"After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever "The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’""
Please America, don't let Trump take you down his 'it's all about me' sinkhole.
For Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ilham Aliyev, and others, a second Trump term provides strategic openings and a dismantling of a liberal order that troubles their ties with the West.
United States President Donald J. Trump meets with the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Mihály Orbán at the White House, Washington, D.C. May 13, 2019. Chris Kleponis/Polaris/pool/ABACAPRESS.COM.
Of the more than 50 elections taking place around the world in 2024, the most consequential one is in the United States, with two presumptive candidates offering radically different views of world order: Donald Trump’s America-First, economic nationalist agenda vs. Joe Biden’s transatlanticist pledge to preserve the world of alliances that America has built since World War II.
How world leaders, in particular the strongman on Europe’s periphery, view the U.S. elections reveals the nature of their regimes and the type of international order they seek.
The golden rule of international politics is for nations not to speak openly about each other’s elections, but it is no secret that in Europe, where democracies have thrived for decades, Europeans prefer Biden’s reelection. This decision is strategic and based on values. Europeans have relied on Washington’s leadership in organizing the robust response against Russia’s war in Ukraine and fear that a second Trump administration would impair Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia and dramatically weaken NATO—the backbone of European security.
For the countries that comprise the European Union, the Biden administration’s attachment to multilateralism and liberal democracy is a familiar comfort zone. Yet there is palpable concern in Europe that a second Trump presidency would see the United States discard these principles, and even overlook international violations, thereby emboldening autocrats around the world—and worse, contributing to the rise of illiberal parties inside Europe.
However, not everyone is rooting for Biden.
Traditionally, Transatlanticism inferred a partnership of countries with democratic traditions—with a strong German-French axis at its continental core. Now there is an alternative trans-Atlantic axis that is no longer rooted in liberalism.
Inside Europe, there are leaders on the far-right, most notably France’s Marine Le Pen and Britain’s Brexit-champion Nigel Farage, who have struck a good relationship with the Trump world and would arguably welcome .. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y2DM/ .. a Republican White House. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a closet .. https://www.politico.eu/article/giorgia-meloni-europe-donald-trump-ursula-von-der-leyen/ .. Trump supporter (though she has delighted Europeans with her eagerness to stand by Ukraine). The European far-right overlaps with Trump’s MAGA base in several ways, but mostly in its fearmongering on “globalist elites” and discourse on equality, diversity, and immigration. Europe’s far-right insurrectionaries think of themselves as part of the same anti-liberal revolution as Trump.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán holds an annual international media briefing in Budapest, Hungary, December 21, 2023. Reuters/Marton Monus.
Viktor Orbán
Then there are the strongmen on Europe’s edges who are pining for a Trump win. Top among these is Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist prime minister and far-right conspirator. Hungary is a member of the EU and NATO but has been singing from a different hymn sheet under Orbán. Trump and Orbán’s long-standing bromance reached a new level in March when, defying diplomatic etiquette on nonintervention in other countries’ domestic affairs, Orbán visited .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-09/trump-lavishes-praise-on-orban-during-fete-at-mar-a-lago .. Mar-a-Lago, skipping the White House, in support of the candidate whom he calls a “man of peace.”
For Orbán, Trump’s appeal is both ideological and strategic—and not unrequited. Hungary’s long-time leader has an iconic stature on the MAGA right and has provided something of a template on how to capture a state and its institutions for an illiberal transformation. Orbán calls it “Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics and patriotic politics ..https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-viktor-orban-europe-hungary-budapest-6480ac99541044d6ff08d8005cf725ca “—read anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigration, anti-liberal. American conservatives and their institutions, including Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation, have hailed the Hungarian leader as an oracle, providing speaking opportunities to inspire U.S. conservatives.
But for Orbán, Trump’s allure is not solely based on culture wars. Orbán’s support for the Trump agenda is also a strategic move in sync with his view—and ambivalence—about an imperialistic Russia in Europe’s neighborhood. Orbán’s Hungary has developed economic and strategic ties with Russia and China—and likes to use its relations with the United States as leverage against other powers. Orbán also happens to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the European Union and has consistently criticized and disrupted the EU’s push to arm Ukraine against the Russian invasion, even dragging his feet on issues like Sweden’s recent bid for NATO membership.
Orbán’s preference for Trump is based on the idea that a Trump administration would be more willing to find a modus vivendi with Putin’s Russia. A widely held assumption in the policy community is that under Trump, Ukraine funding would be in peril and Ukrainians would be pushed to enter negotiations with Russia—albeit short on U.S. military aid and with a weaker hand. Countries on NATO’s eastern flank feel threatened by an emboldened Russia, which they fear would not stop in Ukraine. Orbán, on the other hand, is focused on coexisting with Russia.
