[The answer, I believe, is easy – very serious indeed. We as a
left must build a politics of broad, working-class solidarity to
defeat fascism either now or farther down the road than we can
currently envision. ]
[[link removed]]

HOW SERIOUS IS THE AUTHORITARIAN THREAT IN THE US? WHAT CAN WE DO
ABOUT IT?  
[[link removed]]


 

Adolph Reed Jr.
November 2, 2022
xxxxxx
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The answer, I believe, is easy – very serious indeed. We as a
left must build a politics of broad, working-class solidarity to
defeat fascism either now or farther down the road than we can
currently envision. _

,

 

[This is the keynote address to the conference on Anti-Fascism in the
21st Century
[[link removed]],
held at Hofstra University on Nov. 2 and 3. -- moderator.]

 The answer to the first question posed in my title, I believe most
here will agree, is easy – very serious indeed.  In fact, it’s
not unreasonable to fear that next week’s election could be the last
real one in this country for a long time. And, even if reactionaries
don’t win Congressional majorities or tighten their grip on state
legislatures and governorships at the polls, there is little reason to
doubt that some or many of them may attempt, as Bolsonaro’s forces
are doing now in Brazil, to take apparent electoral defeat as the
pretext for provoking political crisis by refusing to accept results
as legitimate to the point of mobilizing violent opposition.

Of course, the dangerous, anti-democratic tendencies did not emerge
with Trump. He became a useful symbol around which they have been able
to condense strategically and advance rapidly as an electoral
movement. However, those tendencies have been present in US politics
and have been building in this direction for a long time. And it’s
important to stress that Democrats and liberals have accommodated and
abetted their growth by ceding important interpretive and policy
ground to them all along. With your indulgence, I’m going to
rehearse some points I made a little more than a year ago. I wrote
[[link removed]] 

Discrediting government and the idea of the public has been a
component of the GOP game plan since Reagan, and Democrats have
reinforced that message in their own way. Jimmy Carter ran for the
party’s presidential nomination in 1976 partly on his record of
having cut the size of Georgia’s government as governor, and as
president, he initiated deregulation
[[link removed]] as
a policy priority and imposed the economic shock that paved the way
for Reagan. And it was Bill Clinton who announced in his 1996 State of
the Union Address, “The era of big government is over
[[link removed]],”
and he followed through by terminating the federal government’s
sixty-year commitments to provide direct income support and housing
for the indigent. Reagan attacked the social safety net as a wasteful
giveaway for frauds and losers. Clinton, as avatar of what my son
described at the time as the Democrats’ “me too, but not so
much” response to Reaganism, insisted that publicly provided social
benefits should go only to those who “play by the rules.” Four
decades of retrenchment and privatization of the public sector—often
under the guise of “outsourcing” for greater efficiency or
“doing more with less,” which Clinton and Gore sanitized as
“reinventing” government to make it “leaner” and
“smarter”—combined with steadily increasing economic
inequality 
[[link removed]]and
government’s failure to address it in any meaningful way to fuel
lack of confidence, distrust, and hostility toward government and
public goods, and eventually even to the idea of the public itself.
And the reactionary capitalist interests that bankroll the ultraright
have taken advantage of that unaddressed economic insecurity and
stoked frustration and rage into a dangerously authoritarian political
force.

It wasn’t such a big step from Rick Santelli’s faux populist 2009
meltdown calling, from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,
of all places, for a Tea Party rising to the January 6, 2021 Capitol
insurrection. McConnell’s openly declared strategy of stalemating
Democratic initiatives of whatever sort made clear that the
Republicans have no commitment to democratic government; every move
they made was directed, consciously or not, toward takeover via putsch
or putsch dressed up as election. The outcome of the 2000 presidential
election was an early augury, as the George W. Bush campaign
strongarmed a victory by means of actively partisan intervention by
Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, mobilization
of corporate goons
[[link removed]] to
storm the Miami-Dade recount, and turning to a reactionary bloc of
Supreme Court Justices to place a fig leaf of legitimacy onto theft of
the election. The Gore campaign’s reluctance to fight back
aggressively was also an augury of the implications of Clintonism’s
victory within the party, as Gore, Kerry, and Obama all ran, and Obama
governed, in pursuit of a bipartisan coalition anchored normatively by
nonexistent “moderate” Republicans. Hillary Clinton tried that
approach as well and thus did her part to put Trump in the White
House.

