From top to bottom, Americans can virtue-signal like nobody's business. But material conditions of most of society in the US indicate a total failure of governance.
One of the comments on my latest essay on Substack, How the Left Shrank, represents a vitally important concept to understand and explore. So I thought I'd share most of this comment with you, and respond to it at some length. Here's the comment:
I don’t really disagree with anything you say. However, a huge irony seems to be that ‘the left’ has won. You may well say it’s not the ‘real left’, but the MSM [mainstream media], Hollywood, universities for sure, and seemingly the administrative structures of the federal government are all aligned pretty well under some general leftist/progressive/woke/whatever banner. How does that fit in do you think?
And my possibly long-winded response.
Someone committed to the liberal narrative might talk about how ideas are first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as self-evident. They'll say things like overt discrimination against people on the basis of various demographics used to be acceptable, but now it's not, at least in the circles mentioned in the comment, and in much of society at large as well. Proof of the victory of left thinking.
Meanwhile, though, society is more unequal than it's been since the age of the robber barons, with millions of people in the US living on the streets, tens of millions of Americans without health care, half the country struggling to pay basic expenses, altogether demonstrating essentially the collapse of the welfare state, and the fundamental inability -- or unwillingness -- of state or federal government to pass the kind of legislation that could easily solve these problems.
The radical inequality could also be seen as the dismal failure of the left to create, or even to effectively demand, anymore, a better world. And of course, US foreign policy continues to be imperialist, under the leadership of either party. But as far as domestic policies go, are we to understand that the left has both won and it has lost? We use correct pronouns and we know it's not OK to insult whoever sits at the front of the bus, but more of us collectively, altogether, are living on the streets? How does that all work?
I want to get into some historical background in order to arrive at an answer to this apparent contradiction that makes sense.
The basic idea -- and even the practice -- of the welfare state has existed for a long time. The idea that it can be the state's responsibility to make sure all people living within its borders are afforded certain material rights as well as legal ones. Not just the right to freedom of speech and assembly, or the right to sit at the counter at the diner and get served, but the right to live somewhere and have access to all the basic necessities for living a decent life, such as housing, food, and education.
In practice, in the US, the welfare state effectively existed for maybe two generations. It came into being as a consequence of a combination of factors including the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and all the massive sacrifices made by so many Americans in World War 2. There had to be a peace dividend, and that was a welfare state, upheld by the policies of both ruling parties.
This period in the US -- the 1930's to the early 1970's -- ended a long time ago. But it's important to mention this period, because domestic policies with regards to taxation of the rich, the building of infrastructure, state involvement with the production of housing, the regulation of the housing market, and so many other aspects of domestic government policies during that period have defined so much of what Americans understand about America. This long-gone era still defines how so many people frame things in this country.
It's also important to mention this period because -- if you ignore massive elephants in the living room such as ongoing imperialism abroad and institutional racism at home -- the policies of the welfare state may embrace enough of the elements of an authentically left/socialist agenda so that socialism and liberalism could be confused with each other, for a time.
In the US, this period is the exception, not the rule, however. Let's now talk about the rule, rather than the exception to it.
The rule -- before, after, and to a very significant extent during the exceptional period of the more or less functional welfare state -- has been rule by con artists, from two different factions of con artists, both ruling on behalf of the capitalists who pay for them to get elected. The capitalists don't elect them directly, however, so it is their responsibility to con us, the people, into voting for one or another of them, and to pretend they represent our interests.
Of course to some extent they have to actually represent our interests, they can't be completely corrupt. It's a balancing act between giving the people, or at least their base, enough of what they want to keep them appeased, while mainly serving the interests of those who paved their path to power by paying for it, through our broken electoral system, much more resembling an auction than any kind of actual democratic process.
Let's explore a little how this kind of conning tends to work, for both parties, taking the pressing issue of the raging and ever-deepening housing crisis in this country as an example.
There are well over a hundred million renters struggling to get by in this country, and a very large number of them seem to be looking to Trump for solutions.
Trump says we'll solve the problem of skyrocketing housing costs by deporting millions of people without papers, undocumented workers, or as Trump would say, the "illegal immigrants" who are eating your pets. Get rid of them, and free up all that housing stock for Americans.
Exactly this kind of idea has been tremendously popular in the US in the past, and in many other countries as well. It has won many politicians elected office in the US, the UK, Israel, Australia, Brazil, India, France, Italy, Germany, and so many other countries, in recent years and going back a century and more.
But let's note here that what these anti-immigrant, racist, fascist, or fascist-leaning politicians are doing is not just attacking immigrants or foreigners -- they are offering a solution to the housing crisis.
This is very important to understand. Fascists are trying to offer solutions to the very same problems that the other party or parties are trying to solve. Fascism -- or, as they liked to call it in 1930's Germany, National Socialism -- tries to appeal to the electorate or to the people by offering solutions to the same pressing problems that the socialists are hopefully trying to solve. The success of the fascists in getting elected, in so many recent and historical cases, is predicated on the failure of whoever was in power before they came along to solve these problems first.
