[… tl;dr/#longread/whatever we’re calling it these days …]
I look out onto an America that seems to me to desperately require a left-wing. American workers have taken it on the chin for thirty years. They have been faced for years with stagnant wages, rising costs, and the hollowing out of the middle class. They are now confronted with that and a cratered job market, where desperate people compete to show how hard they will work in bad conditions for less compensation. Meanwhile, the neoliberal policy apparatus that brought us here refuses even to consider the possibility that it is culpable, so certain of its inherent righteousness and its place in the inevitable march of progress. And the blogosphere protects and parrots that certainty, weeding out left-wing detractors with ruthless efficiency, while around it orbits the gradual extinction of the American dream.”
Freddie deBoeur, “the blindspot” (see also his follow-up).
This is a conversation we need to be having, if for no other reason than that, by and large, the response to deBoeur has so far has been one of utter confusion regarding the point he’s trying to make, at least as evidenced by the number of replies that take the form of “how dare he say I don’t care about the working class”—because that’s really beside the point.
The point is that what we define as a “leftist” in contemporary America is just a slightly more aggressively redistributionist neoliberal, and the question isn’t that one cares about workers but rather how one wishes to help and from what ideological context.
Because as it stands we’re simply not having a debate about competing ideological theories, at least not one that extends very far beyond the choices of “mostly deregulated free market capitalism with a few social safety nets” and “totally unregulated markets and you can kiss your fucking healthcare goodbye, proles.” This is because Everything Changed™ way back in 1989 when the wall fell and this global consensus emerged that free markets were the apotheosis of human evolution and “market efficiency” was the answer to all our prayers.
It’s just like Li’l Zeezy said in his exclamatorily eponymous biopic: once upon a time the apocalyptic films that emerged from the American national consciousness pitted rugged American free marketeers against a harrowing international socialist threat, while nowadays we’re just up against biblical floods and asteroid strikes—i.e. it’s easier for us to imagine the end of all human life as we know it than a comparatively minor tweak to the way we function economically.
And yet if we were to ask the beleaguered worker we all purport to care so much about how he feels about his plight during the two-decade span from “Red Dawn” to “Armageddon”, two decades in which the neoliberal consensus was given free rein, I’m betting he’d take Patrick Swayze over Ben Affleck any day.