Some of the reactionary, authoritarian tendencies that condensed
around Trump and Trumpism have been festering and growing in American
politics at least since the end of World War II. First Barry
Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan brought them out of the shadowy
underworld populated by such groups as the John Birch Society, the
World Anti-Communist League, various McCarthyite tendencies, Klansmen
and other white supremacists, America Firsters, ultra-reactionary
groups with ties to shadowy international entities like Operation
Condor that has specialized in state-centered terror and death squads
in Latin America and its equivalent in other regions, Christian
Nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes. During the Reagan
presidency the treasonous Iran-Contra operation3
[[link removed]] illustrated
these reactionaries’ contempt for democratic government. The
guide-dog corporate news media sanitized Iran-Contra as a
“scandal,” and dutifully shepherded public discussion of it away
from the magnitude of the crimes against constitutional government and
toward the puerile, soap operatic question “What did he [Reagan,
etc.] know and when did he know it?” They’ve been joined in the
Trump years by a cornucopia of more or less organized thugs, militant
racists and misogynists, open fascists, reactionary libertarians,
delusional conspiracists, damaged true believers, and utterly venal
grifters—a category that cuts across all the others—and they’re
bankrolled by the American equivalent of German Junkers, billionaire
reactionaries whose wealth largely derives from extractive and defense
industries and other sectors that are particularly sensitive to the
federal regulatory environment. 

The ultra-reactionary Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by Yale,
Harvard, and University of Chicago law students and now has stocked
the federal judiciary up to the Supreme Court, including a hefty
complement of Catholic fascists.6
[[link removed]] Justice
Neil Gorsuch, a Federalist Society member, is the son of Anne Gorsuch
Burford, Reagan’s administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency, where her mission—like that of current Justice Clarence
Thomas as Reagan’s director of the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission—was to gut the agency. Political economist Gordon Lafer
documents in _The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking
America One State at a Time _(ILR Press, 2017) how right-wing
corporate lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business—all
funded by the Koch brothers and other rich reactionaries—have
organized at the state level to produce and pass anti-worker,
anti-democratic legislation and to secure and fortify Republican
control of state governments. In an August 2022 _New Yorker_ article
[[link removed]] [“The
Big Money Behind the Big Lie”] that, along with her book _Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical
Right,_ should be required reading for anyone who still diminishes the
threat or clings to the view that neoliberal Democrats are somehow the
greater danger for progressive interests, Jane Mayer examines the vast
dark money network – the American Junkers whose immense wealth
underwrites the accelerated assault on democratic institutions we face
at this moment.

I’m not suggesting that some deep cabal has orchestrated an
elaborate, decades long conspiracy to seize power. That’s not how
politics, certainly not insurgent politics, in a mass society works.
I’m also not interested in hashing out counterfactuals like whether
this could have happened without James Buchanan, the Cato Institute,
or the Koch brothers. What we do know that’s pertinent to what
we’re up against at this moment is that after Goldwater’s
presidential run was crushed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, enough of the
militant ultra-reactionary core of his campaign took the lesson that
they’d been talking too much only to themselves and went out into
localities among largely suburban potential constituencies to agitate
and field-test messages and issue bundles that could enable building
an alliance that extends far beyond the ranks of those who would
benefit from realizing the capitalist class agendas that lie at the
movement’s core. Historian Lisa McGirr [_Suburban Warriors: The
Origins of the New American _Right] examines what was then called the
“New Right” militants’ organizing strategies and the relatively
homogeneous suburban ecological niches – typified by Orange County,
California – within which their efforts gained traction. Political
scientist Daniel Parker’s doctoral dissertation on the Conservative
Political Action Conference
[[link removed]]  is a
distinctly informative account of how the ultra-right approaches
building, sustaining, and directing the movement.

To be sure, elements of the reactionary right have held onto and are
oriented by visions of the society as they’d like it to be
organized, and those visions are neither democratic nor egalitarian.
As their mundane political practice has evolved and their
institutional power has grown, the movement’s engineers have also
improvised, balancing the practical objective of expanding and
deepening a base and disciplined attentiveness to building power
toward overturning all egalitarian reforms that have been won since
the New Deal and imposing an authoritarian government. That means,
among other things, taking advantage of or concocting new issues that
both inflame their broader base and permit them to set the terms of
national or local political debate. Recall how quickly and thoroughly
the GOP establishment went from trying to stop Trump to playing
Renfield to his Count Dracula?

