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.

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Anarcho-Terrosism?

Steven Kurlander's "A Lesson of the Boston Bombings: Stop Classifying Criminal Anarchist Violence as Acts of War" is a real exercise in ignorance. According to Kurlander, "The Tsarnaev brothers were nothing more than immigrant anarchists carrying on a tradition of political violence, this time framed in religious fervor." To be fair, Kurlander believes "anarchist" is just another word for "terrorist":

Back in the early 20th century, "terrorists" were referred to as "anarchists" (basically the same thing) and carried out what would be termed these days as "acts of war."

Absent from Kurlander's spurious attempt to conflate anarchism with terrorism is the fact that anarchism gave rise to one of the nation's most peaceful social movements ever: Occupy Wall Street. Other anarchist groups like Food Not Bombs have been feeding people for decades. What is typically and falsely regarded as violence by anarchists is nearly always some form of destruction of property: smashing a window, sabotaging an animal trap, or destroying machines used to destroy our forests. Perhaps the most thoughtful reflection on the use of violence by anarchists can be found in Alexander Berkman's autobiographical "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist" where Berkman highlights the folly of his attempted assasination of the manager of Carnegie Steel. The act was largely repudiated by anarchists at the time and was a major source of growth for both Berkman and the iconic Emma Goldman.

More recently we have "You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship" which was written over 30 years ago and yet remains as relevant as ever: "A clear explanation of why anarchists oppose terrorism, and why terrorism or propaganda by deed can be of no benefit to the working class, as capitalism is a social relationship, not a group of bad individuals."

In short Kurlander's nonsense is easily refuted by the long history of anarchism and anarchists working to create a better world through direct action, mutual aid, and solidarity. Thankfully many of the commenters pointed this out. One commentator pointed out the salient fact that Kurlander never mentions any of the numerous examples of state sponsored terrorism:

...yet never offers up examples of terrorism committed by the State and reactionary forces against its own population, most notably, the raids on IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) halls by federal and local authorities, as well as reactionary groups often hired by mill or factory owners; the assassination of prominent members of the Black Panther Party in the late 60s by local police forces; the bombing of the MOVE compound, in 1984, by the Philidelphia Police Dept.; the assassination of Martin Luther King, by a member of the KKK; the attack by local, state and federal forces of the Branch Dividians in Waco, TX in 1993; the atempted murder of Judi Bari by planting a bomb in her car for doing both environment and labor work, and lets not for get the killings of young, mostly, black males by police that have been so prominent over the last year its equating to one person dying every 28 hours.

We can't blow up a social relationship. No bomb or act of violence is going to destroy capitalism and the state. The men who bombed the Boston Marathon were not anarchists. And Steven Kurlander should be ashamed of himself.

 

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Operation Iraqi Liberation Ten Years Later

After reading enough nauseating pseudo-apologies from liberal hawks like Ezra Klein, I thought I'd offer my own reflections as one of the many millions who got it right. Despite what the hawks may say, there wasn't any difficulty seeing through the lies and manipulation of an operation deemed Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL by an administration filled with people from the energy industry. And while many millions of us were not fooled, our voices were silenced and marginilized as defense contractors and ex generals made the rounds on the various talk shows to explain why we just had to invade Iraq.

In the days leading up to the invasion it was a euphoric time. By some estimates up to 30,000,000 people in over 60 countries protested the war prior to the invasion. Nothing like it had ever happened in history. The great anti-war protests of Vietnam didn't come until the war had been going on for ten years or more. Here we had millions of people from across the planet holding hands and saying no to a war that hadn't even started yet.

Seeing how the anti-war movement petered out as Barrack Obama put a friendlier, perhaps more eloquent face on our imperialist ambitions, it became clear that many people were more anti-Bush than they were anti-war. It's been a bitter pill to swallow to watch as many of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq stand by quietly as the new president continues and expands our wars of aggression around the globe.

I'm sorry we didn't do more. I'm sorry just doesn't seem to cut it, though, when we're talking about the murder of over a million Iraqis, the destruction of their infrastructure, the looting of their cultural treasures, and the displacement of millions more. Birth defects and cancers are at all-time highs in the country devestated by American weapons of mass destruction like white phospherous and depleted uranium. Somehow sorry doesn't seem quite adequate.

But the fight isn't over. And movements like Occupy Wall Street and others have shown that we've learned a lot over the past ten years. The anti-war movement was mostly symbolic protest, people gathering on the weekends, marching for a few hours and then going back to their daily lives. But we've seen that change tremendously in the past few years with more and more direct action aimed at banks, agribusiness and the big oil and gas giants. Instead of a stagnated anti-war movement we have a multi-faceted group of autonomous movements seeking justice at every turn.

Another world is possible.

 

 

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