After he visited Mar-a-Lago, Orbán rejoiced that Trump reportedly discussed some “pretty detailed plans .. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68533351 ” to end the war in Ukraine and promised, if reelected, to cut off funding for Ukraine. “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán announced after his visit. “That is why the war will end … it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with his confidants for the 2024 election at Gostiny Dvor in Moscow, Russia, January 31, 2024. Reuters/Maxim Shemetov.
Vladimir Putin
Putin, too, has the same reason to want Trump in the White House.
Europeans worry that a second Trump term would start with Washington arm-twisting Ukraine to start talks with Russia, without a proper assurance of Western support and long-term security guarantees for Kyiv. The U.S. Congress’ Ukraine funding debate and Trump-allied Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s hand-wringing over the funding bill already reveal the direction of travel.
While the idea that the war will ultimately end in negotiations is not in itself surprising among allies—a White House spokesperson has said that “The only way this war ends ultimately is through negotiation ..https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/white-house-the-only-way-ukraine-war-ends-is-through-negotiation/ar-AA1mqkNN ”—how and when these negotiations take place matter tremendously. In private conversations, U.S. and European officials define the endgame in Ukraine as the emergence of a strong and sovereign nation that can stand independently, even if Russians continue their de facto occupation of Crimea and parts of Ukraine. However, they acknowledge that to get there, Ukraine must be backed militarily so it can “have the strongest hand possible when that [the talks] comes.” Pushing Ukraine into talks without supplying weapons for Kyiv to preserve its battlefield position would amount to peace on Russia’s terms—paving the path to Ukraine’s permanent partition, with no security guarantees against future Russian attacks.
Putin no doubt prefers that option and may find the chances of getting there easier under Trump.
Other strategic imperatives explain why Moscow’s strongman prefers a second Trump administration, including the unavoidable discord it would create between the United States and its European allies, the prospect of NATO’s paralysis,possible U.S. inaction if Russia advances further into Ukraine, and the opportunity to further expand Russia’s footprint in parts of the Middle East and Africa after potential U.S. retrenchment from the region.
A MAGA presidency would also deliver a blow to the type of inclusive liberal democracy that Putin despises. Putin has frequently ridiculed the West’s progressive politics and transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, which he calls “Western anti-family ideology.” The Russian leader’s anti-woke credentials are no less than those of the MAGA commentators.
Interestingly, Putin has denied that he prefers a second Trump term, even though the advantages for the Kremlin are clear. When asked which candidate is better for Russia, Putin, breaking a well-established Russian tradition of not directly expressing a preference in the U.S. elections, said, “Biden, he’s more experienced, more predictable, he’s a politician of the old formation.”
Most Russia watchers believe that Putin, an ex-KGB officer who is a master of obfuscation, is trolling the American electorate ahead of the November elections and providing the Trump campaign with a useful talking point .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1P9GRy-7K8 . Brookings scholar and Russia expert Angela Stent told me, “Putin feels?that he increasingly has the upper hand in dealing?with a divided, polarized America. Kremlin politics?are such a black box that Western publics hang on every word he says, believing?that he signals his true intentions. In the matter of American?elections, he does not. Having hinted many?times that he prefers Trump, Putin’s unexpected endorsement of Biden intentionally caused great confusion. Of course, he is toying with the U.S. public, but the Trump campaign has a new slogan: a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Vladimir Putin.”
The President of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaks at a press conference in Berlin on November 17, 2023. ddp/Andreas Gora via Reuters Connect.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Further on Europe’s eastern edge, others eye a second Trump term with anticipation.
Turkey’s Erdogan had gotten along perfectly well with Trump during the latter’s first term and would likely welcome another opportunity to leverage the international visibility and presidential access that Trump’s White House generously provided him—and the Biden administration has denied. Erdogan imagines himself as a leader who can play a geopolitical balancing act among great powers and speak on behalf of downtrodden Muslims around the world. But over the past few years, the Biden administration and European leaders have kept Erdogan at arm’s length because of Turkey’s democratic backsliding and proximity to the Kremlin, hence rendering him unable to showcase his international brinkmanship. Erdogan has also been marginalized and frozen out of regional diplomacy on the highly consequential war in Gaza on account of his public defense of Hamas .. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-sultans-ghost-erdogan-and-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/ . He would welcome the chance for high-profile engagement with the United States under a second Trump term.
Turkey has other things to look forward to in a second Trump White House. Erdogan’s son-in-law had famously gotten along .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/us/politics/trump-erdogan-family-turkey.html .. with Trump’s son-in-law and former advisor Jared Kushner, and the two presidents had pledged .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-13/trump-says-he-wants-100-billion-trade-deal-with-turkey?embedded-checkout=true .. to boost U.S.-Turkish trade and investments to an ambitious target of $100 billion. Much like Orbán, Erdogan has also built close relations with Putin and benefited from Western sanctions against Russia by becoming a critical entrepôt. There is the hope that Trump’s re-election might be good for Turkish business interests and increase Turkish trade—even though the Trump administration’s America First economic policy has generally been anti-free trade and hiked tariffs on Turkish steel.