I have no idea how extensive the consciously putschist tendency has
been among the right. The best that one might say for Mitch McConnell,
for example, is that his aspiration perhaps didn’t extend much
beyond immobilizing government, precluding any progressive legislation
or appointments. Nor do I imagine that the likes of Lindsey Graham or
Kevin McCarthy had been impelled by radical ideological commitments
more elaborate than advancing the immediate interests of the class
they represent and suppressing those who might want to do anything
else. That doesn’t really matter; the policy steps necessary to
prepare for ultimate authoritarian victory are the same as those
favored by less far-sighted reactionaries: rolling back the regulatory
apparatus, which includes civil rights enforcement, politicizing and
attacking climate science, using taxation and other federal policies
to generate massive upward redistribution, stocking the judiciary,
gutting the social safety net and demonizing government at all levels,
undermining labor rights and unionization, and more, expunging even
the very idea of the public.

Watching Rand Paul doing his best Joe McCarthy impression going after
Anthony Fauci
[[link removed]]
brought home to me that Trumpism helped to bring the notion of
extra-Constitutional takeover of government in from the fringes of
national politics and out from the dark ideological core of the
Republican right. Trump’s preemptive refusal, months before the
election, to accept a defeat as legitimate opened a portal through
which the goal of authoritarian transformation could move closer to
explicit political strategy. The dangerous rubes who were foot
soldiers of the January 6 insurrection were only acting out in public,
albeit as a kayfabe lynch mob that was a hair’s breadth away from
becoming a real one, a political objective that had already condensed
among a popular right-wing base.

The notion that any Democrat officeholder is by definition
illegitimate and inauthentic isn’t new of course. Birtherism was
predicated on that general conviction; Obama’s race facilitated
spreading the claim about him, but it was already visible within
rhetoric positing Republicans as the “real Americans;” it underlay
fervor around the 2000 election theft, as well as right-wing jeremiads
that electing Democrats threatened the end of civilization, long
before Obama even became a glimmer in Wall Street’s eye. Restriction
of the franchise to property owners and the rich has been a strain in
ultra-right politics across the sweep of the twentieth century and
into the twenty-first. (It’s interesting in this respect as an
illustration of the deep, antediluvian character of the right’s
anti-democratic reflexes that the arcane demand for repeal of the 17th
Amendment to the Constitution, which since 1913 has mandated the
direct election of the U.S. Senate, has routinely popped up on
right-wing political laundry lists.) And the “real Americans like
us” qualifier gives this hostility to democracy a popular appeal for
those outside the upper class who can be suckered into identifying
with them. That qualifier also underscores the work that race
ideology, broadly understood, does to provide the illusion of
commonality among those identifying with the right.

The rallying cry that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or
rigged, or both, is a fantasy originating from Trump’s malignant
narcissism. It’s also a convenient vehicle for exhortation of
putschism. The novel coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s militant
denialism opened another portal. There’s no need to catalogue the
many ways the Republican right has actively sought to undermine public
health efforts to control, limit, or slow the virus’s spread and
minimize the harm it causes. We’re living with them every day, and
because having any basis in fact isn’t a limitation on their
proliferation, the fantastic claims grow and morph even more quickly
than the virus itself. A couple of stratagems in the ongoing
anti-public health panic are worth noting because they echo really
old-school reactionary ideology, from a time before when the fiction
of appeal to a popular audience encouraged public politesse. Recall
that early in the pandemic, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged elderly
Americans to go out and contract the virus and “sacrifice”
themselves to keep the economy open, referring to it as their
patriotic duty
[[link removed]].
Nor was he alone in floating that suggestion. (It’s a parochial
reference, I know, but that call brings to mind the up to 20,000
immigrant Irish workers who were buried where they fell from yellow
fever and malaria while digging the New Basin Canal in 1830s New
Orleans, along with the untold scores of millions of others around the
world who’ve been sacrificed for the sake of “the economy.”)
More recently, Newsmax talking head Rob Schmitt contended that
vaccination goes against nature, opining “if there is some disease
out there—maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where
something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and
that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand
in the way of that
[[link removed]].”
Schmitt and Patrick give voice to the element of the ultra-right that
frets about propagation of unworthy populations, or losers, or, to
capture that snappy old-school sensibility more
directly, _Lebensunwertes leben_. Pandemic denial and opposition to
public intervention to address dangers to public health come
organically to this element, which has been part of the institutional
foundation of ultra-right politics since the late nineteenth century,
among them bankrollers of the eugenics movement from its beginnings.
Recently, Nafeez Ahmed
[[link removed]]
– “The Dark Heart of Trussonomics: The Mainstreaming of
Libertarian Theories of Social Darwinism and Apartheid,” _Byline
Times, _October 10, 2022 – examines the “key ideological driving
force” of Truss’s and her allies’ economic program in the UK,
which he identifies as “the reshaping of neoliberalism into an
extreme nationalist economics rooted in a form of social Darwinism.
Under this ideology, it is impossible to reduce inequality because
characteristics such as race, gender and class that cause disparities
are fixed.” Ahmed perceptively notes the centrality of underclass
ideology as a normative foundation of the essentialized
inegalitarianism. 

