Friday, May 10, 2013

The Liberal Narrative is Dead

Amitai Etizioni's recent article in the Atlantic, "The Liberal Narrative is Broken, and Only Populism Can Fix It," highlights so much that is wrong with the so-called "liberal narrative" and really begs the question: Is it something we really want to fix?

Etizioni begins in liberal land where we are all either liberals or conservatives. There are, to be fair, people referred to as moderates, but they just haven't figured out whether they are liberals or conservatives yet and don't really count. More people self-identify as conservatives, according to Etizioni but they are "operational liberals":

...studies show that the majority only subscribe to conservative philosophies but they are 'operational' liberals. The majority support gun control, the social safety nets, climate protection, and many other liberal programs. As long as we remind the people of what the government really does, they will vote liberal.

Here's where it gets tricky for liberals. What exactly woudl qualify as "voting liberal" anyway? Our last liberal president was Richard Nixon, but that doesn't fit the liberal narrative where liberals are supposed to be Democrats. So Etizioni has to perform some mental gymnastics here:

This lovely thought does not have a leg to stand on, because people cannot vote for these programs. Instead, they must cast one vote that covers all the various programs and issues -- domestic and foreign -- before them.

In other words, it's complicated. No need for Etizioni to dwell on the fact that the Democratic Party has consistently betrayed it's working class base, gutting and destroying all of the liberal programs mentioned earlier. It was, after all, Bill Clinton who passed the union destroying North American Free Trade Agreement while destroying aid to dependent families. Now Obama has his site on the last vestiges of the New Deal: Social Security and Medicare. But nevermind that. It's just complicated.

Etizioni goes on to highlight the popularity of populist ideas found in movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. He even claims that 1 in 10 Americans support both the Occupy and Tea Party movement. So if so many people support these movements, particularly the Occupy movement, why did it do so poorly? Etizioni is kind enough to provide us with the answers:

First, because it had no clear narrative and was mainly an expression of a very diffuse sentiment; second, because it mixed populist with liberal messages; third, because it was unclear who the bad guys are -- Wall Street? The bankers? The one percent? The System?

Apparently Etizioni is big on narratives. Strangely absent from his analysis is the nationally coordinated crackdown of the Occupy movement. The eviction of Occupy Wall Street here in New York City was carried out in the middle of the night by a para-military force that aggressively kept journalists from even covering what was going on. According to Etizioni, however, all we needed was a better narrative to avoid being beaten and arrested by the police for excercising our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

Like his first point the rest of it is complete nonsense. We didn't mix messages. Occupy Wall Street offered a place for people to bring their grievances and be heard. Rather than beg corporate politicians to fix things we took matters into our own hands, feeding each other, educating each other, and housing each other. In a few short weeks Occupy Wall Street was feeding more people than any soup kitchen in the City.

In response to Etizioni's last point the answer would be "all of the above." Yes it's the bankers and Wall Street and the 1%. But above all that--and this is the hardest thing for liberals to understand--it's the system. A system developed, in the words of James Madison, "to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority." In other words, to protect the 1% from the 99%. Our first Chief Justice, John Jay, was a little less eloquent when he said, "The people who own the country ought to run it."

That's what drives me crazy when liberals like Etizioni always talk about "returning the government to the people." When was that? From the very beginning only the propertied aristocrats (the 1%) could even vote. When was this mystical time in liberal land? Apparently it was far more recent that I'd realized:

The next step, a major first step to return the government to one for the people, by the people, is actually a relative easy one to outline: rolling back the negative impact of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

This is a popular meme with liberals. Somehow the relatively recent Supreme Court decision Citizens United is when we lost our so-called democratic government. Like most things liberals believe, it's simply not true. Perhaps the most well known scholar to tackle this problem is professor Thomas Ferguson out of the University of Boston, who developed the investment theory of party competition:

The theory states that, since money driven political systems are expensive and burdensome to ordinary voters, policy is created by competing coalitions of investors, not voters. According to the theory, political parties (and the issues they campaign on) are created entirely for business interests, separated by the interests of numerous factors such as labor-intensive and capital-intensive, and free market and protectionist businesses.

In other words, long before Citizens United, the 1% of been unduly influencing our government. As John Dewey famously quipped, "Politics is the shadow cast by big business." Citizens United didn't fundamentally change anything; it simply codified long-standing practices by the 1% to use their inordinate wealth to direct the state to attend to their interests.

The liberal narrative is not dead because it's too abstruse. It's dead because it's simply not true. It doesn't reflect reality. This system isn't corrupt. It's not broken. It's working just fine, in the interests of the 1%, the way our founding fathers intended. You could roll back Citizens United today and it would do nothing to mitigate the immense inequality in this country; and, as historian Howard Zinn often said, "political rights without economic rights is meaningless."

The Occupy Movement didn't "sputter out." It was stomped out by the heal of our so-called liberal president in a nationally coordinated atttack. Yes, the paramilitary goons managed to destroy our camps, but they didn't stop the movement. People all across the planet haven't given up fighting for a better world and there are plenty of examples like Occupy Sandy, Debt Strike, Occupy the Pipeline, and the current fight here in New York City to keep Cooper Union free. Does that sound like a movement that sputtered? Or does it sound like a movement that has grown and evolved despite the immense repression it has faced?

Liberals like Amitai Etizioni will never get this because their professional careers depend on it. The liberal narrative, if anything, is about celebrating this unjust system and convincing people that we can somehow reform it. Convincing people that voting will somehow fix this keeps them from actually engaging in important political work in their work place, homes and communities. But liberals are also realizing it's getting harder and harder to profess those so-called liberal values while your party systimatically dismantles them. Let's hope the liberal narrative is dead.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

An Open Letter to Car Owners in New York City

Car owners in New York City are still in shock over the new bike share program being rolled out. They are still reeling from the steady encroachment of bike lanes into "car territory." Their wasteful, selfish, inefficient and polluting way of life is being encroached upon and they don't like it! Reason completely slips from their minds as they attempt to defend their indefensible lifestyle choice: bikes cause more pollution than cars, bikes are more dangerous than cars, more cyclists will make New York City streets more dangerous! And their favorite: What about parking!

Did I miss something? When did the City guarantee every New Yorker a free place to park their gas-guzzling pollution machine? I know change is hard, but it's time to accept the fact that the roads are for all of us. How about a little perspective?

Putting the loss of parking claim in perspective, the Department of Transportation’s policy director cited that only 35 out of 6800 potential car parking spaces were lost (representing half of one percent), while 600 potential bike parking spots were created.

Imagine that? The same space that had been monopolized by just 35 car owners can now be shared by 600 New Yorkers! Instead of using one of the most inefficient machines ever developed, we'll be using the most efficient human powered machine ever invented!

Change is always hard. The fossil fuel party has been a lot of fun, but it's time to move forward to a more sane use of our City streets.