Trump’s return to the White House may also provide an opportunity for Turkey to expand its military control over Iraq and Syria—and settle scores with the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds that Ankara considers to be terrorists. The issue has been a major irritant in Turkey’s relations with the United States and Turkish officials believe Trump was prevented by the U.S. bureaucracy (“the deep state”) from addressing the issue. Ankara is now hoping that Trump will be able to finish the job he started .. https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-slams-ridiculous-endless-wars-as-he-defends-dramatic-shift-in-syria-policy-turkey-erdogan-kurds-isis/ .. in 2019 and withdraw U.S. troops from Syria (“I held off this fight for … almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home”). Such a move would allow Ankara to extend its territorial control inside the Syrian border and, as a bonus, consolidate nationalist voters around Erdogan once again.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2023-03-14T000000Z_2115490716_MT1IMGOST0000ZRIGZ_RTRMADP_3_IMAGO-IMAGES.jpg Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, attends a joint press conference in Berlin, Germany, March 13, 2023. IMAGO/Chris Emil Janßen via Reuters Connect.
Ilham Aliyev
A stone’s throw away from Turkey, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev has been snubbing the Biden administration’s efforts to broker a peace treaty with neighboring Armenia, seemingly waiting for an opening to embark on his third military incursion against his neighbor. Having inherited power from his father, Aliyev has been keen to establish his own legitimacy by building a powerful military and reconquering Azeri territory that had been under Armenian control for decades. The 44-day war in September 2020 between the two states resulted in the deaths of several thousand Azeris and Armenians and resulted in Azerbaijan’s decisive victory, without so much as raising eyebrows from the Trump administration. U.S. officials now worry that Aliyev’s maximalist narrative might signal another offensive, this time cutting across Armenian territory to build a land bridge Baku wants.
Azerbaijan has been criticized by the international community and U.S. Congress for its human rights record, intolerance of domestic dissidents, and the treatment of Armenians and Armenian cultural heritage in the territories it has recently conquered. U.S. military assistance to Baku continues but often seems in peril due to congressional concerns .. https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1129418.html .. regarding the country’s human rights record.
Aliyev would like a closer relationship with the West but, despite Baku’s growing role as an energy supplier to Europe, has not been invited to the White House. He would like the human rights issue taken off the table once and for all—and knows that this could only happen under Trump.
Strongmen, middle powers, and democracy
The Eurasian land mass has not been hospitable for democracy, and, with the exception of Georgia and Armenia, authoritarianism is rampant across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the neighboring Middle East. The handful of instances when societies pushed for openings have been met with repression. With the exceptions of Israel and Turkey, democratic pluralism is lacking, and civil society remains weak in many countries. Iraq and Lebanon offer competitive political systems but fail their citizens in governance and accountability. Elsewhere it is lifetime leaders, kings, emirs, and elected autocrats.
This makes external relations critical for legitimacy and maintenance of power.
Leaders have different reasons to want a return of the Trump administration—often they are a combination of strategic interests and a desire to move away from a world where the vestiges of the post-World War II liberal order still set the tone. Those who prefer a Trump presidency are often middle powers run by strongmen who prefer the idea of a multipolar world—one where the United States is not the order-enforcing hegemon and where democratic norms are no longer the organizing principle for alliances. Trump, they hope, would expedite that trend.
Of course, the 2024 U.S. elections will not be decided by Eurasian strongmen or Middle Eastern autocrats, but by the American people (or rather, Americans in key presidential swing states). Yet who they choose will have massive resonance beyond America’s borders at a time when democracy is in decline and a sense of cynicism permeates international ties. The elections can preserve the world of rules and alliances that America has tried to enforce for much of the past century or accelerate the transition away from the age of liberalism, toward a post-American order.
The latter, undoubtedly, is what autocracies want.
Asli Aydintasbas Visiting Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe, The Turkey Project
Note to the left, leave the extremes to the other side..
"After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever "The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’" "
By John B. Judis January 21, 2020
In January 1969, Tom Hayden, a founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and a leader of the antiwar movement, came to speak at the University of California at Santa Cruz, on behalf of the SDS chapter where I was a member. At the time, many on the new left thought a revolution was imminent. Major cities had been set ablaze by rioters; gun-toting members of the Black Panther Party had confronted legislators in Sacramento; hundreds of thousands were marching against the Vietnam War; and with Richard Nixon in office — and the war showing no signs of abating — the protests were turning violent.