With a startling quickness that bespeaks the depth and breadth of
their organizational capacity, the Republican right has mobilized an
alliance of committed reactionaries, opportunist political operatives,
anti-vaxxers, survivalists and other more or less dangerous
anti-government hobbyists, internet conspiracists, unhinged
psychopaths, militant anticommunists, zealous anti-abortionists and
other Christian fanatics, would-be libertarians, gun nuts, unambiguous
fascists and ethnonationalists, actual (i.e., not simply people who
say or do things that affront liberal anti-racists) white
supremacists, xenophobes, sexists and anti-LGBTQ militants, desperate
people seeking answers and solutions to the material and emotional
insecurities that overwhelm their lives, and, of course, the grifters
who follow alongside the herd looking to pick off the weak and
vulnerable. Even the right-wing Catholic bishops have gotten into the
act, at least when they can stay off Grindr, defying the Pope in
pressing to deny Biden the Sacrament, if not to excommunicate him.
Notwithstanding their idiosyncratic identities and issues, Trumpism
has developed as the umbrella under which they converge, with MAGA as
the symbol that condenses all their disparate aspirations. And that
didn’t just happen either; it’s the result of years of propaganda
and organizing.

Birtherism and Pizzagate built on the kayfabe principle to establish
the movement’s foundation in a truer Truth than the world of facts
and contradictions. That’s how Trump supporters can declare
sincerely that he’s “the only one telling the truth,” even
though practically every other word out of his mouth is a lie. No
matter where he was born, Obama’s _essence_ was not American; if
Democrats and cosmopolitan liberals are hidden pedophiles—and the
image of the pedophile as quintessential, unqualifiable,
conversation-stopping evil is the product of a bipartisan sex panic in
the 1980s8
[[link removed]] —and,
more recently, cannibals (the latter presumably included to inflame
those who may be softer on pedophilia), then the problem is not what
they stand for, what positions or policies they advance. And that’s
why belief in the Stolen Election is so impervious to rational
argument; Biden stole the election because real Americans’ votes
were not permitted to prevail. Votes cast for him were fraudulent by
definition because people who voted for him could not be legitimate
Americans. (In Oklahoma, where Biden didn’t carry a single county, a
Republican legislator petitioned, unsuccessfully, for a “forensic
and independent audit”
[[link removed]] of
the 2020 vote in Oklahoma City and other counties in the state on the
pretext that the Biden vote was in his view nonetheless suspiciously
high. This is shades of the high period of disfranchisement in the
late nineteenth-century South, when Democrat putschists considered
even one Republican vote too many.)

Perhaps most important and most telling is how COVID conspiracy and
resistance to masking and vaccination have been articulated and fed
into widespread, round the clock, frenzied agitation asserting the
absolute primacy of individual “rights” over any public concern.
This is the fruit of the half-century of relentless, right-wing
attack—again, abetted by neoliberal Democrats—on the very idea of
the public, which was already evident in proliferation of the belief
that _my _“right” to carry an assault rifle into any public
space overrides concern for the public safety and now that my
“right” to refuse to wear a mask even in establishments that
require them or vaccination in the throes of a pandemic supersedes
regulations intended to safeguard public health. That narrative
reinforces castigation of any public intervention as government
overreach or even tyranny. The apparent irrationality superficially
driving the hysteria stands out and prompts bewilderment and
astonishment. Yet, although characterizations of the Republican party
as having become a “death cult
[[link removed]]”
and the like can be arresting as metaphor, they miss the vector
plotted by this movement’s political trajectory and the gravest
dangers it poses. It is useful to recall Margaret Thatcher’s three
most infamous dicta: 1) “There is no such thing [as society]! There
are individual men and women and there are families, and no government
can do anything except through people and people look to themselves
first
[[link removed]]”;
2) “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul
[[link removed]]”; and 3) when
asked to identify her greatest achievement, she replied “Tony Blair
and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.
[[link removed]]”
The extent to which that sort of solipsistic individualism has spread
in American life, irrational or not, reflects the success of the
Thatcherite vision.

