[ For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the reforms of the
New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat the
Right.]
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REAFFIRMING THE PROGRESSIVE PROJECT IN 2023  
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Harry Targ
May 22, 2023
Diary of a Heartland Radical
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_ For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the reforms of the
New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat the
Right. _

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THESE ARE INDEED HARD TIMES FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF HUMANKIND. AND
THE TIMES ARE TROUBLING FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS.

_First_, communities, nations, and the planet face the possibility of
extinction of all life forms. Warning signs are seen everywhere:
drought, fires, heat, cold, and the prospect of large swaths of land
being flooded by global warming. And as has been the case for hundreds
of years, the greatest threats and immediate suffering is impacting
particularly on the peoples and lands of the Global South.

_Second_, despite years of wise counsel, mass movements, campaigns,
and demands, the danger of nuclear war continues. Indeed, many experts
and peace activists believe the danger of nuclear war is as serious
now as at any time since 1945. Ironically, leaders of the G7 countries
meeting in Hiroshima now are discussing what amounts to further
fueling the war in Ukraine.

_Third_, along with these two life-threatening issues, every country
and people have experienced poverty, inequality, anomic violence, and
weakening educational and health care institutions, Pundits from the
Global North report on food, health care, and educational deserts. But
because a small number of conglomerates control more and more of what
we know, what might be called media deserts reduce the possibility of
people having knowledge about the crises facing them, their
communities, and the planet. The metaphor of the “desert” speaks
to the scarcity of peoples’ access to information about the
viability of human life.

_Fourth_, and to some extent “the good news,” masses of people are
rising up angry within the United States and around the world.
Workers, students, people of color, women, and other oppressed groups
are making their voices heard. And in some places movements have been
impactful. In the United States elections have mattered: some for
good, others for evil. And, in general, if the planet survives,
so-called minorities will be majorities by 2050 (the rightwing fears
this referring to what it calls “replacement theory”).

_Fifth_, one manifestation of people rising up angry is a new emerging
sensibility and organizations coming from “the Global South.” The
Global South, an imprecise construct, consists of all those peoples,
territories, and nations that have been victimized by capitalism for
hundreds of years. Today leaders of governments of various ideologies
from the Global South have organized around trading zones,
dedollarization and new military security arrangements, and the
construction of new international organizations. They have revitalized
demands for a New International Economic Order and a New World
Information Order.

But _sixth_, while people are rising up angry all across the globe
(and in  the belly of the beast the United States), they are doing so
in an array of competing organizations characterized by a multiplicity
of ideologies, issue priorities, and even multiple interpretations of
the historical past and the present. As so often happens, many of
these organizations claim that they are prepared to lead to a new
world order. Organizational interest and individual egos get in the
way of the broader project; that is saving humanity.

And this is part of the context of “Left” organizing in the United
States today. It leads to raising again questions of our history,
tactics and strategy, elections, street heat, and education.

 

THEREFORE, A NUMBER OF ISSUES OF STRATEGY, TACTICS, AND THOUGHT NEED
TO BE REEXAMINED.

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_ __First_, sectors of progressive movements use a catch-all term,
“fascism,” to describe those political forces that are reactionary
in vision and policy. The word  “fascism” provides a kind of
release for sincere frustrations but is counter-productive for a
variety of reasons. The term is usually not defined. The user and the
target of the label logically think of Germany and Italy before World
War II, but it is unclear that a comparison of the US political
context today with the European countries in the interwar years is
apt. Further, the concept usually suggests an inextricable connection
between corporate control of the economy, an autocratic state, an
armed mass movement and a racist ideology. While elements of these
unfortunately exist in the US today the economic and political context
is much more pluralistic than was the case in the 1930s in Europe.

Most importantly, the fascist label is resented and opposed by the
targets of such a label. If the goal is to organize masses of people,
particularly those who have become economically and politically
marginalized by the system, such labeling creates enemies not friends.
And polling data has shown repeatedly that majorities of Americans
support progressive social and economic policies and even to some
degree racial justice.

From the pre-civil war period until today approximately 20-25 percent
of Americans have held and hold reactionary and white supremacist
perspectives. Recent data suggests that some 45 percent of voters
identify as Democrats, a few percentage points less Republicans, and
about ten percent independents. Those who identify as independents
have been less likely to vote. While reports of political surveys
vary, the point is that the electorate and those who hold political
views are varied and contradictory. And we should always keep in mind
that the corporate media communicates, portrays, and sometimes
exaggerates violence as the norm.