Hayden, too, was confident about what lay ahead. Perched on the edge of the stage in a denim work shirt and blue jeans, he spelled out his vision for a new American revolution. I still recall him saying — in the language of the period — “We already have the blacks, the browns, the women and the students,” and then adding that if we could also get blue-collar workers, we’d have the basis for a revolution. Personally, I was a bit more pessimistic. At Socialist Revolution, the Marxist journal I began working for in June 1969, the economist James O’Connor branded me “the little black cloud” because of my doubts that revolution was just around the corner.
[Insert: Me too. Though i never joined a Marxist or any other political group, by late teens i was thoroughly fed up with capitalist excess. And much more firmly into more Democrat Socialist way of looking at things. Extremes even then on either side of the political spectrum pissed me off. Extremes on the right, as outrageous incomes for athletes, for one, and price gouging in business, for two, just felt wrong. One of the things most disappointing about extremes on the left was that it gave conservatives fodder for the right's attack-dogs to feed on. It felt then, as it does 65 years later, simply stupid of the left.]
And yet there were, if you wanted to see them, signs that the new left — which had been concentrated on campuses — might be able to attract support from the white working class. Over the next two years, students joined the picket lines of strikers from General Electric, General Motors and the U.S. Post Office Department. In a special issue on “The Seventies,” Business Week warned that corporations faced a challenge from “the blacks, the labor unions, and the young” that could make “the Seventies one of the tumultuous decades in U.S. history.”
Such heady times may sound like the distant past, but there are more than a few parallels with the present. For nearly a decade now, arguably dating to the Occupy movement of 2011, a new generation of left-wing activism has been stirring. A host of organizations (Indivisible, the Sunrise Movement, 350.org .. http://350.org/ , People’s Action, the Working Families Party, Black Lives Matter, the Justice Democrats, a revived Democratic Socialists of America) and new publications (Jacobin, the Intercept, Current Affairs) are doing what groups like SDS did in the ’60s: elevating left-wing causes and promising dramatic societal change.
These activists and their worldviews have made significant inroads in mainstream politics in a relatively short time. In 2016, Bernie Sanders — a socialist whose platform was well to the left of George McGovern’s then-regarded-as-radical platform in 1972 — almost won the Democratic nomination. This year, Sanders, advocating a “political revolution,” is once again in the top tier of candidates. So is Elizabeth Warren, who’s running on a platform of “big, structural change.”
But at this moment of left-wing optimism, it bears remembering that the ’60s left never fulfilled the vision of Hayden and others. Indeed, even as our cause appeared ascendant, a powerful right-wing movement was also percolating: Young Americans for Freedom, presidential candidates George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, California Gov. Ronald Reagan. By the time I saw Hayden speak in 1969, Nixon had been elected, in part because of a backlash to the new left. In 1972, he would rout McGovern at the polls. Less than a decade later, Reagan was in the White House. If revolutionary change was on the agenda, it was of an entirely different nature from what we had envisaged in 1969.
Will today’s new left stumble down the path of my generation’s left, growing largely irrelevant and then, eventually, disappearing from sight? Or could it come to dominate American politics over the next few decades? Because of key structural differences between then and now, I actually think their odds of success are better than ours were. But to capitalize on those odds, they will have to learn from the failures of my generation — we activists who succeeded in captivating a noisy subgroup of Americans but never came close to commanding a political majority. And there are already, in my view, worrisome signals that they are repeating some of our biggest mistakes.
Among the top tier of Democratic candidates in 2020 are two committed progressives: Elizabeth Warren, who’s running on a platform of “big, structural change,” and Bernie Sanders, who’s advocating a “political revolution.” (Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via Associated Press)
(Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
There are three defining features of today’s insurgent left. The first is that its adherents are concentrated among the young — high-schoolers through those in their late 30s. In the 2016 primaries, Sanders won more votes among 18-to-29-year-olds than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. In current presidential polling, Sanders’s and Warren’s followings tilt strongly toward the young. In polling on capitalism vs. socialism, the young tend to be much more critical than older Americans of capitalism and more supportive of socialism. In a Pew poll from June, 50 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds had a very or somewhat positive view of socialism. (Socialism in this case appears to be a critique from the left of existing American capitalism — a preference for Scandinavia or even Canada, not for Venezuela or China.)
In 2013, the average age of a DSA member was 68 — the group, in other words, had never moved past its roots in my generation of leftists. By 2017, the average age was 33, and membership was skyrocketing (from about 6,000 in 2015 to 55,000 today). The Sunrise Movement, one of the main organizations battling for action on climate change, declares that it is “building an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority.” The founders of Black Lives Matter were in their late 20s and early 30s. The founders of Indivisible were young former congressional staffers. The Justice Democrats were young veterans of the Sanders campaign.