Many liberals, and not a few leftists, may dismiss the account I give
here as wildly hyperbolic, although in the past year more liberals
have come around to acknowledging the real threat to democracy and
what they fetishize as “rule of law.” Liberals have an abiding
faith in the solidity of American democratic institutions; some
bookish leftists have internally consistent arguments demonstrating
why a putsch can’t happen because it wouldn’t be in capital’s
interests. It always seems most reasonable to project the future as a
straight-line extrapolation from the recent past and present; inertia
and path dependence are powerful forces. But that’s why political
scientists nearly all were caught flat-footed by the collapse of the
Soviet Union. To be clear, I’m not predicting the possible outcome
I’ve laid out. My objective is to indicate dangerous, opportunistic
tendencies and dynamics at work in this political moment which I think
liberals and whatever counts as a left in the United States
underestimated or, worse, dismissed entirely for far too long. If
forced to bet, based on the perspective on American political history
since 1980, or even 1964, that I’ve laid out here, I’d speculate
that the nightmare outline I’ve sketched is between possible and
likely, I imagine and hope closer to the former than the latter.

A key practical reason to stress the danger on the horizon is the
possibility that the national and global political-economic order
we’ve known as neoliberalism has evolved to a point at which it is
no longer capable of providing enough benefits, opportunity, and
security to enough of the population to maintain its popular
legitimacy. I am hardly alone in suggesting that we may have come to a
significant crossroad. People with much greater faith in and
commitment to contemporary capitalism than I have, and who have much
more sophisticated knowledge of its intricate inner dynamics, also
have expressed that view, though in somewhat different terms and in
relation to different political concerns. And that’s in addition to
a broader consensus among globalist economic technocrats that the
tendency to financial crises is chronic and that the goal of
management of the global financial system must center more on
recognizing them quickly and mitigating their effects than on
preventing them. No less decorated a Doctor of the neoliberal Church
than Lawrence Summers
[[link removed]] as
early as 2013 invoked, albeit gingerly, the language of “secular
stagnation,” long rejected by his brand of economists, as perhaps
useful for making sense of chronic underperformance of U.S. GDP. He
elaborated further on the stagnationist tendency in the national
economy in a co-authored 2019 Brookings paper
[[link removed]]
[“On Falling Neutral Real Rates, Fiscal Policy, and the Risk of
Secular Stagnation”]. BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset
management firm which has a significant voice in the Biden
administration, most prominently through Brian Deese, Director of the
National Economic Council, also sounded the alarm about stagnation and
discussed heterodox responses, including industrial policy, another
neoliberal bugbear, in a 2019 report, “Dealing with the Next
Downturn
[[link removed]].”
At the same time, the already astonishing patterns of regressive
redistribution of wealth and income that largely have defined
neoliberalism globally, and in the U.S. particularly, have accelerated
since the Great Recession, and even more during the coronavirus
pandemic
[[link removed]]. How
could such an order not slide into the throes of legitimation crisis?
That’s even more likely to the extent that approaches to mitigation
of the effects of periodic fiscal crises mainly are intended to
protect the investor class at the expense of taxpayers and public
goods. 

If neoliberalism has reached such an impasse, I’ve argued, there are
only two possible directions forward politically: one is toward social
democracy and pursuit of solidaristic, downwardly redistributive
policy agendas within a framework of government in the public good;
the other is toward authoritarianism that preserves the core
neoliberal principle of accumulation by dispossession by suppressing
potential opposition. The latter direction, commonly anchored
rhetorically by what Colin Crouch has described as “politicized
pessimistic nostalgia,” has proliferated since before the Great
Recession. Parties or movements organized around that sort of
reactionary politics have come to power, electorally or otherwise, in
Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, Ukraine, Brazil, and I’d add Boris
Johnson’s Tory government in the UK and Trump’s here.
Elsewhere—e.g., France, Austria, Germany and throughout the
EU—they’re significant enough to require being taken into account
in electoral political calculations. It’s short-sighted not to note
that similar forces are on the rise in this country and that Trumpism
has emerged as a vessel for cultivating and deploying that politicized
pessimistic nostalgia as an alternative to more social-democratic
response.