_Second_, much research suggests that there does exist a “politics
of resentment” across the country, a resentment of alienation,
powerlessness, and recognition that wealth and power are grotesquely
unequal in its distribution. Often this resentment leads people to
find solace in demagogues or more often to choose to not participate
in what they regard as an unfair system.

The politics of resentment in this country led the Roosevelt
Administration and the Democratic Party to begin to address real
sources of economic pain and suffering in the 1930s. The Democratic
party of the New Deal, The Fair Deal, and the Great Society was built
around addressing some of the economic and political needs of the
people. And as a result, on the national level, the Democratic Party
became the majority party.

But in the 1970s, the Democratic Party tilted toward neoliberalism,
primarily policies of austerity and deregulation of the corporate
sector, a neoliberalism that was fully institutionalized in the 1980s
Reagan Revolution. And it is important to note that the Reagan
Revolution was sanctified by the Clinton/centrist wing of the
Democratic Party which has become the dominant faction of that party
ever since.

_In short, there has been an inextricable connection between the
rightwing thrust of national and state politics in the United States
and the shift of the Democratic Party away from the New Deal
tradition. For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the reforms
of the New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat
the Right._

Labeling extremists as fascists, ridiculing Trump and MAGA, and
rewriting narratives of US history will not defeat reaction. Only a
progressive agenda will. And those progressives in the Democratic
Party, in the labor movement, and among the sectors of the Left must
demand that their candidates uncompromisingly stand for economic and
social justice. For sure, there exist vital and popular movements
around healthcare for all, women’s rights, the right to form unions,
climate change, increased voting rights, support for public
institutions such as schools, libraries, and transportation systems,
immigration reform, and underlying each an end to the long, painful,
and immoral history of racism in the United States.

_Finally,_ and this is critical, a careful review of twentieth century
US history shows that domestic and foreign policies are connected. In
critical periods, US foreign policies have been used to crush
progressive politics at home. As historians such as Joyce and Gabriel
Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and others have shown
there was no Soviet threat to US national security when President
Truman warned of the “international communist threat”  in his
famous Truman Doctrine speech of March, 1947. But there was a threat
at home. That threat was a strong, militant labor movement that sought
co-equal input in the making of public policy.

In addition, from 1947 until 1991 the “communist threat” was the
device used by policymakers to weaken or destroy a progressive and
pro-labor agenda at home, and with decolonization around the world
from the 1950s through the 1970s, socialist militancy all around the
Global South.

Most importantly United States foreign policy became the rationale for
trillions of dollars being spent on the military, creating images of
diabolical enemies in education and popular culture, and normalizing
the idea of war.

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ALL THIS SUGGESTS THAT A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA IN THE YEARS AHEAD
REQUIRES:

1.A systematic progressive economic and political program that
prioritizes the fulfillment of human needs.

2.A unified political movement that organizes around this program or
at least building an alliance of Left groups that share this common
vision even as they work on particular issues.

3.A grassroots organizing strategy that in word and deed does not
prematurely identify critics with pejorative labels. Certain sectors
of the population already embrace a progressive agenda, others are not
yet decided, and a smaller percentage have embraced rightwing fascism.
The task of the left should include mobilizing those who agree,
convincing the unconvinced, and finally respectfully seeking to change
the minds and actions of the minority who are reactionary (including
those who believe only violence will protect them).

4.A progressive movement that reaches out to, participates with, and
learns from the literally millions of people that are rising up all
across the globe. At this stage in human history the campaigns of
people of color and various nationalities in the Global South matter.
And these movements parallel those of the poor and oppressed in the
United States as well.

5.Finally prioritizing in this progressive project an anti-militarist,
anti-war agenda. It is clear that the “permanent war economy”
constructed after World War II robbed the world’s citizens of
resources and hopes for a better future. A just world is a disarmed
world, a world of peace.

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Harry Targ: I teach foreign policy, US/Latin American relations,
international political economy, and topics on labor studies in a
Department of Political Science and a program in Peace Studies. I see
connections between theory/education and political practice. I am a
member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
(CCDS), the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO),and the
Lafayette Area Peace Coalition (LAPC). My new book, Diary of a
Heartland Radical, can be ordered at
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[email protected]
 

* US Left Politics; World Politics; Peace vs War Politics;
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