The second feature of today’s left is geographical: It is concentrated in postindustrial metro areas and also college towns. These include the larger cities on the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards as well as cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Austin and Denver. These areas specialize in what economist Peter Temin has called FTE — finance, technology and electronics — but also in government, higher education and specialized health care. Political scientist Ruy Teixeira and I estimated that, in 2000, 43.7 percent of Americans lived in these metro areas. It is probably now closer to half, and it’s growing.
The third feature is that today’s left is drawn primarily from members or future members of what French sociologist Serge Mallet once called “the new working class.” In American labor surveys, they mostly fall within the category of professionals or higher-level service occupations that sometimes require certification and that usually, but not always, require a college degree. (One clue to the politics of at least part of this cohort shows up in polling that finds that people with advanced degrees are the most consistently liberal of all the educational groups.) They do not own their businesses but are paid by wage or salary. They work primarily in the postindustrial economy producing knowledge and information and high-level services; some, but by no means all, work in the public or the nonprofit sector. They are teachers, nurses, pilots, editors, writers, doctors, software programmers, graphic designers, social workers, architects and engineers. Unlike other white-collar office workers — such as salespeople or office managers — they don’t judge their work primarily by the money they can pull in or the costs they can hold down, but by the excellence of the product they produce or services they render. Is the software cool? Did the patient get better? Did the kids learn?
There is nothing paradoxical about people on the upper tier of the working class playing a leading role in the left. The labor movements in the United States, Great Britain and Germany were initiated by the better-paid and more-skilled craft workers, not by common laborers. Today, this group has the distinction — first promised in Thorstein Veblen’s early-20th-century book “The Engineers and the Price System” — of possessing the knowledge and skill to run society without a need for expert managerial guidance.
To understand why the young and college-educated have become amenable to radical ideas, it helps to consider certain long-term trends in American life and, especially, American capitalism. Marxists describe a process called “proletarianization,” which occurs when occupations whose workers previously enjoyed some independence, responsibility, status and good income lose their authority and become dependent on layers of officialdom and bureaucracy. They might have their jobs divided into separate tasks or eliminated altogether, and they may suddenly face declining prospects for their livelihood. That happened to many craft workers — for instance, shoemakers, weavers, granite cutters and blacksmiths — at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In reaction to this proletarianization, workers formed unions.
The ’60s left’s rebellion increasingly took a religious rather than a political form. It consisted of establishing one’s moral credibility and superiority in the face of evil.
Something similar has been occurring in the United States over recent decades. Many professionals are becoming subject to layers of bureaucracy — think of registered nurses having above them doctors, hospital administrators and insurance companies. These workers are also becoming subject to severe bottom-line concerns. Software developers may no longer work on their own or for small companies but for huge corporations like Facebook or Microsoft, where their responsibility is a minute task within a larger system. They may be asked to produce services for a country or company they don’t respect. Engineers may be pressured to produce shortcuts; teachers may be forced to teach in crowded classrooms; social workers may not be allowed time to deal with difficult clients.
Those who work within the knowledge industry today can also rarely look forward to the kind of lifetime employment for themselves or their children that many Americans used to enjoy. Millennials are often described as “job hoppers” because of the number of different jobs they hold in their 20s. (I’ve given up counting how many jobs my daughters — now in their mid-30s — have held since they graduated from college.) These jobs require college degrees and in some cases advanced degrees, the cost of which have risen stratospherically, as have the debts that students have had to incur. CNBC has described .. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/millennials-spend-less-because-theyre-poorer-federal-reserve-says.html .. the situation this way: “Adjusting for inflation, compared to college tuition in 1988, private school tuition in 2018 has increased 213 percent and four-year public school tuition has increased 129 percent. As a result, much of the generation is drowning in student loan debt.” And often, college graduates, who expected to be professionals, end up working in their 20s as bartenders or as part of the gig economy.
The cost of housing in the places where these college graduates want to work has also skyrocketed. In an Atlantic article .. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/why-millennials-cant-afford-buy-house/591532/ .. titled “Why Housing Policy Feels Like Generational Warfare,” Alexis Madrigal cites a study by the real estate firm Unison: “Imagine you’re a 30-year-old in Los Angeles with the median income. By Unison’s math, you can imagine buying a home at 73. For young people in high-opportunity metro areas, the route to home ownership is basically blocked without the help of a wealthy family member or some stock options.”
Facing an uncertain future, college students and graduates are suffering from a rise in anxiety and mental illness. One survey in 2017 by the American Psychiatric Association found millennials to be the most anxious of the current generations. (Baby boomers were the least.) Business Insider, examining surveys of millennials’ mental health, reported .. https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-mental-health-burnout-lonely-depressed-money-stress .. that “depression and ‘deaths of despair’ are both on the rise among the generation, linked to issues such as loneliness and money stress. Millennials also feel that their jobs have an outsize role in their overall mental health. Because of longer work hours and stagnant wages, millennials suffer from higher rates of burnout than other generations. Many of them have even quit their jobs for mental-health reasons.”