The reality that the processes of neoliberalization at their core rest
uneasily with popular democracy makes reckoning with this right-wing
tendency’s growth all the more urgent. Insulation of policy
processes as much as possible from popular oversight—at local,
national, and international levels—is at the heart of neoliberal
accumulation. To that extent, it’s naïve to presume a capitalist
class preference for democratic over authoritarian government,
particularly if the democratic form comes with an opening for efforts
to impinge on capital’s prerogatives. Even if we take the corporate
rush to affirm support for racial justice after George Floyd’s
murder as expressing genuine endorsements of anti-racist equality of
opportunity and opposition to unequal and criminal hyper-policing, and
not tainted by opportunism, is it reasonable to expect that, say,
Uber, Amazon, McDonald’s, or Goldman Sachs would actively fight for
a form of government that might regulate their labor market practices
and methods of accumulation and force them to pay taxes against one
that promised to protect them? As Walter Benn Michaels and I have
observed repeatedly, earnest institutional and individual commitment
to an anti-disparitarian ideal of justice is entirely compatible with
support for a society that becomes ever more sharply class-skewed and
unequal in the aggregate.

So far, I’ve focused on the nature of the authoritarian threat, an
assessment with which I assume many may agree at least in general
terms. Although the two are related, the more important question is
how to combat that threat. I want to stress that in my view the only
hope for thwarting that tendency is to concentrate our efforts on
formulating, organizing around, and agitating for an ensemble of
policies that reinvigorate the notion of government in the public
good, which has been a casualty of more than four decades of
bipartisan neoliberalism. The “pessimistic nostalgia” that
Trumpists and other authoritarians propagate and mobilize around is
most consequentially the result of decades of bipartisan failure to
provide concrete remedies that address the steadily intensifying
economic inequality and insecurity that have driven so much of the
working class to the wall. We need to provide an alternative vision
that proceeds unabashedly from the question: What would be the thrust
and content of public policy if the country were governed by and for
the working-class majority?

 Of course, for the moment, very much hinges on Democrats’ beating
back or holding off the Republican electoral efforts next Tuesday. But
building a broad working-class based movement is the only way we might
successfully defeat the reactionary right wing, and we need between
now and 2024 to begin trying to build the sort of _popular_ movement
that we need. And we must be clear that such a left movement does not
yet exist, no matter how many internet announcements of imminent
victory show up daily on our various electronic devices. There are
many leftists and people who support leftist causes and programs, but
a left with real political capacity has been absent for so long in the
United States that even most sympathetic people can’t conceptualize
what one would look like, how we could distinguish it from the
“pageantry of protest” or the effluvia of premature proclamation
and branding. Several years ago, Mark Dudzic and I suggested salient
features of an institutionally significant left. 

By left we mean a reasonably coherent set of class-based and
anti-capitalist ideas, programmes and policies that are embraced by a
cohort of leaders and activists who are in a position to speak on
behalf of and mobilize a broad constituency. Such a left would be, or
would aspire to be, capable of setting the terms of debate in the
ideological sphere and marshalling enough social power to intervene on
behalf of the working class in the political economy. Some measures of
that social power include: ability to affect both the enterprise wage
and the social wage; power to affect urban planning and development
regimes; strength to intervene in the judicial and regulatory
apparatus to defend and promote working-class interests; power not
only to defend the public sphere from encroachments by private capital
but also to expand the domain of non-commoditized public goods; and
generally to assert a force capable of influencing, even shaping,
public policy in ways that advance the interests and security of the
working-class majority.

