[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] [sftalk] Re: Fwd: Democracy Now!'s Tribute to Bayard Rustin

[C. G. Estabrook]

Why liberalism collapsed
Posted: 20 Aug 2013 11:01 AM PDT
Sam Smith

Liberalism collapsed because:
It became an elite demographic rather than a grassroots movement
It lost interest in the economic issues that had made it relevant. 
It came to prefer fake icons like Obama and the Clintons rather than real programs.  

It dissed the folks it should have been converting. The working class just became Rush Limbaugh listeners not worth the time of day. Liberals condemned instead of connecting. 

It made the federal the enemy of the local rather then an ally as it had been under the New Deal and Great Society. Instead of sharing decisions and money with the states and cities as the New Deal did, Washington became the boss who knew it all. 

On Aug 21, 2013, at 2:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com> wrote:

> In my lifetime I've watched American liberals reduce their demands for reform from opposition to inequality to clamorous condemnations of discrimination, of any sort. The substitution happened somewhat sub rosa - American liberals to their credit seem to have a bad conscience about the change - but we can now see how it's developed over the last 40 years ago.
> 
> I do think that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, but those struggles are rarely perspicuous: the 99%, compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives, are seldom arrayed openly and consciously against the 1%. (The 1% seem usually to have a much better understanding of their position.)
> 
> But that fundamental antagonism lies at the root of society and produces a series of hostile groupings, engaged in shifting alliances and confrontations. It is almost never a simple matter to decide in the case of any particular dispute which side is to be supported in the furtherance of the emancipation of the working class and the consequent abolition of all class antagonisms. And these things can't be decided a priori: it's necessary to go and take a look.
> 
> The career of Bayard Rustin is one example of the peculiar relation between anti-racism in American politics and anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism struggles. He illustrates the fact that they aren't the same thing. If every class struggle is, as has been said, a political struggle, it's necessary to understand those political struggles aright, and that begins with giving an adequate account of how they came about.
> 
> In the generation after WWII, the American ruling class had to counter the heritage of the New Deal, made up of both pro- and anti-capitalist elements. The US - with 50% of the world's wealth but only 5% of its population - could afford to buy off that population with rising wages and social supports, from Social Security to Medicare, which were at once the result of popular demands and also concessions to maintain capitalism. And the result was growing economic equality: the Gini index for the US decreased from 1945 until the late 1960s.
> 
> But the second generation after the war (ca. 1970-1995) was different from the "Golden Age of Capitalism," 1945-1970. The growing political demands from the civil rights and anti-war movements led on to an explicit critique of capitalism (cf. the SDS mantra "name the system"). By the early 1970s, that critique was clear enough - and growing in popularity.
> 
> The counter-attack was conscious and swift. American business had worked hard all along to oppose the social(ist) elements of the New Deal, and the opposition was renewed and expanded in the post-war period. (The best - and still practically only - study is Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, "Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60" [1995]: it's instructive, what historians choose to write about - and what they ignore; those aren't free variables.)
> 
> But the anti-capitalist consciousness that came from the New Left was understood by the 1% as a serious threat, and they were not sluggish in response. Signposts of their countermarch include the "Powell Memo" (1971, from corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, soon to become a supreme court justice, to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the 1975 'report' by three establishment academics, "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies" - the crisis being that there was too much enthusiasm for democracy about, so it was beginning to be said (horreurs!) that the economy should be run democratically - one-person-one-vote - rather than on "dollar votes." That couldn't be allowed: if investment decisions - and therefore what jobs were available - were to be made democratically, rather than by the (very few) owners of capital or their agents, the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of those very few would be reversed. 
> 