Job dissatisfaction has contributed to an increase in union organizing, strikes and political activity among this generation of workers. This includes teachers and nurses, but also stirrings within media organizations, universities and high-tech behemoths such as Google and Amazon. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) In recent years, the United Auto Workers has succeeded in more unionization drives among grad students, university staff and media workers than among auto assembly workers.
These economic and psychological factors provided the kindling; a succession of major disasters — a calamitous war in Iraq, the Great Recession, widening inequality of wealth and power, the threat of climate change, the hard-right policies and crude rhetoric of President Trump — provided the sparks that have caused so many young people to turn for answers to the left. The questions, though, are whether the politics of this generation will stay the same as it ages, and whether young leftists can begin to draw significant numbers of other voters to their side.
Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, talks with actress and activist Jane Fonda in 1972. Hayden thought that if the ’60s left could win over blue-collar workers, it would have the basis for a revolution. (Associated Press)
The ’60s left collapsed for many reasons, but two major ones are especially relevant to the prospects for today’s left — and they pull in opposite directions. One important advantage the contemporary left has over the ’60s left is that it was created by conditions that are not going away. The Vietnam War was the main issue uniting the diverse parts of the ’60s left, and it brought hundreds of thousands of new sympathizers into the movement. And so, when the Nixon administration ended the draft and then signed a peace agreement with North Vietnam, what we called “the movement” rapidly dissipated. The women’s, civil rights and environmental movements — to name three of the biggest groups — continued, but they were no longer part of a larger whole. Meanwhile, those groups that had espoused revolution were displaced by reformist, staff-driven organizations that worked out of Washington or New York offices.
Today’s left is different. Of the factors driving it, only the Trump presidency will expire, and that might not happen for five years. Climate change will continue to menace shorelines, create extreme weather, and imperil agriculture and fishing — and this is, unfortunately, going to happen even if a Democrat wins the presidency this year and rejoins the Paris agreement. As the politics around climate change inevitably become more pressing, the case for a large-scale subordination of private capital to public priorities — a demand that is at the heart of the political left — will only strengthen.
Most important,though, the underlying economic conditions that led to the creation of today’s left are going to continue to shape the labor force of American capitalism. Under the impact of artificial intelligence, many jobs will alter overnight or disappear, creating continuing insecurity among the young, fueling dissatisfaction with capitalism and providing an incentive to organize. The economy itself may not soon endure a recurrence of the Great Recession, but an increasingly fractious world trading order and overcapacity in manufacturing will continue to threaten growth. The predominance of finance and the winner-take-all structure of the high-tech industry mean that disparities of wealth and power will only grow.
During the ’60s, proletarianization was in its early stage. In 1960, only 8 percent of Americans had a college degree or above. Today, the ranks of college-educated people — those most susceptible to the appeal of the contemporary left — appear to be growing. Thirty-nine percent of Americans 25 and older have a bachelor’s or an advanced degree, a figure that is expected to increase over the next 10 years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, professional occupations, which require at least a college degree, made up 20.9 percent of the labor force in 2018 and will make up 21.5 percent by 2028. Allied occupations such health-care support are also expected to grow, from 2.7 to 3 percent. During the same period, the ranks of sales personnel, office and administrative support occupations, and production workers — who do not fit the profile of today’s left — are expected to shrink. By the end of the 2020s, college-educated workers facing persistent insecurity about their future, and concern about the value of their work, should account for somewhere between 22 and 25 percent of the labor force.
Perhaps because these underlying economic trends are continuing, the youngest American voters are no less susceptible than millennials to radical appeals. In fact, they may be more susceptible. A January 2019 Harris Poll found that 61 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds — Generation Z — have a positive reaction to the word “socialism.” By comparison, 51 percent of millennials do. Taken together, these two generations could well pose a formidable challenge not only to conservatives but to establishment liberals.
Among the issues galvanizing today’s progressives are climate change and civil rights. Pictured here: A climate change and social justice protest, and a Black Lives Matter rally. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
(Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
And yet, there was another key reason for the collapse of the ’60s left, one which may bedevil today’s progressive activists. To win a political majority, contemporary young leftists — who are primarily college educated and work, live and study in high-tech metro areas and college towns — will need to win significant support for their politics from the rest of the working class, many of whom have not graduated from college, live in small or midsize towns, and work in or around manufacturing and mining. The left of the ’60s faced a similar challenge and fell woefully short. It’s worth looking at why.