Clearly, this is not the sort of formation that can be generated
overnight. And that has long been a catch-22 for leftists, especially
those whose political thinking is shaped by moral outrage or its
practical expression, activistism. On the one hand, the magnitude of
the immediate dangers we face is so great that we don’t have time to
concentrate only on the sort of slow organizing that building such a
movement necessitates, and this moment’s urgency is at least as
great as any other any of us has faced in our lifetimes. On the other
hand, arguably one of the reasons we’re in the current predicament
is that a left as Dudzic and I describe has been absent for decades.
So, even as surviving the 2022 election looms in our political
calculations (as Walter Benn Michaels notes regarding the stakes of
the current moment, “even those of us who don’t love liberal
democracy will love even less what we’ll get from [Josh] Hawley et
al.”), we aren’t going to be able to turn the tide against the
rising reaction unless we begin to organize in that way and to rebuild
broad working-class confidence in a public good approach to
government. It’s clearer now than ever that only by agitating for a
solidaristic political agenda and perspective on politics can we even
hope to forestall, much less defeat the assault that has already moved
well in from the horizon.

An implication of that imperative is that the challenge of beating
back surging reaction must go well beyond electing Democrats. In fact,
since 2015 we’ve seen ample evidence – first in their intense
mobilizations against the Bernie Sanders insurgencies in 2016 and 2020
-- that mainstream Democratic elites are more concerned with
preempting emergence of a left faction within the party than with
combating the rising authoritarian or fascist tide in the polity.  (I
know some object that the Pelosi/Schumer/Clinton wing of the party
were so hostile toward Sanders not because he was too far left but
because they were convinced that he couldn’t win. However, that is a
distinction without a difference. They were convinced that he
couldn’t win because they embraced the view, associated with the
Clintonite party’s embrace of neoliberalism, that winning elections
_requires_ chasing the phantasm of the moderate – socially liberal,
fiscally conservative -- Republican voter or what the pollsters’ and
political scientists’ fetishize as the median voter.)

This offers a sharper perspective on the flood of support for
antiracist arguments and gestures after George Floyd’s murder. It
also, in addition to however genuine the political and business elites
were who embraced it, shifted the focus of progressive politics away
from economic inequality. Antiracism in this way functioned much as
Trumpist and other reactionary forces did in mobilizing race and other
ideologies of ascriptive difference to undermine politics based on
fashioning working-class solidarities. It is telling in this regard as
well that in 2022 Democrats more or less concertedly solicited people
of color, women or LGBTQIA candidates to embody – literally –
“progressive” values rather than candidates who first of all stood
for working-class programs and agendas. 

Of course, we can’t possibly generate anything on the scale of what
Dudzic and I describe by 2024, and next week’s outcomes as likely as
not will pose new, more immediate and possibly desperate challenges
and dangers. The larger goal of building a grounded working-class
movement, however, should inform how we go about responding to the
immediate imperative of turning back the reactionary assault. 

Trumpism’s success also has shown that making headway on this front
will require undoing decades of bipartisan disparagement of public
goods and propagation of both the Thatcherite fiction that there is no
realm beyond the individual and Democrats’ at best self-deluding
fantasies about doing more with less. Many readers will recall from
the 2008 presidential campaign the agitated cries among McCain
supporters to “Keep your government hands off my Medicare
[[link removed]].”
There is an ample social science literature finding that whether or
not one recognizes that government is the source of benefits one
receives has an impact on trust in and regard for government. I’ll
cite only one study I know most intimately. Political scientist Ashley
Tallevi, in a sophisticated study of Medicaid managed care and federal
contraceptive policies, [“Making the Political Personal: Health
Insurance, State Visibility, and Civic Perceptions” (unpublished
Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of
Pennsylvania, 2017)], found that recipients of the services who knew
they were provided by the state had more favorable views of government
than those who, principally because service provision had been
privatized or outsourced, did not know. This research, which
dovetails with experience from the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute’s
trainings with rank-and-file union workers on economic inequality and
the health care crisis, underscores that privatization and outsourcing
are not merely objectionable insofar as they turn the public sector
into a woodlot for profiteers. They also have been instrumental in
implanting Thatcher’s first dictum as common sense. Proliferation of
that common sense marks the success of her second dictum, and the
Democratic Party’s trajectory from Bill Clinton to the Biden
presidency is testament to the boast in her third. We can only even
chip away at those critical setbacks on the ideological front if
leftists—including left or progressive leaning advocacy and interest
groups and most of all the labor movement—lobby and agitate for that
public good perspective and approach.

