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**DECEMBER 18, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Department of Transportation Issues $140 Million Fine for 2022 Southwest
Holiday Meltdown
The company will compensate customers who experience major delays or
cancellations with travel vouchers, over and above offsetting all costs
from the disruptions. BY DAVID DAYEN
Microsoft, Musk, and the Question of Unions
Suddenly, a leading American corporation appears to be OK with the idea
of collective bargaining. Hint: It's not Tesla. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
Getting the Lead Out
The Biden administration sets a goal of removing all lead water pipes
throughout the country in the next ten years. BY RAMENDA CYRUS
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Far Left and the Possible Left
The odyssey of some confused lefties who migrate to the far right-and
the cure
Why do onetime progressives, such as Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, Robert
Kennedy Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and the comedian Russell Brand, among
others, sometimes gravitate to the right?
**New York Times** columnist Michelle Goldberg recently offered some
musings
on that question, which was in turn inspired by a longer essay in the
magazine
**In These Times**.
For Goldberg, one reason is a reaction to a public humiliation or
cancellation. Many of these defectors are wrestling with personal
demons. Settling scores gets muddled with wild ideological swings.
The authors of the excellent In These Times piece
,
Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, tell a longer and more complex story,
adding the fact that the right has far more money than the left to lure
defectors and offer them fortune as well as fame. The far right is also
welcoming of former lefties licking their wounds and looking for new
friends.
Another reason, Goldberg argues, is "a crisis of faith in the
possibility of progress." I am a huge Goldberg fan, but she is
uncharacteristically wrong when she contends that "liberals and leftists
have lots of excellent policy ideas but rarely articulate a plausible
vision of the future."
This claim is doubly off the mark. It falls into the trap of conflating
the possible left with the far left-and the possible left has been
doing well lately.
Our magazine, for instance, is all about articulating a plausible vision
of the future, one that is plausible both as policy and as majority
politics. We have influenced the policies of the Biden administration in
several areas, including a Day One Agenda
of executive orders, as well as on
trade policy, labor policy, constraints on Big Tech and Big Pharma, and
general revision of the mistaken conceits of neoliberalism.
"The possibility of progress" is the whole point. Mainstream
progressives who are clear about first principles are not among the
defectors to the right. Could you imagine, say, Elizabeth Warren
switching sides just because the battles she fights are hard? Or
anti-monopoly crusaders like Lina Khan or Matt Stoller? Or our friends
at the Economic Policy Institute?
David Horowitz, one of the earliest defectors, migrated from far left to
hard right. The conspiratorial mentality is similar. But the so-called
horseshoe theory-the idea that the left and right almost meet at the
extremes-is true only of the very far left.
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One piece of mischief that both opportunistic centrists and careless
commentators indulge is false symmetry. A fundraising piece from No
Labels contends that young people need
"someone to restore their faith in the promise of America, after so many
years of partisan fighting that's left them pessimistic about their
futures." You'd never know that all the partisan blockage is on one
side.
One way to be clear about first principles is to keep political economy
paramount and never forget the role of raw power in denying democratic
preferences. Most Americans, if given the choice, would support the kind
of social democracy that this magazine has always stood for-decent
wages and job prospects, affordable housing, reliable health coverage,
college without crushing debt, taxation of billionaires to give everyone
else a shot.
Here are some first principles of mine:
Get political economy right, remind the bottom 95 percent of what unites
us, and divisive cultural and racial schisms are less fearsome.
Don't let the cultural far left define the possible left. One can
support radical reform of policing and carceral abuses without embracing
the politically lethal slogan "Defund the police."
Watch out for the temptation of facile contrarianism. In an obituary
appreciation of Charles Peters
,
who died last month at 96, I saluted him as a lovely man and a fine
editor who was mostly wrong in his calls for neoliberalism.
Foundations, weirdly, tend to have a blind spot when it comes to
magazines like ours. They spend billions to promote policy ideas and
hire public relations firms to get the message out. But when we go hat
in hand to foundations, too many tell us: Sorry, but we don't have a
media program.
Excuse me? Our entire purpose is to change narratives and translate
policy ideas into compelling journalism coupled with a political
analysis of what it takes to get them taken seriously. In the more than
30 years that I've been at this, getting foundations to appreciate the
role of progressive media has been a never-ending challenge: Fire the PR
people and fund us.
So in the meantime, we rely on our readers. And-here comes the
pitch-we are having a year-end fundraising telethon
today. If you value what the
**Prospect** does, please click here and
send us a gift.
There is zero risk that we will defect to the far right, but some risk
that we will not maximize a much-needed voice absent your support.
Thank you!
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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