David Schultz
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair |
I have saved for last the rule the new-new left seems most thoroughly to have forgotten, because every other fault finally runs through it. The first purpose of politics is to assemble a coalition large enough to win elections and take power. Everything else, every program and principle, is inert until that majority exists. This is not cynicism; it is the precondition of doing any good at all.
Dahl understood democratic politics as the patient construction of majorities out of overlapping minorities, none of which can govern alone. The tradition understood it too: Harrington and Debs built coalitions of workers across trade and origin because they meant to win, not merely to bear witness. A left that prizes the purity of its positions over the breadth of its coalition has confused politics with testimony. The drift toward an agenda of identity and status is, among its other faults, a failure of this elementary arithmetic, subtracting where politics demands addition.
I should enter one caution against my own emphasis. There is an assumption, which I share only in part, that an electoral strategy can by itself challenge entrenched power relationships. The reality is that voting alone may not be enough to break an equilibrium of power in which ownership, wealth, and the structural veto of business are arrayed on one side. Elections can change who administers the system without touching who owns it.
To break that equilibrium, other forms of non-violent activity may be required: the strike, the boycott, the union drive, the sustained mass mobilization that raises the cost of the status quo until the powerful must concede. The ballot is necessary but rarely sufficient. A left serious about its ends would treat electoral and extra-electoral action as partners, using the vote to take office and organized pressure from below to make office mean something. This is not a turn away from the first rule but a recognition of what winning power actually requires.
The trap follows directly. A movement organized around shared economic interest is hard to divide, because its members want the same concrete things. A movement organized around plural identities, the world that Hegemony and Socialist Strategy theorized and the new new left inhabits, is easy to divide, because its components can always be set against one another. This is the gift the left has handed its opponents.
Conservatives have learned to govern by culture war precisely because it works on a left that has made culture its terrain. Raise a symbolic issue, watch the progressive coalition fracture into the offended and the embarrassed, and the economic questions that would unite a majority never get asked. This is the manufacture of consent by other means, Chomsky’s point that power protects itself by controlling the boundaries of debate.
The culture war is a marvelously efficient boundary. It keeps the argument fixed on questions of identity and offense, which divide the many, and away from questions of wealth and ownership, which would unite them. Every hour the left spends litigating a symbolic provocation is an hour not spent building the multiracial working class majority that frightens the powerful. The wedge does its work, and the left, having abandoned the class frame that would dull it, keeps walking into it.
What would it mean to take the first rule seriously? It would mean building the coalition outward from what people share rather than inward toward what distinguishes them. Across every line of race, region, and origin, working people confront the same stagnant wages, the same unaffordable rent and care, the same powerlessness before employers who decide their hours and their futures. These shared conditions are the natural foundation of a majority that no culture war could easily split, because its members would be bound by interest and not merely by sentiment.
Harrington understood that solidarity is not a feeling to be exhorted but a fact to be organized, and that the organizing has to begin with the interests people actually hold in common. The new new left has too often done the reverse, leading with the questions that divide and hoping unity will follow. It does not follow. A coalition is built from the bottom, on the ground of shared material need, or it is not built at all.
The way out is the way back, not to nostalgia but to the organizing insight the tradition never should have surrendered. Bernstein tied socialism to democracy and to the ethical demand that every person be treated with respect. Harrington tied it to the democratization of economic life, and Dorothy Day and Debs tied it to solidarity with the people whose labor sustains the world.
A left that recovered all of this would be formidable: one that organized the working class majority around its shared material condition, that built the broadest possible coalition because it remembered winning is the point, that paired the ballot with organized pressure from below, that cared whether government worked, and that refused the culture war bait. That left once existed. These essays are an argument that it could exist again, and that the first step is to remember what it was for.
David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University. He is the author of Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter.
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