuse together to create our lived experience. And that experience is bound up in vague but powerful expectations about success, what it means, and who it’s for. There is a future that appears increasingly likely to me, a bleak future, and one which subverts traditional partisan lines. In this future, the meritocratic school of liberalism produces economic outcomes that would be at home with laissez faire economic conservatives, to the detriment of almost all of us.
The future that I envision amounts, depending on your perspective, to either a betrayal of the liberal dream or its completion. In this future, the traditional foundations of liberalism in economic justice and redistribution are amputated from the push for diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identity, and related issues. (...)
Traditionally, both equality and diversity have been important to liberalism. There are obvious reasons for this connection. To begin with, the persistent inequality and injustice that afflict people of color and women in our society are powerfully represented in economic outcomes, with black and Hispanic Americans and women all suffering from clear and significant gaps in income, wealth, and similar measures of economic success. Economic justice is therefore inseparable from our efforts to truly combat racial and gender inequality. What’s more, the moral case for economic justice stems from the same foundations as the case against racism and sexism, a profound moral duty to provide for all people and to ensure that they live lives of material security and social dignity. The traditional liberal message has therefore been to emphasize the need for diverse institutions and economic justice as intertwined phenomena.
In recent years, however, the liberal imagination has become far less preoccupied with economic issues. Real-world activism retains its focus on economic outcomes, but the media that must function as an incubator of ideas, in any healthy political movement, has grown less and less interested in economic questions as such. Liberal publications devote far less ink, virtual or physical, to core issues of redistribution and worker power than they once did. Follow prominent liberals on Twitter, browse through the world of social justice Tumblr, read socially and culturally liberal websites. You might go weeks without reading the word “union.” Economic issues just aren’t central to the political conceptions of many younger liberals; they devote endless hours to decoding the feminism of Rihanna but display little interest in, say, a guaranteed minimum income or nationalizing the banks. Indeed, the mining of pop cultural minutia for minimally-plausible political content has become such a singular obsession within liberal media that it sometimes appears to be crowding out all over considerations. (...)
As The American Conservative’s Noah Millman once wrote, “the culture war turns politics into a question of identity, of tribalism, and hence narrows the effective choice in elections. We no longer vote for the person who better represents our interests, but for the person who talks our talk, sees the world the way we do, is one of us…. And it’s a good basis for politics from the perspective of economic elites. If the battle between Left and Right is fundamentally over social questions like abortion and gay marriage, then it is not fundamentally over questions like who is making a killing off of government policies and who is getting screwed.” The point is not that those culture war questions are unimportant, but that by treating them as cultural issues, our system pulls them up from their roots in economic foundations and turns them into yet another set of linguistic, symbolic problems. My argument, fundamentally, is that we face a future where strategic superficial diversity among our wealthy elites will only deepen the distraction Millman is describing. Such a future would be disastrous for most women and most people of color, but to many, would represent victory against racism and sexism.
But partisan politics are only a part of the actual political conditions that dictate our lives. Politics, culture, and economics fuse together to create our lived experience. And that experience is bound up in vague but powerful expectations about success, what it means, and who it’s for. There is a future that appears increasingly likely to me, a bleak future, and one which subverts traditional partisan lines. In this future, the meritocratic school of liberalism produces economic outcomes that would be at home with laissez faire economic conservatives, to the detriment of almost all of us.The future that I envision amounts, depending on your perspective, to either a betrayal of the liberal dream or its completion. In this future, the traditional foundations of liberalism in economic justice and redistribution are amputated from the push for diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identity, and related issues. (...)
Traditionally, both equality and diversity have been important to liberalism. There are obvious reasons for this connection. To begin with, the persistent inequality and injustice that afflict people of color and women in our society are powerfully represented in economic outcomes, with black and Hispanic Americans and women all suffering from clear and significant gaps in income, wealth, and similar measures of economic success. Economic justice is therefore inseparable from our efforts to truly combat racial and gender inequality. What’s more, the moral case for economic justice stems from the same foundations as the case against racism and sexism, a profound moral duty to provide for all people and to ensure that they live lives of material security and social dignity. The traditional liberal message has therefore been to emphasize the need for diverse institutions and economic justice as intertwined phenomena.
In recent years, however, the liberal imagination has become far less preoccupied with economic issues. Real-world activism retains its focus on economic outcomes, but the media that must function as an incubator of ideas, in any healthy political movement, has grown less and less interested in economic questions as such. Liberal publications devote far less ink, virtual or physical, to core issues of redistribution and worker power than they once did. Follow prominent liberals on Twitter, browse through the world of social justice Tumblr, read socially and culturally liberal websites. You might go weeks without reading the word “union.” Economic issues just aren’t central to the political conceptions of many younger liberals; they devote endless hours to decoding the feminism of Rihanna but display little interest in, say, a guaranteed minimum income or nationalizing the banks. Indeed, the mining of pop cultural minutia for minimally-plausible political content has become such a singular obsession within liberal media that it sometimes appears to be crowding out all over considerations. (...)
As The American Conservative’s Noah Millman once wrote, “the culture war turns politics into a question of identity, of tribalism, and hence narrows the effective choice in elections. We no longer vote for the person who better represents our interests, but for the person who talks our talk, sees the world the way we do, is one of us…. And it’s a good basis for politics from the perspective of economic elites. If the battle between Left and Right is fundamentally over social questions like abortion and gay marriage, then it is not fundamentally over questions like who is making a killing off of government policies and who is getting screwed.” The point is not that those culture war questions are unimportant, but that by treating them as cultural issues, our system pulls them up from their roots in economic foundations and turns them into yet another set of linguistic, symbolic problems. My argument, fundamentally, is that we face a future where strategic superficial diversity among our wealthy elites will only deepen the distraction Millman is describing. Such a future would be disastrous for most women and most people of color, but to many, would represent victory against racism and sexism.
by Fredrik deBoer | Read more:
Image: Getty
