[ Two diametrically opposed groups of people, operating under two
totally different definitions of “the enemy,” cannot unite in any
meaningful sense.]
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THE NONSENSICAL ‘RIGHT AND LEFT NEED TO UNITE TO TAKE ON ELITES’
TAKE THAT JUST WON’T DIE  
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Adam Johnson
August 16, 2023
Real News Network
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_ Two diametrically opposed groups of people, operating under two
totally different definitions of “the enemy,” cannot unite in any
meaningful sense. _

Split-screen image: (Left) SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikers walk the picket
line at the Netflix studio located on Sunset and Van Ness on Aug.14,
2023, in Hollywood, California. Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. (Right)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a press confe,

 

Every few months—sometimes for sinister and ideological reasons,
sometimes for just plain ahistorical and dimwitted reasons—a pundit
comes along who thinks they’ve cracked the DaVinci code of class
politics. “What if,” they ask us (as if the question has not been
asked countless times before), “left and right unite to take on the
elites”? The phrasing of the question can vary, but it’s
invariably some version of the same claptrap. This take has a
particular superficial appeal: What if the right and left could set
aside their seemingly insurmountable differences and unite to take on
these mysterious “elites,” or “those in power”? What if,
indeed! On its face, the proposal sounds like something everyone can
get behind, and it’s effective RT-bait:

 

This line is used primarily, though not exclusively, by two groups:
(1) milquetoast corporate liberals and centrists embodied by Third Way
and other Wall Street-funded front groups attempting to push the
Democratic party even farther toward the center than it already is;
and (2) right-wing “populists” of varying tendencies (third
positionists, producerists, outright fascists). I’ve detailed the
problems with Group 1 elsewhere
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but I’d like to take some time to discuss this trope’s popularity
with Group 2 and why those on the left—or anyone genuinely concerned
with the plight of the working class and racial justice, however they
define themselves—should be wary of this second group.

From the start, and above all else, what’s important to know is that
this trope, and the myriad ways of phrasing it, almost always means
nothing. Saying “It’s not about right or left, it’s about
power,” or some other variation, will always be a popular, smarmy
applause line because such lines possess the mother’s milk of good
ad copy: what hack writers call the “generically specific.” They
seem specific enough to be meaningful, but are generic enough that
listeners can project their own meaning onto the slogan. What is
“left” and “right” in this scenario? What does “power”
mean here? Who or what is “elite,” and what criteria distinguish
them from the “non-elite”? Who knows? Just nod, turn off your
brain, and accept whatever fascist or pro-corporate bullshit the
speaker is about to jam down your throat.

Take a recent, deeply cynical version of this formulation spouted by
one-note “anti-monopoly” producerist Matt Stoller.
His _Politico_ article arguing
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the right and left can “work together” to “break up our big and
slothful monopolies” is an object lesson in how those pushing
reactionary politics can use ostensibly “populist” or vaguely
left-wing argumentation to smuggle their agendas into mainstream
consciousness. For the past few months, Hollywood writers, later
joined by actors, have been on strike against the major TV and film
studios, demanding
[[link removed]] better
pay and staffing requirements, increased residuals, more control over
how studios can use “artificial intelligence,”
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less precarity overall. Stoller, for some bizarre reason, sees this as
an opening for these writers and actors to partner with the likes
of virulently anti-union
[[link removed]] Florida
governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis to get one over
on a single studio for which they share a superficially similar
hatred. 

His lead to the story
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grand and noble: “There’s a new generation on the right and they
think very differently about corporate power. When that right and the
left come together, we will break up our big and slothful monopolies
like Disney. DeSantis isn’t there yet, but it’s coming.” 

Is it, though? 

The piece suffers from—or, depending on how you look at it, thrives
because of—that same aforementioned deliberate vagueness. “The GOP
presidential candidate [DeSantis] and the striking Hollywood creatives
may not agree on much,” Stoller writes, “but both are aggrieved by
Disney’s raw use of power, and perhaps the broader dynamic of
corporate monopolies in general.” 

What? Is that really what’s happening here? To say both camps “are
aggrieved by Disney’s raw use of power” may not be technically
incorrect, but it’s a testament to how vague and squishy one must
make one’s prognosis for it to apply to each side. Moreover, this is
neither the left nor the right’s explicit reason for criticizing
Disney; it’s Stoller’s. He goes on:

The rise of imperial Disney and its vast bargaining leverage has led
to considerable fallout. One consequence is simply that Disney, like
all giant streaming firms, has reduced its payout to writers,
producers, directors, actors, movie theaters and suppliers. The strike
consuming Hollywood is a reaction to this dynamic. Another is that the
company has raised ticket prices at its theme parks for consumers and
eliminated perks that longstanding Disney fans appreciated. A third is
that the firm’s creative energy is dissipating, with an endless
surfeit of Marvel movies. And fourth, it wields its cultural power in
clumsy ways that angered and annoyed large swaths of the public, first
by holding its fire on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law
and then by firmly opposing it.

All of these problems are happening now, because Disney, like other
firms that have generated bipartisan backlash, such as Google and
Facebook, is less a set of businesses trying to sell products than a
giant financial institution organized around acquiring and maintaining
market power. In other words, the fury directed at the House of Mouse
isn’t about Disney, per se; it’s about the end of antitrust
enforcement and regulations designed to keep markets open, a shift
that’s happened across industries.