> In fact, the counter-attack - neoliberalism - succeeded wonderfully for those few, and wealth concentrated in their hands at an accelerating rate over over the last 40 years, while wages for the vast majority of Americans (rising throughout the Golden Age) remained essentially flat since 1973. It was a famous victory for the 1%, but, again, little written about or even acknowledged until recently. (The best account remains David Harvey, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" [2005].) 
> 
> But meanwhile American liberalism had seized upon an obvious evil - discrimination - in order to vent its reformist wrath. Good and noble struggles were carried out under that banner, but the accompanying liberal acquiescence to the neoliberal program can hardly be denied. Chris Hedges' "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010), gives a swingeing account of the surrender by American liberals.
> 
> It's true that one source of the identity politics of the 1970s and after was the despair of some members of the anti-Vietnam War movement (speak, memory) who sought a "new revolutionary class" - the American working class having, it was thought, shown itself to be irretrievably petit-bourgeois and non-revolutionary. Youths, women, people of color, people of various sexual tastes - all were nominated as the agents of history, as Marx thought of the industrial proletariat. It was a short step for those groups to insist that left victory consisted of their being recognized (not a new notion: cf. Hegel on recognition).
> 
> The Nixon-Ford administration is still the most liberal administration since WWII (regardless of the various presidents' views), including plans for a guaranteed annual income (defeated by Democrats). The withering of American liberalism under the neoliberal assault became apparent in the Carter years and accelerated subsequently from the Carter administration on. "...the neoliberals ... certainly did fund and forward the ... [1st First Black President] Clinton, [2nd FBP] Obama, and Democratic Leadership Council arguments..." Instead of asserting the socialist elements of the New Deal tradition - which were under attack - "the liberal class" acquiesced in the dismantling of social supports and regulation (cf. Clinton and welfare). Neoliberalism won, and inequality in America, which had reached its lowest point in the late 1960s, began to grow and accelerate. It wasn't an accident, and liberal acquiescence was the key: both political parties became increasingly neoliberal. 
> 
> But the substitution of what were finally subjective identifications with a group (gender was socially constructed, it was argued) for the objective circumstances of class (particularly of those of us who sell our labor power for wages and do not own the means of production) not only made economic inequality incidental to the ending of oppression, it produced a different sort of politics - "identity politics."
> 
> Discrimination should be opposed and eliminated, of course, but substituting opposition to it for opposition to economic inequality is a trap. "...the focus on [economic] disparities between black and white ... has come to the fore in the last thirty years, a period in which economic inequality has been rapidly increasing. What the ‘disparitarian perspective’ represents ... is not a critical alternative to that inequality but ‘a concern to create competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race’. No one, for example, thinks that sending more black students to elite universities will reduce inequality; what they think is that it will allow a few more black people to benefit from it. This is ‘a notable and striking reversal ... from even the more left-inclined of War on Poverty era liberals, who spoke without shame about moving beyond simply placing people on an equal starting line – “equality of opportunity” – but also making sure they ended up closer to an equal finishing line’" <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/walter-benn-michaels/believing-in-unicorns>. 
> 
> Freedom indeed, CGE
> 
> 
> On Aug 13, 2013, at 1:38 AM, "Roediger, David R" <droedige at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 40 years ago? So it was then the period right before 1973 that liberals gloriously supported class struggles? And then somebody (Who was that in this fantasy? Got to think in terms of timing that George McGovern looks to be a likely culprit) tricked them into instead pursuing the supposedly completely different, indeed opposing, ideas of being against white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia.
>> 
>> I'm old but I can't remember that inspiring stretch of pure-and-simple class agitation by liberals. What would be some of the most outstanding examples from those years, say from 1963-73? I keep coming up with struggles for jobs and freedom now, with the uncompromising stance taken by working-class queers at Stonewall, and with important opposition to a racist and imperialist war. But surely these were on your view just the thin, plotting  edge of the nefarious identity politics wedge, diverting us from real deal.