There were always new-left radicals who tried to build bridges. But by the late ’60s, when Hayden was urging outreach to what was then an overwhelmingly white working class, many revolutionaries had abandoned any attempt to create a popular American majority and instead cast their lot with an imagined world revolution, led by China, Cuba or even, in the case of one Berkeley group, North Korea. They saw America (which they spelled “Amerikkka”) as the enemy and blacks and Latinos as being, along with Vietnamese, victims of U.S. colonialism. They saw white workers as beneficiaries of “white skin privilege” with a “stake in imperialism.” If they were white, they saw themselves as a fifth column within the mother country, fighting on the side of minorities at home and America’s enemies abroad.
These leftists believed they were putting into place a sophisticated neo-Marxist politics — they talked about the proletariat and the cultural revolution and quoted from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” — but their activity most clearly resembled that of 17th-century American Protestant sects who imagined themselves as congregations of visible saints in a sinful world. In fact, the new left’s rebellion increasingly took a religious rather than a political form. It consisted of establishing one’s moral credibility and superiority in the face of evil. That religious fervor provided, perhaps, a meaning for the lives of activists, but it was, as social critic Paul Goodman wrote in “The New Reformation,” “a poor basis for politics, including revolutionary politics.”
What also doomed the new left was that, beginning with the decision in 1967 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to expel its white members, the movement began to splinter into identity groups; indeed, this was the beginning of what has come to be known as “identity politics.” Black nationalist and later Latino, Native American and feminist groups pursued their own demands with some success, but the larger movement lost a sense of cooperation and coherence.
Much of what these separate groups fought for was entirely justifiable and contributed to racial and sexual equality. Yet some of their stances pressed their causes to the extreme: radical feminists casting doubt on the moral legitimacy of the family; black nationalists advocating armed struggle and calling for African American communities to be subject to the United Nations rather than the U.S. government. These positions put them at odds with much of America. And, alongside the activities of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground, they fed the backlash that led to Nixon’s landslide in 1972 and Reagan’s victory in 1980.
Today’s left has not embraced the separatism or the revolutionary fantasies of the last days of the ’60s left, but, as someone who was there, I find disturbing echoes in the present. I’ll list three. First, many on the left — and many more-moderate liberals as well — attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 and white working-class reluctance to support Democrats entirely or primarily to “white supremacy” or “white privilege.” They dismiss flyover Americans who voted for Trump as irredeemable — even though there is evidence that many supporters of Barack Obama backed Trump in 2016, and that many Trump voters cast ballots for Democrats in 2018. It is an echo of the ’60s left’s Manichaean view of Americans.
As a result, today’s left has become fond of a political strategy that discounts the importance altogether of winning over the white working class. Such a strategy assumes Democrats can gain majorities simply by winning over people of color (a term that groups people of wildly varying backgrounds, incomes and worldviews), single women and the young. One recent article in the left-wing Nation declared ..https://www.thenation.com/article/democrats-trump-white-working-class/ : “Since the 1980s, Democratic candidates have proven that they can win elections while losing whites without a college degree by a significant margin.” It’s a questionable strategy for Democrats — in a presidential election, it could cede many of the Midwestern swing states to a Republican — but it is even more questionable as a strategy for the left, which has historically been committed to achieving equality by building a movement of the bottom and middle of society against the very wealthy and powerful at the top.
Second, the left is again dividing into identity groups, each of which feels justified in elevating its concerns above others. In Philadelphia this summer at Netroots Nation — a gathering of left and liberal groups — Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) told aspiring officeholders, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.”
While activists focused on identity politics have, like their predecessors from the ’60s, made perfectly reasonable demands — for instance, an end to police brutality, or equal wages for men and women — they have also made extreme demands that display an indifference to building a political majority. Some have backed reparations for slavery — an idea rejected by broad majorities of the electorate, most of whom are descended from immigrants who came to America after the Civil War. Other groups have demanded “open borders,” defying a majority of Americans who think the country should be able to decide who to admit as citizens and who will be able to enjoy the rights and benefits of being an American.
Third,many of these demands and strategies are accompanied by a quasi-religious adherence to special language and gestures that echo the experience of the ’60s. Again, at the level of morality, these aspects of the left may be persuasive, but at the level of political-majority-building, they are problematic. For instance, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lists “LGBTQIA+ Rights” among her priorities, but how many Americans outside the bluest Zip codes know what “LBGTQIA+” stands for? According to a recent poll, 98 percent of Latinos are uncomfortable with the left-wing term “Latinx.” At the Democratic Socialists of America convention I attended over the summer in Atlanta, delegates identified themselves on their name tags, and when they spoke, by their preferred pronoun (“he,” “she” or “they”) and signaled their approval by twirling their hands. Someone who used the colloquial “guys” to refer to the audience was sternly rebuked. There were charges of “ableism” and of “triggering” due to loud talking. These kinds of moral stances are fine for a church congregation, but not for a political organization that wants to win a majority of voters. The reality is that 80 percent or more of Americans who wandered into such a gathering would think they were on another planet.
