Putting "The Party" back into the Democratic party
I meant to finish/revise what became a pretty lengthy rant on Obama’s economic positioning a few days ago, but didn’t. Here’s a part two, sort of.
Virginia is the geistiest state in this election. Kaine and Warner, a VP finalist and someone who would have been had he not withdrawn himself, represent an important turn in American politics. One of Kaine’s big things is “Smart Growth.” Warner’s keynote speech focused on similar themes, but applied more broadly—the question of how America can stay gloablly competitive in a way that benefits everyone, including those in other nations. In short, they love them some capitalism, but are more interested in its productive potential than in its ideological propositions. This pragmatic approach makes them naturally opposed to the consolidation of wealth and the self-serving version of the “free market” it’s politically committed to. In this, they share a great deal with Obama and good Marxists everywhere. It’s hard to put this better today than it was in 1848:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
That’s from the communist manifesto, and a pretty classic bit at that. Nevertheless, it’s not read particularly well. That last line, I think, connects this thinking with my “it’s never OK not to worry” riff. It implies that the constantly revolutionizing nature of “real” (world-historical) capitalism requires a pragmatic and empirical approach to thinking about the economy that doesn’t turn to always immidiately outdated assumptions and norms of market morality. This is to say the obvious—the fundamental argument of Marxism is materialism.
For all the charges of being too abstract, under these lights Obama is a materialist and a historical thinker. I also believe he’s also a shrewd politician, meaning he realized the point is not simply to leap directly into a new mode of political discourse.
In his first appearance at the national level, the 2004 DNC keynote, he famously made his post-partisan pitch:
E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.
The Manifesto again:
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.
It’s not quite “workers of the world unite”, but Obama is making an effort to establish a new political majority out of the population that has been strategically balkanized by a ruling minority that often control the means of production (the economic elite caste of Republicans who direct the meaningful policy action of the party). It’s not an accident that they formed a pact with social conservatives, both want to restrain the profaning of the holy and the melting into air, albeit on different levels.
Obama’s post-partisan riff is form of political demystification that serves, in part, as a precondition for the repositioning represented by Warner’s keynote this year. “Hope” and “change” are tools to open up the space to articulate a new vision of progress that’s oriented towards growth that benefits all of society—a rising tide that really lifts all ships. The slogan the Obama campaign uses on its economic tours, “change that works for you”, encapsulates this well.
And that’s the big question. How does this whole thing get effectively packaged?
Thursday night’s speech was good for a number of reasons, many of them very local, involving present situation in the campaign. The truly global—broadly strategic rather than narrowly tactical—implication of the speech was that it showed that Obama might just be capable of this trick. Recall the much praised “specifics” about his economic policy; they were less technical explanations as they were characterizations beyond simple economic populism. He touts things like his welfare-to-work record not just to score points with “reagan democrats” who might have some racism, but to show that a focus on growth gives him a way to work for equality without being about anti-american redistribution.
All this (and more!) post-populism gets bundled with the post-partisan riff to create the popularly palatable version of his plan to break the ideologically conditioned acceptance of the “extreme philosophy” that allegedly pro-market republican have been espousing—“In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you’re on your own.” And he framed his attack against it in terms of redefining what counts as progress:
Well it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.
You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.
[…]
We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.
There’s a strategic redeployment of familiar aspects of American economic ideology—entrepreneurship and the “dignity” of work—against the political coalition that has traditionally relied on them.
This strategy is pervasive, he often taps American history to provide context for the realignment (cough, class consciousness) that he’s pushing for:
That’s why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors — found the courage to keep it alive.
His acceptance speech was something between his 2004 keynote and Warner’s 2008 keynote. It points in the direction he wants to take the party and its a good one. I’m not saying he’s a communist. I’m saying that, like Marx, he thinks well—historically and strategically. From ‘04:
I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.
Post script: The above train of thought involves a few of the more disparate themes of this tumblr. Specifically, the election and the post-capitalist economic situation/Marxist reading there of.
Also, to my mind, it articulates the motivation for my campaign to valorize cities. It’s a way to celebrate progress over the reactionary urge to conserve the status quo in a case when that opposition is frequently intensely obfuscated.
Absent here is the important issue of vangaurdism. Getting into that leads me into some highly self-referential business that seems to be the academic mire into which a lot of lefty methodological discussions descend. Another time.
Also, this probably should be a HypeGeist post. I may have to rethink my allocation of cognitive surplus.