>> 
>> I'm also blanking on the important liberal working class leaders who were then resisting taking the identity politics bait and laying down a class line uninfected by "identity politics"--one that could have won against neoliberalism. Was that what Walter Reuther was doing in keeping the skilled trades in auto overwhelmingly white? Or maybe, as the increasingly misguided late-career Bayard Rustin whom you rightly join in denouncing had it, the class warriors were George Meany and Albert Shanker (those great practitioners of white identity politics), united in their opposition to considering race whether the issue was integrating the building trades, keeping Vietnam from being incinerated, or engaging other than hysterically with community control of schools in minority neighborhoods. 
>> Please fill in some details.
>> 
>> In championing Walter Benn Michaels' socialism of fools--the view that a narrow class politics can by itself transform a social order predicated on multiple intersecting axes of oppression and that hidden plotters keep that from happening--you are advocating not just a poorly defended position but one that operates increasingly as a soundbite article of faith not really subject to evidence. Or in the conspiratorially inclined rhetoric Benn Michaels favors, maybe the neoliberals invented Benn Michaels and Estabrook. They certainly did fund and forward the similar, and hegemonic, Clinton, Obama, and Democratic Leadership Council arguments along the same lines, holding that it is only permissible for "progressives" to talk about allegedly unifying and hopelessly tepid economic issues, and not about justice.
>> freedom now, dave roediger
>> ________________________________________
>> 
>> ________________________________________
>> From: sftalk at yahoogroups.com [sftalk at yahoogroups.com] on behalf of C. G. Estabrook [carl at newsfromneptune.com]
>> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 9:09 PM
>> To: Brussel, Morton K
>> Cc: <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>; sftalk at yahoogroups.com; ocCUpy
>> Subject: [sftalk] Re: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Democracy Now!'s Tribute to Bayard Rustin
>> 
>> It's the bane of identity politics, which American liberalism substituted for class politics 40 years ago, in its timorous response to the assault of neoliberalism. ("OK, if we can't have socialism, and we have to have imperialism, let's just see what color the rich kids are...!")
>> 
>> --CGE
>> 
>> On Aug 12, 2013, at 8:52 PM, "Brussel, Morton K" <brussel at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> Not infrequently Democracy Now! runs off the rails. I can remember well how disgusted I was with Bayard Rustin and his support of the Vietnam war by the U.S. .
>>> It is a disgrace that those actions of his are unmentioned in the Democracy Now! piece.
>>> 
>>> --mkb
>>> 
>>> On Aug 12, 2013, at 10:32 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>> 
>>>>> From: <turbulo at aol.com>
>>>>> Subject: Democracy Now!'s Tribute to Bayard Rustin
>>>>> Date: August 12, 2013
>>>>> 
>>>>> I sent the following e-mail to Democracy Now! in response to a tribute to Bayard Rustin they did this morning. The occasion was a posthumous award
>>>>> Rustin is about to receive at the White House.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> While rightly lauding the courage and commitment of Bayard Rustin as a founder and organizer of the civil rights movement, this morning’s tribute left out a less stellar side of his political career. By the mid 1960s,Rustin had sold his soul to Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party, acting to keep the civil rights and anti-war movements within the political bounds prescribed by the administration, and to red bait and exclude all elements deemed too radical by the cold warriors. He used his considerable influence to undermine the first big march against the Vietnam War in 1965 because its organizers refused to bar the participation of communists and other left-wing radicals. He opposed MLK’s 1967 Riverside Church address condemning the war. In his view, silence in the face of the wholesale slaughter of a people fighting for its independence was not too high a price to pay for remaining within the good graces of the slaughter’s chief perpetrator, in hopes that Johnson might do more for civil rights. It was Rustin’s role as a policeman for the White House that sullied his name in the eyes of the radical activists of that era, of which I was one. His posthumous accolade from Barack Obama comes as no surprise. In his older years he was a shining example the kind of housebroken “radical”that the president would no doubt like to see followed today. Rustin’s early role as a fighter deserves to be remembered. So do his later accommodations to power.  --Jim Creegan

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