And the trouble spots I’ve identified here are only being exacerbated by the importance of social media to contemporary politics. During the ’60s, the left’s cultural insularity was reinforced by its geography. Today, the insularity of the left is magnified by the Internet, which tends to draw us toward people who think alike while screening out unfriendly opinions.
As some of the stances of today’s left have seeped into Democratic presidential politics, it’s become clear that there could be real electoral consequences to these missteps. Warren and Sanders have both promised to offer free Medicare for undocumented immigrants — something that even Canada does not provide — and to decriminalize border crossings. Warren promised a 9-year-old transgender boy that he could have veto rights over her appointment of a secretary of education. Sanders has promised voting rights for imprisoned felons. As sophisticated politicians, Warren and Sanders must know that if they win the nomination, these kind of stands will make it difficult for them to gain votes outside of heavily blue metro areas — and therefore difficult to put together an electoral college majority.
Some of the stands Warren and Sanders have taken during the Democratic nomination contest could make it difficult for them to gain votes outside of heavily blue metro areas in the general election. (Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press)
(Jim Young/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Clearly, there’s a lot to worry about if you want to see the left triumph — at least in the short and medium terms. But there are also reasons to think the left can, in the ensuing decades, eventually overcome its cultural insularity. The first reason is demographic. However separate it is from small-town America, today’s left is geographically much broader than its predecessor, which was based on elite campuses like Berkeley and Columbia. The left is now part of a large class of Americans attempting to come to terms with their place in the economy and society — and while that class isn’t, of course, represented in every city or town, it’s well represented in some locations in just about every state.
As Ruy Teixeira and I argued two decades ago in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the trend in America has been toward more towns becoming “ideopolises” — metro areas devoted to the production of ideas, in which the members of this new proletarianizing class play key roles. The past 40 years have seen a transformation of cities like Omaha; Louisville; Columbus, Ohio; and Kansas City, Kan. It stands to reason that the people in them — including those on the lower rungs of the working class — have become more receptive to the politics and the culture of the left.
Moreover, what seem like radical cultural causes often become accepted after several decades of agitation and exposure. In 2004, George W. Bush was able to use opposition to same-sex marriage to curry votes. Today, it is no longer an issue. In a decade or two, few Americans may be confused by pronouns or unisex bathrooms.
There is also a process of political maturation that movements can undergo as they elect people to office who are then forced to respond to citizens with different social views. I saw this with the Democratic Socialists of America, which now has over a hundred elected officials among its members. As it turns out, my own Maryland state representative, Vaughn Stewart, is a member of DSA and was elected with the help of DSA activists who knocked on doors. But Stewart didn’t run on a promise — in the words of a DSA placard at a demonstration in New York — to “abolish profit, abolish prisons, abolish cash bail, abolish borders”; he ran on a platform of “Putting Neighbors First” and has recently introduced “housing for all” legislation to expand renters’ rights and options for home buyers.
Many of the left’s most extreme stands have been driven by the excesses of Trump’s presidency. For instance, in response to Trump’s brazen bigotry toward Hispanics and his plan to build a border wall, his foes on the left have gone well beyond advocating comprehensive immigration reform and instead denounced the very idea of borders. If Trump does win a second term, I fear that the left and right could both go to extremes, as happened during Nixon’s first term. The times could be tumultuous and also dangerous. But when Trump is gone from the scene, the left may be able to better distinguish those issues that could potentially unite a majority from those that will only divide and inflame.
Finally, there is a larger tectonic shift taking place in North American and European politics away from the assumptions of market fundamentalism, which helped precipitate the Great Recession of 2008. There is a growing argument on the left and the right — witness Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley in the United States — for an enlarged role for government and the public sector in economic life. Criticism of the practices of high finance and corporate CEOs are coming not just from the AFL-CIO, but from the Business Roundtable and Financial Times as well. The left will undoubtedly find it easier to navigate in these waters than in those of Cold War anti-communism or Reaganite market fundamentalism. Progressives will be able to advance their economic arguments without being accused of encouraging “big government”; candidates outside of New York City and Vermont may be able to campaign as “democratic socialists” without being associated with communism.
For the foreseeable future, though, if the left wants to create the political majority that Tom Hayden dreamed of in 1969, it will have to frame its positions in a vernacular that most Americans can understand. It will also have to draw a sharp distinction between the positions it deems essential for “big, structural change” and those that can be delegated to communities to calibrate and debate. The new left of the ’60s failed in this mission. We didn’t just dream big; we ascended into the realm of fantasy and visible sainthood. Today’s left will need to learn from our mistakes.
Correction: This article originally mentioned a strike by workers from the U.S. Postal Service. However, at the time of the strike, post offices were run by the U.S. Post Office Department, which was later replaced by the U.S. Postal Service.
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