Learning from the Debacle: It's the Institutions, Stupid
Kazin, Michael
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Learning from the Debacle It's the Institutions, Stupid MICHAEL KAZIN What do the depressing, if predictable, results of the 2010 midterm election mean for the potential...
...and, when necessary, bludgeons its opponents...
...How else could they give back control of the House to Republicans who ran ads like one paid for by the U.S...
...West Virginians who attend a church that belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention— a bastion of the Christian Right—now outnumber those with a family member who belongs to the United Mine Workers...
...Institutions matter...
...Medicare cuts...
...the president let the Tea Partiers gain a near monopoly on populist rage...
...Latinos have organizations, both secular and religious, that defend immigrant rights and push for greater power in the larger society and culture...
...The result is that millions of Americans keep voting against their interests...
...Have you had enough...
...A laid-off steel-worker from Martins Ferry, Ohio, told Steven Greenhouse, the great labor reporter for the New York Times, "We heard everything was going to change, but there hasn't been much change and the unemployment is still bad and the area we live in is still really depressed...
...The stimulus passed in early 2009 was too small and ill-designed to put most of the jobless back to work...
...Pessimists take the long, doleful view: they argue that the United States is and will probably remain a center-right nation...
...and are taken in by the old right-wing attack on "liberal elitists," even when it is directed at a black president, raised by a single mother, who attended Ivy League schools on scholarships and got rich only by writing two eloquent books...
...At the same time, it would be naive to deny that big business knows how to protect its interests and regards serious regulation and healthy unions the way the late Jerry Falwell saw gay marriage...
...No wonder that once strongly Democratic state has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in the last three elections...
...That was true in 2010 as well...
...Optimists counter with a list of short-term failures—of policy and political imagination...
...Corporations and their advertising front groups have spent huge sums—in and out of election campaigns—to convince Americans that liberal programs are harmful to their interests and their values...
...White voters who don't have college degrees but do have a union member in their household voted for Obama's party by 24 percent more than did their non-union counterparts...
...African Americans have their churches, the NAACP, and other groups, both formal and informal...
...the immensity of corporate power seduces...
...Their gloomy counterparts who voice disdain for ordinary people, though, are committing a more profound error...
...Whether or not organized labor is able to revive its fortunes in the private sector, white working-class men and women need new kinds of institutions that can speak to their discontents and offer compelling alternatives to the politics of anger and nostalgia...
...Absent a compelling narrative, young people of all races voted in anemic numbers, and the GOP surged to victory, almost by default...
...Were Americans so stupid in 2008 when they elected a black man with a Muslim middle name...
...The president should have made a better attempt to explain how the financial crisis occurred and how health care reform will help to create a more decent, as well as more efficient, society...
...The long-term work of nurturing such prospects is vital not just to defeating conservatives in elections to come...
...Middle- and upper-class liberals have universities and friendly media, from the Times and NPR to such Web sites as the Huffington Post and Daily Kos...
...Of all the groups needed to forge a winning progressive coalition, white working-class people are the only ones who lack sturdy institutions that promote egalitarian ends...
...Lesbians and gay men have the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a variety of local and regional networks...
...As Harold Meyerson has been pointing out for decades to anyone who cared to read or listen, white men and women who belong to unions are far more likely to support progressive ideas on a variety of issues and to vote for Democrats than are their nonunion counterparts...
...If that unemployed steelworker belonged to a vibrant labor union, he might be able to see himself as a maker of change, instead of its victim...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Learning from the Debacle It's the Institutions, Stupid MICHAEL KAZIN What do the depressing, if predictable, results of the 2010 midterm election mean for the potential for progressive change in our country...
...In the storm of post-debacle opinions, two kinds of arguments have held sway—one quite dark, the other glinting with the hope that a better day might come as soon as 2012...
...Don't mourn, organize...
...Unlike Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, he allowed himself to be defined by his adversaries and neglected the oratorical skill and empathetic demeanor that had helped him win the White House...
...and Barack Obama failed to explain what he and the Democratic Congress had done and to inspire much enthusiasm for it...
...In fact, the exit polls showed that the only sizeable group of Americans that shifted in large numbers from voting for Obama in 2008 to voting for Republicans in 2010 were whites who lack a college education—the people we used to call "the working class...
...co-opts...
...The president did make the cardinal error of assuming that good policies were, by themselves, good politics...
...But if Obama comes up with a better narrative, and the economy rebounds, his chances of winning re-election are bright...
...Some liberals go a step further, blaming ordinary Americans for being stupid or, at least, woefully ignorant about how government works...
...But a forceful narrative would have done nothing to save that man's job or to provide him with a way to help himself and his former co-workers to "be the ones we've been waiting for," as Obama put it during his presidential campaign...
...But both pessimists and optimists suffer from their own kind of myopia...
...Unions remain an excellent source of political education...
...Some may sprout from current projects to rebuild old factory towns as centers of green industry or from local campaigns to force Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers to provide good health insurance and a living wage...
...But outside the public sector, they struggle to keep the strength they have and are a declining influence in workplaces and neighborhoods where they once were strong...
...the ungainly process of enacting health reform left much of the public uncertain about what the legislation actually contained...
...swallow lies about "death panels...
...Chamber of Commerce that announced, "Government run health care...
...One can't advance democracy in the abstract if one thinks so little of the demos...
...And when journalists asked them why they were swinging rightward, their answers were often the epitome of common sense...
...It is as vital to the future of the Left as the ability to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there...
...Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, which will be published in August...
...The keep-hope-alivers ignore polls that report that twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives as those who call themselves liberals...
...Each perspective has some merit, of course...
...That is a lot of minds for a progressive administration to change...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