Stoller’s matter-of-fact synthesizing of these issues in the second
paragraph belie how unconvincing the throughline he draws to connect
them is. The left’s criticism of Disney isn’t, as Stoller suggests
later, that they pump out cultural schlock (though some may be annoyed
about having 19 Wasp and Antman movies, it’s not exactly an urgent
priority of leftist politics at the moment). The left’s criticism of
Disney is the same as it is for every corporation: that they don’t
pay nearly enough in taxes, that they use their money and influence to
lobby for pro-corporate policies that benefit them at our collective
expense, and that they have too much political power. Leftists have no
uniquely vested interest in despising Disney anymore than they would
Comcast, Apple, AT&T, Netflix, Amazon, and other large media companies
that push for horrible “trade deals,” abuse their workers, and are
currently attempting to “starve”
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and actors on strike.

The right’s criticism, of course, has nothing to do with any of
this. Aside from vague gestures about Disney being “too powerful,”
the critique levied by demagogues like DeSantis’ is not that large
corporations are deleterious _per se_, it’s that the ones who
produce content seen as too feminist or gay or pro-trans need to be
singled out and punished for doing so—for simply being “woke.”
If Disney was focused on pumping out cultural products that aligned
more closely with DeSantis’s reactionary _weltanschauung_, he, of
course, would be significantly less concerned with Disney’s “raw
use of power.” 

What if DeSantis wanted to go after Wall Street banks that had what he
viewed as too many Jewish executives—would this be another
Stollerian opportunity for him to “join forces” with Wall Street
critics like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and draw up a list of
investment firms to break up that each side criticized for overlapping
but totally different reasons? Singling out companies that
right-wingers see as too pro-Black or pro-gay and then seeing if any
of those same companies have also been criticized by Public Citizen or
the Roosevelt Institute is not a mode of serious politics; it’s a
way to boost the faux-populist credentials of racists and
exterminationists. It serves no other functional purpose.

So what’s Stoller’s play here? His play, like the many purveyors
of this hollow left-and-right-must-unite-against-the-“elites”
mantra mentioned above, is to use the shallow pseudo-politics of
“anti-monopolism”or “anti-elitism” to sell right-wingers like
DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and other post-Trump right-wing “populists”
to low-information, half-paying-attention progressives and
independents who are seduced by the supposed ideological overlap. But
political coalitions cannot be built on hate and discrimination, the
right and left necessarily have different political goals, and the
fact that they happen to dislike the same entity, person, or
corporation is not evidence that they can band together like an Odd
Couple Buddy Comedy. The reasons for this dislike actually matter a
lot, because the reasons for dislike pave the road for what the policy
solutions should be. The policy proposal Stoller offers in his piece,
for example, is to simply “break up” Disney. But the left
doesn’t want to just break up one corporation—because their
content is too inclusive and queer—while leaving the rest untouched.
What good would this do other than incentivize that corporation’s
remaining competitors to produce more overtly racist and homophobic
content?

The point is not to be precious about this or maintain some type of
pure left ideological hygiene; the point is that, very often, when
debates emerge about the potential for these supposed
cross-ideological alliances, the terms of debate are deliberately
muddied, and the end goal is to push the left further to the right,
not the other way around. Words matter here, and those who promote
this facile “right-left alliance” schlock are counting on the
reader or listener not really paying much attention.

There are instances where a “right and left alliance” makes sense
in a targeted and concrete context; such alliances are inherent to the
political fabric and inner workings of an entity like the US Senate.
Mike Lee and Rand Paul co-sponsoring a bill with Bernie Sanders to end
the war in Yemen, for example, is a perfectly fine
“cross-ideological” partnership, because the purpose of that
partnership is the passing of a specific law with a specific scope.
This is inherent to all lawmaking in a nominally democratically
representative society: bringing people from across the political
spectrum—left, center, right, liberal, libertarian—into the
process of sponsoring bills or building voting coalitions is a
functional necessity for a complex society in which the system of
governance ostensibly relies on balancing the collected interests of
that society’s respective constituencies. But voting blocs are not
political coalitions, and supporting bills without throwing any
vulnerable communities under the bus is a perfectly fine use of
legislative power.

But what the Stollers and Greenwalds and Taibbis of the world are
proposing isn’t this. It’s something much more cynical and
calculated. It’s about softening up liberals, leftists, and
independents to boilerplate Republicans like DeSantis in the hopes
that their “anti-elite” bonafides will somehow translate to
“anti-elite” policies, even though their campaigns are funded by
the same billionaires and corporations (i.e. elites) as every other
Republican. That they pay lip service to “populist” agendas, or
target the occasional corporation for being too “woke,” is a
far-right co-option tactic as old as the right itself. It’s not
sincere, and this insincerity matters in the long term, despite all
the hype over this supposed “new” new right we are sold every four
years.

The next time a suspender-snapping pundit insists the “right and
left” need to “unite” to take on “corruption” or
“monopoly” or some other vague Bad Guy, ask specifics about how
the right in question define “elite,” “power,” or
“corruption.” You may very well get a rambling, unlettered mix of
Hunter Biden’s laptop, welfare fraud, trans agenda, and Chinese
COVID “globalist” cover-ups. What coalition can be built around
this list of enemies isn’t clear, but whatever the end result will
be, it won’t look progressive or populist in any meaningful sense.

_Adam Johnson hosts the Citations Needed
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[[link removed]] on Substack. Follow
him @adamjohnsonCHI [[link removed]]._

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* US Right Wing
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* Disney
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* Ron DeSantis
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* left-right asymmetry
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* Writers Strike
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