Concretely, that means taking advantage of the openings—ambivalent
and limited as they may be—to press where possible, in our own
networks, workplaces, civic engagements, and institutional
affiliations, in the public realm for those with ready access to it,
for the administration’s infrastructure plans to reinvigorate the
public sector, not simply stimulate private investment opportunities.
It means similarly working to anchor climate change policy to job
creation and a serious commitment to make whole those workers who are
displaced in the economic and social reorganization that addressing
climate change requires. It means also agitating and building public
support for initiatives like postal banking
[[link removed]] and eliminating the income
cap on social security tax, even though the latter may produce little
more than a holding action against Biden’s long-demonstrated
proclivities regarding “entitlements.” 

In the electoral domain, at DJDI we have observed in our worker
trainings that even allusion to candidates or signature partisan
issues for many workers sets off alarm bells of distrust, barriers of
unnecessary resistance to our training program. Others have recorded
the same phenomenon, noting that even in states that
characteristically vote Republican, voters have also passed ballot
initiatives that raise the minimum wage and legislate other pro-worker
initiatives that Republicans steadfastly oppose. This underscores the
importance of getting outside the Democrat/Republican divide and
gearing electoral interventions to push clear working-class programs
and policies. That in turn suggests that electoral engagement can be
more productively directed toward pursuit of ballot initiatives that
place clear working-class oriented proposals before the electorate
without all the noise and confusion – e.g., personalism – that
accompany candidate-centered campaigns. Issue-centered ballot
initiatives also can be useful tools of political education. The new
episode of DJDI’s podcast,
classmatterspodcast.org [[link removed]] discusses
one such campaign, the Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment, which will
levy a 4% tax on incomes over $1 million a year, and which is
projected to generate $2 billion revenue annually that will support
education, transportation, and public infrastructure. 

Finally, I sometimes hear that I don’t want people ever to be happy
or to celebrate political victories. So I’ll close with what may at
first blush may not seem like an upbeat note, which I’ll preface by
pointing out that a few years ago, I binged-watched several political
films from the 1960s and early 1970s – “The Organizer,”
“Battle of Algiers,” “Z,” and “State of Siege” – all in
one day. I was struck that each film ends with a defeat but that each
was broadly understood in its moment as a profoundly optimistic film.
I realized that such films couldn’t be made now – what! no
superheroes or magical intervention?! Fast forward to the present and
the perils facing us. During this past summer, I faced up to the
likelihood that, even if we began to generate a working-class movement
of the sort that could meet the challenge, the greater likelihood is
that we won’t be able to defeat the fascist tide; it has too great a
head start because it is so deeply rooted institutionally. And that
led me to consider that our efforts now may be more for those who’ll
be around when the authoritarian regime begins to unravel, and who
will be looking for ways forward. I found that thought immediately
somewhat depressing, if not defeatist, which is why I more or less
consciously repressed it for a while. After all, an implication of
that realization is that, as a 75-year-old, not only could this
November 8, or maybe at best 2024, well be the last real election in
the U.S. in my lifetime; another, more significant implication is that
we simply can’t hope to fend off the authoritarian threat at this
juncture. However, I mentioned my sad little epiphany to a colleague
who has been experiencing the same concerns about our lack of capacity
for mounting responses to the reactionary horrors. I was surprised
that the response was elation because, like the sensibilities of that
earlier left, the colleague understands and is rooted in appreciation
of protracted struggle and saw in that observation the basis for a
practical sense of purpose. And that recognition of the protracted
character of our struggle is a reminder, first, that as a left we face
the same imperative to build a politics of broad, working-class
solidarity no matter whether we hope to defeat fascism now or farther
down the road than we can currently envision, and that a realistic
source of optimism in a moment like this is recognition that the
ruling class’s fantasies of its omnipotence are just that.

Thank you. 

_ADOLPH REED JR. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the
University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor and author of several
books on the relationship between class and racism. His writing and
opinion pieces have appeared on academic and popular journals and
magazines including The Progressive, The Village Voice, The New
Republic, The Nation, Dissent, and nonsite.org, of which he is an
editorial board member. Professor Reed served on the board of Public
Citizen Inc., was a member of the Interim National Council of the
Labor Party, and is currently on the boards of Food and Water Action
and the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute (DJDI), serving as a regular on
its Class Matters podcast — [link removed]
[[link removed]]._

  

* Anti-Fascism
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* Fascism
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* neo-fascism
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* democracy
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* working-class
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