For their part, the Democrats are ruling on behalf of the landlord lobby all over the country -- let's be very clear, that is the situation, as evidenced by one Democrat-controlled legislature after another banning rent control since the end of the era of the post-war social contract. But although they have no real intention to solve the housing crisis, they try to address at least little bits of it with their own, liberal cons.
The Democratic leadership knows they won't solve the housing crisis, since housing as a form of investment is fundamental to their party ever holding office. The Democratic "machine" that runs so many American cities is a machine fueled by and put in place through money from developers and banks. The need for Americans to have a place to live is one of the biggest, most monopolized, and most profitable industries in the world, and the Democratic governors and Democratic legislators serve their masters loyally, while speaking out of the other sides of their mouths to us rabble.
When their words are aimed at their more well-to-do supporters they'll say things like "the housing crisis is basically a huge intractable problem that goes way back. It's going to take many years to get ahold of the rising prices of everything. It will require massive investment in building more housing. Plus we'll need to do things we progressives are loathe to do, such as deregulating the housing market even further in order to have less red tape, fewer concerns about materials, safety, the environment, climate change, etc." Because, they say, incredibly, it is too much regulation that makes housing too expensive, rather than a different kind of regulation (rent control), as is the obvious reality, if you see how the functional countries do things.
With this kind of talk they aim to calm the minds of the landlords, big and small, and of all those invested in the housing market. Don't worry, we're not really serious about changing anything.
Then, out of the other side of their mouths, they tell the hard-pressed tenants drowning in ever-rising rents charged by monopoly landlords that at least if you elect us, even if we won't even think about doing something as radical as passing rent control legislation, we will seriously work on starting to create an atmosphere whereby the capitalists might think it's a good idea to build more affordable housing, and -- oh yeah! -- we'll also start a program that will fund all homeless military veterans to get housed.
And we'll start a program aimed at housing some of the most marginalized elements of society, who the more left-leaning Democratic base is understood to care deeply about, such as immigrants, people of color, and abused teenagers who ran away from home and require expensive, state-funded, gender-affirming surgical care.
This is the liberal's version of deporting all the aliens. Whether we deport the aliens or house the veterans and the pregnant mothers, we totally fail to solve the overall housing crisis, we continue to serve the interests of the capitalists, but we hopefully throw enough crumbs to our bases of support that we get elected again.
And the liberal pushing for housing the veterans can say to their critics from the left calling for housing everyone, what, you don't want to start somewhere? You don't really care about the traumatized veterans and the other most marginalized among us? You want to center the interests of less marginalized people instead? You just want to put forward your utopian, impossible agenda rather than supporting practical initiatives?
There are many arguments to keep the "class reductionist" or "less woke" leftists in line, and the liberals use their rendition of woke reasoning to exactly that effect.
Of course it ends up driving many former supporters of the Democrats into the ranks of the Republicans, especially the elements of the MAGA scene these days who are trying so hard to appeal to the working class, despite the party's long record of serving the interests of big business. But if we lose some part of our base, they reason, this is the price that must be paid for actually serving the interests of the rich, of the military-industrial establishment, of the banks, the Israel lobby, etc.
The leadership of both parties know they're working for the highest bidder, they know this is an auction, not a democracy, but their jobs depend on maintaining the illusion, of being convincing in their con 24-7.
Whether they're Republicans conning us in the fascist direction, or Democrats conning us in the socialist direction, there are no indications that the Democratic leadership has actually embraced a progressive agenda, and many indications that they have adopted various positions that are convenient for keeping just enough of us within their little tent.
If the Democratic leadership was interested in a real socialist agenda, then they would have voted against all the military budgets and corporate-sponsored "free trade" bills over the past fifty years, rather than voting for them. If they were interested in real equity in society, rather than just window-dressing, then we would not have more dramatic inequality in this society than at any time since the 19th century.
This situation in the world's richest country -- a gigantic country, with so many hard-working people and tremendous natural resources -- is one that has been engineered by the political servants of their capitalist masters. And it's a situation that a few good majority votes in Congress and a few signatures of a president's pen could undo.
We could literally have affordable housing for everyone within a few months, if the political will existed. The housing stock is out there, empty. The shortage is largely imaginary, or engineered. They're all pulling a con -- whether it's the ones calling for kicking out the immigrants, or the ones calling for housing the latest most favored marginalized group.
It's nice to treat people with respect and call them "sir" or "ma'am" instead of addressing them with a racial slur. If a change in attitudes among a lot of people over the past fifty years were an indication of some kind of leftwing victory, then maybe we could imagine we've arrived already. But obviously if you look around yourself you can see we have not.
Because what the left has always stood for ever since the concept has existed in the modern age is actual material progress for the 99%. An actual improvement in the physical conditions in which people live. By that measure, the Democratic leadership continues to rule on behalf of the rich, it continues to choose to fail to serve the interests of the people, and most certainly it continues to fail to serve the interests of the people of the rest of the world as well, with every new bomb from Biden hitting the ground in Gaza and Lebanon.
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